Page 104 of Hidden Empire

“Hey, hey,” he coaxes, reaching around me to rub my back while he holds me. “Shhh, slow down, I’ve got you.”

I didn’t think I was going to cry this hard a few minutes ago when I decided to open up. I figured it would really hurt to talk about it. Otherwise, I would have told my family the truth by this point, but I severely underestimated how powerful horrible memories can be. It’s like I’m still there, perpetually falling and crashing to the floor, feeling the fresh wounds of betrayal lash at me.

You don’t understand things like this when you’re three years old. You don’t understand how the person you love more than anything in the world can hurt you without blinking. It’s impossible to comprehend the vile hate required to make a small and vulnerable child bleed so much that they pass out.

“C-can someone get Matteo?” I cry, shaking against his chest. If I can’t have Dmitri or my dad, I need my brother. I have to tell him the truth, I can feel it eating away at me from the inside out.

“Fuck,” he murmurs. “Shit, okay, hold on?—”

He attempts to maneuver around me when a wave of crushing disappointment hits me. He can’t bring Matteo here, because I’m not supposed to be here.

“Don’t go,” I blurt, squeezing him tighter. “I forgot, he can’t come here, I?—”

Ivan freezes. “Jade, if you need Matteo, I’ll bring him here, secrets be damned. Dmitri won’t care, we can handle it.”

“No, no,” I emphasize, digging my fingers into his shirt. “He can’t know yet. Please, don’t?—”

“Okay, okay,” he rushes out, interrupting my raising voice. “I’ve got you, alright?” Ivan holds me so tight that it almost feels like I’m being crushed, but I don’t tell him to stop. “Dmitri will be back soon, okay? You want to tell him instead?”

I don’t want to tell anyone ever. I just don’t know that I can’t live much longer with it bottled up. All of it. Not just the nose-breaking incident but everything.

Being shoved off of a counter by my own mother may have been the first betrayal, but it isn’t anywhere near the worst or the most violent. I assume that all of my brothers have been filled in on the basics when it comes to Kim and Bruce. Everything I told Apollo was relayed to our dad, likely with painstaking detail. But I have a feeling they attempted to spare the remainder of our family with a less graphic summary. But Dmitri hardly knows a thing.

All of these secrets just seem to keep getting harder to keep, and I feel like they’re going to explode out of me at the worst time. Dating Dmitri behind my family’s back, the broken nose lie, my past, and the games…

God, the games, I have to tell Dmitri about the games.

Chapter 28

Jade

6 Months Before

“Bruce liked to play games.”

A sickening chill shudders through me, but I attempt to ignore it.

“Bruce was your mother’s boyfriend?” Apollo asks, and I mutely nod. “When did that relationship start?”

“I was ten,” I answer easily. “I don’t know how long she knew him before that, but that’s when he first turned up. He moved in a few days after we met.”

“Okay,” Apollo acknowledges, signaling for me to keep going.

“Right off the bat, he didn’t like me, but honestly, I was kind of okay with that,” I say, keeping my pace slow so that I can control my breathing. “It was better than Kim’s whiplash. We’d have months where I thought she loved me and then even longer stretches where I couldn’t convince myself that she wouldn’t prefer I were dead.”

It didn’t matter how many times it happened, I would just keep soaking up any semblance of love or kindness she teased me with. There was no way I could fully let her go in my head, I couldn’t have no one. I needed someone, even if she never needed or even wanted me.

“Bruce was mean,” I tell Apollo, dropping my head against the shower door to look at the ceiling. I bring my knees up, wrapping my arms around my shins to hug myself into a more relaxed position. “He openly said he didn’t like me, not to bother him, and so on and so on. It was rude, but it wasn’t scary.”

“At first,” Apollo guesses, and I gulp.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “At first.”

“Like six months into him living with us, I turned eleven. Bruce said he was going to give me a ‘valuable life lesson’ as a present. I figured that just meant he spent all of his last paycheck on beer and vodka and would drunkenly babble some kind of ‘back in my day’ bullshit disguised as advice.”

I was preparing all day to keep my face neutral during his spiel so he wouldn’t have anything to get mad at me about.

“But after dinner came and went, and he still hadn’t given me anything, I was pretty sure he just forgot to.”