Page 85 of Elex

I swallowed convulsively, the burn of bile in the back of my throat.

“They took me, drugged me, then Maalik, our brother, he— he—,” I closed my eyes and had to force myself to get the last part of the sentence out. “He raped me. Tortured me. Cut me. Almost killed me.”

“Goddess, Kat,” Hel growled. He continued pacing angrily, hands clenching and unclenching as if he longed to wrap them around someone’s neck. “Is that… is that how you got the scars?”

My stomach fell. Of course he had seen the scars.

“Some of them,” I looked down at my hands, refusing to look at him. “Some were just normal beatings for screwing up, for not obeying, or just because someone had a bad day.”

Anger flooded me as I thought of Maalik. He had taken great joy in ordering beatings for V and I whenever he could.

“Normal…” Hel whispered, his voice trailing off.

Some of his angry energy seemed to have burned off, and he came back to the fire, sitting down next to me instead of across from me this time.

“There’s more, isn’t there,” he asked quietly.

I nodded.

“Usually when you are taken to one of the Darker Houses there are restrictions on what they can do to you. The House of Eros had the least restrictions, which is probably why Maalik chose it.”

“But what I did, what I let him—it was for nothing. I couldn’t—couldn’t take it all. I wasn’t strong enough, tough enough. Because I couldn’t take the punishment he dished out, they brought V there anyway,” I snarled.

“V— did Maalik…” Hel’s voice trailed off.

I shook my head.

“He tried. He thought I was too drugged to act and had stopped Suppressing me as much. I was able to break through the Suppression field. I made sure he wasn’t able to dothat, at least, but V was in a coma for days.”

The familiar feeling of failure poured over me like a suffocating liquid. I was drowning in it.

“You know that none of it was your fault, right?” Hel asked me softly, bending to look in my eyes when I couldn’t meet his gaze. I shivered, even though the air was warm.

“Ofcourseit was my fault. They were my mistakes, my failures. It’salwaysmy fault,” I whispered.

“You listen to me, Kitten,” he said, lifting my chin and forcing me to look him in the eyes, the moonlight turning them to pools of silver. “It. Was.Not. Your. Fault. None of what happened there was. You did the best you could in a shitty situation.”

“How do youknowthat?” I asked, disbelievingly. “You don’t know what I’ve done. You barely knowme.”

“I don’t know how I know. I just do. This,” he twined his fingers through mine, the energy almost humming now that we were seated next to each other. “This tells me you’re a fighter. You love your brother. You love your people. I’ve seen how you are with Deliah and Tik. I know you would have done anything to protect any of them. Hell, you almost killed yourself trying to keep your brother alive. If there had been a way,anyway at all to get him out of there, you would have taken it.”

We sat there for what seemed like forever in silence. Finally I took a shuddering breath and broke the silence.

“You’ve got two more truths coming,” I said.

“We don’t have to do them now.” The expression on his face was full of concern.

“Now. Who knows when we’ll do this again?” I asked, looking around. What I really meant was, who knows when I would have the courage to talk about this again, but Hel seemed to understand.

The stars had come out overhead in a gorgeous display. In Alexandria the light pollution washed out all but the brightest stars. Above us now the sky looked like black velvet someone had scattered diamonds across. The rising moon shed its silvery light across the atrium.

“Let’s just do one,” he said. I shrugged.

“Okay, pick,” I said, looking away from him. I wanted to get this over with.

He hummed a moment, but I noticed he hadn’t let go of my hand.

The moonlight slowly slid across his face, casting his scarred side in shadow. Finally, he spoke.