Page 83 of Billionaire Lumberjack's Bride

Lyla stares up at me, tears soaking her green eyes, and I brush the hair back from her face, wanting so badly to take away her pain and erase everything that just happened from her memory.

“I’m so sorry…”

“It’s not your fault.” She shakes her head, her lower lip trembling as she cradles her wounded arm against her chest. “You couldn’t have known he would—”

I shove off the bed to my feet, pushing my hands back through my hair. “But that’s just it, Idid.” I scrub my palms over my face, unable to look at her and the damage he did without wanting to destroy something. “What he did to you is nothing compared to what he’s capable of.”

Her breath hitches, and I know she’s putting the pieces together. “It was him, wasn’t it? All the scars?”

I suck in a shaky breath, battling with the memories I’ve tried so hard to forget, to leave behind me when I came up here. It was inevitable that she would ask. The talented artist I found who has spent years trying to hide them hasn’t been able to fully conceal what was done to me. And now that she’s met Martin Bolton, now that she’s felt the sting of his violence, I can’t keep the truth from her anymore.

Not even if I wanted to.

And the truly terrifying thing is that I don’t want to hide it from her anymore.

I want her to know, to understand why I can’t ever be what or who she wants and needs me to be.

Slowly, I pull my hands away from my face and lower myself to the bed beside her. She lets me pull her bruised arm onto my lap, and I feather the tips of my fingers across the marred skin, feeling the same anger I’ve carried for so long welling inside me again.

“My uncle’s a monster. And my father, he wasn’t much better.”

“He knew?”

I nod, remembering the looks he would give me that would silence me in an instant. “He never brought it up, never acknowledged it openly, but the one time I tried to say anything, he made it very clear to me that he didn’t want to know what happened when I was alone with my uncle.”

The smells and sounds and agony come racing back, threatening to drown me in the anxiety that keeps me up here on this mountain instead of living a normal life below it.

My heart thuds wildly against my chest, my breaths coming in hard, heavy pants as the past meets the present. Lyla slips her hand over mine, squeezing it gently, giving me an anchor, something to keep me grounded and help me remember where I am while I relive the horrors of my childhood.

I swallow against my dry throat, closing my eyes and picturing the house that was my home my entire life before coming up here. “We all lived together in the family mansion that’s been the Bolton home since the early 1800s.”

“What about your mom?”

It’s such an obvious and innocent question but such a complicated answer.

I shift my position so I can prop myself against the headboard beside her, her hand draped on my lap, the bruises darkening every minute we sit here. “My father made sure she wasn’t a problem.”

Lyla looks at me, her brow furrowed, and the tears momentarily stop in favor of listening to the story she’s wanted to hear since the moment she saw my old wounds. “What do you mean?”

“She had issues with drugs, self-medicated for her depression. After she had me, it got worse, but my uncle and my father kept her well stocked in anything she ever wanted.” I give a half-shrug because I’m not entirely sure what happened—but I can make an educated guess. “I have brief memories of her from when I was very little. Then they just stop. My father and Marty told me she OD’d when I was four, but for all I know, it was staged that way to get rid of her.”

“Jesus…” Lyla shifts to turn toward me, using her free hand to brush hair back from my temple. “Silas, I’m—”

I turn into her touch, locking my gaze with hers. “Please don’t. Please don’t say you’re sorry. I don’t want to hear those words come from your mouth, from anyone’s. Losing my mom didn’t change anything. If she had been there, it still would’ve happened. She couldn’t have stopped them.”

The emotions threatening to choke me fill my chest, but I fight them back, needing to get all this out now, or I know I never will again.

I owe it to Lyla to tell itall.

“My father and my uncle had too much power over the staff, everyone in the company, hell, even the police. No one was ever going to stand up to them. My uncle’s sadistic tendencies, they got him into a lot of situations that would have looked very bad for the family and Bolton Steel. He needed an outlet, someone they could control more than the random women they paid to silence or made sure went away some other way.”

Lyla turns her wounded arm and laces her fingers together with mine, and I stare down at her pale skin marred by a Bolton’s hand against my inked skin that can’t hide the evidence of what was done.

We’re so different, from completely opposite worlds, yet I’ve dragged her into this quagmire we may not escape from.

She brushes her thumb across mine gently. “What did he do to you, Silas?”

My entire body trembles as memory after memory slams into me. I can feel every hit, every strike, every implement he ever used on me as if it were happening now instead of all those years ago.

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