Shattered Dreams (Boys of Bellerose, #3)(60)

“I’m aware,” Dr Candace replied, her voice so carefully calm I had to admire her. “Did you grow up there?”

Rhett jerked a nod. “Yes. In his home. My mother was one of his chosen ones, treated like a favorite pet and punished just the same. Like a dog.” He paused, his eyes flicking to me ever so quickly. “She tried so fucking hard to protect me, but it was like an ant trying to resist a boot. He’s… he’s the reason I don’t sleep easily.”

“He hurt you,” Dr Candace stated. It was an observation, not a question.

Another sharp nod from Rhett. “At first he just focused on her. I’d wake up to find him right there in the bed beside us—” He broke off with a choked sound, shaking his head at the memory. “As I got older, I tried to protect her. Tried to fight him off. Then he made it his mission to break me… Boys like me, ones who resisted his brainwashing, held no value in his church. Not if we couldn’t be controlled to do his every wish without question, no matter how sick and twisted.”

He paused, reaching for the bottle of water I’d left beside the computer earlier. I said nothing while he took a sip, nor did Dr. Candace.

“Eventually, after a lot of pain, I just figured out how to not sleep. Not deeply, anyway. The smallest sounds wake me up, and when you live in a house with eighteen other people, there is no shortage of sounds. So I grabbed five or ten minutes, here and there, just enough to stay sane. Sort of. But it meant that when he came for me, I was prepared for the beating.”

“That must be a hard lesson to forget,” Dr. Candace said when Rhett paused for longer. “I can imagine there is also no shortage of sounds on a tour bus to keep you permanently on edge. How’d you end up in Bellerose?”

Rhett glanced my way again, and I scooted closer to offer him my hand. He took it without hesitation, linking our fingers together.

“I made it my mission to get out of the community. I bided my time, laid my plans, got everything fucking perfect. We were going to escape, just run away with nothing but the clothes on our backs. There was nothing for us there and nothing we wanted to take. A homeless life on the streets had to be better than the atrocities of Townsend Community.” He frowned, clearly remembering that time in his life, and my fingers squeezed his with reassurance.

“Who is we, Rhett?” Dr Candace asked.

His focus returned to the laptop screen. “My mother and I. She wanted to get out; she wanted to leave with me and start a new life out of Jeremiah’s reach.”

“What changed?” she asked, hearing the past tense of those statements just like I had.

Rhett swallowed hard, his face pale as he remembered. “We got caught. Someone that she trusted sold us out to Jeremiah, and he caught us on the edge of the compound.”

I needed to force my breathing to stay calm when inside I just wanted to burst out crying. Poor Rhett. He’d been through so much… Was it any wonder that he struggled to sleep? Or that he’d had a burning need to protect me from our very first meeting when I ran into him, scared and bloody, in an alleyway in Siena? Fucking hell, he was so much stronger than I’d ever realized to have been through so much and not let it twist him into something ugly and cruel.

“For the first time in as long as I could remember, he didn’t reach for his belt,” Rhett continued, locked in his memory now. “He just laughed at us. Fucking laughed. I was so confused, expecting to be killed on the spot. But he just stood there, his thumbs looped into his fucking belt buckle, and told us to go… if that was what we really wanted.”

Ice formed in my gut. Now I understood his reaction when it seemed like I’d chosen Angelo—a man who seemed very much like an abuser—over him.

“She changed her mind?” I asked in a hoarse whisper, lost in his story alongside him. “She chose to stay?”

Rhett gave me a pain-filled nod. “I think… she’d never planned to go through with it. He had her too deeply indoctrinated. Too well trained to ever betray him.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Turns out the only reason he let me leave—the reason he’d never actually killed me over the years—was because it’s against the Townsend Chronicle to murder a child of his own blood. Except he isn’t my mother’s biological father—her mother married Jeremiah when she was just a baby. He’s mine.”

My stomach clenched tight, bile rising in my throat as I processed. His mother’s father—biological or not—had fathered him. I seriously doubted it was consensual either. Fucking hell… Rhett. My heart broke for him.

“Wow,” Dr Candace responded before she caught herself, and Rhett flashed a sad smile.

“Didn’t expect that, huh? Yeah. Me either. He stood there after telling me this and said I was free to go, if I wanted, but then I’d be dead to the Townsend Community. I couldn’t take anything with me. Not my clothes or shoes, not even my name. There was no fucking hesitation for me; I stripped everything off right then and there and spat at his feet that I’d gladly leave my name behind. But then I looked at my mom, and she… she wouldn’t look at me. She just stood there, cowering under Jeremiah’s hand. He gave her the same offer, told her she was free to go… but she started crying when he said she’d be dead to the community. Dead to him.” He slouched in his seat, long, tattooed fingers rubbing at his brow. “She stayed. I left. The end.”