Page 2 of Confessions of Pain

Chapter 1

Ten years later

“Are you sure about this, Gabriel?” Ethan asked for what had to be the tenth time since we’d boarded the plane earlier that morning. “Because if you aren’t sure, there’s plenty of time to reconsider, or, at the very least, slow things down and evaluate the situation thoroughly. It’s only been nine days since you became aware of this thing and in those nine days, you’ve gone…well, Gabe, you’ve gone kind of crazy.” He smiled in my direction, probably hoping it would take some of the edge off his words. The fact that he might very well piss me off didn’t bother Ethan at all. Not when he knew damned well I was about to cross a line there would be no turning back from.

My stint in Afghanistan was where I had met Ethan, so joining up turned out to be the smartest damned thing I ever did. Ethan, his brother, Titus, and his boyfriend, Jeremiah, all three of whom I had met in the third year of my stint in the Army during special ops training, were my family now. Against all odds, they’d accepted me into their group, and we’d forged an unbreakable bond.

I kept staring at my iPad, waiting for updates from Titus, but a small grin tugged at the corner of my lips, telling Ethan I was at least listening to him. When the final email, the one I’d been waiting for all morning, came through with a little ding, the smirk I was wearing on my face morphed into a full-blown smile. It didn’t quite touch my eyes but then again, the cruel ones never did.

“It’s done. Morganston Textiles officially belongs to me.”

I turned in my seat and looked Ethan dead in the eye. “I know you don’t agree with what I’m doing, Ethan, and I love you for it. You want me to be a better person, one not totally consumed with getting even with my enemies. You want me to forget about my past and focus on my future. Maybe find a nice guy to settle down with and have a couple of kids, two dogs, and maybe even a cat or two. I know you want those things for me, but I’m afraid it isn’t going to happen. At least not until I settle some old scores.”

“Listen, Gabriel…”

“No, Ethan. Look, you know you don’t have to come with me. I’ll completely understand and I won’t have the first hard feeling floating in your direction. I know the kind of shit I’m about to get involved into isn’t your thing, so it’s okay for you to walk away.” I took a deep breath and added, “Just be there for me when all the dust settles after the fallout. I’ll need my best friend more than ever then.” That statement was damned hard to say, even to Ethan, and there wasn’t much I wouldn’t share with him. But over the years, I had trained myself to not ask for anything. That way, I wouldn’t be disappointed if no help came along. It’d taken years for me to learn to trust Ethan, Titus, and Jeremiah, my best friends in the world, and sometimes it was still a work in progress.

Ethan growled in frustration. “You know damned well I’m not leaving you with it, Gabe. Don’t say stuff like that because it pisses me off and when I get pissed off, I’m no fun to be around. You know how I pride myself on being the most fun guy in the room.”

I smiled at him. “Don’t make jokes when I know you really want to throttle me. It’s okay to hate me a little right now. I kind of hate myself.”

“Then why in the hell are we doing this? Just let it go. Lethimgo!”

Him. Yeah, he was the reason I couldn’t let it go. Even though I told myself that’s all he was to me now. Just a nameless, faceless pronoun I didn’t have to picture in my mind. I didn’t want to say his name or make him real. At one time in my life, he’d been my everything. One year younger than me, he’d held the power to soothe the anger that always lurked in my heart. He’d been able to charm a smile to my lips when I’d thought it to be an impossible task. Younger, smaller, and practically angelic in my eyes, he’d been the cocoon for my damaged soul. Now? He was justnothing.

I never spoke his name, and as far as I knew, my three best friends in the world didn’t even know who he was. Well, maybe they did know, because Jeremiah, Ethan’s lover, couldn’t standnot knowingeverything, so he’d probably dug up all the crap in my file and had also stumbled across his name in the process. It would be in the police records, after all. I’m sure my friends all knew about my past, but out of respect for how painful it was to me, they didn’t bring it up.

I know they all hoped I would move past the all-consuming need for revenge that had long been the only beacon of light in my life since I’d been forced to leave home all those years ago. It hadn’t been much of a home, but at least I’d been reasonably safe there. Not so much on the streets of Atlanta, where I lived for almost a year after I ran away.

Most teenagers wouldn’t have survived being homeless and at the mercy of people determined to use and abuse them, but then I guess I wasn’t like most. My hate for the entire Morganston family kept me alive when the ugliness of life had threatened to overtake my desire to live. I’d been able to survive the first time I was forced to sell my body to buy food only because of my rage. When living on the streets, there’d been times when the cold weather almost claimed me as a victim, but the hatred kept me warm enough to live another day. When the hunger became unbearable, thoughts of hurting the people who had put me here kept my mind off the gnawing pain in my stomach. Drugs would have probably been an easy way to forget how bad my life was, if only for a few blissful moments, but I’d refused them because I’d known they would make me weak. They would replace my addiction, and I only had room for one.

