“I found out later from Maris that once Darling had called the medics for me, he’d gone after Arturo with everything he had and that Arturo, after beating the shit out of him, had thrown him down the main palace stairs. As soon as Darling had been able to get out of bed, he’d come straight to the hospital to sit with me, so that I wouldn’t be alone there. And do you know what Darling’s first words to me were?”

She shook her head.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you better. I promise I won’t let him get a hold of you again.” Tears swam in Drake’s eyes. “After all the mean, awful shit I’d said to him over the years. After being a complete and utter dick whenever I was around him, he apologized to me. Apologized. Like it was somehow his fault I was an idiot who wouldn’t listen. And it was then that I found out why his speech was always slurred when he called me at school.”

“Because of his pain meds…”

He swallowed hard. “No, it was from the way he had to hold his mouth to speak around a busted jaw and loose teeth. You talk about feeling like a worthless piece of shit… It killed me that I wasn’t able to tell him how sorry I was for everything. That I couldn’t tell him how grateful I was he’d saved my life. That I didn’t care what anyone else said or thought about him. I was finally proud to call him my brother. Most of all, I wanted to tell him that I loved him, too.”

Drake drew a ragged breath. “Three days later when they finally took me off the ventilator and moved me to a regular room, he went to beg Ryn to help us. Something he’d never done before. But Darling was so afraid I’d go after Arturo again, that he was willing to sacrifice his dignity to keep me safe. So the fight they got into that scarred him so badly was over my dumb, stupid, ignorant ass.”

His gaze haunted, he cleared his throat. “That beating I took opened my eyes to a lot of things. I realized then that Darling had kept us at school so that we wouldn’t be in the line of Arturo’s fury, while Darling was forced to live here and bear the brunt of it. Day in and day out. And instead of saying thank you for it, all I’d ever done was insult him because I was too busy listening to lies about him rather than bothering to discover the truth for myself. To this day, I don’t understand how he stood living here, or tolerated us. He has every right to begrudge us every breath we take, and yet he doesn’t. And now you’re telling me that all this time he wasn’t even gay…” He cursed under his breath. “If that’s true, then explain to me where those photos came from.”