Chapter 16
Iwas sitting alone in the Regents office at home with a half empty glass of whisky, surrounded by a collection of memories I'd rather forget, in a cardboard box filled with photographs, documents, and remnants of a childhood that belonged in the deepest pits of hell.
Logan had gone to workout in the basement gym, while a brief text from Ryder told us that they were on their way back from visiting his mother.
I could hear the shouts and whoops of joy from some of the other housemen in the sitting room, probably playing computer games.
Their excitement was a far cry from the dark cloud of emotions that were rushing through me at this point.
My hands shook, rattling the current pile as I forced myself to lift another photograph.
There I was, at five years old, dressed in a suit that cost more than some people's entire wardrobe, my mismatched eyes accentuated with makeup to amplify the freak show.
The depraved monsters at the Palace had drooled over them, my "unique selling point," one blue, one brown, like some prized, exotic pet they could auction off to the highest bidder for the evening. My introduction into society.
A wave of nausea hit me, and I was back there.
That scared little boy. I could almost feel their hands again, clammy and invasive, gripping me tight, holding me down as I screamed as each one of them took their turn violating me.
It wasn't just men, but women as well, the women were sometimes worse.
Some of them I knew were mothers themselves.
Their whispers slithered through my mind, promises telling me how much of a pretty little boy I was as their hands caressed me, as they made me do things no child should even know about.
And when I resisted, those same hands beat me nearly to death.
Promising more vile things, only in a different way.
I still remembered the night my parents took me to The Palace.
They had introduced me to the devil himself.
And that devil, Dominic Blake, had introduced me to so many more monsters.
My parents had watched as the first of these bastards had inspected me.
I had struggled of course, even at five years old I knew that what was happening was wrong and I had tried to fight against the men as Blake had whispered in my ear about how I was going to be his best boy and make him so much money.
Fuck. I shoved that photo aside and downed the rest of the whisky in the glass, before pouring myself another full glass.
I reached over and grabbed another photo, this time from what they called the "formal collection", pictures of me in tuxedos, bow ties, looking like some miniature gentleman ready to escort wealthy perverts to their sick gatherings.
These were the images they used when clients wanted arm candy, someone young and pretty to make them feel powerful.
The memories came in fragments, vivid, but not whole, thankfully.
My mind had done me the mercy of blocking out most of the details, leaving only impressions of fear, pain, and the desperate need to survive.
But some things... some things were burned into my consciousness with crystal clarity.
Like the night Logan arrived. I picked up another photograph, and my breath caught.
There we were, two broken little boys, eleven years old.
Logan looked terrified, his dark hair messy, his hazel eyes wide with shock and trauma.
Blood down one side of his face, and a quickly forming black eye and split lip.
I was holding his hand, trying to be brave for both of us even though I was just as scared.
That was the night Logan's mother died. The night Nicholas Bale's enemies had taken her and Logan to the Palace, thinking they could use them as leverage against the crime lord.
Apparently he had stepped into someone's territory or something and they felt the need to teach him a lesson.
I had seen it many times before. People being brought to the Underground, which was the hellhole that existed under the glittering lights of the Palace.
Blake didn't care who he allowed in, or who he extended the fortress's protection to. As long as they could pay.
I remembered how Logan had screamed and tried to get to his mother, when they forced him to watch what they did to her.
How they gang raped her over and over, while beating her black and blue.
Then one of them had turned towards Logan.
He was one I knew from experience had a thing for young boys.
I had stood in front of Logan, tried to protect him from the horrors that I had suffered for years at this point.
His own mother, who was still being brutalised by another one of his men, begged the man to take her again, and just to leave her son alone.
But he had laughed and advanced on us, anyway.
"Don't worry whore, you'll get another turn," he had sneered.
"Now Cole, get out of the fucking way before I beat the all living hell out of you for interrupting.
" I was terrified, but I stood firm. It had only made the man laugh as he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me screaming over to the poor half unconscious woman.
"Fine, let's give the boy a preview of what I am going to do to him.
" I screamed as I felt him ripping at my pants, knowing what was to come.
But he didn't get very far. In fact, in the next instance I heard a loud bang, followed by more sharper bangs and the man landed slumped over me, his blood covering me as it dripped down the side of his now blown out head.
Each of the men in that room had died right there as Logan's father and his men had arrived guns blazing.
He had come to rescue his family, something my own family had never done for me.
But it was too late for Logan's mother. She died in his arms on that very dirty cell floor, her injuries too severe to survive.
But before she had died she had whispered for him to not only look after their son, but the boy who had protected him.
She used her last breath to protect me, something my own mother couldn't even do.
Nicholas Bale, one of the upcoming gangsters and future crime lord of one of the biggest families in the United Kingdom, had negotiated for my release into his care.
Blake hadn't wanted to give me up, but I was sure that Bale would have burnt the whole place to the ground that night, and strangely Blake's Palace was worth more than an eleven-year-old broken boy.
Logan hadn't let me out of his sight after that.
For months, we'd slept in the same bed, two traumatised children clinging to each other in the darkness.
Nicholas had taken me in, not out of kindness, but because Logan refused to be separated from me and because he knew that taking me would hurt Blake.
But he made it clear right from the start that his rescue hadn't been for free, and his constant threats of sending me back to the Palace, even now thirteen years later, sent my bones cold.
I set that photograph aside with shaking fingers and reached for another.
My heart nearly stopped when I saw it. This was the one that I had been looking for, the one that I hoped I wouldn't find, and was just my brain playing tricks on me.
It was a group shot, several children arranged for what looked like a casual photograph.
Some of them I recognised as other "residents" of the Underground, kids who'd been brought in as new stock.
Already damned to the hell that we lived in.
Others were clearly newer, like some sick, twisted audition.
But there she was, a little girl with purple ribbons in her hair and the biggest, bluest eyes I'd ever seen.
She couldn't have been older than five, her face still round with baby fat, her expression a mixture of confusion and hinted at a fear that she knew she was in a bad place.
Even at that age, even through the fear, there had been something different about her.
A light that hadn't been extinguished yet, a spark of innocence that seemed almost sacred in that place of horrors.
That's why she had caught my attention, among the other children.
I had seen the purity in her. I knew that face.
I'd been staring at it for weeks now, watching it transform from defiance to submission to something more complex under our influence.
This was proof, proof I didn't want, but proof all the same.
I had met her before, in the worst possible hell I could imagine, and she was only a sweet baby.
I dropped the photo and picked up the whisky glass with shaking hands.
I downed the entire contents in one go, relishing the burn against my throat even as tears burned my eyes.
She had been there. Cadence Turner had seen the Underground.
She had only been there once, for that lineup.
But she had been there. The implications and revelations that this meant were massive.
We had gotten everything all wrong. We didn't know Cade at all.
She wasn't just some scholarship student dragged into the world by selfish idiots, and that's what we were.
Fuck she didn't know who she was. She was as much a part of this world as any of us.
More so, because now I knew who Cadence was, I knew exactly who her mother was, and why Ryder couldn't find her.
Why she had been missing for the last seventeen years.
Before I could process this revelation fully, the sound of the front door slamming echoed through the house. I quickly shoved the photographs back into the box and wiped clumsily at my eyes, my heart racing as footsteps thundered up the stairs.