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Victoria exchanges a look with the others, then her gaze finds mine once more. “Do you really think none of us ever gave information about where we lived? We were careful, but not perfect. And do you think we were all fighting the day the Blood Mages came? Most of us were running for our lives, because that’s a normal reaction when hell rains down on you. And as for the torture, I’m sure you ended up on that metal bed at times because we ended our own torture by putting you there. It was just another way the Blood Mages fucked with our minds.”
“That still doesn’t mean you should just forgive me,” I say, my thoughts spinning.
“That’s exactly what it means,” she tells me. “No one should be questioned about what they had to do during a war to survive. Do you understand?”
“I don’t.”
She smiles gently. “One day you will. Until then, just trust us and find a way to forgive yourself.”
I accept their unearned grace. “Okay,” I whisper.
If they actually forgive me, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have so much guilt to inspect and unpack that I can’t possibly do it right now. This is something I’ll have to deal with when I can be alone with my thoughts.
My gaze moves to my men. They’re smiling. They’re okay. And they seem to be approving of what’s going on right now. Again, I need to think about that, but not now. Now, I’m just happy that so many of the people I care about are okay.
A young woman comes up and grabs my hand firmly. “Asha, thank you. We’d still be in the dungeon if you hadn’t come to our rescue.”
“Or worse,” pipes up another younger packmate. I recognize him as Triton, a shy kid my brother used to run around with. “They weren’t going to keep us down there forever.”
“What do you mean?” asks Max, sounding every bit the Enforcer.
“The Blood Mages had suggested this party was going to involve us somehow,” Victoria explains. “The insinuation was that we wouldn’t see the next dawn.” When she speaks of her tormentors, a barely contained rage makes itself known. I think she’d tear their bodies to shreds if Simon — or whoever the monster was—didn’t already take care of that. When her eyes survey the gore surrounding us, they light up with a grim satisfaction.
But she’s not lost. I can tell none of them have lost their sanity the way…not-Simon had. “Who is this guy, anyway?” I ask, directing my gaze to the goop-covered carcass at my feet. I don’t understand.
There’s silence, and then, “Holy shit, that’s Greg Riles,” someone says.
The name instantly sends a chill down my spine. Creepy Greg? He was a shifter in his early thirties who had started dating my brother’s eventual girlfriend when she turned seventeen. The whole town had had a problem with it, and my brother had been one of the people who helped her to realize that he’d groomed her. That a relationship with that kind of age gap, between a teenager and an adult, was completely inappropriate.
She’d broken up with him and started therapy. A couple years later, my brother and she had started dating. Every step of the way, Creepy Greg had remained obsessed with her. When my brother started dating her, Greg had dyed his hair to look like my brother, changed his clothes to look like him, even altered his behaviors.
There was talk of kicking Greg out of the pack. So many half-breeds were crazed, but we thought we’d started a town full of the normal ones. With his behaviors, we were starting to think that maybe he wasn’t as sane as he appeared to be.
But the Blood Mages had attacked before that happened.
“I don’t understand. So was it him the whole time?” I feel lost. Confused. Everything I thought I knew was falling away, and I wasn’t sure what to grab onto.
Victoria looks down at him. “His true face came out in death.”
So the man I’d tried to save, the man I’d hunted, all along was simply pretending to be my brother? Maybe the dark magic made him insane, or his sanity was gone long before that, I don’t know, but it sickens me that he’d worn my brother’s face to do so many terrible things.
But then my gaze swings to my men as a new and unexpected thought comes over me. “If this isn’t my brother, could he still be out there somewhere?”
Doubt instantly shines in Max’s gaze. Braxton’s is thoughtful. But Orson’s? Orson’s is hopeful.
Turning to my pack members with my heart in my throat, I ask, “So, where is my brother? Does anyone know? Has anyone seen him?”
They pass grave looks between them. I feel like I’ve buried Simon a half-dozen times already and I want to tell them not to sugarcoat, not to try and spare me the nasty particulars, but to just rip the fucking band-aid off already. Instead, I keep my mouth shut. There’s no use snapping at them. We could all use a little grace right now.
“We don’t know if Simon is still alive,” says Victoria, but her tone suggests it’s more than that she doesn’t know.
Something inside of me that thought it couldn’t hurt again aches once more. Hope, tiny and delicate, crushes between her fingers.
“I understand,” I tell her, but some part of me still wants to know more. No matter how bad his final moments were. “Where did you see him last?”
“They moved us around a lot,” says Triton, and I can see that remembering those days is painful to him. “You never knew when they took someone away if you were ever going to see ‘em again.”
I remember those days too, but they’re talking about after. After we were done being experimented on. They were imprisoned elsewhere. I was running, trying to escape my demons and find my people.
