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“It’s all right,” Dante said, his gentle voice and the tender way he took her into his embrace nearly making her break apart. “Come here. It’s okay.”

Tess clung to him, balancing on the edge of an emotional chasm she could feel but didn’t dare look into yet. She knew the fall would be steep and painful, so many jagged rocks waiting to cut her open if she let go. Dante didn’t push her. He just held her in the warm circle of his arms, letting her draw from his steady, solid strength.

Finally, the words found their way to her tongue. The weight of them was too much, the taste too vile, so she forced them out into the open.

“When I was fourteen, my father died in a car accident in Chicago. My mother remarried that next year, to a man she met at our church. He had a successful business in town and a big house on a lake. He was generous and friendly—everyone liked him, even me, despite the fact that I missed my real father very much.

“My mother drank, a lot, as long as I can remember. I thought she was getting better after we moved into my stepfather’s house, but it wasn’t long before she fell into it again. My stepfather didn’t care that she was an alcoholic. He always kept the bar stocked, even after her worst binges. I started to realize that he preferred her drunk, so much the better if she spent entire evenings passed out on the sofa and wasn’t aware of what he was doing.”

Tess felt Dante’s body go rigid around her. His muscles vibrated with a dangerous tension that felt like a shield of strength, cocooning her within their shelter. “Did he…touch you, Tess?”

She swallowed hard, nodded against the warmth of his bare chest. “At first, for almost a full year, he was careful. He hugged me too close and too long, looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. He tried to win me over with presents and parties for my friends at the lake house, but I didn’t like being home, so once I turned sixteen I spent a lot of time out. I stayed over with friends, spent the summer at camp, anything to be away. But eventually I had to come home. Things escalated in the months leading up to my seventeenth birthday. He became violent toward both my mother and me, knocking us around, saying awful things to us. And then, one night…”

Tess’s courage faltered, her head swimming with the remembered din of profanity and hysterical rantings, the clumsy racket of drunken stumbling, the splintering crash of breaking glass. And she could still hear the soft creak of her bedroom door that night her stepfather woke her from a fitful sleep, his breath stinking of liquor and cigarette smoke.

His meaty hand had been salty with sweat when he clamped it over her mouth to keep her from screaming.

“It was my birthday,” she whispered numbly. “He came into my bedroom around midnight, telling me that he wanted to give me a birthday kiss.”

“That disgusting son of a bitch.” Dante’s voice was a vicious growl, but his fingers were gentle as he stroked her hair. “Tess…Christ. The other night by the river, when I tried to do the same thing—”

“No. It wasn’t the same thing. It reminded me, yes, but it wasn’t at all the same thing.”

“I’m so sorry. About everything. Especially what you’ve been through.”

“Don’t,” she said, not willing to accept his sympathy when she hadn’t gotten to the worst of it yet. “After my stepfather came into my room, he got on the bed with me. I fought him, kicking him, slapping him, but he was much stronger than me and he pinned me down with his weight. Sometime during the struggle, I heard him draw in a sharp breath. He choked a little, like he was in pain. He stopped trying to hold me down, and I finally managed to roll him off me. He let go because his heart had seized up. He was turning deep red, then blue—dying right there on the floor of my bedroom.”

Dante said nothing in the long silence that followed. Maybe he knew where her confession was heading. She couldn’t stop now. Tess pushed out a long breath, approaching the point of no return. “About this time, my mother came in. Drunk as usual. She saw him