“You’ve probably wondered how I ended up at the Steel ranch.”
She bites her lip. “I have. You said something a while back. When you were upset about everything that was happening and when you were faced with breaching your ethics.”
I wrinkle my forehead.
“Don’t you remember?” she asks.
“I don’t know. What did I say?”
“You said, ‘I feel like I’m back in a damned cage.’”
I close my eyes. Funny that I would use those words. How could I have said that? In front of Callie?
“It kills me, Donny,” she says, “to think of you in pain. To think of you inside a cage.”
“I suppose it wasn’t really a cage in the literal sense. I mean, there weren’t bars.”
“You don’t have to…”
I open my eyes. She’s so beautiful. So full of love. How can I do this to her? How can I tell her about the hell that was those two months of my life?
“Donny…”
“I was seven years old. Dale was ten. They came for us after school at our home, when our mom wasn’t there. They took us… I don’t know. We must have been drugged. Somehow we ended up on an island in the Caribbean. That’s where Dad found us. Dad and Uncle Ryan.”
It pours out of me then. All of it. I don’t cry, I just speak in a robotic tone as I tell her everything.
The pain, the torture, the humiliation.
The rapes. The beatings.
And through it all, my brother. Dale. My hero and my protector.
Everything he went through, some of which I only recently found out about, to shelter me. To save me.
Then…Dad and Uncle Ryan. Aunt Ruby. The dogs. Bo and Beauty.
And…
My attempt to end my own life.
Callie gasps at that one. She was being so good at trying not to look surprised. Trying not to look completely nauseated even when I know she is.
But that one got her.
“Donny, why?”
“I was a kid. A kid who had made a promise to his hero. Dale. That if either of us had a chance to end this miserable existence, we would.”
“But you had been rescued.”
“We had, but neither of us really knew that at the time. Sure, these people seemed nice, but we were still kids. Dale wasn’t talking. I couldn’t even get him to talk to me. So as far as I knew in my seven-year-old mind, our deal was still on. Thank God for Aunt Ruby.”
“You owe her your life.”
“I do. And I don’t thank her enough. I seem to give all the credit to Dad and to Mom. But Uncle Ryan and Aunt Ruby—they have just as much to do with my salvation.”
“I’m so sorry,” Callie says.