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I had a piss, brushed my teeth, then walked downstairs. Logan, Kite, and Ream were sitting out on the terrace, their heads together, obviously trying to be quiet. I guessed the girls were in bed in the guest room.
I glanced at the time on the oven—three in the morning. We were used to the late nights though and seeing the guys still awake was nothing unusual. I grabbed a bottle of water and walked out to join them.
“How is she?” Ream asked before I even had the screen door slid all the way across. It was cold out, but the glass partitions on the balcony blocked some of the wind.
“Sleeping. Don’t think she’ll wake for a while.” I sat beside Logan, stretched out my legs and cracked the seal of the bottle.
“I’ll take her back to the farm tomorrow.” Ream was pretty calm as he said it.
Logan said, “That’s her choice.”
Kite nodded.
“She’s been fine at the farm. She lives here one month and look what’s happened.”
I remained quiet because there was nothing to talk about. I’d support Haven’s choice, not anyone else’s.
Kite put his beer down on the glass table a little hard and the sound clanged. “Because she hid there. Do you want her to do that the rest of her life? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Something triggered what happened tonight and this isn’t the first time.”
Ream stilled. “What?”
Shit. He was going to tell him. “Kite,” I warned.
“No, he needs to know.” Kite flicked his teeth over the stud in the tip of his tongue. “Nothing this serious, but it’s happened. At the farm the day before you came home and again at the party we went to.” Ream’s face tightened. “We have no idea what has gone down while we were on tour. She runs too much and we all know why.”
Ream quietly turned his beer bottle, something he regularly did when he was upset. “I know that, but she won’t talk about it.” Ream looked at me as if he was assessing me and then his shoulders sagged. I saw it in his face, the half-lidded eyes and the bottle stopped turning, and he was giving in to the possibility that Haven and I were close. “Has she talked to you?”
“No, but if she did, I wouldn’t be telling her shit to you. Even if you are her brother.”
Ream tensed and glared, super pissed-off, then he let it go and nodded because he knew I was right. “Yeah.” He got it. I may not protect Haven the way he did, but I’d protect her my way, and there was no chance I’d break the trust we’d built. “But you can tell me what happened tonight.”
I picked at the label of my water. Yeah, I could give him that. “It was like a grenade went off inside her.” I crumbled part of the label between my thumb and finger into a ball and tossed it. “I was talking to her, but she didn’t hear me or see me. Her eyes glazed over and . . . fuck, she just started screaming.”
Ream swore beneath his breath.
My stomach cramped as I thought about her kicking and screaming in my arms, and nothing I did or said got through to her. “She wasn’t here. You know? Like she was somewhere else and she had to get away or something.” She’d begged and pleaded. I tapped my hand on the side of table thinking. “She said it was her fault. Do you know who Charlie is?”
“No.” Ream held his head in his hands, his fingers digging into his scalp then dragging through his hair until he placed his palms flat on the table. When he spoke, it was muffled by the emotion ripping through him. “I’m telling you this because I think you need to know. After tonight . . . it’s important you know why I want her with me back at the farm. Why she needs help. And this, I’m guessing, is only part of what she’s suffered.
“She pretends to be strong. No, she is strong as hell, but she can’t be alone in this any longer.” Ream looked at each of us. “She was raped. Sixteen years old. Fuck, it was more than that . . . violated over and over again and I didn’t see it.” He kicked the table leg.
“The guy Gerard shot her up with heroin . . . that’s how she got addicted.” My heart thudded and tension gripped my insides. “He gave it to her and then . . .” When Ream looked up, our eyes met and there was so much anguish there that it was haunting. He never told me any of this and now I saw why. “I don’t even know how long it was happening for. But she lost weight, withdrew, skipped school.” He hesitated. “One night it all went down. She was fucked up on heroin and I saw the marks on her arm and freaked.” Ream slowly shook his head back and forth. “He was in her room and I killed him. Took a marble statue and slammed it into his head until there was nothing left but blood and shards of bone.”
I shoved my chair away, and stood, walking over to the railing. My hands curled around the metal bar. The roar rushing through me was like a tsunami churning the raging molecules into volcanic pellets of destruction.
“That’s when we left. Lived on the streets a while, then in that old lady Urma’s shed. The one who left us the cottage in her will. But Haven . . .” His voice cracked. “ . . . she was too far gone. Lost. Broken. I didn’t know how to help her. We were sixteen with no money and her addiction pushed her over the edge.
“Don’t know where she got the drugs from, probably some pimp who was going to make her one of his girls once she was indebted to him. She overdosed a number of times and I had to take her to the hospital. We’d get out as quickly as possible before children’s services were called. But the last time . . . a doctor came out and told me she’d died.”
