Staking Her Claim...: Book 1 in the Patricks' Brothers series (19 page)

Fuck! Waiting for Alysia to give me an answer after I agreed to her stipulation that we’d only talk about this once, is killing me. Slowly and painfully at that. I hadn’t thought it would be so much of a pain in the ass getting her to consider it. I figured she would have jumped at the chance to uncover the truths she’d been so desperate for back in high school, but that just goes to prove how much she’s changed.

Alysia has matured from the curious, determined girl I remembered the self-contained woman who weighs things carefully before making decisions I see before me now. And that’s a huge turn on.

I’m man enough to say that when Alysia nods her yes, my heart all but jumps in response.

“Fine, we can talk in the living room. Max and the asshat shouldn’t be back for another hour or so. Is that going to be enough time to say what you have to?”

Following her into the huge, open-plan space, I take a seat on the black, suede love seat in the corner.

“More than enough time,” I reassure.

Eyeing me cautiously, Alysia sits on the edge of the sectional facing me. Her hands are clasped tightly in her lap and her gaze is studious, but I can see the hesitation past the façade she’s bravely putting up. I know she wouldn’t appreciate me asking about her why so I keep my observations to myself.

Launching into it without a second’s reluctance, I start.

“This morning, when I spoke with Brookes, he told me you’ve known for years about what went down back then. I didn’t push him for details, I wanted to talk to you about that, but from what he said, I picked up on the fact that he wasn’t privy to the same information you’d learned.”

“He’s not. No one is,” she confirms.

Heaving a sigh of relief, I nod,

“Good. That’s really good.”

My relief isn’t because I don’t think Brookes would have handled the knowledge with anything shy of complete confidentiality, it’s just that the fewer people who knew about my humiliation, the better in my eyes. Because that’s what it boils down to; shame.

I’m ashamed of what happened to me, and I’m angry I let it go on for so long. Rationally, I can understand what Dr. Sharp explained when he described me as a victim and that it wasn’t my fault, that I was forced into a corner when the people charged with caring for me abused that privilege, but that doesn’t change how I feel about it.

I don’t think I will ever be able to entirely erase the deep-seated feelings of mortification from my mind. They’re too ingrained. Too much time has passed.

“I wasn’t equipped to talk about this shit back then, I can barely talk about it now without breaking into a cold sweat and having a minor panic attack. But I’m going to try, Alysia,” I assure her.

Twisting the ring on her thumb, Alysia is now avoiding direct eye contact with me. Whether that’s out of lack of confidence in my ability to open up, or because she’s uncomfortable with the topic of our conversation, I don’t know. I don’t blame her, though.

She’s got no reason to trust me, quite the opposite. I’ve given her plenty of examples as to why she shouldn’t. All I can do now is prove I’ve changed. That I’m a different man now.

Resting my elbows on my splayed thighs, I gather all the courage I can muster and some I didn’t know I had.

“You know I was in the system. That I had been ever since I was a baby and stayed in until I aged out. That much I never hid from you. The Fitzsimmons, the last couple I was placed with, were evil motherfuckers, Aly. They weren’t anything like the families I’d stayed with before. They were worse. I didn’t have to worry about getting smacked around, kicked, woken up all hours with a backhand to the face or anything, not like the places I’d been in before, what I had to look forward to was a fuckload worse.”

I glance up from the floor where I’d been focusing my attention when she clears her throat. On seeing her staring at me, her eyes more vivid, the violet almost luminescent now, I swallow the knot that’s formed in my throat.

“This isn’t a happy story, Aly. Far from it. It’s fucking ugly, sick, and twisted. There’s nothing about the time I spent with them that doesn’t cause me nightmares. I used to wake up every night, sometimes multiple times a night, covered in sweat, shaking, screaming for them to leave me alone it’s that bad,” I rasp.

Pinching her lips together, her gaze never wavers as she whispers,

“I know the basics, Rob. That’s all I know, though. I found out that my fears were confirmed, that you’d been abused, repeatedly, and that it had been going on for as long as you were living in, Lancaster. I don’t have the details, and at the time I wasn’t in the position to get them, nor did I want to invade your privacy like that digging into your past.”

“About that,” I enquire. “How did you find out? I didn’t peg you as someone who would go prying into the past of a man who destroyed his friendship with you the way I did.”

“I didn’t. The information fell into my lap so to speak,” she says evenly. “A week or so after you left, Lancaster, your foster parents showed up at Mom’s house. I was the only one home. The boys were at football practice, Brookes was deployed, so was Brandt. I’d known who they were when they knocked on the door, but seeing as you’d already been gone for a while, I can honestly say, I was shocked they were there.”

My heart is pounding so hard as she recounts their visit, I think it’s going to beat right out of my chest. I’m sure she can hear it from across the room when she gives me a placating smile, but not even that helps to calm its abnormal rhythm.

“I opened the door, but I didn’t let them in. I’d suspected for years they were the cause of your pain, the physical and the emotional, there was no way I was letting them into the house when no one else was home.”

“Thank fuck,” I breathe.

“They asked if you were there, which I obviously told them you weren’t. When I told them I hadn’t seen you for over a week, they asked if I’d heard from you at all. Of course, I answered no to that too, but that’s when they started to get irate.”

