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But he didn’t have it in him to demonize his brother. Not in the least. He simply didn’t have the will.
But it left him feeling something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. There was something burning inside of him. Some rage. But it was a fruitless rage.
Cairo was his last living family member. There was nothing... There was nothing.
“Get your woman,” said Riyaz.
And Cairo did. He left.
As it should be.
But Riyaz simply had his feelings. His own flashbacks to that time.
Riyaz had loved his mother.
His father.
Cairo had loved Ariel. And it had made him make a foolish mistake, but he had been just a boy.
He had only been a boy. What was there to condemn?
He felt like something violent had grabbed a hold of him and shaken him.
He felt numb. Or perhaps it wasn’t numbness, but a dawning realization. A peeling back of all the pain and grief that echoed in his soul.
Grim acceptance had kept him alive. Brianna did say he was grim.
The belief he was keeping himself alive all those years by holding it at bay.
The belief he was protecting Brianna by holding his emotions back. That he could not love, because he could not open up the depths of himself in that way and put her at risk.
But there, with his soul scraped raw, and his anger, his pain, at Cairo, at his father, at the men who had done these things...
The memory of his mother.
It was not blind anger that drove him now, but grief. For the way his family had been destroyed and the burden they all carried as a result and it was too heavy.
He could not hold any more.
He could not care for anyone. It would be too costly.
He was not protecting her.
He was protecting him.
He was not a hero.
He was a prisoner.
He did not leave the dungeon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BRIANNALOOKEDEVERYWHEREfor Riyaz. Except the dungeon. He didn’t normally go down there at this time. And yet... There was something that had made her want to check. So she crept down there. And there he was. Sitting in the darkness.
“Riyaz? What’s going on?”
“I found Cairo down here. I sent him after Ariel.”
