Page 50 of Reins

She lets out a choking sob, tugging her shirt back across her abdomen. “I knew you’d be mad.”

“Ros—” Gravel suddenly forming in my throat makes it hard to talk. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

Ava had a few small marks.

But this? Rosalyn’s body looks like the fractures of a broken windshield. I can’t even see a spot that isn’t covered.

Someone did this to her when she was just a child.

I’m going to be sick.

“I am,” I choke out. “I’m furious, but not at you. At the horrible people who did this and the ones who let it happen to you.”

I want to dig up her parents just to stomp on their bones. To shatter them into dust and flush them down my septic so they have to spend eternity mixed in shit.

When she bites her lip, fresh blood beads on the cut and trickles down her chin. “It was my fault. I didn’t listen.”

“No.” My hands itch to reach out to her. “When a kid doesn’t listen, they get a fucking time out, not eighty lashes.”

Another, more disgusting truth suffocates me.

I don’t know if I have the strength to ask, although I already know the answer…and it stabs through my chest like a knife. “Was this what Ava helped you with?”

Rosalyn clamps her jaw shut, but nods.

“So she knew how bad this was?” And yet never a word to me?

Why didn’t Ava tell the cops once she was out of the house? Why didn’t she try to help her little sister who was being so badly abused?

Ava fucking knew.

Violently I stand, knocking my chair backwards as I rush to the bathroom.

I barely make it to the toilet before I vomit a string of burning bile into the bowl. The woman I had loved was a cruel stranger. How could anyone stand by and not want to stop that insanity?

“Cade?” Rosalyn’s voice is tempered with fear and hesitation. “I’m sorry.”

No wonder she’s always moving with hesitation.

She’s been beaten down her entire life.

Wiping my mouth, I flush and go to her.

“Ros—” God damn it, I can’t keep my words from cracking. “—you didn’t do anything wrong.” Lifting the wooden chair, I right it and sit in front of her, leaning in to take her hands in mine. “You’re such an unbelievably strong woman. I am honored that you trust me.” Fuck. Tears run down my own face, matching the twin paths down each side of her nose. “I wish I knew a long time ago. I’d have never left you there.”

My head drops to press my forehead against the back of my wrist. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Cade,” she says softly, her thumb moving against my pinky. “Mama made Ava do it too.”

There are hooks of misery digging into my chest, ripping me apart.

Agony makes me raise my focus to her. “What?” I gasp as a jagged piece of my soul dies.

The honesty that bleeds from her frown nearly drowns me. “Mama got in trouble I guess when Ava was little. So she made sure that if CPS ever came back, she could say Ava did it.”

Her mouth twists as she chews on the inside of her cheek. “Ava didn’t want to. She’d cry every time. Then after, she’d try to make me happy.”

I’m gutted.