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Chapter thirty
I’d only been at Tatum’s house on the island a few hours. My sister was upstairs doing whatever the fuck girls did the night before their wedding. Chandler was doing whatever the fuck it was that he did. Caspian was somewhere planning the next steps for his takedown of the Obsidian Brotherhood. And I was in the living room, sipping a beer and watching the moonlight reflect off the waves through the floor-to-ceiling windows when movement at the bottom of the stairs caught the corner of my eye.
I’d been stabbed, had my nose broken, jaw broken, ribs broken, and my face marred by a shard of shattered glass. But I’d never felt the kind of pain I felt the moment I turned my head and saw her standing there.
There was no mistaking it was Lyric. For years, I saw her face every time I closed my eyes. But she was different. This wasn’tmyLyric. Her gaze fell to the floor the second she found me staring. The fight in her eyes had dimmed, the light darkened—just like her new jet-black hair and sun-kissed skin. The white dress she wore buttoned all the way up like a man’s dress shirt, but she’d left the top buttons undone just enough for the fabric to fall loosely off one of her slender shoulders.
My hand rested on the arm of the sofa, the dark green beer bottle dangling between my fingers. My brain fought to register the fact that a dead girl just walked into the room. I wasn’t even high, not this time.
Breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
My heartbeat pulsed in my ears. My hands trembled. My knee bounced up and down at a rapid pace as I worked to calm my breath.
I studied the woman at the bottom of the stairs, the girl I’d once spent hours lying in bed with, our bodies pressed against one another while my fingertips traced every inch of her, the swell of her hips, the dip in her waist, the curve of her breast. Until I’d committed every part of her to memory. Now she was nothing more than a stranger.
But she was here.
She was alive.
That nagging little voice in the back of my mind telling me she didn’t die that night was right.
Every single fucking nightmare I’d had since the night we left The Grove came to life right before my eyes. The only difference was that she didn’t look hurt, or beaten, or broken. She looked nothing like those girls from The Grove. She didn’t look like someone who had been taken. She just looked… sad.
How the fuck was that even possible?
Then again, after everything I’d seen, it wasn’timpossible.
“Should we break out the wine and tiny crackers? Maybe a rosary? Find a crying statue? Fuck, I don’t know. What’s the protocol when you witness a fucking miracle?” My chest heaved with every word. “That’s what this is, right? A miracle?” I clenched my teeth. “Or am I just losing my goddamn mind?”
“Linc…” Lyric’s tender voice called my name, the name only she had ever called me. “I can explain.”
“She speaks.” I downed the rest of my beer because while my mind knew it was a possibility, seeing it… fuck. I couldn’t even process this right now.
Tears streamed down her face, but she did nothing to stop them.
“Have you been here this whole fucking time?” My voice was louder than I intended but who gave a fuck.
Caspian and Chandler knew about The Hunt. They knew what kind of fucked-up shit our fathers did forfun. Did they find out Lyric had been taken and rescue her too? Had they been hiding her here?
I looked around the room for one of them, daring them to walk in so I could snatch the life right out of their fucking bodies. “Was I the only one not playing this sick fucking game?” My voice cracked. My vision blurred. I was losing it. No fucking way I was going to let myself lose it.
She closed the space between us. When her hand reached for mine, my blood ran ice cold.
I yanked my hand back. “We both know how good you are at keeping secrets.”
“Lincoln.” She choked on a sob as she fell to her knees between my legs. “Please.”
“I thought you were dead.” My words were laced in venom, cold and distant. “I thought it wasmyfault.” I tightened my jaw. “For almost five fucking years, Lyric. I have lived with this for nearly five years. Do you have any idea what that’s like?” Thinking she was dead but never really knowing. Wondering if I was the one who killed her. Imagining her being raped and tortured then killed. And all the while she was fine. Not a fucking scratch on her. She didn’t even look scared.
“I’m sorry.” She placed her hands on my knees. “I didn’t know you thought… I didn’t know you blamed yourself. I’m so fucking sorry.”
I was right before. There was no fight left in her. The feisty girl I fell in love with all those years ago was just a shell of a woman now.
My entire body trembled at her touch. “Where have you been? All this time?” My heart thrashed against my ribcage. “Where thefuckhave you been?”Please don’t sayhere.
“They took me.” Her eyes began to water again. “They pawned me off. Gave me away. Like property.” The tears spilled over her cheeks. She shook her head as if she was trying to shake away the memory. “I couldn’t… I had no way to…” Her head fell into my lap, her words lost in breathless sobs.
Jesus fucking Christ.
