“Ice.” She just murmured his name. Softly. Lovingly.
The sound of it wrapped him up in something safe. He wasn’t used to that feeling, and it nearly undid him. He needed distance from his past. He expected her to reject him for many reasons, one of the biggest that he’d been a victim of pedophiles for years. He knew there wasn’t a lot of sympathy for male children, regardless of the fact that they were helpless and the act was rape. He forced himself to continue, to get to the worst. There was a lot of the worst.
“Along with sexual training, they trained us to be assassins, how to kill in a thousand different ways. To slip in and out of homes, crowds, over rooftops, vehicles, whatever it took. If we blew it during training, the beatings were horrendous. We used every kind of weapon. Learned about explosives, how to use them, how to build bombs and take them apart.”
“I would think they would have become a little afraid of you.”
Her statement gave him some hope. He wasn’t coloring in the details because he couldn’t look at them. He had to make her see just how desperate they were without opening those doors too wide and letting the monsters free.
“So many children died in front of us. We all were freezing. There were rats, bugs, little food, no medicine. It reeked. The longer we survived, the more they devised brutal, cruel tortures to use against us. The more children died and the worse our captors got, Czar decided we had to fight back, and he had us work on various skills or talents we had. He wanted each of us to contribute so that we all could get out of there alive.”
“You said he was a child.”
Ice nodded. “He was maybe ten or twelve, I don’t know. He and Reaper had begun devising a plan even before we arrived. Reaper was around five at that time, I think. He and Savage were extremely popular, the way Storm, Alena and I were. I don’t know if when we came, it took some of the pressure off them, but I doubt it. They were much more savagely beaten than us.”
He fell silent, lifting her hand to his mouth, his teeth on the pads of her fingers, scraping back and forth gently.
“Savage and Reaper appear to be very scary men.”
He nodded. There was no denying that fact. “They are for a reason. They had to be so the rest of us could get out of there alive. All of us had to be.”
He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, and he caught the moment when knowledge was beginning to blossom. She went very still, and she briefly closed her eyes. Her expression was cautious.
“The instructors liked to force us to do different things in these sexual training sessions. One of the things I was supposed to do was get a girl excited sexually and show her off to others so they could get off. A group of pedophiles liked that kind of thing. I was getting older then, meaning twelve or thirteen, and the girls were thankfully a little older, not the usual six or seven, but still, it was abhorrent to me when I knew that all these men would be watching her and getting off. It sickened me. Still, if that’s all they’d done, I could have taken it better.”
He shook his head, looked down at her fingers and then brought them up to press them over his forehead. He just sat there, breathing hard. He couldn’t look at her. He had never acknowledged his shame to anyone but Storm, who’d often been forced to participate.
“Ice, it’s all right,” she whispered softly, compassion in her voice.
He shook his head again, refusing to look at her. “It’s not. I refused at first. They beat me. They beat Storm, but I wasn’t going to do that to any of the girls. Then they took Alena from us. We fought them, but they were grown men and they stomped the hell out of us. She came back so broken. She was so little, and they used her like that . . .”
He looked at her. He had to. Right in the eyes. “I would have done anything to save her, including selling everyone else down the river. I traded my soul for my sister. I felt like I had no choice. I agreed to do what they said. The worst was in the beginning it sickened me, but then, after a while, it began to arouse me. I liked seeing whatever girl I was given excited, knowing what we were doing could arouse others. That she could do that with her sexuality. I don’t know, it all got mixed up in my brain. We were turned into killers—and sexual beings. Not much else. That went on for too many years, Soleil, and it fucked me up permanently.”