Page 127 of Visions of Darkness

The pad of his thumb ran the length of my jaw.

Tentatively.

Tenderly.

Affection softened his gaze. “I spent every second thinking of you, too. Worried about you. Wondering if your family took care of you. If they loved you. If you were safe.”

“Were you?” I hedged it on a whisper. “Were you safe and loved?”

With the few things he’d admitted, I knew well enough that he was not. Never before had I wanted to be the one who was there to provide everything he’d lacked more than right then.

His laugh was hollow. “No, Aria, I wasn’t safe and loved.”

Sorrow billowed. His and mine.

He wavered for a moment before his tongue stroked out to wet his dried lips. “From the beginning, my father thought I was a freak. Of course, I can’t remember, when I was really young, what he might have thought the first time he looked at me, but I can only imagine it was disgust.”

Grief fisted my heart, and I set my hand on his cheek. My thumb brushed along the defined angle as I stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

His voice hitched in pain. “I had four brothers, two older and two younger, and my father never let me forget that I was different from them. He did his best to beat it out of me, to whip his freak son into shape. My mother was too busy with the others to give a shit.”

Horror lanced through my being, and tears stung my eyes. “That breaks my heart.”

His shoulder shrugged beneath my cheek, like it didn’t matter. Like it didn’t make me sick. Like the same protectiveness Pax watched me with didn’t well inside me for him. “For a lot of years, the blows were enough to make me think there was something wrong with me. The older I grew, the more I thought I had to be fucking deranged. Crazy. Every time I looked in the mirror, I felt the same disgust my father felt when he looked at me.”

His voice lowered to a wisp. “But in the end, even if I was crazy? Insane? None of that mattered if it meant I got to see you night after night.”

“I hate them for you.” It was true. I’d never felt that emotion as strongly as I did right then.

Pax cracked a smirk. “Probably about as much as I hate your parents for you.”

My head shook.

But mine weren’t cruel.

My father might have made mistakes, but I knew he made them out of fear. Out of his love and hope for me.

Not because he was repulsed.

Pax’s fingers fluttered through my hair. “I finally skipped out when I was fifteen. Left home and hitchhiked across the country. No destination in mind other than getting away, because I couldn’t take living under their roof for a second longer.”

Hesitation darkened his features, and his voice grew thin, threaded with a warning. “I might have escaped them, but it’d already changed me. It carved out something ugly inside me, and it left a hole that opened me up to the depraved.”

His words were gravel, and I knew he was leading me back to the confession he’d made at the store earlier today.

A frown furrowed my brow, and my attention jumped all over his face like I might be uncovering every one of his secrets. “What exactly did you mean earlier? When you told me about the money? You ... look for people doing wrong during the day?”

Pax exhaled a rush of heated air, and he fiddled with a lock of my hair. “I just figured if I was chosen for this life? To fight in Faydor? Why wouldn’t I be fighting the same evils during the day?”

Uncertainty barreled through me, and I was sure he read it in my expression. “So you look for evil?”

“Believe me, Aria, I don’t have to look that hard. It’s all around us.”

“How do you know?”

His fierce brow pinched, and those eyes watched me through the shadows that danced in the room. “I don’t think it’s quite like what you experience ... the voices you hear. The desperation. The hopelessness. And I sure as hell can’t see a Kruen when I touch someone. But I canfeelit ... the pure wickedness. I can sense it when someone has fully given themselves over. I know when there’s no good left.”

A tremor rocked through my body, and I could feel the grim foreboding that radiated from his being.

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