37. Cruel To Be Kind #3
“I get it,” Marcus says, still talking to Kingston. “I can’t even imagine how unreal it must be to go from being tormented for every breath you breathe, to having that tormentor rendered completely harmless in a matter of seconds.”
Kingston practically snarls at Marcus in response, and I can see he’s so confused and reeling that there isn’t much room for reasoning at the moment. So it’s no surprise he’s fighting against the hope I can see slowly building in his eyes.
“Your dad has been left untouched for too long; he got comfortable, confident, lazy, and forgot that there are always bigger fish in the sea. Your dad has people ready to set him free, but we have people in place to ensure it doesn’t happen.
This is a battle of money, and with the Donovan and Bauer name floating around against Sterling’s, no one is going to be stupid enough to let him walk.
He’s done. And not only politically, but publicly too,” Tristan explains while Cade holds up the tablet to show the news blaring Sterling’s face all across every major news circuit and social media.
“He will never be able to show his face again without everyone knowing him for the sick pedophile that he is,” Marcus adds.
Kingston looks up, his eyes meeting mine, and I know I’m showing the same shock he is, because Tristan has a point.
Sterling didn’t just get taken down by the law; he got taken down by a string of power that’s under the belt of names that are more powerful than Sterling’s.
This is actually real. My eyes water at the magnitude of knowing that man is going somewhere he can’t hurt anyone again.
Marcus catches my eye, a brief smile on his face as he sees the relief on mine. I should have never doubted him, or Tristan, or their resolve to get that evil, depraved thing off the streets.
Kingston breathes heavily for a moment. He seems like he might be on the brink of a panic attack as his eyes widen and then dim, and then widen again.
He exhales a shaky breath, and then another one, the silence stretching as he takes it in, before his body slumps down as much as it can against the bindings holding him.
He looks up at Marcus, his eyes swimming with hope and a lack of comprehension, his body quivering as he processes everything that just happened.
“I’m free?” he breathes out, his voice barely a whisper.
“Conditionally,” Tristan reiterates.
Kingston’s brow furrows. “Conditionally?”
“You have the chance to go back and tear everything he built down and rebuild it. Legally. Or you can follow in his footsteps, and we’ll be waiting in the wings to make sure you share his fate,” Marcus reiterates.
Kingston frowns and deflates, his expression turning melancholy as he shakes his head.
“But I don’t know how to–I have no business intelligence.
It was always why he pushed football so hard.
The years of playing would elevate the family’s reputation while buying him time to avoid stepping aside for me.
He used to always commiserate that his legacy would eventually be passed to me, and it’d die with me because I was too stupid to keep it going.
I’d destroy us unless I could make enough money in a football career to hopefully pass more intelligent genes to my future children before our legacy went completely belly-up first.”
“Well, that is just unsurprisingly gross of him, and you were never stupid, Kingston,” I remind him.
Sure, in anger and to be cruel, I have said that to him after he publicly humiliated me and went out of his way to taunt me. But the topic of his intelligence came up frequently when I tutored him in high school, and I always gave him very detailed examples of how intelligent he was.
“I always told you your dad was just a dickhead.”
“Do you have any idea how deep I went while investigating you? Or how many school projects where you were drafting business plans as early as the seventh grade, I uncovered?” Cade steps in to add.
Kingston snorts in derision. “Father said they were horseshit; an absolute waste of time,” he grates out harshly.
“Of course he did. It was easier for him to control you if he convinced you that you couldn’t survive without him.
He didn’t want you to realize how innovative you were and overtake him before he was ready to pass on the family legacy.
But I’ve seen your potential, and you could easily triple your legacy using some of the plans you drafted as a child, Kingston.
He relied on illegal dealings, but you have everything you need right there in your head to change that,” Cade says steadily.
Kingston swallows; he looks at me and then turns towards Cade. There’s a hope in his face that slowly gives way to resolution. He nods before meeting Cade’s eyes.
“I tried once–to stop the abuse. I was eleven when I found one of the prettiest boys I’ve ever seen in my life in my dad’s bed.
