Chapter Four #3
“Who?” he prompted. He had Code. Code could find anyone. There was no hiding from Code. Keys would hunt these people down, and they would come to the realization that there was not normal and then really not normal. He was to the extreme. His woman with her soft heart should have been protected.
“My parents. They didn’t want me. I had an older brother.
He was normal and I wasn’t. I couldn’t look at them.
Certain fabrics touching my skin made me feel as if there were spiders crawling all over me.
I didn’t ever laugh because I didn’t understand humor.
I had learning disabilities. I was a huge disappointment and embarrassment. I know because they told me daily.”
She wasn’t crying. That struck him hard.
She was shaking, but she wasn’t crying. There was no self-pity in her voice, just that low, traumatized tone that shook him.
She fell silent, and he didn’t make the mistake of pushing her.
Lyric had to trust him with her secrets.
He would go to the grave with them if that was her wish, but she could give those burdens to him, and he would take them on.
As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t a more perfect woman.
When she just pressed her face into his chest as if she were trying to crawl inside him, he kissed the top of her head several times.
“You were created for me. You’re my perfection, Lyric.
No one else gets me, and no one will ever know me the way you do.
I think I went through everything I did so I could be with you. ” He’d never meant anything more.
Her head tilted and she gave him her gorgeous eyes. “You are borderline crazy if you think I’m anywhere near perfection. I created an illusion in order to survive. That’s all I am, an illusion.”
He caught her chin before she could hide from him again.
“The illusion works for everyone else, but not for me. I see you. The real you. You can pretend we aren’t meant to be; you can go down your ridiculous list of reasons why we aren’t compatible, but you know better.
That’s why you rushed out of your safe salon with your blow-dryer and attacked men three times your size.
That’s why you very carefully got the feeling back in one arm so you could throw a pair of scissors to me while facing down a gunman.
You trust that I’ll have your back. And I know you’ve got mine. ”
“Let’s not forget that every time you bring up either of those two incidents, you lose your temper and threaten me.”
“It isn’t a threat, Wildfire. It’s a promise.” He brushed a kiss across her lips, featherlight, no demands, just laying it out there. He wanted her as used to the intimacy of their touching as she was to their conversations. “And I don’t lose my temper. You haven’t seen that yet.”
Her eyes searched his. He held her gaze, wanting her to realize she really was safe. She didn’t have to look away or stare down at the floor or look at his chin the way she often did with others. She could look him right in the eyes, and he wanted that.
“My brother hit me all the time. Not lightly. Punching me in the back, ripping out my hair, tearing up my schoolwork, breaking my iPad. I was blamed because they claimed I provoked him. It didn’t matter if I never spoke, I provoked him.
Three trips to the hospital with concussions.
I tried so hard to be as good as I could be, but they gave me away.
They said I wasn’t normal, and they couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me. ”
His resolve to meet her parents deepened. “Who did they give you to?”
“It was a group home. I didn’t fit there either, no matter how hard I tried. And I really did try. I studied everyone to see what they did that I didn’t do.”
Keys found himself rocking her more to soothe himself than her.
He’d grown up in hell, a school whose instructors were made up of the worst kinds of deviants.
They tortured and used children for their own pleasure.
He’d had Czar and his brothers at his back.
Yeah, it had been hell, but he wasn’t alone.
When he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, they were there to shore him up, and he did the same for them.
Lyric had had no one. Not one person helping her.
The idea of her as a child trying to mimic those around her so she wouldn’t be singled out got under his skin.
Her parents had abandoned her because she was neurodivergent.
They hadn’t gotten her help or sheltered her.
They hadn’t even explained why she was different.
First, they’d made her into a victim. They’d taken away all self-esteem.
Then they threw her out. He had thought that ice-cold rage was the worst he could experience, but he was wrong.
Beneath that ugly layer in him, there was something far worse.
He wasn’t usually the man to interrogate.
He knew how. He’d been taught all the worst things one human could do to another, but it wasn’t his forte.
Savage and Destroyer, two of his brethren, were the best in that department.
He was the silent assassin, getting in and out of buildings because he moved like a shadow.
He mostly got killings over with quickly and silently.
He didn’t want quick for her parents or brother.
He wouldn’t mind spending some time driving his point home.
“I take it things didn’t go well in the group home.”
“Not particularly.”
She hesitated and then continued, but he knew he wasn’t going to like what she was about to tell him. He did his best not to tense up.
“There were five boys in that group home. They were super smart, Keys. I mean off the charts, and they ruled that place. They were already shaking everyone down, scamming, committing crimes outside and at school, but they never got caught.”
He didn’t like the fact that there were five boys, bullies, criminals. What had they grown into? She was out there, unprotected.
“Don’t stop. What about them?”
“They didn’t like me much. They thought I wasn’t smart because my eyes didn’t see the way everyone else’s did and that made it difficult to read.
It wasn’t as if I couldn’t comprehend—I could, but I found it hard to read.
If someone read the material to me or I had an audio file, I could retain the information word for word.
But they called me names and pushed me around.
I didn’t fight back because they were bigger and stronger. ”
“Names. Who was the ringleader?”
“That would be Declan. He was always telling everyone what to do. Owen and Leo were the muscle and Nolan and Miles the collectors.”
That tension was spreading through his body. Something had happened. Something that caused Lyric to go on the run. And she was still running. Five of them.
“Keep going, baby,” he urged. He knew it was crucial to keep it together.
If he reacted wrong, he’d lose her. That trust, her faith in him, was fragile, and he couldn’t afford to blow it.
He held himself in check, but it required the discipline he’d learned in that hellhole of a school he’d spent his early years trying to survive.
Her fingers dug into his arm as if he was her lifeline.
“One of them, Miles, liked me right around our first high school year. It helped that he did. The others left me alone because he was big and he’d get mad if they picked on me.
I began to think of him as a friend. I’d tried to be friends with some of the girls in the school, but I wasn’t… ”
He put his hand over her mouth. “There is no normal for us. We make our rules and our normal. The more you think you’re lacking something, which you’re not, the less self-esteem you have.
It’s one thing for the world to knock you down, but you can’t do it too.
You’re perfect just the way you are, Lyric. ”
She gave him her genuine smile. “You do have a way with words.”
Some of the tension eased in his gut. If she could smile like that, it couldn’t be too bad, right? He tugged on her hair very gently, conscious of her head wound. “Finish it.”
“Miles was kind all the way through school. We didn’t date and I was thankful he didn’t ask me on a date. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I learned by watching others, and I didn’t leave my room after dark. It felt safer.”
“Were the others still leaving you alone?”
“They watched me all the time. And they made fun of me behind Miles’ back, but never to his face.
I managed to actually graduate, and the day of our graduation, Miles asked me to meet him in the park the next day.
He wanted to go on a picnic. He said he’d take care of everything.
I’d never been on a picnic. I spent the entire evening researching picnics and watching YouTube videos of people on picnics so I’d have some idea what to expect.
The thought of trying to appear like everyone else was overwhelming. ”
Keys hated that for her. The anxiety she must have gone through with no one to talk to.
She didn’t make friends. She’d glossed over that part, but he knew, in the intervening years, she must have tried and been betrayed on more than one occasion.
She’d stopped trying to be who she really was and gave everyone the illusion.
“And what happened at the picnic?”