Unbroken Hart (The Hart Family)

This book is for fans of "Broken Hart" who wondered what Dante's side of the story was. 

I'd spent an entire lifetime thinking that I'd never know what love felt like. I loved my family, but they weren't going to cuddle with me at night or bear my children.  To me love was as unreal as unicorns and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.  I knew people who swore that true love changed their entire lives, and I'd smile and wish them well, all the while knowing that that wasn't in
my
future.

My acceptance of my fate was absolute.  I'd never even allowed myself to ponder what the alternative would feel like.  I had a set of rules that I followed
in order to hold myself aloof, but the truth is that it didn't even require effort.  I'd seen what relationships looked like in my family, and I hated what I saw.  Hated it, and still had the scars to remind myself of what that 'love' had done.

The one true love of my life was the love I had for my siblings, both by blood and honorary, and my Aunt Sandra.  I'd pai
d a high price to keep my family safe. I was the oldest, and it was my responsibility to protect them all.  My love for my family was what kept my humanity intact. 

There was something wrong with me, something that other people seemed to have that I didn't.  I wasn't settled or secure.
I knew that people thought I was rich, handsome and had a fabulous life, but the money meant shit and my looks were merely window dressing that disguised the mess inside. I always felt like something was missing, some huge piece of my life that I'd somehow lost.  I'd long since given up trying to figure out what it was that had left me so sure that something was missing. 

When I was younger
, I used to have dreams about having a brother being taken away from me.  I didn't have any siblings until Damien came along and once he did, I was so sure that something would happen to him that sometimes I would try to push him away so that I wouldn't care as much when he was taken.  That only went on for the first year of his life, and it's nothing that he remembers.  My mother repeatedly told me that if I wasn't a little brat and took care of my brother, he probably wouldn't go anywhere. She'd always follow sentences like that up with, "But if you act like a little shit, I just can't say what might happen to this one…"

My parents had one rule; children should neither be seen nor heard.  When we needed things, they hurt us.  Any sign of weakness had those two puffing up with glee as they readied themselves to dole out whatever cruel and unusual punishment that they'd dreamt up.
  Especially my mother, who lived to be physically aggressive and violent.

By the time my sisters came along, my parents were completely out of control.  They'd always been awful, but now they were worse.  Neither one of them cared for Delilah or Dominique, but my father in particular hated them.  He could barely tolerate the sight of them, so my brother Damien and my honorary brother Spencer and
I spent as much time as we could keeping the girls as far away from my parents as possible.

I loved Damien and
Spencer, but the twins were my angels.  They were the two most perfectly beautiful things I'd ever seen, and they opened my heart.  Their safety and their happiness were paramount in my mind at all times. Damien and Spencer felt that way toward them, and in turn that made the three of us even closer.  The girls softened our hard edges, gave the three of us something to focus on, to protect and stay alive for.  My love for the girls changed me, changed all three of us.  There was nothing I wouldn't do for them, and the same applies to Damien and Spencer. 

When I look at the girls
, I know that everything I did was worth it.  I helped to protect two of the most amazing and beautiful people that the universe had ever seen fit to grace the world with.  For a long, long time, I thought that what I'd done had gotten me a one way ticket to hell.  I couldn't change what I'd done, because if I were able to, my sisters wouldn't have survived safely, but I will always wish that it hadn't come to that. 

The girls had only been about nine years old when I saw that my father was looking at them in a really inappropriate way.  I was scared shitless, disgusted and furious that on top of everything else he'd done, now he was eying up children.  Damien and Spencer saw the way he looked at them too.
  We made sure that two of us were always with the girls whenever we were somewhere that our father could or would be. 

That was the worst year of my life.  But as bad as the fear was, finding out w
hat a sick fuck he truly was made things a thousand times worse. 

He was all fucked up on drugs, and it was getting worse by the day.  I was just trying to get us
through until I was eighteen so I could move out and taken them all with me. I planned every single day, my focus entirely on getting them all out.  All of my plans for our escape came to a screeching halt when I found him in my sister's bedroom in the middle of the morning when I'd decided to bag on school so that I could get some sleep.  Typically he was passed out in a drugged out stupor or at the Cross'. 

Not that day.  That morning, I saw him going into my sister's room as I was on my way to bed.  I watched as he entered
their closet, and I knew right away that whatever he was doing in there was bad.

I hid with my heart in my throat as I prayed to god that I was wrong.  I waited for a few minutes after he left their room before I made
my way in and went through the closet with a fine tooth comb.  It didn't take me long to find the hidden wires, and within minutes I was pulling a panel up from the floor that had recording equipment in it.  He'd been taping them.

The rage I felt in that moment almost
ate me alive.  We'd been sleeping in shifts for a fucking year to keep the girls safe, making sure to put a dresser in front of their bedroom door every night.  They went nowhere that he could be without us.  But for all that, he'd gotten his perverted kicks anyway. 

