I can’t help glancing at Monroe. She’s got her expression locked down, but the fury in her green eyes makes them almost glow. Rage. Not pity. That’s something, at least. There is more than one reason I don’t like talking about my past, and it’s not simply to avoid being pigeonholed by the location I happened to be born into. I don’t want anyone’s pity. I survived. I’ve done more than survive.

Monroe finally says, “No one helped you.”

That gives me the strength to answer. “No. No one helped me.” Not even the Amazon queen who at least had some hint of what I was experiencing. I was hardly the picture of childhood health the one time she laid eyes on me. “I got myself out when I turned eighteen.”

“How old are you, Shiloh?”

My throat feels too tight. “Thirty.”

“How long have you been with the Paines?”

I can see where she’s going with this, but there’s no point in trying to detour. “Seven years, give or take.”

Monroe narrows her eyes. “Four years between leaving your parents and finding the Paines.”

The sensation of choking gets stronger. I swallow hard. Finding the Paine brothers was sheer luck on my part, and them taking me in was even more luck. That situation could have gone so much worse for me.

They had more than their fair share of trauma, too. Even without asking too many questions, I felt a kinship with Broderick and his brothers and the people they’d gathered around them. I…fit. In a way that I had never experienced before in my life.

I didn’t want to come back to this city, but these people are the family I chose. I figured it wouldn’t be the same, that I could navigate my way through whatever challenges that arose from the ghosts of my past.

I never bargained on Broderick being paired with the Amazon heir. Or on my being assigned as her permanent guard. Or for her to take such a pointed interest in me.

In short, I never bargained on Monroe.

“It was closer to five before I found them.” She opens her mouth to continue questioning me, but I cut in before she gets the words out. “I survived. End of story.” I wouldn’t talk about what I had to do to survive. I had little life experience when I landed in Chicago. I didn’t know how to deal with people, didn’t know how to control the rage that bubbled up in me after too many years kept locked down. After I smashed a glass over the head of a customer who grabbed my ass at the restaurant where I worked, I realized customer service wasn’t going to get me anything but arrested.

“Yes. You did.”