No wonder he hated his mother. He was more than justified.

“Didn’t any of the adults do anything to help him?”

Maris shook his head. “They were even worse than the kids. And they turned a blind eye to how he was treated, even when it was right under their noses. Every time he moved, Darling had to fight someone over it. And his uncle was the most brutal of all. Anytime Arturo saw a man in the palace he didn’t recognize or one anywhere near Darling, he accused Darling of sleeping with him. And when Darling was sixteen…” He flinched as if someone had hit him.

Her own stomach tightened in reflex. “What?”

His breathing ragged, Maris’s eyes blazed with fury. “Arturo sent him to a mental institution for it.”

She gaped at his disclosure. A mental institution? She’d ask him if he was serious, but she could see that answer clearly enough. “How could he do that?”

“He was the acting governor,” Maris said simply. “Absolute power and authority. He demanded the doctors use aversion therapy to cure Darling of his homosexuality.”

“I don’t understand. What’s aversion therapy?”

Maris couldn’t even meet her gaze.

When he finally spoke, his voice was thick and constrained. “It’s where they inflict severe pain, and use negative reinforcement to cause someone to alter their behavior.”

“Like putting pepper sauce on a child’s thumb to keep them from sucking it?” Her father had done that to her when she was six. To this day, she couldn’t look at a pepper without cringing.

Maris toyed with the edge of his sleeve, but he still refused to meet her gaze. “General idea, but much worse. The point is to make the activity so repugnant and horrifying that the patient never wants to do it again.”

Biting her lip, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear anything more.

Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there. “That was how Darling lost his virginity… and it wasn’t to a woman.”

She choked on a sob.

Maris swallowed hard. “He was brutally raped, Zarya. Repeatedly. It was so bad, that for weeks after his release, he sat huddled in a corner, with his back against the wall. Like now, he wouldn’t speak to anyone, and he had violent nightmares from it for years. Sometimes I think he still does.”

His gaze haunted, he wiped a hand over his face. “When I finally saw him for the first time after he’d been released, I stupidly asked what they’d done to him… tears welled up in his eyes and then flowed down his face—and Darling doesn’t cry, Zarya. Ever. Not for anything. He refused to look at me or to speak about it at all. By that, I knew what he wouldn’t say.”

“Did he ever tell you for sure?”

“Years later, when he was extremely drunk and ranting about his uncle, but he’s never gone into any details. Other than to say he wanted to kill them all… and now he has.”