Kai POV
Those years… were the most excruciating of my life.
I wasn't a person in the Blackwood household. Not really. I was… a contingency plan. A body that breathed so it could be harvested when needed. Spare parts for the son they actually loved.
They called it "treatment" for Ace. But to me, it was pain, pure and simple. I'd be called into those sterile rooms without explanation. Blood draws turned into marrow extractions. Needles dug into my skin, and sometimes, I'd wake up groggy and hurting, a piece of me missing and taken, because Ace needed it.
No one told me what was being done to me. No one asked if I was afraid. They just did it, like I was a thing, something to be used, not someone to be protected.
