Page 590 of Dark Love

It’s kind of a requirement for my job. Responding could set us off on a tangent, so I sit silently watching him.

“Can you really handle this? Because I’m not the man you think I am.”

“You are the man I think you are. There isn’t anything that you can tell me you’ve done that would make me think otherwise.”

“I’m a human trafficker.”

What! The s’more slips out of my fingers. A man who saves women can’t sell women to be hurt. Take a breath. There’s more to this than the pain and challenge in his eyes. “Explain that to me.”

He shakes his head. “You aren’t running away.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I tell you I’m a human trafficker and you ask me to explain.”

“Yes.” Before my courage fades away.

“My father bought my mother—”

Bought his mother!

“—with the express purpose of having an heir. Her first pregnancy resulted in the birth of my sister.”

Vex has a sister! Why haven’t I met her?

“A few weeks after my sister was born, I was conceived.”

He feels guilty for being born. The pain his mother must have gone through isn’t lost on him. I hate his father.

“My father kept my mother around until we could keep ourselves alive. Then he sold her.”

“Just like that? He sold your mother.”

“Women had no value to him. The only thing that mattered to him was money and me. I was the way part of him lived on.”

How horrible.

“Almost from the moment I could stand, my father started training me to kill and how to run the family business. The first time I took a life I was eight.”

Eight! I can’t hold back the gasp that escapes my lips. Who makes an eight-year-old kill? A monster.

“You’d think that would have scarred me.”

It did, even if you can’t acknowledge it.

“But the man I killed made my father look like a saint. My father didn’t value women and he didn’t understand pain or regret, but he never hurt people just for the fun of hurting others. It was all about the money. The man I killed tortured for fun. My father didn’t care about that, though. He just wanted money. There was never enough money.”

Is that how Vex got all this money?

“The one bright spot in my childhood was my sister. Somehow, in all of the darkness that was our life, she always remained in the light. Not quite joyful—no one could be joyful with the way we lived—but she didn’t let it get her down.”

I’m so glad he had one person to give him some peace.

“The thing about my father was you never said no to him. My sister knew it. I knew it. The world knew it. That word signed many death certificates. I never dreamed of doing anything but what my father said—”

Self-preservation is a strong instinct. I want to take his hand and give him the comfort that he needs… that I need, but he’s closed himself off in order to tell me all of this.

“—until he sold my sister.”

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