Page 66 of Chad's Chase

TWELVE

His word my hope secures…

“Imprisoned?” Chad whispered, his voice hollow, ghostlike. “You didn’t train willingly?”

“No. I was forced.”

With a hard bob of his Adam’s apple, he nodded. “Like me.”

Holy. Shit.My mouth hung agape at his words. This wasn’t true. “You were…what?”

Ignoring my question, he said with that same hollowness, “He swore to me. He swore he would take care of you.”

I jumped out of my skin when he let out a sudden roar, his rage like a scorching blow of fire…he was the dragon on his back.

He punched the chair in front of him, then kicked it. The chair was screwed into the ground so it didn’t budge, of course, but Chad continued to kick at it, kicked and kicked at it, trying to uproot it. Abruptly, he leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands. “All this time I thought you were well-off. I thought you’d gotten your parents’ inheritance and were living your life, missing them, and hating me. When I saw you in my club, I thought you were back for revenge. I had no idea…I had no…idea.”

I sat erect, alert, staring at his broken profile. Confused. “So you know who sent me, then?”

Several seconds passed before he answered, “Yes.”

“Who?” I asked eagerly. Because damn, this was something I desperately needed some insight into.

Raising his head from his hands, he looked over at me. His face was an agonizing art of pain and regret with blue streaks of wordless apologies. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what they did to you.”

We stared at each other for several long minutes. Just asking me to tread down memory lane was unbearable. I’m pretty sure he knew it would be a painful excursion for me, but was being temporarily selfish.

And to be honest, I wanted him to know, too. To know just how much he’d fucked my life. The number of choices I’d had in my life for the past twelve years. Zero. How my youth, my virtue, and innocence were yanked from me. That I never had the option to live. Only to serve, and obey.

He needed to know all of it. And he needed to hurt.

So I started out from the moment I regained consciousness in a dark and lonely room. Didn’t know how I got there, or who took me there. I’d only remembered being tied up and left in the closet in my bedroom, and where I’d cried and wailed into the duct tape until I fainted.

I told him about being starved, beaten and ill-treated, being punished for sins I never committed. I told him how I’d had to earn my rewards to survive, had to behave, obey. I told him of being forced to train.

When I got to telling him howIhad to pay for my training, Chad got restless. He stood and then he sat back down and then he stood and sat back down, until he started pacing, as though the information was launching him into a whirl of insanity.

Over and over, he kept repeating, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Although I didn’t have to, I continued talking, just to hurt him, telling himallthe details of my payment sessions—the rape, the abuse, the name-calling.

Pat on the back, I managed to tell it all without shedding a single tear. Guess I was stronger than I thought.

By the time the nightmare tale was over, Chad was on the other side of the room, sitting on the floor, back against the wall with his feet drawn up and his head lowered. The update had pronouncedly done one over on him.

For fifteen tortuously long minutes, neither of us spoke, giving words and sighs a rest, the air thick with grief, stiff with the unchangeable, and suffocating with the inevitable. Regrets and apologies unspoken, but potently palpable.

“Is that…” Chad’s voice broke through the silence. No longer cool and confident, but diffidently brittle. “Is that why you became a dike?”

I thought about it. “More yes than no.”

When he looked at me nonplussed, I explained. “The guard assigned to me never approved of the whole sex-for-payment arrangement. I mean, I was only eleven when it all began. And Saturday after Saturday he’d had to stand outside the door and listen to all of it. So at fourteen, when I realized I was never going to get immune to the abuse, I begged him to get rid of Mr. D. And surprisingly, but thankfully, he did.”

“He killed him?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”