Page 84 of Billionaire Lumberjack's Bride

No matter how much time has passed, the memories never go away.

They never dissipate.

If anything, they only grow stronger, more incessant, banging around in my head to get my attention, to make me feel and see and experience them again.

“It would be easier to ask what he didn’t do.”

She flinches, but she doesn’t pull away. “And you never told anyone?”

I shake my head. “Not after my father warned me the first time, but as I got older, I knew I had to get out…”

“That’s why you came up here.”

I nod. “I started saving all the money people gave me for birthday presents, Christmas, special occasions like that. I took items from the house that I could sell easily at pawn shops or on the street—watches, jewelry, things I thought they wouldn’t miss. I knew I’d need cash they couldn’t trace, and I didn’t want to have to take anything out of bank accounts that they might notice and be able to use to find wherever I managed to settle down.”

“Pretty smart for a teenager.”

“No.” I shake my head, clinging to her hand. “Smart would’ve been stopping it in the first place, going to the police until I found someone they didn’t have on their payroll.” I clench my eyes closed against a vision of a young woman, covered in bruises and welts and cuts being led from the house by one of the many servants paid to keep their eyes and mouths shut. “I wasn’t the only person they hurt, especially Uncle Marty. There were women…” I swallow through the lump in my throat. “And I wasn’t strong enough to do anything about it then. I just ran.”

Lyla shifts up until she’s kneeling next to me and takes my jaw in her palms, turning my head until I’m facing her, my eyes still closed. “Look at me, Silas.”

Reluctantly, I open my eyes and meet hers. Resolve shimmers where her tears once did.

“A child can’t be expected to bear that burden, Silas. You saved yourself. That’s all you could do.”

Her words seem so sure, her voice and gaze unwavering as she says them, but despite all this time agonizing over whether that’s true or not, I can’t believe them.

“Is it, Lyla?Isit all I could have done? Because it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like I ran and left him to create more years of victims.”

A single tear falls down her cheek. “Don’t do that.” She rests her forehead against mine, and that brief connection is enough to send warmth spreading through my chilled body. “I can’t listen to you blame yourself.”

I pull my head back. “How can I not? I have all this.” I wave my hand around the cabin. “I had enough money to buy this cabin on this land that Jensen’s brother couldn’t maintain himself anymore on the mountain no one wanted, to hide out here, to cover my scars, to try to forget that life altogether, while everyone else continued to suffer because of the Boltons. What does that make me other than a fucking coward?”

“No. Not that.” She shakes her head. “Youhadto leave.”

Her eyes drift down my face to my neck, and she reaches up and trails her fingers over the thin scar that runs under my chin at my throat. “What made this?”

I squeeze my eyes closed at her soft touch and the goosebumps that spread across my skin with it.

Of course she would see it.

Through the beard, and the ink, and everything else I’ve done to give myself new skin, Lyla found the one thing that tells the worst of the story.

I don’t want to tell her. I want to keep it buried. But we’ve come this far that holding anything back wouldn’t be fair to her.

“That’s why I left, finally, what convinced me I had to. I was three weeks from leaving to go to Harvard. I was getting out, starting college hundreds of miles from my father and uncle.” I swallow thickly, and she slowly brushes her fingers across the scar again. “Uncle Marty, he cornered me, said that just because I was leaving that house didn’t mean that anything was changing, that he was still in control, and that if I ever said a fucking word to anyone about anything that had happened, he would kill me.”

The pure rage in his voice when he made that threat still resonates in my ears. At barely eighteen, after years of him abusing me every way he could think of and getting away with it, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he could end my life and get away with it, either.

“I tried to stand up to him. I thought leaving was going to give me some leverage over him. I told him if he ever laid a hand on me again, I’d go straight to the police. But he grabbed a lamp and ripped the cord off it so fast I didn’t have time to try to defend myself. He had it wrapped around my neck and was choking me before I could take another breath.”

Lyla’s grip on me tightens.

“I only managed to get away because my father came in the room and stopped him.”

“What did your father say?”

I snort and shake my head at the absurdity of my father’s words. “He told him that he couldn’t kill the only heir, and right then and there, I understood why my father had never intervened, had always let him get away with everything.” I lock gazes with her. “Because it was so important for him that the company stayed with the Boltons. If anything happened to him, he needed Marty to take over, and after him, I was the only one left. So, I renounced it. Once I managed to be able to speak again, I told him I didn’t want any of his fucking money and I didn’t want to be a Bolton anymore.”

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