Chapter 151

Ramon POV

I stood in the hospital parking lot, watching Lake help Ollie into the car, and felt nothing but dread.

This should have been a happy moment. Ollie was being discharged. My son—my biological son—was healthy enough to come home. Lake was healing well, the bruises fading, the physical wounds closing. We were going home as a family.

But all I could think about was the research I’d been doing late at night when everyone else was asleep. The articles I’d found. The patterns they described. The profiles of men who did terrible things to children and justified it with excuses that sounded disturbingly familiar.

*I was d***ged. I didn’t know what I was doing. It wasn’t really my fault.*

That’s what I’d been telling myself. What my brothers had been telling me. But the more I read, the more I realized that’s what they all said. Every pedophile, every child molester, every monster who preyed on vulnerable minors—they all had excuses. They all cla