My Maddie (Hades Hangmen #8)(13)

I stilled, awaiting his response. Flame blinked, but otherwise did not move. His hand did not even tighten in mine. I shifted closer until we shared the same pillow, and I read his face. He did not understand… or worse, he was frozen with shock. “Flame,” I prompted. His black eyes burned into mine. “I am with child. Our child. We have made a baby.”

It took a few minutes, but I knew when the information had struck home. I saw his face pale to a deathly white. Flame’s hand slackened in mine, and his gaze fell to my stomach. Flame began shaking his head, his eyes lifting. They were so wide and filled with fear that it destroyed my heart. “Flame,” I whispered.

“No.” His voice was laced with shards of glass. “No!” he echoed louder, wrenching his hand back from my stomach as though it were a deadly poison. Flame scrambled off the bed. “No!”

“Flame, baby, listen, please,” I begged, moving ever so slowly to a sitting position.

Flame backed away to the wall behind. “I can’t have a kid,” he stated, and I felt a million daggers being plunged into my heart in one swift blow. He could not keep still. He paced, his hands pulling violently on his dark hair, which was mussed by our joining. “Maddie.” His face contorted as if he were in agony. “I can’t, we can’t…” He sucked in a quick breath. “I’ll hurt it.”

“No.” I disagreed and moved off the bed. Flame fled to the door. His hand fumbled on the doorknob. Tears built in my eyes as I watched him coming so undone. The door opened as a deep moan of pain poured from Flame’s mouth. He staggered into the living area. I pulled on my nightgown and followed him through. I found him at the back of the room, pacing. “No, no, no, no,” he mumbled, over and over again. But that was not what had me hurt. It was where he was standing.

I held out my hands. “Talk to me, Flame. Everything will be okay. I promise.” I stretched my hand out farther. “Please…” My throat was thick with emotion which inhibited my voice. “Everything will be okay.”

Flame raised his arms and studied his wrists. His breathing was labored as though he had run many miles. Sweat beaded on his skin, droplets tracking down his back and over his brow. “They killed him,” Flame said, his quiet confession a fatal bullet wound to my soul. “They killed him, Maddie.” Flame’s gaze moved to mine. But he was not with me in this room. He was transported to his past, back in the shack in which he was raised. My blood cooled when it struck me where Flame was standing. A rug was there now, extra coverage on what used to lie underneath. I opened my mouth to tell him to move away, to come to me, to flee the haunting vision I knew would be swirling in his mind. But I saw in his face that he was already gone, trapped in the past, the voices shackling him to the worst moment of his life… the moment I had feared would be repeated once he knew about our baby.

Flame’s arms were trembling, but they lowered an inch as if something had been placed on them. He was there, back in that time, in that hell. “He started screaming… The noise hurt my ears. But he didn’t stop. He never stopped crying.” The tone in Flame’s voice changed. He no longer sounded like the formidable man most people saw. Now, in this tortured moment, he was the little boy who was starved by his father and imprisoned in a cellar. He was back with Isaiah, the baby brother who died in his arms. A sob ripped from my throat, and I covered my mouth to silence my cries.

“When I leaned over, he was looking at me, but his breathing had changed. It was deep and slow, but his eyes, dark eyes like mine, were looking up at me. His arms were reaching out.” Flame’s head tilted to the side as if he were studying his brother’s sick tiny body. He said, “I can’t touch you. I’ll hurt you. But he kept on crying.” Flame’s face scrunched in agony. “He kept screaming until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I fought the flames inside… prayed to God that they didn’t hurt him.” Flame’s chest rattled with the emotion building in his voice. People thought he didn’t feel emotion or express it. But it was the opposite. He felt so much that at times it paralyzed him. Like this very instant. “I had to hold him. He was scared and hurt… like me.” Flame choked as he tried to search for breath. I cried as I watched him, for once not knowing what to do. I did not know how to bring him around. I had to let him process this memory. He had to feel it, so he could then talk to me. So I could calm him once more, bring him back to me and our new life, one far from this pain and helplessness.

“I picked him up and cradled him in my arms.” Flame stared at the ghost of the baby brother in his arms. I stepped forward as Flame dropped to his knees, the heavy burden of reliving this moment making his body weak and exhausted. “He wasn’t hot now; he was freezing cold. His eyes were strange—glazed over. But he kept looking at me.” I had heard this testimony before. It had destroyed me then, knowing the man I loved suffered such a trauma at such a young age. And poor Isaiah, losing his mother, and his neglectful father not getting him the help he needed. But hearing it again, my stomach rounded with our baby, made it feel so much worse. I felt it deeper in my heart than ever before. I looked at Flame on the floor, living out his nightmare. My knees were weakened by the sadness that enveloped me in its crippling hold. Sitting down on the cold wooden floor, I looked at my husband with new eyes. No one should ever have gone through what he had to endure. Flame was different. I had known that from the first time I met him. Everyone at the club understood that. He did not see the world the same as everyone else. He did not understand people most of the time. But rather than being cared for and nurtured for who he was, he was abused and made to feel unworthy.