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When I come to a set of double doors, I freeze with my heart in my throat. I don’t want to open this door, but there might be answers on the other side.
Ghosts and answers.
I push the door open with my free hand and step into the room with my gun drawn. As I suspected, it’s the master suite.
“Jesus! Look at this place,” Chase whispers in amazement.
Long abandoned, yet still showing signs of the opulence it once held, the room is a sight to behold. The furniture is dark and heavily detailed with handcrafted workmanship. The marble floors carry a heavy layer of dust and debris from the massive leaded windows having been busted throughout the years. The walls are hand-painted in murals depicting a beautiful landscape. A massive crystal chandelier commands attention, drawing your eyes up to the sky mural on the ceiling.
But all of this doesn’t hold my attention the way the king-size bed does.
I step forward on unsteady feet as I examine it, my brothers at my back, seeing what I’m seeing.
It’s not the size or the grandeur which holds my stare, but the heavy chains attached at each of the four corners of the bed.
I don’t need much of an imagination to figure out what happened to mymadre, or in what state mypadrefound her in.
As the horror of it settles on me, I start crumbling inward. My knees buckle, my stomach heaves, and I retch all over the floor. Gauge is at my back, arms around me, as the first wave of my sobs burst from my lungs.
Esteban is an animal. An animal who caged and restrained my poormadre. He raped her for over a month before mypadrerescued her.
The visual is too much to handle. I dash from the room, nearly tripping down the stairs in my haste. When I reach the front doors, I rip away the barricades before escaping the gilded house of horrors. I’m gulping lungful after lungful of air to regain my composure when my brothers appear at my sides.
Gauge tries to comfort me again, but this time I shrug him off. I’m in no state to accept affection. A fire is burning deep in my chest, and I’m afraid for anyone near me—I don’t want to lash out at one of my brothers.
Brass isn’t having any of it. He comes up behind me and wraps his heavily muscled arms around my chest, squeezing me back together as I’m falling apart. Gauge gets me at my front, joining Brass in the hug. My whole team encircles me in an embrace I never even knew I needed.
“Get it all out, Prez,” Punk’s voice rings out over my roar.
It’s not like I couldn’t piece together what happened through mypadre’sjournal. Still, it’s one thing reading hints and another thing seeing the evidence.
A sour uneasiness grows in my gut and creeps its way to my mind—I don’t want to investigate my new train of thought.
Gauge pulls back, holding me by the shoulder so he can see my face. “You’re okay, brother. He can’t hurt your mom no more.”
I swallow the bile in my throat and nod. Mymamáis beyond his evil reach now. But Josephine and my crew are not.
I mentally slip on my mask of composure. I have a job to do. “The study holds the most potential for intel.”
“Are you sure you’re ready to go back in there?” Chase asks with concern.
Not trusting my voice, I nod once before adding, “The sooner we do this, the sooner we can get back home.”
* * *
Several hours my crew and I spend combing the study for clues. There’s not a shred of paper or book we don’t examine. Nothing turns up.
I fall into the study chair behind the desk, fuming silently. Warren was right. There’s nothing here. Expecting to find something was a fool’s errand.
Ziggy is watching me with a peculiar look on his face.
I snap. “What fuck is your problem?”
With a frown, he waves his hand at me. “Not liking the way you look sitting behind that desk.”
We all freeze as his words sink in.
Alarmed, I jump from the chair as if I was burned, shrinking against the bookshelves behind it. That sour thought I had earlier tickles the nerve endings in my brain. Ziggy’s comment and the shocked faces of my crew confirm that we’re all having the same thought.
