Marly's Choice (Men of August 1)

Cade tucked his hands into the pockets of his jeans. The sky was as black as he sometimes thought his soul was, but he still looked for the light. The tiny pinpricks of brilliance that proved there was at least the hope that life existed.

“We have to keep trying.” It was all he had to hold onto. That someday, the bloody memories would ease, and give him peace.

“He knew, Cade.” Brock’s voice was hoarse with his knowledge, with unshed tears. “He knew what that bastard was going to do to us. I don’t care what he said. He knew.”

Their father. Joe August. Yeah, Cade always suspected the same thing, despite Joe’s pleading vows that he hadn’t known. Despite the lengths he had gone to cover the blood Cade had shed, he knew. There was no way either Joe, or their mother, couldn’t have known what was happening to them.

“I know, Brock.” Cade hunched his shoulders, frowning into the night.

“I wanted to kill him.” Brock’s voice shook. There were no tears. There hadn’t been since those weeks after the nightmare had first begun. Brock hadn’t cried since.

“I couldn’t have hid it.” If he could have, Cade knew he would have killed Joe as well if it had been possible. That need had lived in him for years, like a monster, fanged and enraged, ready to escape.

“I need her Cade.” The loneliness in Brock’s voice was searing. “God. Damn it to hell and back, Cade. I need her.”

Cade flinched.

“We can’t do it to her, Brock. Not to either of them. Not to Marly or Sarah. You know that.”

“Then someone else,” Brock growled, furious. “I hate this Cade. I hate this fucking feeling more than anything in the world. Goddammit, it’s killing us all.”

“Would anyone else ease it, Brock?” Cade heard the mockery in his tone, but did nothing to filter it. “We tried that, more than once. It didn’t help.”

This was their life. Fury ate at Cade, just as he knew it ate at Brock. They were alone. So isolated within themselves and the black secret they carried, that there was no ease, no comfort, with the exception of one thing. Marly. Marly, or the woman whose name Brock refused to mention. One denied him, and therefore better left forgotten.

Cade lowered his head, hearing a lighter strike, smelling a new cigarette filtering through the air. Brock rarely smoked, but when he did, it would take him hours to stop lighting.

“Have you fucked her yet?” Cade heard the longing in Brock’s voice.

Cade closed his eyes, fighting it. Fighting it but needing it just as much as his damned brothers did. They were monsters, all of them, though Cade never accused them so harshly. It was his fault. His guilt that he had been able to find no other outlet for them.

“No.”

“You have to, Cade. Soon.”

“She’ll leave us, Brock. Is that what we really want??

??

“She’ll leave you anyway,” Brock predicted. “She’s a woman, I told you that. She wants you, and whether you accept it or not, she’ll accept me and Sam. I’ve seen it. I know she will. Especially if you explain.”

“No,” Cade denied the idea outright. He wouldn’t tell her, and he would kill whoever did. He couldn’t bear the guilt, but even more the shame. He couldn’t bear to see the knowledge in Marly’s eyes that he was less than invincible.

Screams echoed through the night, but they weren’t the screams of reality. They were the distant thunder of the past, washing over him. The helplessness, the agonizing pain, both physical and mental. The unwashed smell of sweat, blood, fear and semen drifted on the air.

“Was it our faults?” Brock and Sam had both asked that question. The same tone of voice, the same remembered rage.

“You know it wasn’t, Brock,” Cade reminded him. “We did nothing to cause it. You know that.”

A sigh, softer, no longer strangled as smoke drifted through the night.

“You won’t be able to stop this,” Brock told him as he took a deep breath. “Just like Sam and I can’t stop wanting her. It’s going to happen.”

If he took Marly. If he fucked her, and made her his woman in any way, then Cade knew it would as well. For the first time since he had found a way to save them from the brutality of the past, he hated it. Not because it meant sharing the woman he loved with the brothers he no longer knew how to love, but because he wanted it so fucking bad. Wanted it, even though he was terrified it would destroy Marly. Destroy her, and any love she would still hold in her heart for him.

“If I lose her, it will kill me,” Cade told him, shaking his head. “Do you know that Brock? It will be the one thing I won’t be able to survive.”

“Then we’re all doomed, Cade,” Brock told him, his voice bitter, lost. “Just as we were from the beginning. Fucking doomed.”