Kings of Anarchy (Brutal Boys of Everlake Prep #3) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,187

with a shrug.

Saint sighed like I was seriously testing his patience and I had to admit he really had my curiosity piqued now. Hadn't I wanted dirt on Troy Memphis anyway? Maybe if I got Saint to trust me, I could get enough information from him to use in my vendetta. Though I doubted tales of him not letting his kid play with a toy car would get me very far.

"He waited until I finished my tantrum in silence and eventually, when I realised I had no choice in the matter, I threw the car into the well… I can still remember the sound of it hitting the water at the bottom like it just happened," he mused and though his tone was flat, something about his story made me feel a tug of pity for him. He'd just been a kid with a toy car. Was it really the worst thing in the world for him to want to keep something like that?

"That was pretty shitty of him," I said, hating myself for the fact that some of my anger at Saint was fizzling away, but it was kinda hard to stay mad at a kid who had never been allowed to have his toys.

"It wasn't quite as traumatising as the Action Man incident," he mused. "Or at least it wouldn't have been if he hadn't made me go down after it."

"He threw you down the well?" I balked and he rolled his eyes at me.

"No. He suggested that if I cared for the car so much that I wouldn't wish to be parted from it again and instructed me to climb into the bucket. Once I did, he lowered me down into the dark, all the way until the base of the bucket was just touching the surface of the water. He then gave me a choice. I could either dive in and find my toy and he would return me and it to the surface assuming I could climb back into the bucket. Or I could remain in the bucket until I had learned my lesson."

"How deep was the water?" I asked, unable to hide the horror in my voice at all with that question.

"I have no idea. I was too afraid to find out. Perhaps it was just a few inches deep and all I needed to have done was wade around in it until I found the car. Or perhaps it was several meters and I had no chance of ever finding it, let alone getting back into the bucket to be drawn back up to the surface."

"So you chose to stay in the bucket?" I asked, my muscles bunching as I thought about that, this little six year old kid all alone down in the dark. Troy Memphis really was a monster.

"I did. I believe I was in there for around thirty-one hours before he brought me up. Not that he ever let me see a clock to be sure of the time, but it had been around lunch time when I'd been sent down there and it was almost time for dinner the next day once I was brought up." He delivered it with no emotion at all and I couldn't even tell if it was because he didn't feel anything about it or if it was that he was so practiced in repressing the things he felt that he didn't even know how to show it.

"That’s fucked up," I muttered, half wanting to hug the asshole for a minute before I remembered I hated him.

"So I've been told. Are you going to tell me what fucked you up then? If your family loved you before you lost them was it the losing them that did it? Or the foster care? Maybe a bit of both?"

"The losing them," I ground out, quickly finding my anger with him again at the reminder of exactly why I hated this son of a bitch and his entire family. The things his father had done to him might have been all kinds of fucked up but they'd been done with the purpose of moulding him into his image and from what I'd seen of the way he treated Tatum, I was willing to bet that was a pretty solid success.

"How did they die?" he asked like we were discussing the weather.

"House fire," I lied quickly, hoping he hadn't noticed the moment of hesitation it took for me to come up with that lie. But the way he