Born of Silence (The League Gen 1 #4)(32)
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

Ryn scowled at him. “What has that got to do with anything?”

Hauk jerked his chin at Darling. “Trust your brother. He’s the best peacemaker among us. If anyone can settle them down, it’s him.”

Syn nodded in agreement. “Hauk’s right. They were all about to set your clock until Darling came in.” He met Zarya’s gaze. “Great timing with the kid, by the way. You completely caught them off guard with that, and lowered their defenses.”

“Not done intentionally,” she confessed. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the girl when I found her sneaking around the hallway, looking for her father. But I’m glad it helped.”

Darling clapped Drake on his shoulder. “You need to get back to your mother.”

Zarya didn’t miss the way Darling referred to his mother or the fact that Drake didn’t think it was unusual.

“Not while I’m needed here.”

“You aren’t needed,” Darling said, not with malice, but patience.

Drake clenched his teeth. “You know, I may be emotionally stunted, but there’s nothing wrong with my mental capacity.”

Darling smirked. “Obviously there is, or you wouldn’t be arguing with me.”

Still, Drake stood his ground. “I’m not leaving. Not this time. I’m not a child anymore, Darling. It’s time you stopped treating me like one.”

Darling silently cursed at his brother’s obstinacy. Even though he wanted to choke him for it, the kid was right. Still, it was so hard to see Drake as a man when he was used to protecting him. “Fine. Stay if you must.”

Drake inclined his head to him with a respect he’d never shown Darling before.

“So what’s the next step?” Ryn asked. “You pleased a handful of plebs today, but the gerents will all have seizures when they hear that you sidestepped Derkstig, and sided with the workers over them.”

Ryn was right. They would have a tantrum to make any infant proud.

“I didn’t side with the plebs. I only did what was right and decent where they’re concerned.”

Ryn snorted. “They’re not going to see it that way.”

Again, he was right.

Darling considered his options for a few seconds. It was the last thing he wanted to do, but it was something he should have done weeks ago. If he wanted to move forward as governor he couldn’t postpone it any longer. “I need to call a meeting with the CDS.”

Ryn’s eyes widened in alarm. “You sure about that?”

No… The last thing he wanted to do was voluntarily walk into a room where he would be considered a laughingstock by everyone in it. It was why he’d been postponing it.

But he had no real choice. He’d have to meet with them and let them know that they still had their places with the new regime. That he was willing to let bygones be bygones, and to move forward without going after them for the past.

He nodded, then looked past Ryn. “Syn, how fast can you repair my face using Prillion?”

Ryn was aghast at his question. “Are you out of your mind? You do know that shit’s illegal, right?”

Darling shrugged nonchalantly. “I’m sure the Tavali”—he cast a meaningful look at Ryn—“can lay hands on it. And it’s not illegal in my empire.”

The look on Syn’s face called him all kinds of stupid, but he thought it over before he answered. “I could have the bandages off in about seventy-two hours, but there’s no guarantee that one surgery will make that much of a difference. Might not make any improvement at all. That being said, there is a new procedure with skin nanos that might accelerate it and do better than standard reconstruction. It’s still experimental though, and I’ve not used it. I’d have to call in a few favors to get someone to the table who might be willing to try it. But again, I can’t guarantee anything. And I don’t know how your body will cope with any of it. We won’t have a clue until you’re under and you know how risky that is.”

Yes, he did.

But at this point, he’d rather be dead than continue living with his current disfigured face. He saw the panic in Zarya’s eyes that told him she didn’t want him to risk it at all. Gods, how he wished the rest of the world held her heart. That everyone could see past the ugliness and judge him for something less petty.

It was why he loved her.

Unfortunately, others weren’t like that and he knew it better than most.

“Not like you can make it any worse,” he said under his breath. He spoke louder to Syn. “Do what you can, as fast as you can. I’ll call the meeting for the end of next week.” He turned back to Ryn. “Can you run things while I’m down?”

He didn’t miss the reluctance in Ryn’s eyes, but for once his brother agreed to help him. “I’m willing to try. You going to kick my ass if I screw something up?”

“Probably.”

“Oh well then,” Ryn said with exaggerated enthusiasm, “by all means, let me get started right away.”

Zarya suppressed a smile at Ryn’s sarcasm.

Darling ignored it entirely as he walked over to Syn. “How long do you need to prep?”

“I can have you in surgery in about four hours from now. Or we can wait until tomorrow morning.”

Darling’s gaze locked with hers. She wished she could read his mood, but he gave nothing away. “I want it over with. Please, get started on the prep.”

“You sure?” Syn asked.

He nodded.

“All right. Hauk and I will jump on it. See you in four hours at HQ.” They headed for the door.

Darling glanced to Drake. “I really wish you’d go home.”

“I am home.”

A fierce tic started in Darling’s jaw. But he didn’t say anything more about Drake’s refusal. “Can you and Zarya give me a few minutes alone with Ryn and Maris?”

Drake inclined his head to him before he offered his arm to Zarya.

Surprised by the unexpected chivalry, she tucked her hand into the crook of Drake’s elbow.

As they started for the door, Darling stopped them. He cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. “You understand why I’m doing this, right?”

