Page 124 of Diamond Kisses

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he groaned. “His body is destroyed, but his mind…that’s in ruins. This is all my fault. I should never have sent him there. I should’ve known he wouldn’t be a match for Grand. I—”

“Ah, Q.” The woman stepped into him and cupped his cheek. “You can’t beat yourself up. You found him eventually. He’s here now. All those poor slaves are either recuperating or have already been sent back to their families…because of you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Because ofhim.” He pointed at me. “I’ve liberated thousands of slaves over the years. I’ve seen the sickest shit and slaughtered the vilest people, but what Franco keeps reporting on that island?” He shuddered. “The fire couldn’t erase the truth. It didn’t destroy the dungeons, the caves, or the walk-in freezer full of body parts. Body parts, Tess. He was fuckingharvestingthem! There are hundreds of skulls below that despicable place. The things the other prisoners have told me. The ones missing pieces and yet are strong enough to actually recount what they’ve endured…merde.”

“You can’t torture yourself like this,” Tess murmured, tucking a blonde curl behind her ear. “You need to get some sleep.” The petite slenderness of my sister-in-law. The softness of her Australian accent couldn’t hide the obvious authority she had over my brother. “You help for a reason. You carry those horrors for those who didn’t survive. You can’t let this get to you. You’ll be no use to all the others in the future if—”

“The ones in the future?” Q spat. “What about the ones in the past? The ones we were too late for?”

“Don’t go down that path,maître. You refused to let me when I struggled to forget, and I won’t let you get lost too. He’s here. He’s going to be okay. You didn’t fail him—”

“Didn’t fail him, huh?” Q chuckled coldly. “You love me for reasons I will never quite understand but allow me to tell you the sort of man you married,esclave.” His voice shook with self-hatred. “I saw him. All those years ago, when I was barely a teen and he was just a boy…I saw him being dragged into my father’s wing. I heard him scream when he was forced to do whatever it was my father made him do. The first time it happened, I intervened. I claimed I’d seen some cops heading up our driveway and sent a guard in to fetch him. I’d hoped that would be the end of it, but…it wasn’t.”

Tess glanced at me. Thanks to the gloom, she didn’t notice me eavesdropping. Her voice trembled. “How long…how long did it go on for?”

“Years. I tried to stop it. I took a few beatings trying to prevent my father going to the nursery where he was kept. But I was too young to make a difference. After a while, I got shuttled off to boarding school. I wasn’t here to see what happened. I barely saw him when I came home for the holidays. And if I did, he never once looked at me. I remember him actually giving me the finger one afternoon. That’s when I figured he’d become like my father, and I hated him instead of pitied him.”

“So that’s why you shot him? Your father, I mean?”

“I shot him because he housed fourteen women and raped them all while my mother drank herself into her grave. I shot him because he groomed kids tobecomehim. I shot him because it was therightthing to do. All while I never did the right thing by my brother.”

I flinched as Q marched toward me.

He moved too fast. I didn’t have enough time to fake sleep.

He sucked in a breath as he hovered over my bed. “You’re awake.”

Squeezing my eyes closed, I wanted so fucking much to hate him. I wanted to continue nursing my childhood blame, but after everything that’d happened…I couldn’t.

I couldn’t judge him after what I’d done.

I couldn’t condemn him for turning a blind eye when he was just a boy himself. It’d been a shitty situation for all involved. He hadn’t been the one to make me rape my half-siblings’ mothers. He wasn’t the one to hold a gun to my head to make me hurt them.

And he wasn’t the one who’d made me draw Ily’s blood or get hard as she screamed.

That was all on me.

On this sickness inside me.

This fucking beast I could never kill.

I’dbeen the one to kill Ily.

She was dead because ofme.

She died because I saw her, fell in love with her, then sacrificed her to Victor.

Oh fuck.

Barbed wire wrapped around my lungs. My insides tangled. My heart wanted to stop.

She’s dead.

Because of me.

She’s gone.

Because I failed her.

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