I suppose in some twisted sort of way, I owed everything to the Morganston family. My hatred for them had given me the strength to survive. It fueled my ability to keep me alive on the streets. Finally, when I decided I wanted something better for myself, I joined the military. I wasn’t a patriotic all-American soldier-wannabe when I walked through those recruitment doors. I was really only looking for some kind of home, and the military gave me one. A good one. Being homeless, alone, and afraid had made me rethink my future, and the military became the brightest star in a very dark sky.

Unlike me, Ethan, Jeremiah, and Titus had lives built on foundations of love and trust. And money. All three of them came from wealthy families. Not inherited wealth, but the kind that came from hard work and street smarts. Their fathers all chose different paths to make a good living for their families. Jeremiah’s dad was in construction, and built log houses for the rich people who wanted to pretend they were being rustic in their million-dollar homes in the mountains. And Ethan and Titus’s father was a dreamer, and something of a nerd. He had invented a computer program that had made him a millionaire a few times over. He had passed on a lot of that knowledge to his son, Titus, who had even figured out a way to get himself assigned to his own brother’s unit in Afghanistan. I never wanted to know how he’d pulled that off.

The fact that they started out as ordinary guys just like me was a little nugget of truth that was tough for me to swallow at first since I’d spent all of my life hating people who were rich, because I was jealous that I couldn’t have what they did or just saw them as a sorry excuse for human beings. It hadn’t taken me long at all to realize just how different my friends were from the rich bastards I’d known in the past. They were wealthy, or at least their parents were. They had more money than they could probably ever spend, but they used itdifferently. They gave to charities, provided a good wage to their employees, and helped people who were unable to help themselves. It was an alien concept to me. The Morganston clan should have tried it sometime.

Like that would ever happen. Every dime the Morganston men stole from the community and their employees went straight into their pockets. They used people until there was nothing left but an empty, shell, and then they tossed them aside in pursuit of other victims.

Did I sound bitter? Damn right I was.

Ethan, Jeremiah, and Titus all hated this part of me, this part that still was so full of rage and hatred and a need for revenge. They swore there was more to me than that, and each of them envisioned some imaginary good in me that I didn’t really believe existed. A part of me worried that what was happening today would finally open their eyes to the fact that I was not the person they thought I was, and then they’d be forced to remove me from their lives, just like a poor, old dog that Ethan found on the streets once in Kabul and tried so hard to rehabilitate, only to have to finally just admit defeat and let him go.

These guys meant everything in the world to me. They’d been there when nobody else was. They’d given me a job in their private business that they’d started after the military and had made me a wealthy man. I certainly hadn’t even begun to come close to the wealth they possessed, but I had more zeros at the end of my bank account than I’d ever dreamed possible.

None of that mattered, though. The only money I needed—allthe money I needed—was just one more dollar than the Morganston family had. I’d waited nearly ten years for this moment and no amount of internal guilt or puppy-dog eyes from Ethan was going to steal it from me. Kelsey Morganston had earned what was coming to him, and I was happy to be the one to deliver it.

“Are you even listening to me, Gabe?” Ethan snapped in exasperation, jerking me back to my present circumstances and away from my thoughts of sweet revenge.

“Yes, I’m listening to you, Ethan, but you’re wasting your time trying to convince me to change my mind. I’ve wanted this for so damned long and to be honest, I don’t really care if you agree with my decision or not. You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened and how he betrayed me. He took everything from me, Ethan.Everything. My family. My stability. My damnedheart.” I frowned at him, but the scowl was mostly from the fact that just thinking about Kelsey could still threaten to bring me to tears. How could he still have this kind of control over me? We had been kids when we had our romance, for fuck’s sake! It couldn’t have been love.

But it had been…at least for me.

Ethan dragged in a breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know I don’t know everything that happened, Gabe. All I do know is that this boy hurt you. Badly. I get that and it pisses me off. I love you and because of that, I want to hurt him myself. I don’t need to know the facts because I’m on your side, no matter what.” He reached down and squeezed my hand. “I want you to remember that, Gabe. I’m on your side and so are Jeremiah and Titus. We’ve got your back just like you’ve always had ours.”

Frowning, I said, “Then what’s the problem?”

“Revenge has a tendency to rebound. It’s like rolling a heavy stone up a hill and then you fall at the top, and it rolls back over you. I’m afraid your need for revenge on this boy is going to destroy you,” he answered quietly. “It’s all you’ve had for so long. What happens when it’s gone, Gabe? Will me, Jeremiah, and Titus be enough then? Because we sure the hell haven’t been enough up until this point. What happens when you’ve finally gotten everything you want? What happens when the Morganstons are financially ruined and you get to laugh in their arrogant faces? What happens when you finally have to walk away from thisboyfor the final time?” His frown deepened even more when he added, “Aboy, Gabe, that’s what he was at the time. Clearly, he made mistakes, but he was just a kid.”

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