Rock Redemption (Rock Kiss, #3)(91)

He crushed her closer, the tremors in his body having turned stiff until his muscles and bones felt like those of an eighty-year-old man. “I was only six, and he showed me the knife he’d use to cut my parents’ throats. So I didn’t tell.”

To this day, Noah didn’t know if he’d have been believed if he had told. “That summer, he did it again and again and again.” Noah’s father had brought a lot of work with him, and Noah’s mother had so many friends to see after having been on bed rest for most of her pregnancy; they’d thought nothing of leaving Noah with the man who was thought to be a friend. And the man’s wife had thought him a great guy for offering to babysit so she could accompany Noah’s mom on her visits.

“Even after we returned home,” Noah continued before he couldn’t, “I didn’t tell anyone. He’d convinced me that he was a real monster, that he could get to my family no matter where we lived.” Huddled and shivering under his blankets, he’d barely slept as he waited for evil to crawl through the window. “It was only when my parents started making plans to spend the next summer with the same family that I broke. I had a screaming tantrum, saying I didn’t want to go.”

“What happened?”

“Time out.” He smiled grimly. “My father told me I was too old for such theatrics and left me alone in my room to think it over. What I did instead was go into his study and use the key hidden under his lamp to unlock the drawer in which he kept his gun.”

Kit’s gasp was loud.

“I knew how to use it.” How to load the bullets if it was empty, how to release the safety, how to brace himself for the recoil. “My father’d taught me—we’re all ‘real men’ in the St. John family. Guns and hunting and women.” His father had always had a woman on the side, all part of the proud St. John tradition.

Bitterness in his mouth, Noah fisted his hand in Kit’s hair. “My father walked into my room an hour after he’d left to find me pointing the gun at the window.”

Kit went as if to rise up, but he couldn’t bear to see the disgust on her face, so he used his grip in her hair to keep her down. Not resisting, she stayed.

“To his credit, he didn’t yell. Instead, he asked me why I had the gun. I told him it was to shoot the monster so he couldn’t hurt us.” Noah could still see his father’s face as Noah finally told him about how the monster liked to do “bad things” to Noah: a mix of shock, pain, disgust… and shame.

Noah sometimes liked to imagine the latter two had been directed inward or at the man who’d done the crime, but Robert St. John’s later actions had made it clear the disgust and shame had been directed solely at Noah. “To cut a long story short, my father told me we wouldn’t be going to the Cape, I gave him the gun, and two weeks later, after a discreet medical examination to make sure there was no permanent physical damage, I was shipped off to boarding school.”

This time when Kit jerked up her head, he couldn’t keep her down. Turning his face away, he stared out into the garden.

“What about counseling?” she said, horror in her tone. “Did they even talk to you about—”

“No.” After the medical exam, no one in his family had ever again discussed the events of the summer of his sixth year. “My mother couldn’t even bear going with me to the doctor, and my father… he looked at me and was ashamed of me because I’d allowed it to happen.”

“You were just a child!” Open rage in Kit’s voice as she sat up beside him, her knees brushing his side. “They didn’t report the man, did they?”

“No. I spent my first year at boarding school having nightmares about him hunting me down.” It was after a screaming nightmare that Fox had tried to comfort him and he’d spilled the whole truth. His best friend had responded by putting a chair under the doorknob so no one could get into their room, and together they’d rigged up a noisemaker across the window.

“Tell me they didn’t just let that monster walk free,” Kit pleaded.

“On my eighth birthday, my father gave me a cutting from a newspaper. It was the man’s obituary.” Putting one arm under his head, he chanced looking up at the stars again, Kit in his peripheral vision. “It wasn’t until I was older that I searched online and discovered the man had been found in his study at home, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Suicide. He did the world a favor.”

Noah wanted to laugh. “He did nothing. My father used to defend small-time mobsters, did you know that? The kind of men who’d do him a solid, no questions asked.”

“You think he had the bastard killed?”

“I know he did.” Noah was certain Robert St. John had done it because that man had dared shame the family name, not because he’d hurt Robert’s son. “When I turned eighteen, after a big-ass party my mother threw because that’s what she does, my father found me f*cking some random debutante. Later that night, he slapped me on the back and said, ‘Good to know that asswipe didn’t ruin you, boy. I hear the * begged for his life.’”





Chapter 33


If Noah’s parents had been in front of Kit right then, she’d have slapped them both sideways. They’d sent away a traumatized, scared boy without offering him any help. What must he have thought when he was shoved out of the family home? When he was abandoned?