“Sometimes, when we were very little, she would hold us. She’d cry while she did, but I still remember the feeling of her arms around me. I used to wish I was bigger so I could hold and soothe her instead.”

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was telling her this, but the words flowed without effort from the place he’d locked away the memories of his mother. The soft sensation of the girl in his arms and her soothing smell seemed to encourage those memories to rush to the surface, eager to be shared with someone who might understand how his mother had felt.

“How old were you when she died?” Selma asked. She moved closer to his body as if she knew how her nearness soothed him.

“I was nine.” He stroked her hair gently, pausing for a moment when the bitter pain of the time around his mother’s suicide resurfaced. “She’d been growing more and more desolate. Refused to have anything to do with my brother or I, threatened us while my father was in the room. Told us she would kill us in a heartbeat if it meant getting her real child back.

“I don’t know if she meant it, or if it was an attempt at making my father set her free, but he couldn’t ignore the threat. He had finally had enough of her refusal to accept that she was his mate, not the wife of her human husband, and he did the only thing he could think of to break through her resistance.

“He kept her in the ring’s thrall for weeks, only giving her breaks so she could eat and sleep. My brother and I… we heard her scream day and night while he mated her, and cry inconsolably the few hours he didn’t. We begged him to stop, because the sound of it… all of it… it was…

“But he said he couldn’t, that she was sick and needed help—that he had failed in his duty as her mate to make her content in her life with him, and that he had to rectify his mistakes to save her.

“So he took her until the ring finally broke her. I think something in her mind eventually snapped. She became docile, calm… and he thought she was saved. That she’d just need a little time to recover before she’d become the mate and mother she was supposed to be.

“The first day my father left her side to attend to his business, she slit her wrists and bled out before he returned to find her.”