Page 97 of Arran's Obsession
“Or had done to me.”
“By your father.”
It wasn’t a question, but I left that hanging, the additional answer not forming. “When I was older, after my father had been caught and the fire erased our house, I tried to be normal, or at least copy what I saw other people doing. I tried to have sex. Never a girlfriend, but I let a woman come on to me in a bar then take me outside.”
Genevieve inched back, her lips pursed. She swiped at her eyes. “Why is it that I don’t know the woman, and am fully aware that you never fucked her, yet I want to kill her?”
Despite everything, I allowed a savage grin. “There’s my little maniac. Don’t you dare talk to me about previous boyfriends or they’ll probably end up in pieces and floating down Deadwater River.”
She sucked in a breath. “God. Fine. Tell me the rest of what happened.”
“She blew me on her knees on the wet ground. All I felt was panic and anger. I let her finish, then walked away like an asshole. I tried it again, and the same thing happened. No pleasure, but a fucked-up head.”
“How…? I don’t know if I want to ask this. How do you feel when we sleep together?”
I watched her. The lips I’d tasted while she slept and now needed more and more. The body that I’d never get enough of. There was more at the edges of my thought, but I couldn’t let it in. “Different.”
She flinched. “No girl wants to hear that.”
“Why, you don’t care about my opinion?” I sounded petulant but I was stating a fact. From the start, she’d wanted to leave. She’d stayed but not out of devotion to me.
Genevieve’s cheeks flooded red. She fell back, dropping eye contact. “What happened to your mother? Tell me that part. She’s a missing piece in all of this, and I can’t work out how she connects in. Who was she? Where did she exist in all this?”
“Audrey was a sex worker my father bought. He got her pregnant then took her baby, not letting her tell anyone else including me what she was to me.”
“He took you from her? That evil bastard. Did you see her when you were growing up? Why didn’t she say?”
“My father’s control was absolute, and I assume he didn’t feel there was any danger from her. Audrey regularly came to Kendrick Manor with the other women bought in to entertain Dad from the brothels established from his trade. She was as much part of my growing up as any other of the familiar faces.”
“If she wasn’t able to tell you who she was, did she try to get close to you?”
My mouth dried. I couldn’t stomach what Audrey had done. Nobody knew this, though Camden suspected it after what he’d seen one night at Kendrick Manor. He and Jamieson had once tried to talk to me about abuse and living through it, but as much as I cared about my friends, I couldn’t go there with them. Didn’t want it said.
“No. She suffered for years then provided evidence against him and posted it online. A full account of everything she’d experienced at his hands, including about me. But for the seventeen years before that, she did exactly what my father told her. Performed for him. Rarely spoke to me. The only part of her I had, beyond DNA, was my name. She gave that to me. It’s why I believe you about Adelia. It fits.”
“Audrey, Arran, Adelia. She named her babies with her initial.”
“She tried to fuck me, too,” I got out, putting the words ahead of any sympathy that tried to diminish what she’d done. “On one of his twisted evenings, Dad ordered her to take me, and she obeyed. She heard him, crossed the room, and stroked my chest. Ran her hand down my body.”
My throat clogged. I coughed to clear it.
“I guess she thought I’d never know who she was. Divine, because that was her sex worker name, was so messed up by the world, and by me and my father, that she would’ve gone there just to be close to me. So don’t ask about sex and how it makes me feel. It’s right there in the name of my clubs. Divine and Divide, because that’s all I am. A son divided.”
Genevieve’s soft sound of dismay didn’t stop me.
“In Divine, I spend my life trying to protect women and girls, yet I failed the mother and daughter who were the ones who mattered most. But that mother failed me, too. And I hate myself for even thinking that. Now you know exactly how to destroy me, Genevieve. Use that as you will.”
Chapter 29
Genevieve
Arran turned his back and stopped talking. Fucking hell. Broken by his father and abused by his mother, by rights, he should be the worst kind of criminal. A wreck of a person. Maybe in parts he was. He was also incredible. Brave. Brutal but in a strangely admirable way.
He killed bad people. Confessed it with the rest of his awful story. The marks on him were evidence of his abuse.
And in a breathtaking, pulse-racing moment of time, I fell in love with him.
The image I’d painted when I first knew him was rooted in my hatred for gangs. Cruel people doing bad things for their own gain. Arran was the opposite of that in every way. Everything he did was to try to right the wrongs of a past he didn’t create buthad suffered through. To revere the memory of a mother who’d been so messed up she’d failed him.