“Your first hug?” I was going to be sick. Sixteen when she had her first, most basic sign of affection. No fucking wonder she was a mess.

“My first real hug since I went to live with my father,” she said in clarification. “Armando worked with me, showing me that what my father and stepbrother did was not how most men behaved. It took me a long time to trust him. I waited for the insults to slip from his lips, but only words of encouragement and caring ever came from him.” Tears filled her eyes, and a small smile formed on her lips. “Armando was a bit awkward, but that made him more endearing. Noah was also there, and he helped as well.”

“Who’s Noah?” I asked. It was the first I’d heard any inkling of a family outside of her abuse. If they were people she loved, why didn’t she talk about them?

“Noah lived with Teresa and Armando when I moved in. He’s a year older than me. He came from a more abusive home than I did. He was headed to college that fall, something he never thought he would do. He showed me what a brother was supposed to be like. He was better adjusted than I was to people.”

She had to be taught how men really were. How badly had I fucked with her in the beginning? All that hatred and blaming her and taking my frustrations out on her. Was I any better?

“Do you want to know what my favorite Disney movie was?” she asked, drawing my attention.

I forced myself to relax as I looked at her. “I want to know anything you want to tell me.”

“Cinderella. I used to pretend I was her and a prince would come and take me away,” she said as a sad smile tugged at her lips. “It was when I was fourteen and Adam kicked me so hard he broke two ribs that my dream came crumbling down.”

A wave of nausea rolled over me.

“The hospital, of course, believed the story my father told about what happened.”

Her lips pursed together, and I wondered if anyone ever believed her. Surely someone had to be suspicious.

“He told them we were roughhousing when the truth was Adam was pissed off, and I was an available punching bag. It was then I realized that if I wanted out, I had to do it myself. No one was going to come rescue me. There was no prince on a white horse.”

Every muscle in my body was taut, and the need to destroy rippled through me. “Did he do that to you often?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It was mostly verbal. Yeah, he’d push me into walls every day, but a few times a year he would go off, and I’d be in the hospital again. I was ‘clumsy,’ you see. Clumsy Lila hurt herself again. Tripped and fell down the stairs. Can’t walk across a flat surface without falling. Clumsy, clumsy Lila.”

She was holding back from me. The reactions I’d witnessed, her night terrors. No, those weren’t the result of what she’d just described, but a situation much worse. She was skimming the surface for my benefit and possibly her own.

“Did your father hit you?” My teeth were clenched tight, anger consuming me. She twitched at my question, an involuntary response. “Fuck.”

“He would slap me, but he never punched. He couldn’t stand to look at me, and if his eyes met mine, he would snap.”

He never punched her, but her stepbrother…

My hands were fisted in my lap, violent energy coursing through me at the speed and energy of a freight train.

“Why, then?” What about her eyes set him off?

“Because he was staring at his eyes on the face of a woman he slept with once, years before, and he hated her for ruining his life. He hated me.”

My brow scrunched. “Your mother?”

“She died in a car accident when I was five. Steve, my father, knew about me, but didn’t want anything to do with me. When she died, he was listed as my guardian. I don’t think she ever meant for me to go with him, but her own parents were dead, and she had no other family. I’d never met him before that day.”

Torn from her mother in a cruel twist of fate and dropped into hell. I couldn’t stop images of a smaller, thinner, frightened Lila from filling my mind. Skittish in her movements, reluctant in others, as she adjusted to life without fear.

The sadness morphed into anger. Her father, her flesh and blood, hurt her over and over. He encouraged his stepson to abuse her and, God forbid, use her.

The horrors she endured made my blood boil and pump furiously through my veins. My hands shook, teeth mashing together. I wanted to find them and bash their fucking skulls in.

Lila was innocent and so fucking pure in the world, and they corrupted it, twisted it, for fun.

I wondered if my parents still had my bat from when I played baseball in high school.

“He was married by then, and his wife had a son of her own. They all hated me for disrupting their family. It was the talk of the town because he was prominent in the community, so he couldn’t ditch me once word got out. I wish he had, but they had to think he was the kind of man that did the right thing. So, he took me home and ignored me. He refused to soothe me when I was upset, and he would yell and scream instead. He put on his proud father face when out, but when at home, I was left to fend for myself. Child protective services would be all over his ass these days.”

“How did you survive?”

She scoffed, a reaction that surprised me. “He taught me independence through neglect. That was probably his downfall.”

The overpowering need to touch her, to soothe her, took over, but we were at the office, so I was limited to reaching across the desk to take hold of her hand.

“You did nothing to deserve it. You know that, right?” I asked, needing to know she understood she did nothing wrong, that she was innocent.

She nodded in agreement, but I wasn’t sure she meant it.

As we returned to work, I continued to look over at her from time to time, concerned how she was handling the ghosts. There was nothing I could do at the office, but once we were home, I would show her.

She was stuck in the void of her own memories, the emotions that drowned her as a child. I knew Lila was stronger than she believed. The fact that she got out of that situation by herself told me that. She didn’t let them break her completely.

That evening, I tried to show her affection.

When she came around my cock, I felt a shift.

I’d been breached.

CHAPTER 24

I fucking hated the pain. Most days it was manageable, but with the spring weather, pills were sometimes my only solace.