“I do, but I don’t agree with it, and I really wish you’d at least wait until tomorrow. You’ve barely had time to heal from the attack.”

His gaze softened before he leaned down to kiss her.

Zarya held him to her when he started to pull away. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

He nuzzled her cheek. “I know. You’ll follow me into hell and beat me if I do,” he whispered in her ear.

“You know as stubborn as I am that I will, too.”

He kissed her cheek. “I’ll be up in a few.”

She nodded before Drake led her from the room.

Drake didn’t speak until they were alone in the back hallway. Then his entire demeanor turned stiff and icy as he pulled her to a stop. “Why are you here?”

His accusatory tone brought up all of her defenses. “Excuse me?”

He raked her with a suspicious glare. “I’m trying to understand what I saw just now. I’ve heard every rumor from you’re Darling’s kitchen slave, his military prisoner, his political hostage, to the most ludicrous of all that says you’re his mistress. What exactly are you to my brother?”

That was a difficult question to answer. While she had no doubt that Darling loved her, she wasn’t sure what that meant exactly.

Yes, he’d proposed to her, but since they’d gotten back together, he hadn’t breathed a single word about marrying her again. Nor had he asked her about her missing engagement ring that the slaver had taken from her. There was no talk about having a future together—not the way they used to talk about it for hours on end.

When they were alone now, all she could focus on was the shadow of mistrust that would darken his eyes. That unguarded look of painful torment.

But most of all, Darling’s words haunted her.

“When it’s just the two of us and we’re alone, I can forget what happened, and I’m better. Then just as I think I’m all right, it all comes barreling back and kicks me in the crotch. I can still hear you laughing out in the hallway when I needed you most. And honestly, it hurts all over again. I feel betrayed. I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but my feelings don’t have ears and they don’t listen to my head.”

Which meant she had no idea where she currently stood with Darling. Honestly, she was too scared to ask lest she find out just how little he trusted her.

So she settled on the simplest truth. “I’m the woman who loves him.”

Drake’s expression said she was completely insane. “You know he’s gay, right?”

“He’s not gay.”

He laughed until he realized she was deadly serious. “Since when?”

“Always.”

Drake scoffed. “You don’t know my brother very well, then.”

She had to bite back her own laughter. “Trust me. I know him better than most, and I definitely know him better than you do. Darling only claimed to be g*y to save your mother’s life.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“No. Truth,” she said, duplicating his sharp staccato. “You can ask Maris if you don’t believe me. He’s the one who helped Darling pull the ruse off all these years.”

For a moment, she thought Drake might vomit as he finally accepted the truth. He looked positively green with sickness as he stepped away.

“Are you okay?”

He shook his head before he pinned her with a brutally cold stare. “Are you sure? Positive?”

“Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. He and I have been sleeping together for over three years now.”

Once again, he shook his head as if he couldn’t grasp the possibility that Darling had lied to him. Rage blazed deep in his blue eyes. Never had he looked more like Darling than he did right now. “I should go in there, and beat the utter shit out of him.”

She scoffed at his bravado. “I think you’d find that extremely hard to do. I’ve seen him fight. If there’s anyone better, I haven’t come across them.”

Drake held his hand up and laughed. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same person? Darling never fights. He hates it.”

“And again, I’m telling you that I have seen him in battle. Many times. Bloody and fierce. He never hesitates. Your brother is a major badass with a capital ‘B.’ He’s a fully trained assassin with all the skills that entails. How do you think he took your uncle out so easily and held the guards at bay?”

Drake still looked like someone had sucker punched him. “I’m such a stupid bastard,” he breathed. “How could I have missed seeing it?” He winced as if some bad memory had slapped him. “Damn, the shit I’ve said to him over the years for…”

Whatever it was, he didn’t finish naming it.

She rubbed his arm comfortingly. “Don’t beat yourself up, Drake. Siblings fight. It’s what we do.”

“No,” he breathed. “Not like I did. Until I was fifteen, I was a total a**hole to him, in ways you can’t begin to imagine. I honestly don’t know why he even speaks to me, never mind tolerates my presence, now. You know how he got that long scar on his face, don’t you?”

“He fought with Ryn.”

“Yeah. Because of me.” The pain that one word betrayed was so deep that it put an instant lump in her throat for him. The self-loathing in his eyes was hard to look at. “That fight would never have happened had I not been a first-rank bastard.”

“I don’t understand.”

Drake ground his teeth so viciously that his jaw muscles protruded. “I was only eight when my father died, and honestly, I barely remember the man. Still, I didn’t want to go back to school after the funeral. I wasn’t ready. I needed my family around me, especially my mother, but Darling made me leave. He literally picked me up and carried me out of my room and forced me onto the shuttle without any explanation other than I was better off at school.”

She felt terrible for Drake. It had to be awful to be so young and alone after something so tragic. She knew how lost she’d been when her parents had died. The only thing that had kept her going after her father’s death had been Sorche.

“He was trying to protect you.”

