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Disgust coursed through me at that memory. I’d begged him—beggedto not lose Lainey as my roommate. But he didn’t want me to spend so much time with others.
“I didn’t see it when I was younger,” I said. “The way he would isolate me. No friends were ever good enough. He didn’t want me to associate with people outside of the family but offered me an array of physical activities to keep me busy, and since my parents traveled so much, I was often left with him for weeks at a time.”
The tense line of his jaw reflected the stoniness in Milo’s eyes as he studied me.
“I’m telling you this part because—because this is the life I’d always known. Even when I thought it was wrong or wanted it to stop, I didn’t know how to make it stop. I didn’t have anyone I could tell…and before you ask me, no, I never told Lainey before I came back from Pinetree. She knew something bad was happening, except I never told her since I didn’t want my uncle to take her away too.”
I managed all but the last few sentences without emotion clogging my throat.
“The first time he touched me…” I began. Even as the shaking was there, so was Kellan. His hand never left mine and his strength never wavered.
Milo’s hands clenched into fists, and when I got to my tenth birthday, the chair hit the wall and shattered. He rubbed a hand over his face as he stalked away then back again.
“Your whole life?” Three words. “He fucking did that to you your whole life.” The last part wasn’t a question. Then his expression emptied. “Ivy, when you went back…”
“Yes.”
Kellan gave a little jolt next to me. The tension lacing through him seemed to draw taut. His attention was on Milo.
“That’s what your mother was talking about.” Again, not a question. The rage shimmering in the air around him seemed to take on a life of its own. He gripped another chair, flexing his brutalized hands on the back of it.
“Yes,” I said simply. “And I’m going to assume that her finding out is why he put her in that place.”
Why he’d hurt her.
“He always warned me that it was so easy for something to happen and that I should be careful what I said to her… I didn’t want her last memories to be something awful.”
The chair cracked and shattered into pieces. Milo stared down at the parts of the chair he held and then dropped them. His chest heaved with rapid breaths as he battled to calm down.
“All those times I thought you were safe…”
“You didn’t know,” I said with a shudder, finally easing up on digging my nails into Kellan’s hand. There were going to be half-moon indentions for days. “No one knew. I protected his ugly little secret because it wasmyugly secret.”
The press of Kellan’s lips to the side of my head helped to steady me, but even when I glanced at him, there was no escaping the wild heat in his eyes or the very real rage lurking there.
“It wasn’t your fault, Sparrow,” Kellan said. “You did what you had to in order to survive.” Then he focused on Milo. “It’s not your fault either. We all thought she was safer, better off in that world… none of us had any idea.”
All at once Milo fell back a couple of steps, and if he hadn’t hit the wall, he might have collapsed to the ground. “When I said you needed to go back…”
He was so stricken, I had to stand. I had to go to him. It didn’t matter if my legs were unsteady or if the tears were wet in my eyes again. I’d hollowed out that dark corner of my past so many times that it was raw, yet I hated telling him as much as I hated seeing the hurt in his eyes.
“You didn’t know,” I reminded him. He kept flexing his hands, the violence swirling around him. When I reached out, he crushed me to him and lifted me right off my feet.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words muffled. “I’m so fucking sorry, Ivy. That was not what I wanted for you…”
“I know,” I said, trying to offer him soothing. “This is why I didn't want to tell you. Me having a good life was so important to you.”
Dampness hit my neck as I returned his fierce embrace. He was crying. The fact he was shedding tears sliced right through me and the hot sting of wetness in my eyes spilled over.
“Fuck, Ivy.” Grief and anger drenched his tone. “Youare what is important to me.”
He dragged his head up, the red rimming his eyes a brutal testament to how much this hurt him.
“You,” he repeated. “You werealwaysthe important one. I wanted you to have everything… shit that our parents fucked us out of because Mom couldn’t get clean and Dad was a fucking dick.”
“Milo…”
“No,” he said softly. “No, don’t say sorry or try to comfort me. I think I need this right now…I need to be pissed off.”
