Kade found out the truth on a night his back still burned.
His stepmother's hands trembled as she cleaned the wounds—tears slipping down her cheeks, dropping onto his skin, mixing with blood.
"I'm sorry," she whispered again, like saying it enough times might erase what had been carved into him.
He didn't look at her.
He couldn't.
Because something inside him had already attached too deeply.
She wasn't his real mother.
That truth came later.
He overheard it by accident—his father's voice thick with bitterness and drink.
"She ran," the man spat. "Left you. Ran off with another man like you were nothing."
Kade stood frozen in the hallway.
"She didn't deserve you anyway," his father continued. "So I married someone who knows how to stay."
Something cracked.
Not loudly.
Permanently.
Kade was fifteen when his stepmother entered his life, but he had already learned not to expect gentleness.
She didn't try to win him over.
Didn't force affection.
Didn't pretend she could replace anyone.
Instead, she watched him bleed—and cried quietly while cleaning the wounds his father left behind.
That mattered more than love ever could.
"You don't have to cry," Kade said once, voice flat.
She shook her head. "I do. Because if I stop… I become like him."
That sentence followed him everywhere.
She stayed.
That was the difference.
When his real mother had chosen escape, this woman chose endurance.
When his father raised the rod, she cried—but she didn't leave.
When Kade stepped between them at nineteen and took the blows meant for her, she collapsed beside him afterward, sobbing into his shoulder like she was the child and he was the one holding everything together.
That was when the attachment turned dangerous.
"You shouldn't protect me," she whispered one night, cleaning fresh wounds. "That's not your job."
Kade met her eyes for the first time.
"It is," he said. Not angrily. Not emotionally.
Factually.
She flinched—not from fear of him, but from what she saw forming.
The house twisted things.
Love looked like pain.
Care looked like bleeding.
Staying looked like sacrifice.
And slowly, without realizing it, Kade learned to associate devotion with suffering.
If it didn't hurt, it wasn't real.
If someone stayed, they belonged to you.
His father used the truth like a weapon.
"She's not your real mother," he said one night, smiling cruelly.
"She cries because she's weak. Just like the woman who abandoned you."
Kade didn't respond.
But later, he stood outside his stepmother's room, listening to her cry silently into her pillow—trying not to make a sound.
That was the moment something inside him locked.
Blood didn't matter.
Choice did.
She chose to stay.
She chose to suffer.
She chose him.
And Kade decided something that scared even him:
Anyone who made her cry
would pay.
Not yet.
But soon.
And when that day came, it wouldn't be loud.
It wouldn't be emotional.
It would be precise.
Because love, as Kade learned it, wasn't gentle.
It was something you protected—
even if it meant becoming worse than the thing you were protecting it from...