Drake pierced her with a cold glare. “That’s not what he said to me. Ever. All I heard from him was that I needed to keep my grades up and stay at school. Every time I turned around, he stopped me from coming home on holidays and at breaks. He’d arrange for me to stay in the campus dorms or with people I barely knew, and I hated him for it. I kept trying to call my mother, but she wouldn’t talk to me either. In one heartbeat, I was an orphan no one wanted, and I had no idea why my entire family had abandoned me and left me to the care of strangers.”

That would have been hard on anyone. The anguish in his eyes reminded her so much of Darling that it was all she could do not to pull him into her arms and hold him. “I’m sorry, Drake.”

He didn’t comment on her sympathy. Instead, he continued. “Then, on the very night when I was finally allowed back here during one of my semester breaks, my mother was arrested in front of me. Next thing I know, my brother confessed to the world that he was gay.”

“How old were you then?”

“Ten. I didn’t even know what g*y meant. But I was quickly educated.” His gaze burned into hers and the agony there rivaled every bit of the pain that Darling carried. “You have no idea how bad it was. Arturo was so angry over it, that both Lise and I were rounded up and sent back to school that very night, still in our pajamas. Once people found out, which was pretty much immediately, the kids at school were merciless to me over it. All I heard from everyone was that it ran in the family, and that I would be or was already gay, too. From that day on, it was a constant fight against everyone I knew as I tried to prove to them that I wasn’t anything like Darling.”

Anger whipped through her. “Darling—”

He held his hand up to silence her defense of his brother. “Don’t go there. Again, you weren’t here in those days. You have no idea what I went through and you didn’t see or hear the things I did. And if all that wasn’t degrading enough, when I was thirteen, I was going to be honored at school for good merit and for maintaining the highest student body GPA for that year. Something I’d worked my ass off for. Night and day. Then what happens? The day before the ceremony, Darling gets caught screwing Senator Nylan, and that shit went instantly viral.”

Now it was her turn to feel sucker punched. “Excuse me?”

He nodded bitterly. “Oh yeah. There were pictures and videos of the two of them circulating everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it or miss it. Everyone knew about it. Because of Darling’s scandal and the fact my school didn’t want to even admit they had a Cruel on their roster, my award that I’d worked so hard for was yanked. I lost my position on the school team and in our student government. They put me on probation, and I was pulled from the regular residence hall and put in with the social rejects and delinquents. Meanwhile, Darling ended up in a mental institution over it.”

That was not the story Maris had told her. Did Maris not know or had he outright lied to her?

Drake continued with his angry tirade. “For years, Darling was in and out of them. Whenever I talked to my mother about it—which was only twice a year if I was lucky—all she’d say was that Darling had a lot of problems, and that Arturo was trying to help him with them. And I believed her. I had no reason not to. The only member of my family who called every week to check on me was Arturo, who told me that I was always welcome to come home anytime I wanted. He said that Darling had snapped after my father’s death and gone crazy. That he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and that I shouldn’t waste my time worrying about him. I almost never heard from Darling and when I did, he was either drunk or high—I couldn’t tell which. But his words were always slurred, if not completely incoherent. All I could ever make out for sure was his insistence that I stay as far away from here as I could.”

Zarya rolled her eyes at his assumption. Most likely those conversations came while Darling was on pain medication for the beatings Arturo routinely gave him.

Or the meds they pumped into him whenever he was in an institution.

Drake laughed bitterly. “By the time I hit fifteen, I was basically psychotic from everything I’d been through. I couldn’t stand any of them. Not my mother, my sister, and definitely not my brother, whose every scandal rained down on my ass like a firestorm. I didn’t want to be in school anymore and deal with that shit, and I hated Darling in a way you can’t imagine. The handful of times I’d seen him over the years, he was either so effeminate or so terrified of his own shadow that he repulsed me. Every time I turned around, Lise would call saying Darling had tried to kill himself again. I prayed every night that his next attempt would not only be successful, but come sooner rather than later…”

Wanting to slap him for that last comment, Zarya gaped at another tidbit no one had mentioned. What else didn’t she know about Darling’s past?

Drake drew a ragged breath. “I never saw Darling that he didn’t have his head down and his arms wrapped around his body as if he was trying to become invisible. He’d cower and cringe if anyone came near him. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. Not even me. I thought he was a worthless coward, and I have called him every insult you can imagine.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she realized that what Drake had seen was the aftermath of Darling’s rapes and abuse. The times in his life when he’d needed his family most of all.

The times when they’d all let him down and left him to face it.

Alone.

She tried to tell herself that Drake, who was three and a half years younger than Darling, had been far too young to realize what was going on, but still she was mad at him for being so selfish and stupid.

“The summer I turned fifteen,” Drake continued, “if all of that wasn’t bad enough, I found out that Arturo was syphoning off our inheritance. When I asked Darling if he knew, he sounded wasted as usual. He told me to let it go and not worry about it—that it was no big deal. Furious over his cavalier attitude, I signed myself out of school and came home. I’d intended to stay here and be taught by a tutor like he was so that I could keep an eye on our money before Arturo stole it all. Darling met me at the front door on my arrival and told me I needed to leave immediately and go back to school. He had bruises all over his face and a busted lip. I asked him what had happened, but he wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t even look at me. You know what I said to him then?”