And I hope he finally learns what it means to be scared in the dark.
I can’t stop the tears.
They pour down my cheeks like something vital has split inside me. Like every word in that journal carved open an old wound I didn’t know I still bled from. My breath hitches. Chest tight. Vision blurred.
Then I’m yanked, gutted from the inside out, as Karter pulls me into his lap. My body shakes, hiccups ripping from my throat like screams trapped in a too-small space. I cling to him, fists curled in his shirt, but my eyes find Wyck.
“Wyck?” I croak, barely recognizing my own voice. It's brittle. Fractured.
“I’m here, Little Fox,” he murmurs, already kneeling beside me like he’s ready to slit throats on my behalf.
I look at him through swollen eyes, and I already know the answer. But I ask anyway. “Did my father really… do those things?”
His jaw flexes. Fire flickers behind his eyes. But he stays still. Controlled rage simmering beneath the surface. “What did you read?”
My voice shatters. “He molested me.”
The words taste like ash. Like rot and bile and the kind of shame I can’t scrub off.
Karter flinches, his arms tightening as if he could crush the memory out of me. I don’t let him. I pound my fists into his chest over and over, sobbing, screaming,“No, no, no!”
I’m weightless the next second, lifted up, carried like something sacred and broken. I breathe in cedar and smoke and warmth.
Wells.
He says nothing. Doesn’t have to. His silence is the kind that echoes.
He drops into a chair and pulls me onto his lap, letting me straddle him, my face buried in his neck like it’s the only place that still makes sense. His hands rub up and down my back, slow and steady, and under any other circumstance, I’d be squirming from the heat between us.
Now? I feel nothing but ruin.
I feel… Contaminated.
Destroyed.
Like a haunted doll that someone tried to love after it had already been broken.
“Wells?” I whisper, voice shaking. His hand stills in my hair. “Just hold me,” I beg.
He surprises me. Actually speaks. “Anything for you.” His voice is low, gruff, wrecked.
His arms cage around me like he’s trying to keep the world out, and all the monsters inside.
I collapse into him. Let myself be rocked like a child that no one saved in time.
I don’t know how long I cry. I don’t know if I breathe. All I know is I’ve never felt more hollow.
Until Wyck speaks. “You need to read more.”
I freeze.
Wells tenses beneath me. “Don’t you think she’s read enough for tonight?” His voice is low, but sharp, like a blade dragged across glass.
I tilt my head up, startled. He never talks back. Not to Wyck. Not like this.
But Wyck doesn’t blink. Doesn’t even look at him. His gaze is on me. Sharp. Stern. Unforgiving.
“No,” he growls. “I don’t.”
