Worth It (Forbidden Men 6)

I had to wait until my ears stopped ringing before I took a deep breath, licked my dry lips and carefully said, “Excuse me?”

Reese was having a stare down with her man. “If it were you, I would want to know.”

Mason growled out a sound and whirled away as he clutched his head. “It wasn’t our place to tell her, sweet pea.”

“Wait.” I held up my hand, which I realized was quivering like crazy. “You’re joking, right? I mean, that doesn’t really happen in prison. That only happens in the movies?” When neither Reese nor Mason answered, I bit out, “Right?”

Tears coated Reese’s lashes. “I am so sorry, Felicity.”

I shook my head. “No. That’s not...it’s not even possible. It couldn’t have happened. No! Not to Knox.”

“I don’t think it was the first time either,” Reese whispered.

Mason made a sound from across the room, letting us know he didn’t approve of her giving me more details. But Reese hugged herself and kept watching me. “At the beginning of the video, there were three of them who ganged up on him. And their leader guy...the way he talked to Knox, he made it sound as if he’d caught Knox before, and you know...raped him before. And Knox made it sound that way too. He said he wasn’t letting that guy touch him ever again, not over his dead body.”

My breathing picked up and my chest heaved. Shuddering, I backed away from her until I bumped into something. When I glanced back and saw it was her couch, I gratefully sank down and clutched my knees. My skin felt cold. My hands numb. And my heart. Well, that just felt shredded.

“Give me the video,” I said in a low, steady voice.

“Felicity,” Reese started, her eyes full of torment, but Mason snapped, “No! He asked us to destroy it, and we’re going to respect his wishes.”

Storming to a laptop on the table in the kitchen, he ripped a flash drive from the side and snapped it in half.

Just like that.

I gasped, feeling as if he’d snapped me in half. Pressing my hand to my heart, I hissed, “How could you?”

He glanced at me, his jaw clenched. But when he saw my face, he growled and gripped his hair. “Fine. You want to know what happened that day, I will tell you what happened. But there was no way I was actually going to let you watch it. It was...horrendous.”

“Really, really horrendous,” Reese said, sitting next to me and taking my hand.

Mason slumped into a chair across the room from us and sighed into his hands, looking as if he’d aged a decade. “I should’ve snapped the damn thing in half as soon as Reese and I stopped watching it the first time. That video will haunt me for the rest of my life. I had to work with him two days after watching it, and I couldn’t look him in the eye. I couldn’t... I just kept seeing what they did to him.” He shuddered and glanced at Reese, then me.

I gripped Reese’s hand harder. “Will you please tell me,” I said in a soft, calm voice, even though inside I was a complete mess.

He met his girlfriend’s gaze and nodded. “Okay.” But he kept eye contact with Reese as he spoke, as if he needed her moral support to get him through. “It started like she described. Three other inmates jumped him. He was by himself in what looked like some huge, industrial laundry room, pushing one of those cloth laundry cart things. It was obvious the guy in the middle was the ringleader. Jeremy and the other one were just followers, doing his bidding.”

I nodded when he paused to collect his breath. He glanced at me once then returned his attention to Reese. “The leader guy…he was the one who’d attacked Knox before. He told Knox it’d been too long since he’d had a piece of his...”

“Sweet ass,” Reese provided helpfully. “It’d been too long since he’d had a piece of Knox’s sweet ass.”

“Thank you,” Mason murmured at her, his lips twitching in amusement. But then he checked on me, and his grin died flat. “Anyway, Knox told him they’d have to kill him if he ever let that asshole touch him again. So the asshole said he accepted his offer, and just like that, the other two jumped him. Knox was able to shove his laundry cart in one guy’s path, but Jeremy...he had this knife—”

“Shiv,” Reese offered helpfully.

“Right.” Mason nodded. “So Jeremy swung his shiv at Knox and caught him right here, in the ribcage.” When he cradled his own side, I sucked in a breath, cradling mine as well and remembering how I’d seen that scar on Knox.

Reese wrapped her arm around my shoulders, and I leaned into her, needing all the support I could get.

“Knox was fighting him off barehanded, until the other guy caught him from behind and stuck him in the thigh with his own shiv.”

I covered my mouth with both hands, and Reese began to rock me back and forth.

“After they pulled the blade out, they kicked him right where they’d stabbed him, until he went down on one knee. He kept swinging at them, though. But they caught him by the hair and dragged him across the floor until they had him sprawled on his stomach.”

“He still had hair then?” No idea why I focused on that. I guess it was just safer than thinking about the worst of what I was hearing.

Mason nodded. “It was quite a bit longer. I don’t blame him for shaving it off after that. I would’ve too.” With a shudder, he kept talking. “While two of them struggled to hold him down, punching on his arms and head and the bloody gash on his leg, the third guy—the leader—ripped down his pants.”