Severed Ties: A Dark Stalker Romance (Tainted Love Book 1)
Severed Ties: Chapter 38

I hate how haunted she looks right now. The way her body trembles beneath my touch would normally make my cock impossibly hard, but not when it’s not me that scares her. It’s her past.

All the nightmares I’ve watched her have, the nights I’ve brushed her hair away from her face as she screams in her sleep, it all makes sense because someone, or multiple someones, held my woman down and carved into her skin. Her perfect, soft skin is tainted by evil, and I can’t fucking stand it.

I hate that she understands my world better than I thought she did. And yet it all makes sense.

A man like me isn’t drawn to an innocent fawn, one who knows nothing of the world, one who has never seen the darkness it can hold. No. Men like me are drawn to the flame, to women who have seen evil and chaos but have risen above it like a phoenix from the ashes.

I drag my bloody fingers away from the word that is so out of place etched into her skin. She’s not a thief, not in her heart at least. The things our parents make us do, do not define us, I know that better than anyone, and I wish I could make her see that too.

I take a small step back and point to a scar low on my abdomen. I’ll never be able to repair the fractures that night left, but I can reassure her. I know I can.

“When I was twelve, my foster father took me to work for the first time. He was a cold, heartless man and any time one of us kids stepped out of line, we would get a backhand and grounded without access to the television or phone, sometimes even food, and I thought that was the worst thing in the world. But it all made sense the first time he took Ace and me there. I had no idea where we were going until the last minute, and even then, it made no sense to me why we were at the shipping yard. He said he was a trainer. What would he be training by the docks?” I chuckle at my own stupidity. I was just a kid of course, too young to know what true evil looked like even while I was staring him in the face, and yet looking back at it, all the signs were there. How did I miss them?

“I was confused at first. We walked in and there were rows and rows of cages filled with women. The warehouse stank to high heaven and the sound of women sobbing has been permanently ingrained in my memory for the last fifteen years, but Ace and I followed after our foster father because what other option did we have?”

I let out a steadying breath and replace Clara’s eyes. The deep brown still holds panic, but there’s curiosity and pity there now too. Not for me, or at least I don’t think it is. Not yet. Her eyes calm me, stop me from going back to a time in my life that was so dark I truly never thought I would survive, and I press on with the story.

“Ace and I kept looking at each other as we walked down this long passage, but neither of us said a word. Our foster father told us we were old enough to join the family business, and so we followed blindly in a place I can only ever refer to as hell. We stepped through the door at the end of the hallway into the huge room. We were on the second level, looking down at what appeared to be a wrestling ring without the sides. I thought things were finally starting to make sense. He said he was a trainer, this is obviously where he trained people, and I suppose, in a way, it was. It just wasn’t what I was expecting.”

Tears well in Clara’s eyes because she knows where this is going. She knows enough about the darkness in the world to know there’s shit like The Factory in existence. I hate that this story is hurting her or even that I have to tell it, but I think if she knows, if she sees what I’ve lived through, maybe she’ll share some of her burdens with me.

“When they dragged the first girl out, Ace and I looked at each other with both horror and confusion. She was naked, filthy, and covered in so many bruises I almost couldn’t tell what color her skin actually was. But she didn’t fight. She just lay there. Bloody and broken, waiting for whatever was going to come next. I guess she thought it couldn’t get any worse. That was a mistake.”

“Tommy, please,” Clara cries.

“You need to know, fawn. You need to understand why I am the way I am, and you need to know my past is just as scarred as yours.”

“Please don’t tell me this. I don’t want to know.” She pushes her shoulders forward, but with her hands tied behind her back and my grip on her hip, she can’t escape.

“I’m sorry, fawn,” I whisper. I hate this. I hate that I have to tell her this. I hate that I have to explain how fucked up the world is to someone as sweet as her, even if she already knows it from her own experiences. “A man walked onto the platform holding a bag. He strolled toward the woman like it was normal, like seeing a woman like that was an everyday occurrence, but for him, it was. He was desensitized to it. The woman curled up on her side and her body trembled, but she didn’t make a sound. I wish she did. I wish she begged for her life, bargained with whatever she could, but I suppose she probably did that before she was black and blue.

“It wasn’t until the speaker crackled above us that I realized there was more of an audience than I thought. There were several rows of couches beneath where we were standing, each one with a man in an expensive suit. They drank whiskey and laughed with one another like the sight in front of them wasn’t the most repulsive thing they’d ever seen.

“At the same time, a man’s voice filled the room. The man on the platform dropped his bag and dragged the woman to her feet, holding her open to display for the men. And for us, I suppose. I’d only ever seen a naked woman in an old Playboy magazine I found at my previous foster family’s house. The man on the speaker started rattling off details about the woman, but not like she was a human, more like a description of an item at an auction, and then the men started bidding. I thought I was hearing things at first. I couldn’t understand what I was witnessing, at least not until my foster father leaned down and whispered to the two of us.”

I suck in a sharp breath. The memory of his rancid breath and the equally despicable words that followed will remain ingrained in my mind for the rest of my life. “Welcome to the family business, sons.”

“Tommy, no. Please,” Clara sobs. I’m not sure if she’s begging me to stop or begging me to tell her I had no part in something so vile.

“Ace was too stunned to talk. He was a few years younger than me, and he was much quieter. He didn’t say much back then, and so I knew I had to be the one to talk us out of it. I begged my foster father to take us home. Told him I didn’t want to hurt people like they’d hurt that woman.” I shake my head at my own stupidity. “I was too young to understand making a scene in front of people like that would only end one way for me, and I paid the price.”

I brush my fingers over the scar at the bottom of my abdomen and then the one that spans the length of my left arm. The clean cut scarred nicer than the others, but each one tells another horror story. Another tale you could tell around a campfire with the reassurance that there’s no way it’s true. Except each one is. And each one is more horrific than the last.

“They beat me, sliced me up, threatened to kill me if I didn’t fall into line. Ace and our foster sister took care of me, helped me get to and from the bathroom, and then the three of us started planning our escape.”