Chapter Eight #3
He gave her a twisted smile that didn’t go anywhere near his eyes. “My brother was four years younger than me. His name was Jay, and he had a smile that could light up the world. He adored our mother.”
She despised the note of sorrow that leaked into his voice when he looked so completely stoic. She found herself holding her breath. She knew whatever he was about to tell her would be bad. Very bad.
“One day, Mom met us in the house while Dad had gone up the mountain with his friends. She had a duffel bag stuffed full of her belongings. I knew by the look on her face, but Jay…He was certain she was taking us out of there. Getting us away from him.”
A muscle ticked along his jaw. He raked his fingers through his hair several times.
“She told us she was leaving, and she couldn’t take us.
Her excuse was that if she went alone, without us, she’d have a better chance of getting away clean.
He might let her go. But if she took us, he would never stop looking. Never. She was right too.”
“Wilder.” She breathed his name, needing to hold him.
“Jay pleaded with her to take him, but she refused. She just walked out. He was devastated.”
Jay wasn’t the only one devastated. Harlow knew Wilder had been just as destroyed, maybe even more so, but he would never admit it to himself.
“She left you knowing how your father was? Knowing how he treated you?” She couldn’t hide her shocked reaction. It was his mother. The woman who should have been protecting her sons. There was a short silence. She was positive she had offended him.
“What would you have done?” His green eyes looked even lighter, almost glowing at her in the darkness.
“Honestly?” She stuck her chin in the air.
“If he were torturing my sons and beating the hell out of me, I’d probably introduce something into his food to make him drowsy, and then I’d slit his throat when he was asleep.
I’d have my boys packed and ready to go, and we’d go armed.
Anyone trying to stop us would get shot. ”
“Baby.” One word. Gentle. His voice washed over her like a warm embrace. “You wouldn’t pull the trigger.”
“I would if a child needed protection. I absolutely would, Wilder. You persist in thinking I’m some kind of saintly woman, and I’m not. That man would have been dead had I been his wife.”
He brushed a kiss on the tip of her nose.
“I was thirteen when she left. My brother, Jay, was nine. The next few years were hell, but we survived. My father would ‘teach’ us survival skills, including torture and interrogation. We had to practice using weapons and hand-to-hand combat. I figured the training would come in handy, so I threw myself into it. He didn’t neglect our education.
He was very exacting with any child up there.
They had better be excellent and fast at learning any subject.
We had tutors, and we were expected to give one hundred percent at all times. ”
Harlow found herself waiting for the worst possible news.
It was there in his voice, that calm, flat tone that shouldn’t have given anything away, but she was beginning to read him.
She felt the knots in his stomach, the arctic-cold anger that had been pushed down so glaciers covered the volcano beneath, where no one could see.
“He tried to separate us, Jay and me, but I wouldn’t let it happen.
I became so good in the woods that his men couldn’t track me, but I could track them.
I always found Jay, no matter where they took him.
My father would send me down for supplies with a couple of the others and hold Jay there because he knew I would never leave if he held my brother hostage.
And I didn’t. I made it very clear to Jay that I would always come back for him. ”
There was a grim edge to his tone that warned her. She found herself tense, very apprehensive, so anxious that a part of her was panicky.
“I was seventeen when I came home from a supply run, and my brother was nowhere to be found. Neither were my father or most of his men. I had a bad feeling, and I had learned to never ignore my instincts. I tracked them into a particularly high altitude, but with a drop into a deep ravine. I’d been there once before.
It was where my father would go when he was feeling particularly ugly and wanted to hurt someone.
That was entertainment to him. Pure enjoyment.
You could say he lived for those moments. ”
“You knew what you were going to find.”
He tugged at his shirt to expose his neck.
“You see those rope marks burned deep? They play a game when they’re up at that altitude overlooking the ravine.
The first station for their ‘toy’ is to see who can throw a knife accurately.
The goal is to not kill their toy. Depending on how many are playing the game, as many as twelve wounds can be made in various depths.
