Savage lifted his head, his blue eyes twin hot flames. Shame. Guilt. “I got off on it. I would get so fucking hard. I would have to take them one after another. They would beg me to, and I would tell myself they needed me to help them through it. It was part of their training, but it was still self-gratification any way you looked at it.”
She didn’t look away from his gaze, but in true Seychelle fashion, there was no judgment. “Honey, you insist on being so tough on a young boy. They held your brother hostage, hurting him mercilessly, and you were trapped doing their bidding. If that was part of the training, what would happen to Reaper, and those girls, had you not followed through?”
“That’s true, Seychelle, but I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to. I tried not to be aroused. I tried not to like what I was doing, but I did. I couldn’t hide it. There was no way to hide it.” He buried his face on her belly and let her comfort him when there had been no comfort as a child. Especially once he’d been a teenager.
“They were afraid of me. Sorbacov and his cronies. The instructors at the school. Reaper and I were different; we’d grown too powerful. Reaper made his first kill when he was five, creeping through a vent to get to one of the worst of the instructors. We had to be so careful, and we couldn’t kill too many too fast. We had to take only the very worst and spread the kills out. Months apart. A year. Try to make them look like accidents. Never use what we’d learned at the school. Czar planned. The others helped, were lookouts or created illusions. Whatever we needed. But for the most part, Reaper or I were the ones that made the earlier kills. I think that began to show on our faces or in our eyes, whether we wanted it to or not.”
He was trying to prepare her for the worst of him. That side of him that was even more of a monster than he had to show her in the bedroom. Wasn’t that bad enough to have to confess to? Wasn’t it bad enough to have to tell her he’d been raped and tortured as a child? That he’d crawled through vents and killed the men who had done their worst to all of the children in the school, not just the survivors?
“Why did I have to be so fuckin’ good at it, Seychelle?” He could hear the whispers of Absinthe and Demyan telling him he was the best. No one better. He would be huddled in a ball, hating himself, wishing he was dead, knowing the only thing that kept Reaper alive was his ability to use that whip. His expertise. He detested himself for being aroused every time. For participating to keep those he cared about alive when others suffered at his hands.
“I got so I didn’t know right from wrong. The lines just kept blurring, no matter how hard I tried to live up to the code. If they didn’t take Reaper, they threatened one of the girls. I got so good at it. And so good at the assassination work. Too good. Sorbacov loved sending me out. I was his golden boy. I always got the job done, and he liked it messy. Bloody. Not at first. At first, he wanted accidents so no one could trace the deaths back to him. But then he wanted his marks to suffer and know they were suffering because he’d decreed it. I excelled at making them suffer. In fact, Seychelle, I was the best in the school, so once again, I was the golden boy, the Master of Pain. Had that shit burned right into my skin declaring me so. It wasn’t just about my ability with a whip or a fucking flogger. The things they taught me there to do to the human body …” He trailed off.
He waited. Anger building. That red swirling up in him through the black. She remained silent, her fingers on his scalp, moving to his temples and then down to his neck, where his muscles were in merciless hard knots. That didn’t deter her. Nothing seemed to. He wanted to knock her hands away. He wanted to shake some sense into her.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Seychelle? Do you not understand what I’m telling you? Why they took a red-hot iron and burned that title into my back? When Sorbacov wanted information, I got it for him by taking his enemies apart. Enemies of the state, he said. I kept them alive until they told me everything he wanted to hear and then some. Do you know what I felt when I did that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What does that make me? If you were thinking of running away from me because I stupidly fucked up over not telling you why someone might want to kill me, then baby, you might consider this a much better reason.”