Page 10 of Damian & Jun, Episodes 9-12 (The Residency Boys #8)

Richard disappeared from his back. A moment later, his hand wrapped around Damian’s ankle, pulling it toward the ankle cuffs at the base of the cross. Damian growled but didn’t fight. Richard locked both his feet wide apart, the tether so small he couldn’t hurt himself.

Damian pulled and twisted. Richard’s tools weren’t toys. They weren’t there for pretend or a thrill. They did what they looked like they should do.

He gave up, leaning forward, breath coming in harsh pants. “I can’t be a monster, Sir. I won’t become them. I’d rather die.”

“What will hating her change, boy?” Richard’s voice was soft as velvet and deep as a ravine.

Yellow. They weren’t playing. This was an edge, and he was teetering on it. Richard was holding the chalice of poison to his lips.

All he had to say was yellow. And Richard would pause, take a different tack. This would all be left for later. He’d be able to pull the stretched-out pieces of himself back together.

And be right back in the pain that had brought him to this place.

“Boy.”

Damian sobbed.

“How will you be a monster, boy?”

The words tore out of his throat. “Because THEY ARE!”

“You’ve built your life on being what they are not,” Richard whispered.

“Yes!” Damian jerked against the bolts of the cross.

In every other place, he was a strong man, a large man, even, compared to some.

He couldn’t thrash, couldn’t rage, but here it was safe.

The bolts clanged, but nothing gave. His arms and legs burned from the tension and the stretch, this struggle he was putting himself through, fighting against a thing he couldn’t escape.

“They…they blamed me. Everything they couldn’t change—they blamed me. I can’t blame them. If I do, then I’m just the same.”

Richard’s frame blanketed him from behind, caging him in. “So close, Pup. You know the truth.”

Knowing the truth and feeling the truth were oceans apart.

“You’re going to suffer for their sins, Pup, as long as you claim them.”

“I could have DONE something.”

Richard stepped back. The cane made a swoosh through the air, lifting the hair on Damian’s arms. In the next flash, it was against his skin, raising fire, once, twice, three times.

Damian screamed. His body thrashed in the restraints. He wasn’t trying to get away anymore; he was overloaded. His nerves had no choice but to shake and thrash through the onslaught.

“Please,” he whispered, his body shuddering, knees buckling.

Richard caught him from behind, saving him from hanging from his wrists. “What are you afraid of, boy?”

“Hate, sir.” Damian sucked in air through a raw throat. “There’s a lake of rage inside me. What if it owns me?”

“Rage is acid, boy. It clarifies, separates, melts. It burns. Choose what it burns.”

Damian squeezed his eyes shut. “What if I am what burns?”

“Even if that is all that is left, you are you. You will still be the man I cherish and respect.”

“How do you know?”

“Because–” Richard’s voice rattled like a husk.

Damian pulled, trying to turn to see his sir.

Richard reached under his arms and gripped the beams of the cross.

“--when they took Collin and émeric, I was my rage. I was everything that I am without the small limits, the social concerns, the everyday desire to survive. I was all of myself, clean and pure and sure.”

“You rained down death.”

“I loved, Damian.” Richard’s voice cracked.

Tears ran down Damian’s face, not just for himself. “What is about to die?”

“You are the master of yourself, Damian. I’ve seen you become a man who owned himself. So fight yourself. Choose what dies. Choose what deserves to survive.”

Richard stepped away, leaving Damian on the cross. “It doesn’t change a thing to acknowledge it. It only changes you.”

The thump of the flogger against his shoulders made Damian sway on his feet. It barely registered as pain. He was deep inside himself. The strikes on his body beat out a rhythm as he walked the places in his mind down to the dark lake deep inside.

A place as deep and as old as himself. He crouched down by the water and placed his hand in it, watched the water bifurcate over the sides of his palm. It changed color as it fell, red, then blue, then green, then yellow, then finally orange. He stretched out, stirring it up.

Some of it was cold. Some of it was warm. Some streams were so hot they seemed to become steam as they fell.

The pain in his physical self mounted, his limbs tingling with a high that only masterfully built-up stimulation could bring—euphoria at the hand of a lash.

He grunted, twisting and pulling on his restraints, letting himself fight until he found that place he knew he was going.

He was going to drink, here and now, chained down, trusting Richard to tame his beast if it appeared.

