Page 31 of When Kings Fall

The shackles might not be physical anymore, but they were still there.

“Have you heard anything else about her?”

“Brianna Walker?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s recovering at the clubhouse with her father.”

“I want to see her.”

He shook his head. “It’s not a good idea.”

“Dad, we were there together, we—”

“That’s the issue. She’s not doing well, Levi. Seeing you could trigger her and make it all the worse. She needs time, just like you do. Besides, she’s under lockdown, her father has round-the-clock protection on her.”

“Fuck.”

I pushed off the wall and he wrapped his arms around me.

“Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“All right, yeah.”

“I got you those computer components that you wanted, so you can put all this pent-up energy into that.”

I forced a smile that I really wanted to feel, but couldn’t. “That sounds good. Thank you.”

As we made our way out of our home gym, my dad fell into that sad and contemplative state that he had been since I’d been liberated from that nightmare. He was so distraught about what had happened to me and despite his efforts to hide it, I knew him too well not to be able to see through to the truth.

The fact that something that awful had happened to his son was bad enough for him.

He loved and adored me so much and we were so close, I was basically his world. Everything else came second to him, even his multi-million dollar business empire.

But that I’d come back haunted so much by it all to such a degree that I couldn’t see past it was another, because it was lingering, it was changing me. And I knew he was so very worried that it had actually damaged me irreparably, that the son he’d known had gone and been replaced by something else.

A shadow of what he had been.

And he wasn’t wrong there.

Those demons had taken something from me during that hell.

They’d also infected me.

With fear.

Powerlessness.

Despair.

Rage.

And the hardest thing of all to shake—shame.

Shame that I hadn’t been able to stop it, that those things had been done to me.

That those things had been done to her.

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