don’t you tell me how you got such a wicked reputation? I sensed it and got a glimpse of it when you cut out George’s tongue. I’m always hearing whispers, but you do a good job of keeping that part of yourself hidden. And don’t skimp because I know that your devil is in the details.”
The boyish smile, laced with a ton of charm, got me every time, enticing me to grin. The cute crinkle that showed up at the edge of his right eye, and the way his lips bent and filled up his face, were small details that let me know his smile was genuine, along with the way his nose wrinkled when he was thinking hard. I liked it, realizing I had never paid that much attention to a man’s less obvious features.
“You can say that my reputation was built from years of training, and torture, but mostly abuse.”
Torture? Abuse? The words stuck out and latched onto my brainstem.
“There is no doubt in my mind that our father was the living version of the devil planted here on earth. I’m sure you know already from all of your data collecting on me and my brother that we grew up in the syndicate, but what you probably don’t know is that our father started grooming me to be a death-soldier at age five. He started taking me to syndicate sanctioned beheadings, firing squads, and executions of every kind. He wanted me desensitized so that I’d get used to the gore involved in death.”
This bit of news kicked up my intrigue and had me glaring harder at his lips as he spoke, unwilling to miss a thing.
“It took a good year for me to start stomaching most of what I was being exposed to. Khane had arrived a few months before I started training, and the only reason my father left him alone was because he was a toddler. The kind of training I was receiving at five, the syndicate suggested you start at eighteen. My father didn’t care, and my mother loved him more than life itself, so she went along with whatever he wanted. There was no school, no mingling with other kids our ages. We trained with other boys in the syndicate whose fathers wanted them to start early. We were homeschooled, one-on-one tutors, and would end up punished as severely for academic failures as we were for our so-called training.
“When it was only me enduring my father’s harsh version of training, I could take the punishment. I could take being beaten. I could take being verbally abused, starved, and physically worn out. However, when Khane turned five, and my father started in on him, everything changed. Seeing my little brother suffer, tore me apart more than anything my father could have ever done to me, and he knew it. He hated Khane because he was born out of an affair he’d had with his maid.”
That explained why their features were like night and day. And Arjen was right. This was the kind of information I would never find, no matter how much digging was done.
“My father was the one that took Khane’s eye.”
Shit!
“When I was fifteen, and he was thirteen, we had let a man we had captured for an execution, escape. One of my father’s men ended up getting killed in the recapture. As punishment for what we had allowed to happen, my father vowed to take something from us, since we had allowed a life to be taken on our watch. He stood us in front of the audience that was there to watch the man’s execution and asked for a volunteer from Khane and me. Of course, I volunteered, but my father’s hate had already made the decision.”
I wasn’t aware how tense I had become until Arjen brushed a tender caress along the side of my face.
“He made Khane pick an eye. I jumped in front of Khane to try to help, but our father promised me a month in what he called, the vault, for interfering. He had handed out countless harsh punishments to us throughout the years: brutal beatings, broken bones, burns, and extended periods in a soundless black hole in the ground, he called the vault. To us, of all the punishments, nothing was worse than being locked in that vault. It messed with your mind, and it took weeks, sometimes months, for you to retrain your mind once you came out of there.”
I strengthened the hold I had