“They didn’t hurt you did they? They didn’t touch you?” I ask seething. If I found out they’d laid a hand on her, I would be more than happy to find out where Devil’s Spawn MC had buried the motherfuckers, dig them up and kill them all over again. Just the thought those sick fucks had talked to Alysia made me wild. I wanted to tear something apart. It made me want to hit something, over and over again, until the rage polluting my veins ebbed.

“No, nothing like that. I could just sense that if I continued talking to them, things would escalate. And with no one else in the house, I couldn’t let that happen,” she replies calmly. “I explained we had a falling out before you left, that we weren’t friends anymore, I’d deleted your number, and that you wouldn’t be welcome at our house if you did come back.”

Noticing my pained expression, she goes on to clarify.

“It was all lies, Rob. Not the part about us having a falling out or us not being friends anymore, that was true, but the part about you not being welcome, that was a huge lie. You would have been welcomed with open arms if you’d come to us, you knew that. And if you didn’t, you should have. It wouldn’t have mattered how much time had passed, you could have come to Mom and us. My brothers, and I would have done anything in our power to help you.”

“Like I said, I wasn’t in the right place to accept that, Aly. It took me getting my ass kidnapped, facing certain death if you hadn’t shown up to bail me out to get me to see something needed to change. That I needed to change.”

“I’ll admit, I didn’t understand what was holding you back then, but I did later. Anyway,” she says waving her hand in the air, dismissing that line of thought. “A few things they said struck a nerve with me. It wasn’t that they divulged details per se, it was the way they claimed you were theirs and talked about you like you were a possession, not a human being, that convinced me what I’d imagined for so long was true.”

Pausing for long seconds, she goes on to add,

“There wasn’t a shred of compassion or care in the way they spoke about you. It was all ownerships and propriety. I put the pieces together, what they said, what I’d seen, the way you behaved, and I confronted them, right there on the doorstep. I told them I knew they had been hurting you. I warned them if they searched for you, I would contact the authorities. And I would have. I would have gone to Uncle Luke and explained the situation to protect you from what I believed they’d done. They backed off after that. The husband told me that my threats weren’t necessary, that they were simply worried about you, and confirmed they would leave well enough alone. I can’t say that I trusted that to be true, but what choice did I have? So, I took them at their word, and prayed you wouldn’t come back to, Lancaster, because I knew if you did, there was a good chance the cycle would begin all over again. And I didn’t want that for you, Rob. No matter how damaged our friendship was, I didn’t want you to have to live through a moment more of their cruelty. Even if that meant I would never see you again, that was still preferable over you being hurt.”

Seemin
i
gly exhausted by her confession, Alysia rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms, sighing deeply. Angry and confused, I ask,

“Jesus, Sweetness. I’m proud as hell you stuck up for me, but what the hell were you thinking, baiting sick fucks like them?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” she admits. “I just wanted them to leave you alone and to never bother you again. It was all I could think of that might help.”

Not knowing what else to say, I wipe my sweaty hands on my jeans, replying,

“Thank you. Thank you for being brave enough to confront them when I wasn’t. You don’t know how much it means to me that you had my back even after everything I’d done to you, how badly I’d hurt you.”

Folding her arms protectively across her chest, Alysia tips her head.

“It was never about being brave, Rob. I did it because I was angry. No, I was furious. I couldn’t believe that people put in charge of taking care of you were the people who ultimately ended up being the very ones to hurt you. I hated that for you. And I hated they made you feel like you couldn’t tell anyone about it.”

Realizing time is running out, Max and Peter will be getting home soon, I bite the bullet and tell her about the hell I had survived through. I explain my introduction into the sick, depraved world of the Fitzsimmons. The debasing acts I’d been forced to commit. I describe the times I’d feel physically ill because I’d been made to witness intimate acts of cruelty between two willing parties and one who was anything but.

I go into great detail about the frequency of their visits and what they trained me to do to both of them on command. The sodomy. The violation of every inch of my skin. How I learned to suck cock like a professional by the age of thirteen. I told Alysia that every sexual experience I had until the age of eighteen featured one of them.

I admitted that it wasn’t until almost two years after I’d left, Lancaster that I consensually had sex with a woman. I even divulged how humiliating that time had been. How I could barely keep my cock hard enough to penetrate her, all the while believing there was something seriously wrong with me for not being as into it as the woman was. Every sick, sordid, gruesome detail tumbled out as if my brain-to-mouth filter had sprung a leak.

Throughout the entirety of my story, Alysia sat quietly listening. She didn’t interject. She didn’t make a sound. She just sat, unmoving, giving me her undivided attention.

When I finally finished, the tears she’d been so valiantly keeping under wraps cascaded from her eyes unchecked. She didn’t hide her pain from me, quite the opposite. Alysia showed every ounce of hatred for the people who tortured and degraded me in her expression. She showed me how sorry she was, how much she wanted to erase my pain and heal my soul with each tear she let fall.

Eventually, when I couldn’t stand her silence any longer, I pleaded,

“Please say something. Anything. I don’t care if you tell me I disgust you, that you can’t bear to look at me, just say something, Aly.” Because it was true, I didn’t care what she said. As long as she acknowledged she’d heard me, that I didn’t have to repeat any of the heinous details, nothing else mattered right then.

In seconds, her face contorted into a mask of determination and she was off the sectional, kneeling in front of me. Taking both of my much larger hands in her smaller ones, she shakes her head.