Dark and Deadly: Eight Bad Boys of Paranormal Romance (46 page)

The warmth in his eyes and the slight tilt of his sensual lips conveyed how much he had loved his mother. She hadn’t failed to notice that he was talking past tense. Something had happened to Payne’s happy family.

“I grew up in a mansion with other families but my father was the head of the bloodline. He indulged my every whim, spoiling me and my mother.” His eyelids dropped again, shuttering his beautiful eyes, but she hadn’t missed the darkness that had entered them just a second before he had closed them, shutting her out. “I was on the verge of puberty when my fae markings appeared.”

“You weren’t born with them?” Her heart missed a beat and lodged in her throat, trembling there. Verity had been wrong. Elissa had hoped that her sister had been right and that Luca only had witch in his genes. She had prayed to the earth and the sky that Luca had inherited none of his father’s genes. Now she knew without a doubt that those prayers had gone unanswered. Luca would develop his markings when he matured.

Payne shook his head. “I tried to hide them. I was scared and I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t understand them and why I had them. I tried to make them go away. I was scrubbing myself raw in the bath one day when a servant entered and saw them. She told my father.”

“What happened?” Elissa lay next to him on the bed and risked placing her hand over his right one where it rested on his stomach. He didn’t pull away. He spread his fingers and let her slip hers between them, her palm pressing against the back of his hand.

“I had never seen my father so angry. He was enraged and distraught, his anger flowing freely, disturbing the whole house. He dragged me from the bath and held me by the back of my neck. He marched me through the house in search of my mother.” Payne looked into Elissa’s eyes and she squeezed his hand, wishing she could do more, could take away his hurt and shame. “He found my mother in the entrance hall, just returned from riding. The whole house had gathered to stare. She was horrified that I was nude before everyone, my skin red raw. She argued with my father.”

“She thought he had hurt you.” What affectionate mother wouldn’t think such a thing on seeing her son being treated in such a disgusting way?

Payne nodded. “It was only when my father accused her of sleeping with another male and shouted that I wasn’t his that she truly looked at me. She saw the marks on my skin... I could sense her confusion... or perhaps it was my own.”

Elissa shuffled closer to him and kept quiet this time. The red edging his eyes, slowly eating away all the other colours, warned that he wouldn’t want her sympathy if she offered it. He wanted her to listen without interrupting, and she would. She would let him do this at his own pace because he clearly needed to tell her. She only hoped it was cathartic for him.

He shifted his gaze back to the canopy. The blue and gold in his eyes swirled, and he gained a distant, unfocused expression. His markings darkened again to obsidian and crimson.

“Mother swore to my father that she hadn’t betrayed him and she loved him with all of her heart. I can remember her voice and her pain, her fear. I remember it all as if it were yesterday. It haunts me. She told my father that she didn’t know why I bore my markings or what they meant.” He sighed and the hurt surfaced on those markings again, tinting them purple and blue in places and increasing the black. “Father wouldn’t listen to her. The whole family stared down at me and I was afraid they would turn on me and ask me what I was. I didn’t know. I was confused and scared, and unsure of myself. I felt alien... wrong... disgusting. An abomination. I ached for my father and mother to look down at me too and tell me that nothing had changed and they loved me still, and that together we would come to understand what the weird symbols meant and why I had them.”

He closed his eyes and a tear slipped down from the corner of his lashes. He shifted his left arm out from behind his head and threw it across his eyes, hiding them from her. Elissa tightened her grip on his hand, her heart aching for him. Her anger rose too. Payne had done nothing wrong and his parents must have felt his fear and confusion, but they had done nothing to reassure him. His father had paraded him in front of the family, shaming him and making him feel as though he was an outsider, an object to stare at with disgust. He had degraded his own son, the boy he had claimed to love.

“When my father looked at me at last, there had been only coldness in his eyes. I turned to my mother but she refused to look at me, even when I fell on my knees and begged her.”

