“Nathan, if you don’t want me to touch you … if you want me to stop—”
“No. Fuck, no. I’ll never want that.” He reached out to caress her face, gutted that she would think he’d reject any part of her now, after all they’d been through together. He uttered a harsh, low curse, hating that his ugly past had invaded here. “You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just …”
He couldn’t hold her innocent gaze. He didn’t want her to see through him to the Hunter he’d never totally managed to leave behind.
He didn’t want her to see the scars that had never fully healed, despite that his Breed genetics had hidden all outside traces of them.
Jordana reached up to grasp his fingers where they lay against her cheek. “You can tell me when you’re ready … or not at all. I’ll love you either way.”
Her promise was so sweet, so patient, any words he might have offered just then got strangled in his tight throat.
What would she say if she knew what his handlers had done to him, how they’d eventually broken him?
What would she think if she knew what he’d done to survive?
As she went back to tending him, the memories flooded in. He couldn’t stop them.
And he knew that if he didn’t spit them out, his past would always stand in the way of the future he hoped to have with Jordana.
“In the program, they had tests to cull the most viable Hunters from the rest,” he murmured, his voice sounding wooden in the quiet of the bathroom. “They tested things like physical strength, linear and abstract thinking, problem solving. They tested endurance, and the ability to withstand pain. All kinds of pain.”
Jordana’s hands stilled. Slowly, she sat back on her heels in front of him, listening in utter silence, a quiet dread in her eyes. “Nathan …”
He kept going. He knew he had to push through before her sympathy froze him up. “The beatings were easy enough to handle. Even the torture. Eventually you find a place to park your mind and you can separate yourself from what’s being done to you. That was the lesson our handlers were trying to demonstrate. Except, when nothing seems to break you, it creates a temptation in some people to find something that will. They get creative. They get f**king sadistic.”
She swallowed hard, staring at him as though bracing for a physical blow herself. “Oh, Nathan.”
“They used clubs and chains,” he recalled, still able to feel the crush of his flesh and bones when the strikes landed on him. “When that didn’t make me beg for mercy, they used blades, sunlight, sometimes they used fire. They could’ve used any weapon on me and I would have endured it. It was only physical pain. My body healed as good as new every time, thanks to the Gen One DNA they bred into each of us.”
He exhaled a tense breath, recalling the countless hours and days he spent huddled and shivering on the floor of his cell, enduring the anguish of broken bones and savage injuries that would have killed a Breed with less hardy genetics.
But death hadn’t been the goal of the Hunter program. Dragos had been trying to create perfect killing machines. Soulless weapons to command at his whim. He wanted only the strongest.
Only the merciless.
“After some time, my handlers decided to test me in other ways. They started teaching me new lessons. Inflicting wounds that would leave scars on my mind, ones that no DNA could heal.”
Jordana let out a soft, ragged sigh. “Nathan, don’t. You don’t have to tell me any more.”
“I do.” He bit off the words. “You’re the last person I want to tell any of this to, but you’re also the only one … ever. And you need to know, Jordana. Before you touch me and tell me you love me, before you let me promise you a future I’m not even sure I can deliver, you need to understand who I am. You need to know all of it.”
As he continued, she held his stare, her light blue eyes unwavering.
“Instead of limiting the torture to me alone, one day they brought me into a cell with another Hunter. He was younger than me, and our handlers informed me this was his first training session. I could see he was afraid, even though he tried to hide it. I thought they would start abusing both of us. They spared him, only made him watch all the things they did to me. And their creativity that day was especially brutal.” Nathan blew out a harsh breath. “I didn’t realize the other Hunter’s lesson would come later. We both would learn something different that day.”
Jordana reached out for his hand. It took all his will to accept the kindness, to wrap his fingers around hers even as he relived the horror of what was done to him that day in the cell and the even worse lesson that followed.
“They left me on the floor in a pool of my own blood and vomit. I didn’t realize the other Hunter was still in the cell until sometime later, when I felt his hands under me, helping me up. He moved me out of the puddle of filth, then used his shirt to clean the worst of it off my face. Neither one of us realized that our handlers were watching the whole time. Waiting for just this kind of failure. Eager to make both of us pay for it.”
Jordana drew in a breath, her fingers squeezing his tighter. “Oh, no …”
It had been a long time since Nathan had thought about the young male whose compassion had cost him his life. He wasn’t the last.
“I should’ve known what they would do. It was the same game my handlers played in the beginning. They’d beat me, brutalize me, then come back around after a while to offer a hand up or some other small consideration. If I accepted, there was always more pain. And much worse than any that came before.”