Caged (Mastered, #4)(93)

“Omigod. That is awful.”

He closed his eyes. “The entire town thought I should be in jail for manslaughter. More rumors circulated that Cassidy’s parents planned to sue us. Not that it was an option, since Cassidy’s parents received a copy of the accident report, including their daughter’s blood-alcohol level and that she hadn’t worn a seat belt. Her parents only added more speculation when they banned me from Cassidy’s funeral. I was a pariah.”

Her tears dampened the back of his shirt. “Deacon. Stop. I’ve heard enough.”

He spun around and forced her to look into his anguished eyes, to really see him, to see what this had done to him. “No, goddammit. You were willing to kick me to the f*cking curb because I kept this from you, so you damn well will hear every bit of it. All the way to the bitter end, because, babe, it gets even uglier.”

Embarrassment flared in her eyes before she glanced down. “Okay. Finish it. But I can’t . . . look at you while you’re telling me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll be so focused on how I can be there for you now that I’ll miss what you went through then.” Her tears landed on his hands. Then she tenderly kissed his scraped and scabbed knuckles. “I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me whenever you’re ready. And I’ll be right here for you when you’re done.”

It took a moment to find his balance. “My parents were lost in grief. I was filled with guilt and anger and loneliness like I’d never known. I didn’t go back to school as I recovered from my physical injuries. Two months after the accident, when I couldn’t take the rage anymore, I went out and picked a fight with the biggest, meanest motherf*cker I could find.”

“Where’d you find him?”

“Biker bar. Guy beat the f*ck out of me. But during the fight I figured out that’s where I could channel my rage to block out my grief. Fighting became my coping mechanism.”

“It still is, isn’t it?”

“No. Now I fight because I’m good at it. But Jesus f*ck. I couldn’t get away from myself or my family connections or the accident. As if being sprawled on the ground, eating dirt, bleeding, and sobbing like a f*cking girl wasn’t enough”—he paused to swallow—“some * in the bar recognized me.”

“No,” she breathed.

“Oh yeah. The douche f*cker worked for my old man and called him.”

“What happened?”

“My dad showed up, loaded me in his car, and took me home. Then he disappeared for a few days. Without him as the buffer, my mother didn’t have to hold back.”

“This is the ugly part, isn’t it?”


Yes. This was his private shame.

“Deacon. You have to believe I’m the last person who’d ever sit in judgment of you.”

“I do believe that, which is why I’m here pouring my guts out and not hiding in the bottom of a bottle of J?ger at the strip club at the thought of losing you.”

She squeezed him hard. “Tell me.”

He had to force the words out through gritted teeth. “My mother told me she wished I had died instead of him.”

Molly’s distressed gasp sliced through him. She ducked under his arm and plastered herself to the front of his body, her shoulders heaving as she tried to muffle her sobs against his chest.

Deacon’s heart turned over then, at having this beautiful, sweet, loving woman here with him, crying for him. It loosened the lump in his throat so he could go on. “I was devastated.” The isolation his mother had caused with her words had tainted everything in his life and had haunted him for years. As he’d grown older he’d understood them for what they were, but the broken child in him couldn’t forgive her or forget.

Molly continued to sob as if her heart had been split open.

He wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then he pressed his lips to her forehead. “I left shortly after that.”

“Left? Where’d you go?”

“Everywhere. And nowhere. I was dead inside. I changed the way I looked—shaved my head, started getting tats—so I wouldn’t be reminded of him every time I looked in the mirror.” He’d obliterated the image of who he’d been so completely that it pained him to admit he couldn’t remember what he—they—used to look like. Dante had been a disembodied voice in his head for so long, not a physical presence, that was how Deacon remembered him.

“But you were fifteen,” Molly said. “How did you support yourself?”

“I turned sixteen two weeks before I left. I’d taken a couple hundred dollars out of my bank account before I took off. I washed dishes or worked as a janitor for cash under the table. Menial-labor jobs ensured I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone. I moved around a lot. I had no interest in anything—sex, women, booze, or drugs. The only thing I cared about was bulking up so when I turned eighteen I could start fighting. I found a sketchy dojo that offered to train me in jujitsu. The underground fight scene is illegal, so I had to keep traveling farther away to find decent opponents.”

“How long did you stay away from home?”

“Almost five years.”

“Did your family look for you?”

“At the time I didn’t care. I legally changed my name a week after I turned eighteen.”