He had no idea those little droplets of sweat were tears until the room turned blurry. He used his arm to swipe across his face because he couldn’t let go of her. She was sanity. His only sanity in that moment when his past was so close.
“When I would lay perfect stripes on someone, they would reward me, sucking my dick, making me come. I swear I didn’t know the difference, only that it was better to feel good than to hurt like hell. I was very good at training others to like pain. Erotic pain. Pain and pleasure are so close, so intertwined, and it isn’t that difficult to confuse the two sensations. I was so good at it. I could turn pain into pleasure every time. Every way. I did that shit for years, Seychelle, and they called me the Master of Pain, the Whip Master, so many other titles. And I earned every one of them.”
He closed his eyes against the memories, of thin red streaks and tears, of his body moving in others. The trouble was, those memories were behind his eyelids. Carved into his soul. There was no getting rid of them.
“I liked training them. I liked seeing my mark on them. Each year I got better. The better I got, the harder it was for anyone to assault me. I learned to fight. I learned to hurt others. I learned so many really ugly things without knowing they weren’t right. It was the only sex I knew. I didn’t even know it was done any other way.”
He had been shaped into a monster without any realization that was what was happening. He was twisted into something unrecognizable. Something vile.
“I hurt others so I wouldn’t get hurt, at first. Then because it kept my brother from getting hurt—at least, that was what I believed. Then my body was so confused it didn’t know how to have an erection unless I was marking someone. While I trained my partners to like pain, I didn’t realize I was being trained to need to give it. To see those marks. It’s been impossible to have any kind of an erection without it.”
It was a confession, straight up. He left out the terrible, brutal details. The things that had put those scars all over his body. The children he’d watched die. The girls he’d trained given away when his handlers got tired of them and wanted newer playthings so they could start all over again. Watching those first girls being cruelly tortured and eventually killed. He didn’t give her those things, but they were all there inside of him, swimming in that red-hot pool of rage.
“There’s no way to reverse years of damage. Over twenty years, Seychelle. I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on in the hopes of being different, but it isn’t going to happen. I know that. And I know that these things trapped inside of me, the voices of the dead wailing for justice, I know I’ll never be rid of them. I need to avenge them just the way I need to mark my partner and then make it all better.”
He took a breath. Needing it. He had to face her. Had to look at her and see the truth of what she thought. Seychelle couldn’t hide from him any more than he could hide from her. She either would order him away from her, sickened by what she’d heard, or she would have the courage in her to face the monster with him.
He slowly turned his head until his eyes met hers. Those blue eyes swam with tears. There was no condemnation on her face. She had too much empathy in her, too much compassion. She saw the things he’d told her in vivid detail. The little boy beaten, brutalized, raped. The cigarettes put out on his body. The blowtorch they’d used on him. The branding iron. The terrible scars left from the deep lashes of the bullwhips and slashes of the knives. She could see a lot more evidence than that, but now those images were in her mind. Trapped there, both a gift and a curse. A gift to pull out when she needed a reminder of how he got the way he was. A curse because the images would haunt her, give her nightmares.
“Savage.” She whispered his name. “I’m so sorry. I don’t understand how anyone could do those things to a child.”
Neither could he. She wouldn’t understand his need for justice. His need to show those fuckers what it was like to be brutalized. To be tortured. He hadn’t told her the things he’d seen. The children who had died because he wasn’t strong enough to save them. He didn’t tell her how he and the others had escaped, but he knew one day she’d ask.