Page 39 of Hold On

“I told Col to go up to his room and stay there. The details of how I got them tied up doesn’t matter, though my mother managed to grab the knife and stab me in the chest.” He made a choked sound. “I remember not feeling anything except this deep-seated desire to hurt them. I stabbed them over and over, but I didn’t want them to die quickly.”

Ren could feel himself starting to shake. This sounded like what had been done to him.

“I wanted them to know what it had been like for me all those years, how I’d started to die the first time they put their hands on me, how the pain never ended. I wanted them to feel what I’d suffered. The hurt and the fear, the betrayal. I hated myself because of them. I still do. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to change that.”

But this was nothing like him.

Dominic dropped his head. “I’d prefer not to tell you exactly what I did to them.”

Ren tried to take hold of Dominic’s hand, to stop him shredding the grass but when he tried, Dominic shook him off.

“When they were dead, I called the police. Col came downstairs to find me sitting in the living room. He thought I was dying. I sort of hoped I was, but he threw himself at me. He hadn’t seen the knife I was holding and somehow managed to get caught on it.” He shuddered. “I was… It snapped me back to reality. The last thing I’d wanted was for him to get hurt and now I’d hurt him. Col told the police I hadn’t tried to kill him, but they decided he was lying, that I’d tried to kill myself and him too, and attempted murder was added to my list of crimes.”

Ren saw how that could happen. What chance did a boy who was barely ten have against people determined to throw the book at his brother? Dominic hadn’t been in his right mind. It should have been a case of diminished responsibility or something. How could he get so long inside for that? Had there been an appeal? Something seemed off.

“Sixteen years?” Ren asked.

“I was sentenced to twelve.”

“Then you should have been out in six.”

“In theory. My lawyer told me that if I behaved myself, six years was likely the maximum I’d serve. My parents’ long-term abuse was taken into account, the…medical evidence, but so was the way I…tortured them.”

Ren could hardly imagine what it must have been like to have parents like that.

“I was transferred to prison when I was twenty-one and came up against a guy called Adem Kilic.”

Ren didn’t know the name but hedidrecognise it as Turkish.

“He wanted me to be his bitch, his prison wife. I said no—repeatedly—and he ended up dead. It was self-defence. He’d made the knife, he brought it to my cell, but the court took one look at me—someone who’d stabbed his parents to death and tried to murder his brother, while Kilic was only in for fraud, plus he had friends inside who said I’d attacked him, a guard who backed that up, an assertion that the knife was mine, and minds were made up.”

“Oh God.”

“I went…a bit crazy then, knowing I now had to serve my whole sentence and because I maintained I was innocent, I served even more. I raged at the unfairness of it. I was out of my head lashing out at everything and everyone. Either that or I was catatonic.” He released a shaky breath. “I was moved to Marsden and I got better. Then back to prison, where I didn’t cope, then back to Marsden. If it’s possible to like any sort of incarceration, I did like it there. It’s a gentler place despite the nature of those locked up in it, and I felt as safe as it’s possible to feel inside.”

On a cocktail of drugs?

“But the day I was freed, my Offender Supervisor whispered in my ear that Miran Kilic, Adem’s brother, would be seeing me.”

Ren bit his knuckle. “Shit.”

“So that’s the sort of person who’d like to know where I am and I don’t want anyone in danger because of me. Because a prison officer delivered that threat, I feel I can’t stay here for very long. And yet, he might just have said it to make me uneasy. It worked. The day I was released was the day I met you.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Ren whispered.

“At least you’ve not run. I spent most of the day considering whether or not I should tell you and how much I should tell you. I could have waited until I’d seen whether anything…serious was going to happen between us, maybe just even told you part of it, but then I’d run the risk of pissing you off that I’d not told you all of it before. There would never have been a right time. I think that’s what swayed me.

“Sooner or later, I’d have had to tell you. It’s too big to keep a secret. I’d have wanted to know if you had some secret. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it, for not finding another way when I was a kid, for not understanding what that night would do to not just my life but Col’s and anyone I came to like. Hindsight’s a dangerous thing because it lets you believe there might have been a better way, but what’s done is done.”

Ren struggled under an attack of guilt. “Do Col and Theo know you’re telling me?”

Dominic shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they’d have said not to.”

“Why?”

“Because they’d worry you wouldn’t react in the right way, that you’d hurt me. I don’t mean physically. Just that you’d either not give me the chance to explain, or you’d walk away once you knew. I felt it was worth the risk. I’d rather be sad now, than devastated later once I’d started to care for you. I’d just ask again that whether you walk away or not, you don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

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