“It’s okay to cry,” I told him. “You’re allowed to be sad and grieve who you lost. You don’t need to worry about how I feel about it. I’m sad for you and for Nala and the baby, too. No one deserves what she went through.”
I didn’t move when Damien got up and came to my side. I wrapped my arms around him when he hugged my body to his. He put his head on mine and cried. When he cried, it almost instantly set me off. I held him, rocked him side to side, and let him release everything he had been keeping inside.
“I have more to tell you,” he said, clearing his throat.
“More of your story or your brothers?”
“My brothers,” Damien answered, pulling back to look at me. “Mine ended after I … after I took Trent’s life.”
Hearing him say that out loud didn’t horrify me like I thought it would have; it gave me an incredible sense of relief and a huge sense of justice for Nala and the baby he killed.
“I’m glad,” I said, taking hold of his hand. “I’m glad.”
Damien closed his eyes and rested his forehead against mine.
“Also, I don’t want to hear your brothers’ stories from you. I want to hear it from them.”
Damien nodded and kept his eyes closed.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m just enjoying this feeling of being close to you,” he answered as he opened his eyes. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too,” I said. “It killed me to shut you all out, but I needed to. I needed to reach this frame of mind where I was able to hear you out.”
“I know, freckles.”
When I kissed Damien, he was so surprised that he didn’t return the kiss for a few seconds, and when he did, it felt like magic. When we separated, he kept his hold on me.
“I want to talk to you about Alec,” he said. “He gave me permission to tell you this. This is something only I know, and by allowing me to tell you, he wants you to know that he loves and trusts you enough to keep this secret between the three of us.”
I reared back. “I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna keep secrets anymore.”
“This is a secret that you won’t want to share,” Damien assured me. “It’s only to help you understand my brother and understand the level of love and trust he has for you after everything you have been through with Carter.”
I inhaled a deep breath.
“Okay.”
“Alec is thirty-one, and he is happy all the time.” Damien began. “He makes innuendoes, he overreacts about a lot of things, he has shits and giggles about random things that pop into his head. He is different. Have you ever stopped and wondered why?”
I raised my brows. “No.”
“Out of all my brothers,” Damien continued. “Alec is the one who deserves to smile and laugh over dumb shit because for a very long time, the bubbly, happy man you know didn’t exist. He was a shell of a person.”
“What?” I whispered. “Why?”
“He was heavily abused in his line of work.” Damien swallowed. “He was a prostitute in Marco’s eyes, but he considered himself to be an escort. Most of the time, he had consensual sex on the job, a lot of the time he didn’t even have to kiss his dates, but some of the time … he was forced to do things that I don’t want to go into detail about.”
“R-rape?”
“Yes.”
A cry bubbled up my throat, and I covered my mouth with my hand to contain it.
“It got bad.” Damien’s voice became rough. “When I was sixteen, a year after the jobs started, Alec was hurt by two men in a way I’ll never be able to get over.”
I felt sick.
“He always came home late, and this night, I got some midnight snacks when I heard him come in and go up the stairs. He was crying. I had never heard him cry before, so I knew whatever happened to him was bad. I followed him up the stairs after a minute or two, just to see if he was okay and …”
My heart stopped.
“He tried to kill himself, Alannah,” Damien said, a pained expression crossing his face. “He used a cable tie, threw it over one of the beams on the ceiling, and put it around his neck. What those men did to him made him want to die.”
“Oh, God.”
“I still don’t know how I got him down or got the cable tie from around his neck. It’s all a blur, but I’m just happy I was awake when he came home, and that I followed him to see if he was okay.”
I cried, and Damien held me.
“He told me everything that had happened to him and made me swear never to tell the others. Not because he didn’t trust them, but because he wanted to save them the pain of knowing.”