The toy remains tied to the tree while they toast themselves with shots of tequila.
That means ants and beetles and all manner of bugs crawl into the wounds. ”
Harlow had never conceived of such horror. “That was done to you?”
“Yes. The next round is to see who can waterboard without drowning the toy. Some of the men were extremely enthusiastic. When they were finished with that round, if their toy was still alive, he was thrown onto the ground, still bleeding, still attracting bugs, while they toasted one another with more shots of tequila. The third round was the most dangerous in that they would tie a noose around the neck of their toy and throw or drag him as close to the ravine’s edge as possible.
Whoever got the closest, without the toy going over the side, won that round. ”
“What was wrong with those people?”
The phone continued to ring and she swiped it off the small table, sending it flying into the grass.
Her childhood had been a piece of cake next to Wilder’s.
Tossing her phone to escape her father’s annoying, persistent calling felt freeing.
He was a criminal, but she was learning there were different calibers of criminal.
Her father was guilty of raping and beating women, but he fell far short of the sadistic breed that Wilder’s father and his followers were.
She hadn’t ever conceived that anyone could be as vile and inhuman as Wilder’s father.
She knew that didn’t make her childhood any less traumatic, nor did it erase the many triggers she had, but it took away some of the fear she had of the senator.
Wilder had served as an officer, and just by being a part of Blom’s team, she knew he had to have a master’s in something.
He spoke several languages. He was an extremely educated man.
Wilder had gone through hell and survived. He was a survivor and very, very skilled. Compared to her father, whose power came from wearing a suit and tie, Wilder had been trained in the strategies to survive in any situation—and to neutralize his enemies in utter silence.
“I arrived far too late. My brother was hanging from a tree, his neck broken, his body tortured almost beyond recognition. I could see him clearly from my position. My father and his friends were laughing and drinking tequila shots, toasting one another, with my brother dead not but a few feet away. He was thirteen years old.”
Harlow should have expected that horribly grim news.
It had been there in his eyes all along.
Hell. The worst. How did one live with that nightmare?
How did one keep going? Then it occurred to her.
Wilder had been a witness to his father’s brutal, sadistic killing of his brother.
Not only his father, but the men who followed him.
He’d said ten of them. There was no statute of limitations on murder.
“Wilder, could your father be setting you up? Maybe he found you and is trying to kill you.” That seemed like a very good possibility.
More than very good. Wilder knew enough to put the man and his followers behind bars for the rest of their lives.
“He might have paid someone to find out where you would be sent, or even arranged it.”
Wilder lifted his head and pulled back from her.
Very gently, he deposited her on the porch and stood.
There was a finality in the way he put her aside.
Harlow studied his expressionless mask. Just like that, in the blink of an eye, he had gone from a gentle, sweet man to something altogether different.
She already knew there were many sides to Wilder, and most of them were predatory. He had the capacity to go from relaxed and calm to erupting into violence without warning. Did she trust him never to turn that ability on her? It was clear to her that his protective streak was off the charts.
Wilder glided down the porch steps to the grass, where he bent to retrieve the phone. “It is an impossibility that my father or his followers are involved.”
“You can’t know that.”
He turned his head to look at her over his shoulder. “I killed every single one of them that day. I didn’t leave any of them alive. I hunted them and took them out one by one before they could make it back to the camp.” There was no expression in his voice whatsoever.
“Wilder,” she hissed his name, looking around her.
“You can’t ever say that aloud. Never. Have you told anyone else?
Does Blom know? Could he send you to prison?
” She knew the anxiety in her voice was a dead giveaway to her feelings for him, but she didn’t care.
Surely, he had to know, no matter how justified, he would be held accountable.
When he turned fully to face her, she realized her reaction probably wasn’t normal, but then she knew monsters weren’t always caught.
They got away with all kinds of heinous crimes, destroying lives for their own personal reasons.
The more they got away with it, the worse they became. Someone had to stop them.