Free Claimed by Tara Crescent

I desperately hoped she wanted to stay.
    “Anyway, back to the story. Time went on. They both turned eighteen and their fortunes were released to them. Carrie moved to France and fell in love with a farmer in the Rhone valley. Dylan was, in the meanwhile, drinking and partying his share of the money away in New York. Then, when he was twenty-four, he came to visit my aunt.”
    The next words were difficult to speak. “The man my aunt was engaged to had a sister, Marie-Therese. Dylan wanted her but his interest wasn’t reciprocated. So he took her.” I swallowed. “Marie-Therese was my mother.”  
    “Alexander,” she whispered. Her eyes locked onto mine and she leaned forward to kiss me, her lips grazing against my cheek. “I’m so sorry. I don’t need to know. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
    After everything my father had done to her, she wanted to spare me pain. I did not deserve this woman. I swallowed and continued. “The village searched for months for Marie-Therese. Her brother, my aunt’s fiancé was frantic with worry. Everyone was affected.” I sighed. “Then, months after, in the middle of the night, Dylan came back with a very pregnant girl, one who was almost about to go into labour.”
    “Before she died, my mother revealed the truth. She’d been kidnapped by Dylan. Raped repeatedly. Held in a barn somewhere in France, food and water withheld from her unless she cooperated with Dylan’s desires. Beaten. Hurt. And above all, afraid. She was only fifteen.”
    She made a small noise in her throat. I saw the glint of tears in her eyes. I pulled her closer towards me. “The rest is more complicated. She died in childbirth and my aunt couldn’t bring herself to call the cops on the older brother that she had idolized. At the very least, Dylan would have been arrested for rape. My birth proved that sexual contact had occurred and fifteen-year olds are too young to consent.”
    “What did she do?”
    “Money buys a lot of silence. Marie-Therese’s body disappeared before she could be identified, so the truth never came out. My aunt broke off her engagement and moved to Provence, to the farmhouse you’ve been to. She couldn’t look her fiancé in the eye and tell him the truth. That it had been her brother who had done this.”
    “And she sent you away too, as soon as she could.” Her voice was so soft.
    “I was proof of what her brother had done to a defenceless young woman,” I replied. “I was a visible sign of her complicity in Dylan’s crimes. Given all that, she was as kind as she could be. She didn’t send me away to a foster home or an orphanage.”
    “Instead, she made you feel unloved.” Her voice was harsh. “You might have been able to forgive her, Alexander. I am never going to be able to. Dylan kidnapped fourteen women after your mother. She could have stopped that.”
    “And I could have as well,” I replied. This was my secret shame and as afraid as I was that she’d judge me harshly for this, I had to tell her the truth. I owed her complete honesty. “So many times, I itched to line a gun up to his face and pull the trigger, but I couldn’t. I convinced myself that a quick death was a luxury that Dylan didn’t deserve. That a truer punishment would have been the same imprisonment he had bestowed on so many women. Maybe I was lying to myself because I was weak and I couldn’t kill him.”
    She made a noise of dissent. “Remember what you told me last night, Alexander? You told me that our humanity made us who we are.” She snuggled against me. “Am I supposed to condemn you for failing to kill your own father? Because I can’t do that.”
    We were both silent for a few minutes, then she stirred. “What happened next?” she asked. “Your aunt sent you to boarding school, you told me that much.”
    “She did. For many years, my father ignored my existence. I received presents at Christmas and that was the only sign that I even had a