Maris inclined his head to him. “Thanks, Syn.”

After thanking him, too, Zarya went to the bed while Syn left them.

Once they were alone, Maris returned to stand beside her. “It’s hard to see him like this, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “How many times have you been with him in a hospital?”

“More than I care to remember. But the worst had to be when he was seventeen.”

“Was that when he was knocked through the table?”

“No. Before. It was a while after his first confinement in a mental institution.”

She scowled. “What happened to put him in a hospital?”

His expression grim, Maris took a sip of water before he answered. “His first attempt to kill himself. Like Lise, I found out about it from a news report right after I’d come in from a training exercise. It’s why I wasn’t upset at her for overreacting. I know how bad it is to hear something like that from a stranger who’s reporting it with a sickening gleam in her eye.”

Sighing, he capped his bottle. “By the time I got to the hospital, I was so mad at him for not calling me first, I could have killed him myself. What I didn’t know then was that Arturo had taken his link from him. Darling had been prohibited from talking to anyone, for any reason, including his mother and especially his family. Between that, having been raped, and his nightly strip searches that were every bit as humiliating and invasive as his rapes, Darling had been unable to cope with it all. The thought of enduring another thirteen years of hell like that had been more than he could stomach, so he broke the mirror in his bedroom and used the fragments to slash his wrists.”

Tears welled in his eyes. “I’d never seen Darling like that before. When we were in school together, he’d always been so strong and happy. Nothing got to him. Ever. Whatever came at him, he stood ferocious before it and dared it to try and knock him down. That was the Darling I was expecting to beat to a pulp for being stupid. And then I opened the door.”

Clearing his throat, he wiped at the tear that had fallen down his cheek. “His face battered, Darling had looked so pale and defeated. So broken…”

He bit back a sob. “Since the doctor was afraid Darling would try to kill himself again, he’d ordered Darling strapped to the bed like some kind of animal or criminal. They’d braced his arms so that it wouldn’t touch the bandages over his cuts. Darling was so ashamed of it all that he wouldn’t even look at me. He kept staring out the window with these dazed, glassy eyes that said he didn’t want to be here anymore. And he was there all alone. No family. No friends.”

“I’m so sorry, Maris.”

He shook his head. “My pain is slight compared to his. But that had to be the hardest year of his life. I can’t imagine everything he went through in just a handful of months. I still don’t know how he survived it all.”