He conjured a chalice in his mind. Dipped it into the water. Stared into its surface. Every color of the rainbow swirled there, colors against depths of black.

The pain of the flogger spilled over the edge, driving him to the place where sensation was only pleasure. He floated in a world so suffused with pain that there was none.

A vestige of Dalia walked across the water.

Her face switched from how she was now to how she had been then, the day she betrayed him, and then further back to when she had been young, seventeen when he was six, twenty when he was nine, a beauty in her prime, twenty-five, a darkness on her brow as he passed his fourteenth year, the last of his respect for their father fading from his eyes.

Could he hate all that she had been and all that she was? Could he forget the moments she had been his loving older sister? The mornings she’d dumped cheap cereal in his bowl as she blended blush on her cheek or helped him pour the milk while quelling Thaddeus’s temper at how much he was eating?

Tearing her out of him was a cut against his own person.

Hanging on to his guilt had nothing to do with her and everything to do with himself.

He wanted the older sister who he loved.

Had wanted her more than he had wanted himself.

Hating himself for losing her was better than believing that she hadn’t loved him enough—that his only warmth in those early years had been so weak.

The boy inside clung to something that had never been, hoping the illusion would come back and dance.

He knew it was over.

But putting off belief let him pretend, shielded the child inside from the truth.

He had to let go of her, on every level, in every way.

The whole cloth of his childhood was poisoned. There was no saving it.

Dalia held out her hand, demanding he approach.

He raised the chalice instead. “I love me more. Even if I have to hate you to love me, I love me more.” He was going to become her monster. He was going to be every hateful thing she had flung at him.

He drank.

It wasn’t poison. It was life. It was color and rain and sunlight. It was Jun’s kisses and Richard’s hands. It was Enzo’s laugh and Matthew’s feet on the track. It was émeric’s scones and Auntie’s coffee.

It was blood and rage and laughter. It was belief.

Dalia’s hand fell. Her eyes narrowed. He stared at her, licking his lips.

He could feel the rage. Tears fell down his cheeks, inside and out.

The rage he’d been so afraid lived inside him, strong as a wave, red and rising inside his chest. It burned, rewriting memories, building the case against her into a wall of evidence, lending him the strength of a beast. The strands between them, those bonds he’d always known to be tangled up in family, appeared between them, heated from the inside, the color of lava.

They burned to ash. Wounds ached in his heart, the points where connection had once been now empty and raw.

His physical body was falling. Arms had him. A blanket was wrapped around him, but he couldn’t look away from the wounds inside.

Someday he was going to see her face again, and he was going to feel nothing.

Tears soaked his skin. Why did you have to be the one who was kind once?

And then even that question was fading. His hands were free. He wrapped himself around Richard, the first truth, the first rock of his life.

Jun

Jun shimmied out of the dress and petticoats and traded them for loose sweats from Damian’s side of the closet.

In the bathroom, he washed his face, getting rid of the makeup that feminized his features and hid his identity, and then moisturized, careful to treat his lips and under his eyes.

Damian and Richard had not yet shown their faces.

He went back to Damian’s room and folded the clothes into the garment bag, then went in search of émeric.

Perhaps the Frenchman would know where his husband was and, by extension, Jun’s boyfriend.

Voices led him down the hall past the playroom and the main bedroom. The door to the lounge at the end was open and the curtains all rolled up, letting in cold winter sunlight. Collin lay onone of the couches, his head on émeric’s leg. His sir was petting his hair.

Jun held up the garment bag and laid it over a side table, then threw himself on the couch opposite Collin and émeric. “Where’s Richard and Alpha?”

“The playroom,” Collin said.

“Oh.” Jun bit his cheek. That meant that Damian was probably submitting to Richard.

He couldn’t be upset about that, not when he’d cried his heart out and almost fallen asleep in émeric’s lap.

He poked the feeling inside his chest for jealousy or panic.

All he felt was bereft. He wanted what Collin had, someone to touch.

He rolled off the couch and crawled over to Collin. “Share.”

Collin blinked. “Share what?”

“Cuddles.”

Collin giggled, surprised. “You want me to cuddle you or you want to share émeric?”

“Both. I’m greedy.”

Collin craned his neck back to see émeric’s expression. “Sir?”

“There’s room for two of you to lie side by side.”