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She shot me awhat the fucklook.
I shrugged. “Just saying.” Taking a sip of my coffee, I smiled behind the mug.
“The fact that you can make a joke about it means you are so much more fucked up than me.”
She had a point.
“What can you tell me about Madam Therese?” I asked her. Kenzi visibly shuddered, goose bumps erupting on her skin. She rubbed at her arms self-consciously and scowled at the plate in front of her.
“She was in charge of etiquette and recruitment,” she sneered. “Real piece of work, that one. She’s the one who made a deal with our—my,” she corrected herself, “father.”
“They take people who won’t be missed,” Kenzi continued. “They don’t discriminate. Men, women, children. They are all just bodies to be used by them. Those who are brought in are put through a test to see where they belong. Endurance, seduction, you name it and there is likely a test for them to measure it. Once you’re done with the tests, they decide where to put you, and then your training begins.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered, guilt gnawing at me. “You weren’t someone who wouldn’t be missed.”
Kenzi scoffed. “The only person who would have known I was missing would have been Libby.” She gave me a pointed stare. “You ran away, and even if you hadn’t, no one would have let you call me anyway. Christian and my”—she choked back a sob—“my mother were both in on it. The only person who would miss me was Libby, and she never bothered to call at all.”
“Libby said she spoke to you every week,” I insisted. “You would talk for hours on the phone about classes and friends you had made. She never believed anything was wrong.”
“Did I ever send her a picture?” Kenzi raised a questioning brow at me. “Were there ever any texts with pictures of my dorm room? Or video chats? Did I ever text her out of the blue or answer any of her messages?”
She hadn’t. Now that I look back at what Libby had told me, she hadn’t once mentioned simply texting Kenzi or having any kind of video chats like they normally would when one of them was away. I couldn’t believe we had both been so blind.
“What happened to her?” Kenzi bit the inside of her cheek nervously. “What really happened to Libby?”
“Matthias didn’t tell you?” I would have thought he would have told her what happened that day, but Kenzi shook her head.
“He said it was your story to tell.”
I tapped my fingers against my coffee mug. Its warmth had faded out over the time of our conversation, but it still gave me comfort. I imagined it was Matthias’s warm hand wrapped in mine as I told her how Libby had been murdered by her own brother.
Because of me.
When I was done, she simply nodded, sadness and pain sweeping through her eyes as she stood abruptly from the table. “I need to go.” That was all she said before she took off from the dining room, her steps barely making a sound on the wooden floor.
I took another sip of my coffee that was now lukewarm and tasted like ash in my mouth.
That was a first.
“She’ll be back, lass,” my father assured me as he took her empty seat. The maid was already busy cleaning up the dishes we’d finished with. “Just give her time to fully process everything.”
“I spent so long being angry and wanting revenge that I never bothered to think about what she went through.” A sob tore through me, my chest aching. “I can’t imagine what she went through, and she did it all alone, thinking no one cared about her. She was—I failed her. I was supposed to look out for them, and I failed them. They shouldn’t have…” I hiccupped. “I could have…” My father took the trembling coffee cup from my hands and set it on the table. He pulled me into him, my head resting on his shoulder as he rubbed my back in soothing circles.
“You couldn’t have prevented what happened any more than I could have stopped what happened to your mother,” he murmured in my ear, the voice of reason in unmitigated chaos. “We were manipulated and controlled by forces we never thought would be at work against us.”
“She never got to say goodbye,” I sobbed. “Kenzi never got to hear her voice again. Her laugh. We never even knew anything was wrong.”
He didn’t say anything after that because he knew there were no words that could soothe my battered soul. I’d taken hit after hit since being forced back from that little no-name town in Texas, and I just wanted it to end. For all of us.
Then it hit me.
Kendra was complicit in selling her daughter to the highest bidder. She’d known all along what had happened to her.
Pulling back from my father’s embrace, I wiped at my eyes and straightened my shoulders.
“Where is Kendra?”
His brow furrowed at my question, but he didn’t hesitate to tell me.
