Unbroken (The Protectors 12)

“My English, it was okay when they took me, but not great, and I often spoke to the people who took me in Portuguese. They’d get angry and tell me to speak English, but I was just too scared.”

Aleks began to shake violently and his breathing once again started to tick up. He was holding my hand with both of his and was squeezing so hard he was actually hurting me.

But I didn’t even think of asking him to loosen his fingers… If there was a way I could have taken all his pain and felt it for myself, or better yet, taken it from him, I would have in a heartbeat.

“The first man who bought me… he… he pretended to be my friend and I was able to talk to him in English. He said things that I eventually started to believe. He just kept telling me the same things over and over,” Aleks said with a shake of his head.

“Like what?” I interjected as quietly as I could in the hopes my voice wouldn’t ratchet up his panic.

“That Mama and Papa didn’t want me back because I’d been bad. That Dante would come if I was good.” Tears started to slip down Aleks’s face, but I doubted he noticed. “He never came, no matter how good I was. I… I believed the man at first… that Dante knew where I was but refused to come get me.” Aleks lifted his shoulders to wipe at his face, since he didn’t seem to want to let go of my hand. He’d managed to calm down a bit.

“Your brother wouldn’t have let anything or anyone stop him from coming to find you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

Aleks nodded. “I believed he would come for me for a really long time but after a while it got too hard. It made it hard to always be good…”

“What do you mean?”

Aleks hesitated and then wiped at his face again. He tried to pull his hands free, but I gently held on to one and intertwined our fingers and began rubbing the pad of my thumb over his skin.

“When the man would do things to me that really hurt or that I knew were wrong, I’d tell him Dante was going to punish him. I… I actually started dreaming of Dante showing up just as the man was about to hurt me again and stopping it, and when he didn’t…”

I used my free hand to wipe at his face.

“He would have if he could have, Aleks.”

Aleks nodded. Tears kept slipping down his face. I couldn’t help but lean across the console as I pulled him against me. I brushed my lips over his damp cheek, the shell of his ear, and his forehead and just whispered soft words to him, mostly about how I would have stopped the man from hurting him and that he was safe now.

But even as I said the words, bile crawled up the back of my throat. I’d had the chance to save Aleks so he wouldn’t be hurt anymore and I hadn’t done it… not quickly enough, anyway. And he most certainly wasn’t safe now.

Aleks held onto me for a while and when he began speaking to me again, he did it against my chest, which was just fine with me.

“The man didn’t like that my English wasn’t better, so he brought in a woman to teach me how to read and write it. But no other subjects. I didn’t understand why.”

I did. The men who dealt in kids like Aleks viewed them as the most luxurious of amenities. Being able to understand and respond to his tormentor in English would have added value just like adding leather seats or specialty tires on a car did.

“Her name was Miss Penny. She always looked so… scared,” Aleks murmured. “The man, he told me what would happen to me if I asked her for help or told her he wasn’t really my cousin like he’d said. But…”

“But?” I encouraged when he fell silent.

“I think she knew,” he finally admitted. “We weren’t left alone very often but when we were, she’d quietly ask me questions about my ‘cousin.’ But I never said anything. Until one day when she… she brought me a book about flowers. I wasn’t allowed to have any toys or books and that’s what I told her.”

“How old were you?” I asked.

“Um, I’m not really sure… ten maybe. I’d been with Brian for a while.”

Brian. Finally, a name I could attach to the bastard. I automatically vowed to kill any fucker in my dark world named Brian. Even if he wasn’t the one who’d hurt Aleks, he was hurting some kid somewhere.

“It wasn’t a big book and I really wanted it, so I accepted it and hid it. I… I didn’t know Brian had found it.”