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“It was really great in the beginning. He was incredible,” Grayson said. “I only caught them arguing once or twice. And it wasn’t knock down, drag out fights. He’d get real quiet and would wait until I was out of the room.”

“Of course, he did, to keep her isolated and you from knowing the truth,” Ryder’s voice was rough and Grayson wondered if this was bringing up things from his own First Life.

“This one time I found Mom pressed into the corner of the kitchen and he was right in her face, you know?” Grayson said, swallowing deeply.

“Holding onto her wrists. He was a big guy. She couldn’t break his hold.

Later, I would see her hiding bruises there and other places.

And then they got married, and he didn’t hide what he was doing from me anymore. ”

Grayson closed his eyes for a second and breathed.

He could still hear the slap of Dirk’s hand against his mother’s tear streaked face.

He could still remember how Dirk’s face would get redder and redder, until he was almost purple, with this molten rage after dinner where his mother moved like she was afraid something would snap beneath her.

The anger came from everywhere and nowhere.

There was no figuring out what would trigger it.

And that was the most insidious. Because his mother kept looking for those triggers, for an explanation of how the man who had seemingly adored Grayson and her had become this .

But she never found them because they weren’t there.

“My mom was a paralegal at a pretty big firm and she was making good money. She was even thinking of becoming a lawyer. The partners she worked with encouraged her to do it, thinking she had the mind for it. Between her salary and the insurance payout after my dad’s death, we were really good money-wise,” Grayson said.

“He had a construction business, supposedly doing really well, but…”

“It wasn’t?” Ryder asked.

“No, he was in debt up to his eyeballs and being sued by a bunch of people for shoddy work,” Grayson explained.

“The worse his business situation got, the more he drank, the more dangerous he became. Mom had given him control of her checking and savings accounts, because share and share alike, but that was a big mistake.”

“Had he spent it?”

“Yeah, yeah, but not on what he should have. He was supposed to be paying the bills, but Mom found out that our house was being foreclosed on because he hadn’t paid the mortgage in nearly a year,” Grayson continued, gritting his teeth as he remembered his mother confronting Dirk about it.

It had been in the dining room. She had the foreclosure notice in her right hand.

Her hand was shaking whether from anger or fear, he didn’t know.

Even when her wrist had been so messed up she couldn’t carry things properly, she had never told anyone what was happening.

She was too embarrassed to ask for help.

But, looking back, Grayson thought she believed she had the money she’d scrimped and saved over the years to get them away.

But now she’d found out that it was gone too.

She had been holding the notice out to Dirk, asking him what was happening, demanding to know how he had let this happen.

Dirk’s shoulders had rounded like a bull’s about to charge.

His mother’s eyes had gone wide, knowing the signs then.

But she didn’t move fast enough or maybe she just couldn’t let this last outrage go.

Dirk punched her three times, twice in the chest and then once in the face.

He rarely hit her face, but this time he had and he’d broken her nose.

She’d flown back and hit the wall before sliding down, clutching her bleeding face.

Grayson had run towards them as his stepfather had leaned over his mother.

He’d been certain that he was going to punch her again.

Grayson had barreled into the man, knocking him down, and then he’d crouched over his mother, using himself as a shield.

His stepfather had rounded on Grayson, face unrecognizable in drunken fury.

He’d pulled back both fists to simply pummel Grayson and his mother.

“He was going to kill us. I knew it. I could see it. And then the power was just there . It felt like there was this explosion inside of me and a raging fire in my chest.” Grayson touched his chest where that flame now eternally burned.

“I pushed him. I mean really pushed him. Slammed him against the wall not once or twice, but… His head burst open. His brains and blood were on the wall like a gigantic firework.”

He let out a shaky breath. He hadn’t really allowed himself to remember the full fury of his attack.

“It wasn’t just one blast, Ryder. I destroyed him,” Grayson said.

“And I couldn’t stop. Mom was making this keening wail and that sound finally got through to me, I think.

She wasn’t touching me. She never reached to touch me.

She was curled into a ball against the wall, arms wrapped around herself, and that was when I saw her face.

Her expression when she looked back at me was… one of horror .”

“Grayson” Ryder breathed his name into Grayson’s hair. He was holding Grayson tightly against him, rocking him.

“After everything he’d done to her--to us --I thought she’d be glad, but now…

now I see how frightening it must have been,” Grayson admitted and swallowed that lump in his throat.

“I hadn’t just attacked and knocked him against the wall.

I’d used magic to batter him into something unrecognizable. And I wasn’t sorry.”

Ryder tightened his hold.

“I ran away then. Not giving her the chance to reject me before I rejected her,” Grayson said.

“I see that now, too. Would she have come around to realizing it was still me? Maybe. Probably. But she saw a monster when she saw me. And, she might have loved me and forgiven me and even understood that Dirk being dead was better, but she’d always know I was something… else .”

“Grayson, I’m so sorry,” Ryder breathed into his hair.

“It’s okay. I’m okay. I know that sounds crazy. This thing--grief, guilt, anger--has lived in me for so long, but ever since I met you--ever since I came here--something’s changed,” Grayson admitted. “I feel like I’ve always been here with all of you, and that was some bad dream I can just forget.”

“You can. You belong here. With me. With everyone,” Ryder assured him, kissing the top of his head again and again.

The person he had been when he’d come here seemed fainter still now after he’d unearthed and exposed this old wound. He felt… he felt…

Grayson covered Ryder’s hands with his own, holding them close to him, and asked, “Ryder, have I been here before?”