“No.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.

He curled his lip in self-disgust. “Next time you give head, you should wear protective gear.”

Fury tore through her. “Why would you say that to him?”

His eyes blazed with hatred, but she wasn’t sure if it was for him, Darling, or for both of them. “Because at least once a day, every single day for years, someone e-mailed me photos of a naked Darling being groped by a man old enough to be our grandfather, with some kind of insult for both of us tagged to it. They didn’t stop until Darling and Syn became tight, and Syn hacked in and deleted every online copy. You have no idea how humiliating it is to be laughed at for something your brother did that you had no control over. How many times other men propositioned me because of it. I was sick of hearing and seeing it.”

Zarya couldn’t make any sense of that. Maris had told her that Darling had never experimented. Had those pictures been forgeries?

Or was there something about Darling that Maris didn’t know?

“Anyway,” Drake continued, “I pushed past him and went to my room. He dogged me every step of the way there, telling me that I had to leave before Arturo found out I was in the palace. He said that Arturo would kill me if I mentioned the missing money to him. That Arturo would be furious at me for coming home without permission. I didn’t know the man Darling described. Arturo had never been violent toward me in any way. Never raised his voice. So I stayed. And that night… I found out fast why Darling’s face looked the way it did and why Darling was so skittish of Arturo. Even with my fight training, Arturo beat me unconscious, and just like Darling had warned, he damn near killed me. I didn’t even get a chance to accuse him of his theft before he had me on the floor.”

“What did Darling do?”

Drake clenched his eyes closed as if he were reliving that night. But he didn’t answer her question. At least not right away. “When I finally came to after the beating, I lay in the hospital, feeling sorry for myself, thinking that I had no family who gave a shit about me. No one came to check on me or call. Not until two days later. I was still in ICU on a ventilator, unable to speak. Darling came in, looking even worse than he had the night he’d warned me how stupid I was. His eyes were so swollen and bruised, he could barely open them. He had one arm in a sling, and the other one in a brace from a third-degree sprain. He was just a krikken kid, too. You know? I still don’t understand how he could hold himself up in that condition, never mind move. Yet with all that pain, he’d come to see me even though he should have still been in bed himself.