Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #4)(109)

He blew out a long breath, his jaw tightening. “Christ, I love you.”

Okay, so clearly he didn’t find her logic appealing. “Butch, if I asked you, would you not do it?”

When he didn’t reply, she covered her eyes, though she had no tears left in her.

“I love you,” he repeated. “So, yeah…if you asked me not to, I wouldn’t.”

She lowered her hand, her breath catching. “Swear to this. Here and now.”

“On my mother.”

“Thank you…” She pulled him into her arms. “Oh, God…thank you. And we can work through the…feeding issue. Mary and Rhage have. I just…Butch, we can have a good future.”

They were silent for a time, just sitting on the floor. Then from out of the blue, he said gruffly, “I have three brothers and a sister.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve never talked to you about my family. I have three brothers and one sister. Well, there had been two girls, but then we lost one.”

“Oh.” She sat back, thinking his tone was very odd.

And his hollow voice gave her the total creeps as he said, “My earliest memory is of my sister Joyce coming home from the hospital as an infant. I wanted to check her out, and I ran to her crib, but my father shoved me back so my older brother and sister could look at her. As I bounced off the wall, dad picked up my brother and lifted him so he could touch her. I’ll never forget my father’s voice…” Butch’s accent changed, the vowels flattening out. “This here’s your sistah, Teddy. Yah gonna love’ah and take care’ahah. I thought, what about me? I would like to love her and take care of her. I said, Pa, I wanna help, too. He didn’t even look at me.”

Marissa realized she was squeezing Butch’s hand so hard she must be bruising his bones, but he didn’t seem to notice. And she couldn’t loosen the hold.

“After that,” he went on, “I started watching my father and my mom, watching how they were different with the other kids. Main thing was on Friday and Saturday nights. My father liked to drink, and I was the one he went for when he needed to knock something around.” When Marissa gasped, Butch shook his head with a total lack of regard. “No, it’s fine. It was good. I can suck back punches like you read about, thanks to him, and trust me, that’s come in handy. So anyway, one Fourth of July…Hell, I was almost twelve then…” He rubbed his jaw, his beard growth scratching. “Yeah, the Fourth of July came and we were doing the family thing out at my uncle’s on the Cape. My brother skims some beers from the cooler and he and his buddies go ’round back of the garage and crack them open. I hid in the bushes because I wanted to be invited in. You know…I hoped my brother would…” He cleared his throat. “When my father came looking for them, the other boys took off and my brother about crapped in his pants. My father just laughed. Told Teddy to make sure my mother never found out. Then dad saw me crouched down in the shrubs. He came over, hauled me up by the collar, and backhanded me so hard I spit blood.”

As Butch smiled in a hard way, she looked at the uneven edge of his front tooth.

“He told me it was for being a spy and a snitch. I swore to him I was just looking, I wasn’t going to tell no one. He clipped me again and called me a pervert. My brother…yeah, my brother just watched the whole thing happen. Didn’t say a word. And when I walked past my mother with my split lip and the chip out of my tooth, she just held my little sister Joyce closer and looked away.” He shook his head slowly. “Up at the house, I went to the bathroom and cleaned up, then headed for the room I was staying in. I didn’t give a shit about God, but I went down on my knees, clapped my little hands together, and prayed like a good Catholic should. I begged God that this not be my family. Please let this not be my family. Please let there be someplace else I can go…”

She had a feeling he didn’t know he’d switched into the present tense. Or that he’d reached up and was gripping the solid gold cross around his neck like his life depended on it.

His lips cracked into a half smile. “But God must have known I wasn’t sure about Him because nothing came of it. Then that fall my sister Janie was murdered.” As Marissa sucked in a breath, he pointed behind himself. “That’s the tattoo on my back. I count the years since she’s gone. I was the last one to see her alive, before she got in the car with those boys that just…desecrated her behind our high school.”

She reached for him. “Butch, I’m so—”

“No, let me get this out, okay? This shit’s like a train, now that it’s moving, I can’t stop it.” He dropped the cross and shoved his hand through his hair. “After Janie disappeared and they found her body, my father never touched me again. Wouldn’t come near me. Wouldn’t look at me. Didn’t talk to me, either. My mom went crazy after a little while and they had to put her in a psych ward. It was right around then that I started drinking. I ran the streets. Did drugs. Got in fights. The family just limped along. I never understood the change in my dad, though. I mean…for years he beat me, then…nothing.”

“I’m so glad he stopped hitting you.”

“No difference to me. The waiting to get clipped was as bad as getting my ass slammed. And to not know why…but I did find out. At my oldest brother’s bachelor party. I was like twenty by then and had moved from Southie—er—South Boston to here because I was starting as a cop with the CPD. Anyway, I went back home for the party. We were in some guy’s house with a lot of strippers. My father was pounding the beers hard. I was doing lines of cocaine and sucking back Scotch. Party comes to an end and I’m buzzing out of control. I’d done a lot of coke…man, I was so f*cking polluted that night. So…Dad’s leaving…getting a ride home from someone, and suddenly I had to talk to the sonofabitch.