He had these wide blue eyes and blond curly hair; he looked like one of the little cupids, you know.
The only reason I could even tell he was a boy is because he was naked.
Shivering, with tears falling down his face.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what was happening,” he says, and my heart falters as I realize he’s answering Cade’s earlier accusation of having never helped his father’s victims.
There’s a slight narrowing of Cade’s eyes that makes him look almost confused at Kingston’s words. His mouth opens as if he’s going to speak, before he rocks back on his feet and shakes his head, closing his mouth and swallowing whatever question Kingston had raised in Cade’s mind.
However, Cade’s countenance goes completely over Kingston’s head, while Kingston’s eyes are so obviously lost to the memories his brain is fixated on at the moment.
“And then my dad walked out of the bathroom in nothing but a flimsy thigh-length robe. I couldn’t walk out of that room and leave that boy to his fate.
I just couldn’t. So, I grabbed his hand and tried to get him out before my dad chucked a heavy glass across the room and hit me in the back of my head.
“My parents slept in separate bedrooms at the time. I don’t know if she knew what he was doing, or if it was the screaming that got her attention, but I do know it was her intervening that kept my dad from beating me to death that night.
It was the last time I ever saw her,” he chokes just a bit on the statement before his desperate eyes meet mine.
“Father sold my ‘services’ to a very perverted, cruel man for a week. Not only did I learn the monstrosity of what my father was, but I learned the true horror of what it meant to suffer his punishments. By the time I got back, my mother had died. Supposedly, she’d fallen down the stairs, but I know better.
Father said as much and promised if I ever breathed a word of how she died, or of his perversions, I’d find myself as a permanent fixture in my buyer’s household,” he says before huffing out a sardonic laugh.
“He sold me to be raped by a man, but then beat me years later when I told him I wanted to be with a boy from school. Father made sure he and his family were relocated, and I never saw him again. He said that was my one warning; if I got any other delusions in my head like that again, he’d make sure their death was my punishment. ”
Marcus’s face drops before his eyes meet mine.
“After you told me about Sterling’s proposition, we had Cade investigate Sterling using his methods.
Of course, Cade had found evidence of the children who had passed through Sterling’s door.
Some were sold, some have broken out of the trade they were entrenched in years ago, and some didn’t make it out alive at all.
But there was no evidence of Sterling having sold his own son to anyone as punishment or otherwise. ”
“There wouldn’t have been. I’m an heir. The ledgers were for children who were procured and then bought, sold, and traded within the organization.
But the men who let their own sons be passed around were never recorded.
Our punishments weren’t allowed to be documented, so they could never become public knowledge,” Kingston says, his eyes facing the floor, and my heart breaks.
Knowing what his father was, and knowing the cruel way his father talked down to him, I don’t know why it never crossed my mind that Kingston might have been assaulted and raped like the other children that passed through that evil man’s walls.
“You couldn’t be with men, but your dad could abuse children, and somehow convinced you that being with men was worse than the other,” Tristan says quietly, swallowing down the bucket of horrors Kingston had just dropped on us.
Kingston nods, his eyes still on the floor.
His eyes are more honest than I think I’ve ever seen them.
Despite believing the sincere expressions he gave me when we were younger, the eyes he has now are vulnerable and raw.
A lifetime of abuse, disdain, self-hatred, and some thread of hope mixed in with a still tangible deep-rooted hopelessness.
“I could fuck whoever I wanted to; I just couldn’t have any delusions of being with someone that wasn’t expressly chosen by Father, and definitely not a man.
No matter how he justified his perversions, I always knew they were perversions.
But he made sure I understood mine were as well,” he says almost inflectionless.
The emotionless tone feels almost as though the weight of abuse is still trying to mask the depth of the horrors while he speaks them aloud. Like his mind still fears the repercussions for daring to utter them, and trying to soften the blow by giving the words far less emotion than they wrought.
“He was wrong. One is the most heinous, twisted kind of perversion. The other is natural, despite society’s continued disparities,” Tristan argues solidly.
He huffs as though the distinction is weightless, like it doesn’t matter at all.