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Chapter forty-three
Ayelswick was something straight out of a Thomas Kinkaid painting or some mythical book-turned-movie. Everything here was made of stucco and stone from the buildings to the bridges and the cobblestone pathways like the one we were walking on now. The garden was a wide-open space with blooming splashes of color scattered over patches of emerald-green grass. The bridge crossed a stream of crystal-clear water flowing over mossy rocks. The whole place was calm, serene, and almost magical.
And Anniston lived here. No wonder she saw the world so differently. She literally grew up with sunshine and roses while I grew up surrounded by concrete and steel. I’d shielded her from the truth as much as I could, but something told me after today, I wouldn’t be able to do that any longer. I had no idea how the fuck I was going to explain this.
“You fucked the princess?” Caspian’s voice cut through my thoughts.
“You fucked my sister?” Liam added, and I couldn’t tell if the shock in his voice was from me fucking Anniston or if he was still reeling from seeing what we almost did to his father.
I stepped over one of the larger rocks on the path. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” Caspian said.
Lincoln piped in, stepping over the same rock, “You mean, like how you chose to fuckmysister?” He lifted a brow at Liam like some kind of anti-sister-fucking bro code.
I glared at him. “The fuck was that? You two bonding now?”
Lincoln laughed.
“You mean, mywife?” Caspian said, acid dripping from his words. The guy acted like you couldn’t even mention Tatum’s name without his permission.
We kept walking.
I told them about The Induction and everything that happened that night. It felt wrong to tell such a sinister story in such a heavenly place.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” Caspian asked once I was finished. “Why the fuck would you put yourself through that?”
“You know how in movies someone coaxes the monster’s mouth open and another person tosses a bomb inside. Then thirty seconds later, BOOM!” I paused, letting my words sink in. “I wanted to be the bomb.”
“And how’d that work out for you?”
A wide grin spread across my face. “I fucked the princess.”
They tried to break me. They hoped I’d break her. In the end, I discovered I couldn’t be broken. Neither could she. I thrived in the darkness. So did she.
We followed a slope to the bottom of a hill to a tiny cottage made of white stucco. I expected mold and mildew and shutters falling off windows. This was clean and well-kept. A grove of tall trees surrounded the house on three sides, like guards keeping watch.
“This has to be it,” I said as I looked around for another cottage at the bottom of a hill.
We all stared at the wooden door in silence, waiting for a sign that we might be walking into an ambush. Lincoln walked around to the back, then returned with a thumbs up. I reached around and gripped the gun in my waistband without fully pulling it out.
“I remember this cottage,” Liam said. “When I was a kid, the servants used to tell ghost stories about this place. My mother told us it was forbidden.” He looked around as if searching for memories. “One day Anniston and I came to check it out for ourselves, but our father had blocked the path in front of the bridge. I forgot it existed.”
“Pretty sure that was the point,” Caspian said, then he creaked the door open.
Sunlight flooded the dark space inside. The windows were covered in black canvas. We walked in, one at a time. The kitchen and living area were one big open room with two closed doors on the back wall. To our right, there was a row of tables that went the full length of the wall and two tripods with video cameras on them at each end. There were televisions and laptops on some of the tables and dildos, butt plugs, and some shit I’d never seen before.Was that an ice pick?What the fuck would they need an ice pick for?
Five girls huddled together on one bed in the corner, facing longways toward the door.
Sometimes, anger felt like an earthquake threatening to make everything around you crumble. That kind of anger was exactly what I felt when I saw those girls sitting there. None of them had clothes on. Nothing but blood-soaked underwear covered their frail bodies. The fact that they didn’t even move to cover themselves spoke volumes about what they’d been through.
I walked over to the bed, stopping a few feet away and making sure my voice was confident and calm, even though I wanted to throw up and break shit at the same time. My eyes found one of the girls, the closest one to me. “Hey.”
She looked up at me, and… nothing. There was nothing in her eyes. No fear. No spark. No fight. No hope.
“Jesus,” Lincoln said as his gaze roamed around the room.
This was worse, so much worse than the girls we’d found at The Grove. Those girls were terrified but determined. They still wanted to fight. They still wanted to live. These women were broken, empty shells with pale faces and glassy eyes.