I destroyed his recording equipment, smashing it until it was b
asically dust.  In the afternoon I ransacked his office; disassembling it piece by piece until I found his stash.  There were dozens of videos, and he had boxes full of photos of the girls, naked, that he'd made from the videos.  From the pictures I realized that he'd put cameras in their bathroom as well.  I knew then, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was going to touch them.  Nothing we did was going to stop him. He'd made up his mind to do it, the pictures left no doubt of that.  We'd thought we could keep him away, but that was all for nothing. He'd already violated them, and they didn't even know it. 

But I did.

That was when I decided to kill him.  I spent the entire day planning how I'd do it.  I was going to strangle him while he was in a drug induced stupor, and then I'd call the police and turn myself in.  I spent the hours after that taking out the recording equipment he'd hidden in the ceiling fan in their bathroom and going through his bedroom.  I found more pictures of them in his bedside table, and the sickness I felt ate at me like a cancer. I burned every tape and picture I found.

When he showed up later that night, he figured out pretty quickly that someone was onto him.  His office was destroyed, and his bedroom was no better.  I hadn't tried to be conspicuous.  I wanted him to know that I knew.  I wanted him to fear what was coming.  He'd violated the two people I loved the most, and that motherfucker was going to pay.  I stood in the doorway and watched him as he frantically tore through his office.  When he turned to look at the door, I gave him a look of pure rage.
 

"You're pur
e fucking filth, and I turned you in, asshole.  I called the police today, gave them all your sick fucking pictures.  They'll be back in just a few hours to arrest you.  You're going to jail Mike.  We all know what they do to pedophiles in jail.  I hope they fucking destroy you." 

Of course I hadn't called the police.  I wouldn't allow pictures of my sister's naked to become evidence for other people to look at.  But it was important that he think I'd called them, because I knew that his addiction would demand to be fed when his anxiety spiked.

He went white as a sheet as he trembled like the little bitch he was.  For all his evil and his violence, he wasn't so fucking tough when it came to his personal safety. 

I shut the door after me and waited half an hour before going back in. I knew he'd be drugging himself up but good and I knew once he was out of it, I could do what needed to be done.  Fate had a different plan.

When I went back in, he was sprawled out on his couch with a needle in his arm and a bunch of empty pill bottles in front of him.  He'd clearly chosen to overdose rather than go to jail but, when I walked in, he was still alive.  Barely, but if I'd wanted to, I could have saved him. 

In no way did I
want to.

Locking the door, I sat in a chair across from him and watched as his breathing got shallower.  I didn't leave that room until I was positive that he was dead, positive that he'd never again taint my sister's with his evil.  I chose to let a man die rather than save him.  I'd played judge and jury, and I made the decision.  The fact that I didn't have to strangle him didn't mean shit.  I'd still been the architect of his demise, whether my hands were involved or not.

For years I lived my life as a prisoner to the choice that I'd made to protect them.  It made sense to me that I wasn't worthy of love, wouldn't ever have a girlfriend or a wife.  No one would be able to love me if they knew that I wasn't as honorable as I pretended to be.

All of that changed, ironically, on the anniversary of my mother's suicide.  I'd been short-tempered and edgy for
weeks, knowing that the date was closing in.  Every year I'd sit down and re-read the suicide note that she'd left me, wondering when the rage that she had within her had been allowed in.  According to her letter, it happened when she met my father.  I knew better than anyone how evil he really was, and it was the knowledge of what he had done, more than anything else, that had me keeping people at a distance. 

The morning that everything changed, I was sitting at my desk with the newspaper spread out in front of me.  I was trying to read it, but my eyes were focused on the date as memories went through my mind.
  My father had been the one to find her, but he'd neglected to tell me that she was dead when he told me to go into their bedroom to wake her up.

I knew something was off about that
, because none of us had been allowed into their bedroom, and seeing any of her children wouldn't be the way she would start the day.  When I hesitated, he told me he was going to make Dominique or Delilah wake her.  They were only three at the time, and my mother hated them.  There was no way that I was going to put them in a situation where she could get her hands on them.  Instead, I grudgingly went to their bedroom and went to wake her up. 

I'll never forget the things that I saw that day.  She was long gone, a totally different color that left no doubt about her condition.  Her eyes were open, and even in death I swear her eyes
reflected her hatred of me.  When I turned to run, my father was at the door laughing.  "Aw, look at the little baby, fucking afraid of a dead whore."

I wasn't afraid of her,
but I was shocked that he'd let me look at her like that.  There seemed to be no limit to his cruelty.  I'd never liked my father, had known that he was a terrible man. My mother had been the one that was really violent.  My father liked to dole out punches and lashes of his belt, but he wasn't as scary as she was.  But that day, I saw something in his eyes, a reason to be scared of him from then on.  It was like when she died, he'd inherited all of her rage and he couldn't wait to take it all out on us.