Mother earth, what cruelty they had inflicted upon him, their boy who had looked up to them and loved them with all of his heart. He had only wanted their love in return, just as they had given it to him unconditionally before his markings had surfaced. Payne’s fingers squeezed hers, hurting her. She didn’t let her pain show. He needed to hold on to her and she wouldn’t deny him anything that would comfort him. He could break her fingers and she still wouldn’t let go of his hand. She wouldn’t let him suffer alone. Not as his parents had.

“My father ordered that I be taken out of his sight. Someone took me away. I don’t remember who. I only remember the shame that burned in me and the way everyone whispered as I passed, staring at me and my cursed markings.”

He lifted his arm and looked at her. He looked so lost and broken that she wanted to touch his cheek, needed him to know that she was here with him and that she felt for him. She managed to hold her tongue and keep still, knowing that he needed to keep going now that he had started.

“My mother tried to convince my father that she hadn’t cheated on him with another male. I heard them arguing all the time over the coming weeks. They would fall silent whenever they saw me, and would turn away, neither of them willing to listen to me. In the end, they made me remain in my quarters. I lost everything. My family turned their backs on me one by one, shunning me. My father probably ordered it.”

His gaze roamed back to the canopy above them.

Elissa’s heart went out to him. She couldn’t imagine how he must have felt. Just a boy, scared and uncertain, unsure of what he was and what his markings meant, mistreated by those he loved and relied upon. He had gone from being the centre of his parents’ world to an object of hate and disgust. He had suffered so much, had been treated so poorly, dejected and disgraced, left to struggle with the changes happening in him alone when someone should have been there to hold him and guide him, to love him.

“My father refused to believe my mother because she couldn’t offer solid proof that she hadn’t cheated on him. They argued about me for months, growing more and more distant from each other, and from me. My father moved into the other wing of the mansion, as far from my mother as he could get. He refused to speak to her or me.”

He tensed and stared in silence at the canopy, his eyes blank, as though he was miles away from her. What pain was he reliving now? Tears slipped down his temple into his sandy hair and Elissa couldn’t stop herself anymore. She moved closer to him, rolling so her chest pressed against the side of his torso, and stroked his hair with her left hand while retaining her grip on his right.

His eyes dropped to her and he looked more lost and broken than she had ever seen him.

His voice cracked as he spoke. “My final memory of my mother is of her embracing the sun.”

He swallowed hard and didn’t look as though he could continue. Struggle shone in his eyes and flickered across his face, twisting his handsome visage into a pained grimace. She stroked his hair, gently running her fingers over the tousled sandy spikes, trying to give him some peace in the midst of so much suffering. She wished she had never asked him why he had chosen to call himself Payne or why he felt he deserved to suffer now. She had never meant to inflict this hurt upon him.

It pained her to see her strong, powerful male so hurt and weak, suffering and vulnerable, wrestling with his past and his feelings. It was little wonder he despised his incubus side and couldn’t accept it, and sought pain as a remedy to his desires. He had probably never stopped hurting in the centuries that had likely passed since he had been shunned as a boy. He carried his pain with him, an eternal torment, a poison that bred doubt in his mind, making him believe that no one could feel anything positive towards him. His family had instilled in him a belief that no one could ever love him as he was because he was an abomination, something that should be detested and scorned, not cherished and adored.

She could see that now, and she hated them for it. She wanted to seek out his family and punish them all for the pain that they had inflicted upon an innocent, warping his perspective of the world and causing him to despise himself and his mixed blood.

He sucked in a sharp breath. “I hadn’t been able to sleep and had felt her pause outside my room before moving on down the hallway. I followed her down to the entrance hall and found her standing near the double doors. She looked at me with so much pain in her eyes, so much misery, and then threw open the doors to the garden and let the sunlight stream over her.” His voice hitched and cracked again, and he ground his teeth, tears streaming from the corners of his eyes and his eyebrows knitting tightly. “I tried to stop her but I failed. I was too young. My hands caught fire. I wanted to die in her place... if I couldn’t have that... then I wanted to die with her.”

