Page 76 of Damaged

It took him a long time to answer. I could feel him shaking against me. Sadie was pressed up against his leg and nuzzling whatever part of him she could reach.

“What if they don’t want me?” Silver said in a hushed voice. “What if they find out what Ivan…”

When Silver didn’t continue, I pressed another kiss to his head and said, “I don’t think that will happen, my love, but if it does, we’re back on this boat and heading home, do you understand me? I want you. Forever. I’m not letting you go unless you let me go first.”

Silver immediately began shaking his head against my chest.

“Don’t spend the rest of your life believing what happened to you was your fault. That you did something wrong or that you somehow deserved it. You were a kid lost in?—”

“A broken world,” Silver finished for me.

“We have a family,” I continued. “It’s not just you, me, and Sadie, either. It’s Jace and Caleb and Willa and Ronan and all those men and women who were there for us when we needed them, whether we wanted them to be or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re thousands of miles away or right next door. They will always be there for us just like we’ll be there for them.”

Silver pulled in a deep breath and nodded. “Okay,” he said simply.

“Do you want to take us in?” I asked as I released him enough to jerk my head toward the steering wheel. “I’ll drop the buoys.”

During our trip exploring the bay, we’d had to stop a couple times for supplies and gas, so Silver had learned how to dock a boat and like everything else, he was already a pro at it. Within minutes, we were pulling into one of the vacant slips and tying off the boat. The moment we disembarked, Silver wrapped his fingers around mine. Sadie was at his side, her body bumping his every time his left leg took a step forward. Under normal circumstances, I would have told the dog to stay on the boat since I didn’t know what we were walking into. It was the same with the gun I had stashed at my back, but my first priority was Silver’s safety, both emotional and physical.

At the end of the dock was a well-traveled path that we followed until the trees began to dissipate. Silver came to a jarring halt when he saw the massive house sitting a couple hundred yards away. I hadn’t given him any details about the house, even though I’d looked it up on the internet on a real estate site. As far as I’d been able to tell, the house had never been sold since it had been built in the early nineteen hundreds. It had, however, undergone a massive remodel, but only to restore it to its glory days as the years had taken their toll on it.

But what I was seeing wasn’t the same thing Silver was. I could tell by the way he was breathing. Lush green grass surrounded the house. From our position we were looking at the back of the house. There was a huge pool surrounded by a safety fence. Next to it was a playground. Not a super fancy one, though. Just a collection of toys, slides, a sandbox, and things for kids to climb or weave their way through. To the right of the house was a large barn that matched the color scheme of the main house. Several horses, along with an array of farm animals, lazed about in well-maintained pastures. On the other side of the sprawling farmhouse was a tennis court and several outbuildings.

“The swings,” Silver whispered.

I looked at the swings which were currently empty but swaying just a tiny bit in the breeze. “Do you remember those?” I asked carefully. Silver looked like he was on the verge of bolting. From the way his fingernails were digging into my skin, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had whipped around and gone running back down the path to the boat.

Before Silver could answer, which I wasn’t sure he would have, several dogs came running at us out of nowhere. Sadie stepped in front of Silver and let out a soft growl. There had to be at least five dogs that surrounded us, but they were all wagging their tails and yapping happily. I didn’t think Silver even noticed them because his eyes were fixated on something I somehow had managed to miss completely.

Next to the pool but outside the safety fence was a huge wooden picnic table that had to seat at least twenty people. Or more, based on the quick count I managed to do as all the people occupying the benches at the table had swung their heads in our direction when the dogs had started barking. An old-fashioned checkered tablecloth covered the massive table and there were an array of bowls and platters all along the middle of it. The people now staring at us were a mix of old, young, and in between.

Fuck, I hadn’t been expecting something like this. I’d thought we’d ultimately run into one or two people and slowly ease our way into explaining who we were. Several of the younger men at the table stood. Their buzz cuts and wariness were painfully familiar to me.

Military men.

At least six of them.

“Shit,” I said softly, but Silver didn’t seem to hear me. He was staring at the people surrounding the picnic table. I couldn’t tell if he recognized them or anything about the scene. If it had just been the two of us, I would have thought him to be in one of his trancelike stares, but the way he was gripping my hand told me otherwise.

For the first time since I’d located the house on the internet, I began to have doubts about whether I’d done the right thing.

“Can I help you?”

The female voice had me jerking to the right and automatically reaching for my gun. The girl was watching us from atop a black horse. She was wearing a hard hat and what I assumed was the type of clothing horseback riders wore. Her soft smile had me dropping my hand from the butt of my gun and carefully pulling my shirt back over it.

“Um, yeah,” I began but then snapped my mouth shut because I realized I had no idea what to say next. Excuse me, do you recognize this person next to me because I think he used to live here but was kidnapped when he was a kid and held prisoner by a pedophile who tortured and abused him for years.

Silver was at my back, probably deliberately hiding from the girl, though based on her size and build, I doubted she was a girl but rather a young woman. She smiled brightly as she took her hard hat off. A wave of golden-brown hair tumbled down her back.

Familiar golden-brown hair.

“I’m Agnes. I know, right?” she said as she got off the horse. “Agnes? Who names their kid that? I guess it was an old family name—some Greek great-great-grandmother or something on my mom’s side. Can you imagine the teasing I would have gotten in school as I got older? Thankfully, my brother couldn’t pronounce Agnes when he was little, so he was the one who came up with?—”

“Aggie—” Silver whispered from behind me. He’d spoken softly but the expression on the woman’s face changed. She seemed surprised and confused.

“Yeah… how did you know that?” Wariness had her stepping backward. “Do we know each other—” she began to ask as she moved closer to the horse’s head. She was trying to get a better look at Silver.

The second her own clear, silvery eyes met their mirror image, she gasped and shook her head. “No,” she whispered in disbelief. “Andrew?”

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