Path Of The Broken

22. Barrier-3

Jess sat curled up on her favourite lounge chair in the sitting room, looking out at the mountains beyond. She found the sight soothing. She took down her own personal shield, then painstakingly reconstructed it again. Over and over. It was remarkable how difficult it was to rebuild something that had at one point come naturally to her. She sensed Damien enter the room and smiled at that small victory.

She felt his approval wash over her and turned to look up at him.

“Oh, stop it. If I hadn’t been so stubborn and I’d listened in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to work to get back what I had previously.” Still Jess smiled, allowing herself to bask in success.

Damien sat down in the large high-backed chair next to her and shook his head.

“It was my failure for not being able to get the problem across to you until you started falling apart.”

“How did you come to be so wise?” Jess rested her head against the armrest, looking up at him.

“The same way anyone does. The hard way. With much worse results than you.” Pain flashed on Damien’s face.

“What happened?” Jess bit her lip, sensing the sadness and guilt that rolled off him.

“The world I grew up in was brutal and under the control of a warlord. He promised the village they would be safe if I joined his war party. They didn’t see any other way to protect everyone, and it seemed like a good deal: trade me for everyone else in the village. I became a killer for him. The only way I could do it was to cut myself off. Not to feel or empathise with those I tortured for him.” Damien closed his eyes as he recounted that time, his face a mask.

“Did it keep them safe?”

“Yes, for a time. The things I did. It was he who ordered it, but I was the one who committed the atrocities. It gave him great pleasure. He liked owning people. We belonged to him. I didn’t much care, I was incapable of it, or so I thought.”

“What changed?” Jess knew something must have and almost dreaded finding out. Damien today was not the man he was describing. She knew people didn’t change that much without something to cause it.

“My little sister was beautiful, and my parents mostly tried to keep her out of sight, but because he’d taken me and promised to leave them alone, they relaxed.” Damien opened his eyes, taking a shaky breath.

Jess felt horror well up in her. “It wasn’t the village, it was your parents who gave you to him to protect themselves, to protect your sister?”

“They didn’t have a choice. He was Kin. If they didn’t give me up, he would have taken me anyway and killed them along with the whole village as punishment.”

Silence fell between them and finally Jess prompted. “So your sister?”

“The warlord ordered me to kill a boy, I don’t know why, something happened that day, but despite the death and cruelty I’d committed in his name, I refused. He saw my sister playing with the other girls at the edge of the river. She was not a little girl anymore but not of age yet. Still, she was attracting the eye of more than one man in the village. As punishment for my disobedience, he claimed her as his own. To use her as his bed slave.”

Jess gasped, her hand flying up to her mouth in shock.

“I’m sorry, that isn’t adequate, I know.”

Damien laughed but there was no warmth in it. “He chained me in a cell across the courtyard from his bedroom, so I could hear her cry and beg him to stop as he took her. It broke something inside of me. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I went through transition. All that I’d done came back to haunt me, and I thought the pain was my punishment.”

“That is when you became Kin, so you escaped?” Jess spoke quietly.

“He’d finally done enough to break the villagers, and they rose against him. Despite his power he was a coward, really. He ran out, releasing those of us he kept to terrorise others from our cells, ordering us to fight for him. We all turned on him as well. I used the distraction to grab my sister off him. I promised I would keep her safe and we fled as far as we could run.”

“You ran here to Ilarith. Isabella is your sister.”

It wasn’t really a question, but Damien nodded.

Jess rose from her own chair and slid into the seat next to him. Wrapping her arms around him this time she comforted him until the bad memories the conversation had brought to the surface faded into the background.