Tears filled Elissa’s eyes and she sniffed them back, her heart breaking for him. He had clearly adored his mother as much as he had said, and felt responsible for her decision to commit suicide. She stroked his cheek, his cool skin damp with tears beneath her fingers. He had suffered so much because of his mixed genes. She had never anticipated, had never dreamed, that he had been through so much. It was little wonder that he hated his incubus side now and wanted nothing to do with it. She couldn’t blame him for it either. It had stripped away all that he loved and had cherished, and something told Elissa that his suffering hadn’t ended at his mother’s death.

“The next thing I remember is waking in a dark room, in my parents’ bed. I thought perhaps someone had saved my mother and I was resting with her. When my vision cleared, I saw my father lying beside me, his arms swathed in bloodstained bandages.” He closed his eyes again and pinched the bridge of his nose. She gave him a moment to gather himself and brushed her fingers over his hair, letting him know that she was still there for him. “I was covered in bandages too. Every inch of me... all of them stained crimson. I wanted to cry but I stifled my pain and loss. When my father stirred, I expected him to make me leave. Instead, he drew me to him and told me that he had never meant for this to happen. I hated him.”

Understandable. His father had driven his mother to kill herself.

“I hated my father but I blamed myself for her death. I spent years looking for information on fae and searching for a way to clear my mother’s name. When I discovered that my mother’s bloodline had an incubus in it, her father, and that all of the children he had sired with her mother had been female and therefore not incubi, but a carrier of those genes, I grew enraged at my father.” Payne slipped his hand free of hers and wiped his eyes, clearing away his tears. Elissa looked at Payne’s markings nearest his wrist. She didn’t recognise the symbols there, at the top of his lineage. His mother’s name written in the fae tongue? “My mother hadn’t known that she had incubus blood in her. I challenged my father and my father banished me, but not before I fought him. My father swore he never wanted to see me again.”

“What happened?”

“I left and lived in the world alone. I grew up without my family, watching them from a distance. When I had matured and was stronger, I went back to see my family. I needed to know if I could return.” The darkness in his tone said that they had denied him and her heart ached again, a deep throbbing that made her want to wrap her arms around him and hold him, and whisper that his family should have taken him back. He had only wanted to be with those he loved, even though they had hurt him. “I argued with my father. He blamed me for my mother’s death, accused me of ripping his heart out and destroying him. I countered him, accusing him of being the one who had torn out my heart and destroyed me, humiliated and shattered me. He struck me repeatedly, blaming me all the while, telling me I had killed my mother. I will never forget that night.”

Payne rubbed his right arm and Elissa stared down at it, at the scars that littered his skin. What had his father done to him? It was bad enough that Payne had to live with the scars on his heart and his soul, haunted by his memories, but his father had done something to place scars on his body too, so he could never forget.

“I lost my head. I fought back and shoved him. He fell near the fire, picked up one of the irons and flew at me. I tried to defend myself. He broke my arm with the iron and didn’t stop. He kept hitting me, shattering the bone, breaking through my skin. After the seventh strike, the pain overwhelmed me. I had no control over myself. I attacked and got the poker from my father. The next thing I recall is my father staring at me, blood pouring from his lips, scarcely breathing. I looked down and I saw what I had done.” Payne closed his eyes and frowned, his whole body tensing. Elissa stroked his arm, running her fingers up and down, needing to do something for him. “I had skewered my father with the poker. I had driven it under his breastbone and straight through his heart... I had gone to the house to ask my father to take me back and love me again, and I had ended up killing him. I was no better than my father had accused me of being.”

He turned his head and opened his eyes, looking straight into hers.

“I am a monster.”

She shook her head, unwilling to believe that because it wasn’t true. His father had made him feel as though he was wrong in some way, an abomination and a monster. He had driven his son to murder, wounding him so badly that his vampire instincts had seized control and forced him to defend himself, driven by a dark need to survive. It wasn’t his fault at all. All of the blame rested at his father’s feet.