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“We always assumed Blackstone was upstairs dreaming up new ways to hurt us, but he wasn’t always there. I saw his upcoming plans for a charity gala in San Francisco. He’d be gone for several days, along with most of his guards. It was the first time I realized we had a real chance at escaping. But we had to be smart about it.”

“How did you come up with your escape plan?” she asks.

“The other guys have certain abilities, too. We combined all the intel we could get and strategized for weeks. Thankfully, Blackstone had been looking forward to that gala for a while, so we had enough time to really think through our escape route.”

“Did it work?”

“It had to. We had no choice. If we messed up even one part of the plan, we were dead. I wasn’t going to die. My need for revenge kept me alive for years. I never stopped fueling it with memories. That’s why I’m telling you all of this. It’s so you’ll understand. I’ve got nothing but hatred inside me. There’s no room for love.”

“That’s not true,” she murmurs.

“It is. Any love I had is gone, and it’s not coming back. Nothing you can do will change that.”

“No. The love is still there. When we’re born, we’re given an enormous capacity to love. We’re filled with so much love, and we want to give it to the people who are supposed to love us back. Our tiny little hearts are bursting with love. But then something happens. In your case, your mom died. Suddenly, you have all this love trapped inside your heart, but you can't give it to anyone, so all that love gets locked inside you.”

I don’t know how the hell she knows that about me, but it’s true. I sit on the edge of the bed, still out of reach but closer to her than before.

“And there’s this need, thiscompulsion, to let all that love out. And you might try sometimes, but it only takes one person to reject it, just one heartless bastard, and all that love gets suppressed again. I hate Blackstone for what he did to you. He made you hide all that love inside you.”

I start trembling because she’s right. I’ve never admitted that to anyone before, but she understands me. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to do with this, so I move closer and let her take me into her arms. I bury my face against her chest. I don’t want her to see that she’s tugging on that lock around my heart. She’s working it free, bit by bit, and I’m powerless to stop her.

She holds me close and doesn’t say anything for several minutes. “When you can’t do the thing you were born to do, it hurts like hell.”

"What thing?” I ask in a voice I don’t recognize. There’s too much anguish in it to be mine. I don’t dare say another word. I don’t want her to see me like this, but she’s doing it anyway, seeing right through me. She’s seeing my blackened, shattered heart, and she’s not running. She’s here, tearing that cage around my heart wide open. I don’t know what I’ll do if she unleashes all that longing and desire to be loved. I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it. No one has ever understood that side of me before, not even my brothers. I have no idea how to deal with it. None.

“You were born to love, Scar. To give all that love in your heart away to people who deserve it. Your mom deserved it. From what you’ve told me, she was a good mother.”

“She had her demons.”

“We all have those. I’m so sorry you lost her when you did. And that a sadist got a hold of you instead.”

I hear what she’s not saying: it’s too bad you’re a broken monster of a man because you could have been so much more. She doesn’t know it, but that’s the thought I have in the darkest part of the night when I can’t sleep and the demons of my past are circling, waiting to steal my sanity. I’m too ruined to be good enough for someone as pure as she is.

I don’t know what to do about her. She’s slowly peeling back all the scars, looking for the man underneath them. I’m afraid of what she’ll find. I’ve pushed some things so far down that even I don’t know what’s hidden in the depths of my heart. She could unleash hell beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. She could make me hope for more than what I have.

I can’t deal with that. Hope is the most dangerous feeling in the world. I know how easily it can be destroyed. I used to have hopes and dreams. I hoped someone would see what Blackstone was doing to us. I dreamed someone would rescue us. But nobody ever came. I clung to hope for years until I realized what a treacherous feeling it could be. So, I locked that up, too. I put hope in a little box inside my heart, along with all that love she seems to know so much about.

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“What happened to me is nothing compared to what you went through,” she says.

“Did someone hurt you?” I ball my fists, ready to hunt down anyone who dared to make her suffer.

“Just a jerk boyfriend. He betrayed me. He cheated on me. I found it hard to trust anyone after that, so I stopped dating.” She shrugs as if it’s nothing, but to me, it’s everything. She needs to know there are good men out there waiting for someone like her.

“Not everyone’s an asshole,” I say.

“True, but once you’ve had your heart broken, it’s hard to put it back out there. I don’t want to get hurt again.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then don’t. Just tell me the truth. Talk to me. We can work through anything as long as we’re honest with each other.”

“I’m too twisted inside,” I remind her.

“No. Blackstone made you do terrible things, but you’re not a bad man. You had no choice. He tried to break you. If you refuse to love again, then you’re letting him win. Don’t let him win. He doesn’t deserve a place in your head, and he certainly doesn’t deserve to keep your heart caged forever.”

“Hum,” I mumble noncommittally.