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Bindi drew in a shaky breath. She’d thought that would be the hardest part, telling Mack about the rape. But there was worse to come. The destruction of her whole family. And she’d been partly to blame.
“I kept his secret for nearly a year, just like he told me,” she admitted. Although things had never been the same for her after that. Her parents seemed oblivious to her disenchantment as she slowly withdrew from the world. Her school grades suffered, and she stopped going out with her friends. Her life seemed to drain of all color, but she kept a smile in place for her parents, because they could never know. She felt ashamed and guilty, as if she’d somehow brought the whole thing down on herself. “He stopped coming around to the house, which I was grateful for. I don’t know how I would’ve coped if I’d had to pretend everything was the same in front of my parents.”
“So, that was the end of it, then?” He was staring at her intently, as if willing her story to have a happy ending. Except it didn’t. She almost felt like she was letting him down as well as everyone else, but the truth needed to be told.
She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. “A few days before my fifteenth birthday, he came back, climbed in through my window and raped me again.” Mack’s arm tensed around her shoulders, but she stumbled on before he could interrupt her. “The first time I’d been broken and sad. This time I got angry. Really, really angry, and I refused to keep quiet.”
“Good,” he said roughly. “I hope you reported that bastard to the cops.”
“I did,” she agreed. “I knew I’d only have the strength to tell my story once, so instead of confiding in my parents and having them perhaps try and talk me out of it, I marched down to the local police station and filed a report.” That’d been both the best and worst day of her life. She hadn’t even turned fifteen at the time, but she’d felt far older than her years, world-weary and scarred beyond redemption. A young constable had taken her statement, and he’d been caring and considerate, as if he believed her. Which made it slightly easier to tell the tale. And then another female officer had taken her to the hospital, and they’d performed a rape kit on her. There was no doubting her story after that.
“But I never imagined the repercussions from that day.” Perhaps, if she’d known, she might’ve kept her mouth shut, like Mutt had kept telling her she should’ve done. But her story was out and there was no putting the genie back in the bottle afterwards. “The police contacted my parents and then arrested Kai.”
At first, her parents hadn’t believed her. But once Bindi had tearfully relayed the events following her fourteenth birthday, her father had taken her into his arms and rocked her. Uma, her mother, had been slower to comfort her daughter, and in the following days she had become less and less communicative. Bindi heard her parents arguing late into the night. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she knew Uma wanted to believe that Kai, her only son, the light of her life, wasn’t capable of such an atrocity.
“They released Kai on bail, until his court hearing, on the strict directive that he not contact me, or come within one-hundred meters of me,” she continued.
That’d been hard, knowing her brother was out there somewhere and she’d been scared, believing he might try to hurt her again. But instead of her brother showing up at her door, Mutt had come calling.
“One night, about a week before the trial, Mutt turned up on our doorstep and begged for me to hear him out. Kai was staying with Mutt in his share house while he waited for the trial. At first, my father didn’t want to let him in, but my mother was desperate to hear anything about Kai. So, my father gave him five minutes to speak.” Bindi shuddered at the thought of that night, of watching Mutt’s animated face, at how he was so desperate for her to withdraw the charges. “He told us that Kai was terribly remorseful, and he was a changed man.”
Mack gave a loud snort of disbelief, but let her continue.
“He said Kai wouldn’t survive a stint in jail, and I had to think long and hard about going ahead with the prosecution.”
“I hope he didn’t talk you out of it?” Mack asked.
“No, he didn’t. My father backed up my decision one-hundred-percent. He said there was no place in his family for an incestuous pedophile, and Kai deserved everything he got.” Bindi remembered how grateful she’d been for her father, standing behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder, shouting down Mutt’s excuses. “Mutt got really angry and told us that we would all pay if anything happened to his friend. How could they defend a filthy little slut and not care at all about Kai’s welfare? My dad marched him out of the house, and we thought that was the last of it.”
“But it wasn’t?” Mack asked when the silence stretched on.
“No,” she replied in a low voice, dropping her chin so she didn’t have to look him in the eye. “A day before the court case, Kai killed himself. Took a drug overdose. Left a note saying that he couldn’t face a life in jail.”
“That bastard,” Mack grunted with such vehemence she felt the sound echo in his chest. It wasn’t quite the response Bindi was expecting. The few people who knew about the situation had all said how sorry they were that her brother had taken his own life. None of them had been angry at him. Except her. She’d been so angry, the emotion had seared away every other feeling, every other sensation and opinion. She was so MAD at him. Like he’d taken the easy way out and left a trail of destruction in his wake. Because her parents were devastated, especially her mother.
“Yes. Everyone was shocked and saddened. But Mutt took it worst of all. He started standing outside our house at all hours of the day and night and screaming obscenities at us; at me in particular. Saying I murdered him, that it was all my doing and I needed to pay for what I’d done.”
“That’s a little…weird,” Mack consented.
“Yes,” she agreed. Bindi had had a strange premonition that there was something else going on. Mutt’s dogged determination almost bordered on obsession. Almost as if he’d been in love with Kai. Which was crazy, because Kai was as straight as a die. He liked to have sex with women—a fact Bindi could attest to—and showed an outright dislike for anyone from the gay community. If Mutt was gay, then he’d done a damn good job of hiding it, especially from Kai. Because if Kai had caught even a whiff of something like that, he would’ve kicked Mutt to the curb without a backward glance.
“Anyway, to cut a long story short, my parents’ marriage didn’t survive the fall-out. My dad walked out about six months after Kai’s death, and my mother retreated into herself and stopped speaking to me. I spent a few months sleeping on my friend’s couches, not sure what to do or where to go.”
“Shit, Bindi, I can’t believe what you’ve had to go through.” Mack’s arm tightened around her, his gaze compassionate and caring. She liked the feel of his body next to hers. The way the T-shirt fabric stretched nicely over the muscles of his pecs.
“Yeah, well. It was seven years ago. I flew to Brisbane on the day I turned sixteen, and I’ve never looked back since.” Had never seen her family since, either.
“You try to make light of it all, but this is some heavy shit,” Mack replied. He opened his mouth to say more, but the faint sound of a siren broke the rapidly warming morning air. The flash of blue and red lights appeared around a bend in the road in the distance. Mack sat up straighter and stared at the fast-approaching squad car.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he promised, pulling her in for a hug, then standing up and walking toward the road.
She nodded glumly, leaning back against the tree. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about her sad and sorry past. But it didn’t look like she was going to escape it now.
