Page 108 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Maybe you should before we get there.”
“I’m planning what I’m going to say to him about leaving the family. I’m rehearsing it in my head.”
They were retreating to Logan’s NYC apartment for protection from the Russian mafia, not journeying to confront him about what had happened fifteen years before. “What did Logan ever do to you?”
“What? He left the family!” she insisted.
Her adamance suggested an ingrained thought. Maybe brainwashing. Maybe fucking Stockholm Syndrome. “That’s what your parents told you, and quite honestly, that family dynamic doesn’t sound healthy. I counsel combat veterans on the verge of self-harm, and most of the time, we start talking about Fallujah but end up talking about their abusive parents. They went into the military and into battle to escape what their families or society were doing to them.”
Sarah inhaled sharply through her nose, a hidden gasp. “You cannot be conflating serving your country by giving your all with Mommy and Daddy yelling at you.”
Blaze fought this viewpoint whenever he testified before Congress or convinced his fellow billionaires to cough up cash for veterans’ causes. “Many veterans were escaping being made the scapegoat of an enmeshed family, only to sustain the moral injury of war. A family shouldn’t define itself by its mutual enemy.”
“We didn’t. That—not right.”
Her hesitation spoke volumes.
“Look, my birth family wasn’t particularly healthy,” Blaze told her. “My father was a police officer, and he was killed when I was ten.”
“Oh, no,” Sarah exclaimed like her heart was breaking. “Was it in the line of duty? Was he one of America’s bravest?”
“No. My father was murdered by other dirty cops because he was taking too big of a piece of their drug and extortion racket.” Blaze had told this story so many times that he recited the facts without feeling much at all. “My mother was relieved. He used to beat the shit out of her, and when I tried to defend her, he’d beat the shit out of me. The world is a better place without him.”
Even though Blaze was driving, the lack of movement in the air told him that Sarah had gone shock-still. “I’m so sorry.”
“When my mother died of cancer and alcoholism a few years later, some other, slightly less dirty cops shook down the ones who’d killed him and sent me to boarding school outside the country. It was supposedly a scholarship, but I found out what happened later. I met your brother, plus Micah and Twist, at Le Rosey. The four of us were inseparable. Logan, Twist, and Micah are my real brothers. They were there for me when I had no one else. Them, and my SEAL Team buddies, of course.”
“Yeah, the SEAL Team, of course,” Sarah echoed, musing. She glanced up at him, one brow arched but with a worry line etched between her eyebrows. “Logan didn’t serve in the military. Did he?”
Blaze stopped watching her out of his peripheral vision and concentrated his view on the asphalt ribbon rushing at them and diving under his tires at more than a mile per minute. “No, but the fact that you had to ask me whether he’d spent years of his life in the military means that you don’t know your brother at all.”
She was quiet after that, but Blaze’s brain chewed over the strategic lines of the conversation like a two-pound puppy confronted with a twelve-pound roast. He tore at the meat of the matter with all the ferocity he could muster, but the shreds he pulled away did not diminish the monolith.
He’d known Logan since they were thirteen, survived puberty together with no adult guidance, gotten drunk for the first time together and debriefed each other the first time they’d gotten laid, and in the dark of the dorm at night, told the stories how they’d been thrown away by their families.
And Sarah was sitting in Blaze’s car, obstinately confirming Logan’s tale.
But some puzzle pieces of their stories didn’t fit together.
Blaze said, “I don’t get it. You take meticulous care of your farm and your stock. Everything is in great shape. You’re hardworking.”
“Of course I work hard. I’m a farmer.”
“It’s your farm.”
“Yes.”
“Your parents gave it to you.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you mad at him?”
“He left us when we needed him.”
“Why did you need him?” Blaze asked, settling into his familiar routine of opening the conversation and actively listening to the other person. If it worked for veterans suffering from PTSD, maybe he could reach Sarah.
“Because we had a farm! We needed all hands on deck.”
