in what they chose to do to kids. So many had died, and they got away with it. The more that happened, the more children became disposable to them, the more brutal they became toward us. Czar insisted we work on developing our psychic skills and we all did, whether we thought it would work or not.”
He pressed his fingers into his temples, wishing he was lying on the bed with her and she was massaging his neck and shoulders. His Scarlet. He couldn’t lose her now that he’d found her. He could hear the blood roaring in his ears as loud as the pounding waves outside breaking against the rocks.
“Savage was forced to be with sadists all the time. The ones who loved to flay the skin off the boys or girls or carve their names into them. Some liked to brand them. Or pierce them. He was a favorite because he was so strong and he never made a sound. No one could break him. He caught the whip one day, pulled it out of the wielder’s hand and he took over. No one stopped him. He became the whip master and the top trainer.”
Again Absinthe paused. He forced himself to meet those green eyes, needing to see how deep the condemnation would go. “I had been talking to him for months, years really. Repeating the same things to him. You’re a better trainer. You like what you do. You like seeing the red lines on their bodies. It makes you so hard. You want them. You can make them enjoy it. You have to be the best, better than any of them, better than all of them so they admire you and want you to train theirs for them.”
He saw the comprehension dawning on her face. His voice. That velvet tone, the one that persuaded others, influenced them. Years and years of influence, from a child to an adult. He had created that sadist, that insatiable need for pain in others. That craving and addiction that would never go away.
“It wasn’t just Savage. I persuaded all of them to like what they did. To need it. I didn’t realize what I was doing at first. I don’t think I really ever did until it was too late. We were all such a mess, bloody and broken all the time. Hating ourselves and what was happening to us. Feeling out of control. Czar set rules for us to remain human. He was our moral compass in a way. I mean, we were learning to kill and having sex in every way possible from the time we were little kids, but he made it clear that what they were doing to us was wrong, even if they made us feel good, and we were never to do that to children. Never. That was abhorrent to us and we had to repeat that daily, hundreds of times a day. We should always have one another’s backs and watch over one another to make certain we never became the predators they were. We also had to grow strong enough to strike back at them and to watch out for one another and protect one another.”
Scarlet set the bottle of water on the table between them and continued to regard him steadily. He couldn’t see judgment in her eyes, only that comprehension of what he was telling her. He had to keep going. Why did his life have to be so damn fucked up?
“You’d think it would have gotten better when we were older, but it didn’t. It got steadily worse. Maybe we just knew more. Or the newer instructors were more brutal. Sorbacov reveled in finding really fucked-up men and women to come in to teach us how to perform under any circumstances. We had to be in control of our bodies no matter what was happening to us. I went overboard with the others, trying to help them stay in control so they weren’t brutalized. God, it was so ugly. Those days. The nights. They were so vicious, Scarlet. Not human. There was no real way to fight back.”
He was sweating again, and he rolled the cold bottle over his forehead, grateful for the ice chips he always made certain he had floating in the glass. Sometimes, at night especially, he couldn’t get those days and nights out of his mind.
“No matter how much I talked to them, planting suggestions, or Demyan did, or sometimes the both of us working