“I fought to stay alive,” he said, pushing on, before her softness made him retreat behind the lies and remoteness that had long been his shield. “I got brutally good. Lethally good. I survived. Then, eventually, I left. And I never looked back.”
Her brows knit, pain swimming in her gaze. “Wasn’t there anyone who was there for you during all that time?”
“To do what? Save me?”
“Yes. Or, I don’t know,” she murmured. “To show you some kindness. To give you some kind of hope, or . . .”
He shrugged, about to deny there was. But the unbidden image of an impish face framed in pale blond hair sprang into his mind, refusing to let him erase her with a lie. A face that still haunted his memories more than he cared to admit. “There was a little girl. My father and his second mate adopted her many years after my mother had died. She was . . . sweet. She was the only innocent thing in that place.”
“What was her name?”
“Kitty.” He shook his head on a low curse. “She didn’t know about the pit. And I’d have killed anyone who brought her down there to see that, to see the monster I had become.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and it was hard to keep the regret from his voice. “I left in the middle of the night. I didn’t tell her I was going, or that I would never be back.”
He didn’t want to be forced to explain it to her. Or shatter her innocence by letting her see the monster he’d become. So, he’d simply gone.
“I regret the way I abandoned her like that,” he murmured quietly. “She deserved better. She must’ve hated me for abandoning her the way I did. For a long time afterward, I wondered if I should’ve gone back for her, or taken her with me. Not that I could’ve provided a better life for a child. Hell, in those early years, I hardly provided for myself. But maybe I should’ve tried.”
Carys was studying him in silence now. She reached out to lace her slender fingers through his larger ones, then drew his hand to her and pressed her lips gently against his knuckles. A kiss to each one, whether to heal or absolve him, he wasn’t sure.
He didn’t tell her how those early years in his father’s fighting pit had nearly devoured every scrap of his humanity. He didn’t tell her how he’d hardened himself to the violence, until it became just another facet of his life. Just another condition of his existence.
He didn’t tell her how he struggled, even to this day, to imagine being anything but what his father had conditioned him so ruthlessly to become.
He didn’t have to tell Carys any of that. Her tender gaze said she could see it all without the words.
Rune stroked the pad of his thumb over her soft skin. He intended to keep his voice low, private, in the middle of the crowded restaurant. But when he spoke his words came out clipped, almost strangled. “My past is behind me, Carys. I don’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not until you. I can’t change what I’ve done or who I am. There’s blood on my hands that won’t ever wash clean.”
She nodded faintly, blinking hard. “It’s okay, Rune. I understand.”
No, she didn’t. Not fully. And for now, that was how he preferred it. He’d already seen the sympathy in her eyes tonight. He didn’t think he could bear to see her pity.
The waiter came by in the heavy silence that followed, asking Carys if her meal was to her liking. She’d only eaten half of it, and since her brief glimpse into Rune’s past, she’d barely picked at the dish.
“Dessert, perhaps?” the waiter asked hopefully. “We have an incredible strawberry flambé prepared tableside this evening.”
Carys shook her head. “No, thank you. Everything was delicious, but I’m finished.”
“The check, please,” Rune said. After the human scurried off, he tightened his grasp on Carys’s fingers and leaned forward. “I have something sweeter and hotter in mind for my dessert. What do you say we get out of here?”
She smiled, tenderness and compassion backlit by a flicker of desire. “Yeah. Take me out of here, Rune.”
CHAPTER 18
They hailed a taxi and Rune gave the driver the penthouse address. Carys hadn’t told him that’s where she wanted to go, but he seemed to understand as well as she did that the club and the weight of what it represented to Rune would not be allowed to invade any more of their time tonight.
She was still trying to process everything he’d told her. His past, his childhood, the trauma he’d been subjected to by the father who was supposed to love him. Her heart broke for the boy who’d endured that kind of hellish upbringing, and for the strong, complicated man who still carried the wounds, even if he did so stoically, unbroken from everything that had been done to him.
His remoteness made sense to her now. His walls were steep for good reason, yet he’d allowed her to peer through a tiny crack tonight. She saw darkness and pain on the other side of Rune’s walls, and a solitude that would have wrecked anyone weaker than him.
I survived, he’d said. And, yes, that much was true. But would he ever be able to leave his past behind when he couldn’t let go of the cage that still confined him?
Carys knew the answer to that, and as she walked out of the elevator on the top floor of the apartment building with him, she hoped that, in time, Rune would see it too. Either way, she intended to be at his side. But tonight, there would be no more talk of his past or the club.
Tonight, she needed to feel his arms around her as much as she needed to wrap her arms around him. Tonight, she just needed . . . him.