Page 66 of Captive Souls

He wasn’t trying to hide.

Predators didn’t need to hide.

And I knew he heard me approach.

“I was broken. Early on.”

His back was to me and stayed to me while he spoke.

I wanted to see his face, desperately, but something told me whatever he was about to say was too painful for him to speak while facing me.

So I stood. Waiting.

“My mother, if you could call her that, wanted a man. She had two sons, but that didn’t matter to her.”

I could feel the scorn in his voice. The poisonous, unyielding hatred. It almost choked him. An inkling of why he’d had such a visceral opinion of my own mother.

“When she found someone she thought was good for her, she ignored what he did to us.”

My stomach pitted as I heard in his voice agony that no one should have to carry. I had an inkling of what he meant, and it squeezed my heart.

“I like to think she didn’t know he was a child molester when she married him,” he continued, speaking my greatest fear. “I’ll be generous for her, but she was also so fucking desperate that he could’ve told her that on her wedding night, and she would’ve stayed. Not that thehowof it matters. It mattered that it happened.”

He turned then, and as much as I’d been longing for his eyes, I wished he would’ve stayed facing away from me so I didn’t see the void in his gaze.

There was no pain, there was no anger, no grief. Nothing but a never-ending black hole of coldness that he’d created to keep him safe from it all.

“I knew there was something off with him from the moment I met him.” His voice was a flat monotone, words so heavy I was surprised they didn’t drill me chest-deep into the earth. “So I stayed up that night, the first night he was in the house as our stepfather.” He laughed. I’d never heard him laugh before. Notthat I would ever truly call the sound he made a laugh. I’d never heard a sound so horrible. So chilling. It echoed through the forest.

“He didn’t even bother to wait,” he continued. “He went for my brother first.” He stopped speaking, standing stock-still. I would’ve thought he turned to stone right there and then had his hand not fisted and his body quaked.

Seeing him shuddering was akin to seeing a skyscraper tremble. You were so used to them standing tall and strong that you forgot they could fall too. And if they did, the wreckage was unimaginable.

“My brother was younger. He preferred them younger. But I managed to avert most of his attention away from him. When I could.”

The handful of sentences held decades’ worth of meaning. Of pain. Of a kind of evil I couldn’t even digest. Logically, I knew terrible things like this happened in the world. Sickening things. But I had never let myself think too much on it. I worked with children. Every day, I saw the brightness in them. The purity. The innocence. What a treasure they were.

And to think a human could sully something like that in such a disgusting way sent my blood curdling. My heart splintered in my chest for Knox.

He was explaining how he averted a pedophile’s attention in order to save his brother the trauma.

“How old were you?” I barely resisted the urge to vomit in the dirt beside me.

“I was nine when it started,” he said, his voice dead.

I blinked slowly, trying my best not to let my horror and pity seep onto my face. I knew that’s not what Knox wanted, that that would only drive him further away.

There was a reason for Knox being the way he was. That I’d known. People did not come out of the womb entirely wrong.Not even my father. The world molded my father to be that way. Sure, there was a rottenness in his core that might’ve been there since birth. But that could’ve melted away had he grown in an environment of nurture and love, raised in places where the good parts of him could’ve bloomed to outweigh the bad.

I’d known Knox was made, not born. And I’d reasoned that something horrible must’ve happened to him to leech so much happiness and empathy from a man, leaving only a cold, malevolent presence.

But I couldn’t have dreamt up this.

“He was the first person I killed.” Knox was unapologetic, unashamed. Matter of fact.

“Good,” I choked out, never thinking I’d celebrate the idea of someone being murdered. I was against the death penalty; I believed in redemption.

In theory.