Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Corvus
I snuggled closer to the warm body next to me, my heart flipping in my chest when muscular arms tightened around my waist. Kip lightly brushed his lips over my shoulder, which was still covered by the t-shirt he’d let me borrow the night before.
Michelle stroked her fingers up and down my thigh, and her leg had slipped between mine sometime during the night.
After eating fries and drinking another cup of coffee, I’d crashed into bed, sandwiched between them.
And I’d felt the safest I had in a long time.
Probably ever. And for once, I didn’t have flashbacks of seeing Hudson bleeding out and dying on Kreed’s living room floor.
I hadn’t felt this well rested in months.
“You awake, bub?” Michelle asked, her voice low and soft. Soothing. Her voice always wrapped me in this weird metaphorical security blanket.
“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled, pressing my face into her neck and inhaling the scent of her—something citrusy with a hint of coconut. It was quickly becoming one of my favorite smells.
“We need to talk about last night, chibi,” Kip said from behind me, his voice also soft.
I groaned, shaking my head. I didn’t want to talk about any of it because it really meant my parents were trying to get in touch with me, and it meant they wouldn’t stop until they got what they wanted from me. Which was always some monetary gain…no matter how they had to go about getting it.
Just a reminder of the pain I’d woken to the last time I’d caved to them made my stomach roil with nausea.
“Yes,” Kip countered. “You can’t just show up here a drunken, crying mess and expect us to not worry and want to know what happened.”
“I’m not ready,” I mumbled, my voice muffled by Michelle’s throat.
Michelle leaned back and gripped my chin in her small fingers, tilting my chin so I was looking at her. Her brows were furrowed low over her pretty dark eyes, and concern lingered in their depths.
“Holding it in won’t make anything better either, bub,” she gently told me.
I blew out a soft breath through my nose and closed my eyes, feeling sick to my stomach.
“It’s a lot,” I warned them, refusing to open my eyes.
I couldn’t spill all this and look at them.
I was a grown man, and I still caved to my parents.
I knew they’d hurt me. I knew they’d let other people hurt me.
They’d been doing it for years, but the few months of peace I got from giving them what they wanted outweighed the pain for me.
I just wanted peace and to be left the fuck alone. Was that too much to ask?
“We’ve got time, chibi,” Kip said gently.
“I don’t sleep well,” I started, figuring it was easiest to start there.
“I found my best friend bleeding out on the living room floor because of how much he loves Kreed. Hudson was destroying his mother’s marriage to Kreed just so he could finally have him.
Hudson’s own mother tried having him killed so he’d no longer be in her way.
I have flashbacks of finding him. Of how pale he was.
I can’t stop seeing all that fucking blood.
On the floor. On him. On me. My fucking hands.
” I swallowed past the lump in my throat.
“Therapy isn’t helping, despite Kreed forking out hundreds of dollars for each session. ”
“Do you have anyone aside from your therapist to talk to about it?” Michelle asked.
I shook my head. “It was a really hard time for all three of us. I don’t want to drag it back to the surface.
Especially not for Hudson, who it literally happened to.
And Kreed—fuck, he thought he was losing the love of his life that day.
It’s not fair to either of them. I don’t want to burden them. ”
“It’s also not fair to yourself to keep all this bottled inside,” Kip gently reprimanded. I sighed. He stroked his hand over my belly. “But we can talk about all of that later. Keep going. You’ve been living with that for a while now. It wouldn’t send you off the deep end.”
How did he know me so fucking well already? It was like, from the moment he laid his eyes on me, he could see past the front I put up and straight into the depths of my soul.
I shook my head again, my words lodged deep in my throat.
I couldn’t speak them into existence. What the fuck would they think of me?
What would they think when they found out I allowed my parents to fucking drug me, so their sick, fucked-up friends could pay them to fuck me while I was unconscious and incapable of consenting?
When I couldn’t stop them from doing whatever the hell they wanted to me?
“Corvus…” Michelle said softly. Her thumb swiped over my cheek. I didn’t realize I was crying until she wiped away a second tear. “Bub, what happened? Talk to us. There’s nothing you can do or say that will make us run or send you away.”
“But you don’t—”
“Do you trust us?” Kip asked, interrupting me.
I drew in a deep breath, and surprising myself, I nodded, realizing I did.
Even drunk me had known I could trust them to take care of me and never let me down.
And that just made me cry harder because I’d never had anyone I could trust outside of Hudson and Kreed.
Now, I had my own people I could trust in the same way Hudson trusted Kreed.
“Shh,” Kip soothed, tucking my head beneath his chin. He draped one of his legs over mine, weighing me down and seamlessly calming me. “It’s alright. Just blurt it out, okay? Don’t think about it. Just—”
“I let my parents drug me, so their friends can rape me.”
Silence filled the room. My heart stopped. It was so quiet, I heard the electricity running through the walls. I didn’t think any of us were even breathing.
Michelle was the first to break the silence, her voice trembling with rage.
“I’ll fucking kill them,” she snarled.