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“Daniel, we only met yesterday. It’s okay if you want to wait to tell me whatever it is.”
“No. Waiting won’t make it any easier.”
“All right, then.” She settled back in the chaise. “I’ll just sit here and drink wine. Take your time.”
That made him smile. It was so damn easy to talk to her.
And suddenly the words were there.
“BDSM is how, and where, I channel my need for control,” he said. “Before I found BDSM, well, and to be fair before my years of therapy, I had to be in control. Ihadto. I grew up with…with no control, so as an adult I swung the other way.”
She watched him with compassion, but no pity. “I’m sorry, that must have been hard.”
“I don’t mean that I just had a chaotic childhood.” Time to take the plunge. “I actually grew up in a cult, living in an isolated compound.”
“Holy shit. Daniel, are you serious?”
“Yep. My mom joined the cult when she was nineteen. I was born there. My father was probably the cult leader—he called himself ‘the apostle.’ His thing was that the cult was a church. His church. And they were the only true christians.”
“How original.”
“It gets better. He ‘married’ most of the women, and girls, at one point or another. Marriages that lasted only for as long as he wanted to fuck them. There were other men, all older, living there, but I’m pretty sure he was my father, and the father of most of the other kids born into the cult.”
“Daniel…” Autumn scooted forward, so she was sitting on the end of her chaise, close enough to reach him.
“He used them, the kids, to manipulate and control the women. Some weeks children were pampered and loved, the next used as literal whipping boys to keep the adults in line. Some weeks they had school every day, the next there was no school at all, and the week after that they were forced to study twenty hours a day.
“The children slept in different places each night, depending on his whims. Sometimes inside, but on the floor with no blankets, sometimes in lovely soft beds. On bad nights, the kids were locked out of all the homes. Mothers would look out the windows at their children, but they never opened the doors. Not if he said they couldn’t.”
Autumn grabbed his hands, squeezing them fiercely. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, because it was a long time ago. I separated that kid from who I am now.”
“I noticed you said ‘the children’ and ‘they.’ Not ‘me’ or ‘us.’”
“I’ve learned to do that.” He raised a brow. “It made my congressional testimony easier.”
Chapter 17
She blinked. “Your…what?”
He laughed, needing the moment of levity.
“Next is the part where I tell my story.” He laced his fingers together, looked at his thumbs. “I was kicked out of the cult when I was thirteen. I was ‘impure in the faith’, meaning I started to fight back and question his bullshit. I’d gotten a hold of some fiction books that were tucked in the very bottom of a donated box of school supplies. Finding out that the world outside wasn’t the hellscape the apostle described, reading stories where the man I was expected to revere had more in common with the villains than the heroes…that changed things for me.”
Usually he sped through this part, but he found himself telling her things that he normally didn’t talk about.
“I barely remember my childhood. Only a few memories are vivid.” He swallowed then shook his head, to push those few vivid memories, all of which were horrific, to the back of his mind.
“It’s common with children who experience early trauma to have fuzzy memories,” he said. “But I do remember how it felt when I finally realized that the world was so much bigger than I thought. I felt hopeful, for the first time in my life.”
Autumn was biting the inside of her cheek, he could tell from the set of her jaw. He had a feeling she was fighting not to cry, and damn it he loved her for that, for not turning this into a situation where he had to comfort her, which had happened in the past.
He cleared his throat, and decided to power through the rest. “The compound was in the Arizona desert. When they kicked me out I had to walk. It was sheer fucking luck the direction I picked was towards a town and not deeper into the desert.
“I walked for days. Didn’t die of dehydration, exposure…I should have. But I didn’t. And when I reached the closest town, it was like arriving in Oz. A world full of color. Of people who rushed to help me. A stranger who saw me stumbling along and got me in his car, brought me to the little hospital. The nurses and doctors who called in social workers, and then the authorities.
“These people listened to me. Every one of them asked if I was okay, what I needed. They wanted to hear my story, and once I started talking, I wouldn’t shut up. Wouldn’t stop demanding that the apostle be stopped. That these strangers who had helped me help the other children too.”
