years.”
“We had to learn to work together when we were children. We each had different strengths and we pooled our resources. Czar was the one who pulled us together. He’d been in that hellhole the longest of the eighteen of us. There were others who had been there longer when he arrived and were far older, but they didn’t try to get out. They had lost all hope. There were others who believed if they curried favor by turning on the rest of us, and ratting us out, any little thing we did or rule we broke, they’d eventually get out. Of course, that wasn’t so.”
“What did you do to make it out when so many others didn’t? How were you able to turn the tables on them?”
“Czar. In one word, Czar. He got sick of all the dying children and he realized none of us would get out. He decided to fight back. He recruited Reaper and Savage first. They were younger, just around four or five, I think. I wasn’t there yet. Czar put together a plan to take out the worst of the instructors, the ones who were so cruel there was no hope of a child surviving the time spent with them. Reaper crawled through the vents and killed his first one while the man slept. Slit his fucking throat and then washed up in the man’s bathroom before crawling through the vents back down to the dungeon.”
That had been one of the first stories ever told to him by Czar when Czar was trying to convince him there was hope.
“Czar was careful which of the children he recruited. They couldn’t afford to be caught or betrayed. Czar, by the way, was only a boy himself. We’re not talking a teen. He was a boy. He had to watch any child brought in carefully because once we began to fight back, even though we made the kills look like another adult was doing it, Sorbacov suspected and sent in plants.”
“That would have been terrifying,” Breezy said. “How could Czar know and still risk it?”
“There was no way not to risk it, not if we wanted a chance to get out of there alive. We saw dead or dying children monthly.” Just saying it brought the images into his mind and the smell into his nostrils. He could taste the filth of the dungeon in his mouth. His stomach reacted, churning violently.
A shudder went through his body and Breezy immediately turned back to him and framed his face in between her palms. “Honey, we don’t have to talk about this.”
She knew how sickened his past made him and there was no hint that she thought he couldn’t handle it, just that she didn’t like him upset.
“No, it’s good to remember, Breezy, and to tell you. I want you to know what kind of a man Czar is. He hates trafficking so much, he gave up five years of his life, five years, in order to bring that ring down.”
“I’m beginning to see.” She pressed her lips to his throat, just a brush, but it felt like a velvet stroke over his skin chasing away demons. He inhaled to take in the scent of her hair, fresh from the shower. Her skin smelled like wildflowers, further distancing him from the horror of his childhood.
“Czar risked his marriage to the only woman who ever meant anything to him. Blythe is his only, the way you’re mine. Our bodies don’t react the same as other men’s. I told you that. They made certain of that. Some of us are really fucked up in sexual ways—like Reaper and Savage and Ice and Storm, Maestro and Keys … Okay, all of us. And then there’s me and few of the others who are just plain crazy …”
“No, you’re not. Don’t say that. You can’t believe that.”
“Even if I do, I’m not letting you out of your word.”
He bent his head to capture her mouth with his. She tasted like fire every time. Sweet, sweet fire, burning him clean when he was so dirty he hadn’t thought anything could do that. He kissed her over and over because once he started kissing her, there was no stopping. He took a step, pushing her back against the window, trapping her there while his mouth explored hers.
He had been too close to those nightmare years of living in the dungeon with the others. He hadn’t realized how close he’d been to falling into the abyss