Page 60 of Shadow Of Sin

“Since when?”

“Since always.” He leans back against the cushion. “My brain doesn’t have an off switch. It just runs. When I was a kid, my parents tried everything. White noise machines, weighted blankets, medication. None of it worked.”

“Your mom,” I say. “You never talk about her.”

“She died when I was thirteen. Cancer. It was fast.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I lost my parents, too. It really sucks to go through that loss.”

He rests his arm behind his head. “How’d your parents die?”

“Car accident,” I say, a lump lodging in my throat. I don’t usually talk about my parents. The accident was crushing since we were so close. I’ve never gotten over them being gone. “Tell me about your mom.”

“She was the buffer,” he says. “Between my dad and the rest of us. When she was alive, he was still himself. But she kept the worst of it in check.” His thumb taps against his knee. “After she died, there was nothing between him and us. Nothing between him and me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted me to be something I wasn’t. Normal, I guess. Easy. A kid who played sports and made friends and didn’t take apart the television remote to see how the infrared signal worked.” He shrugs. “I wasn’t any of those things. And he took it personally.”

“Personally how?”

He fixes his piercing gaze on me. “You really want to know?”

“I’m sitting on your couch at two in the morning. Yeah, I want to know.”

He’s quiet for a second. His thumb taps faster.

“He tried to fix me. He set me up with specialists, therapists, different behavior programs. When those didn’t work, he tried other things. Yelling. Punishing. Taking away the stuff I was obsessed with so I’d be forced to engage with the real world.” His jaw tightens. “He broke a radio I’d been rebuilding. A vintage one. I’d spent three months on it. He smashed it on the kitchen floor because I missed a family dinner to work on it.”

My chest hurts. Actually, physically hurts.

“After that, I stopped showing him things I cared about. I just did it all in my room with the door locked. He thought I was getting better because I stopped being weird in front of him.” A pause. “I wasn’t getting better. I was just getting better at hiding.”

Sweet Lord.

I’m looking at a man who learned to put on a mask before he learned to drive. He figured out that the safest way to exist in his own house was to stop being himself in front of the person who was supposed to love him the most and without question.

I get that. You learn what to hide and then you hide it, and eventually the hiding becomes so automatic you forget what was underneath.

“Your brothers,” I say. “Did they know?”

“Cillian knew. He’s two years older and we’ve always been close. He used to sit outside my door when my father was on a tear. He never said say anything, just sat there so I’d know someone was on the other side.”

That tracks. Cillian leaning against the doorframe, not because he wants to bolt.

Because he learned to be the person between the threat and his brother.

“What about Ronan?”

“Ronan was Dad’s pet project. His golden boy. He didn’t see what was happening to me because Dad made sure he didn’t.”

“And now?”

“Now Ronan runs the family, and he’s got the same instinct Dad had. He has to control everything and trust nothing. But Ronan…for as much of an asshole as he is, he’s not the vindictive bastard my father was. He’s just...” He searches for the word.

“Cold,” I say.

“Yeah. Cold.”