AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Mikey’s eyes widened. I plowed on before I lost my nerve. “That’s how Auren died. Azazel put a hit on me, and the wolves he hired picked the wrong brother to kill, Mikey.”
“What?” he gaped. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“He was trying to create an environment that would traumatize Auren enough that he would want to be Azazel’s evil sidekick or whatever. He then manipulated you into thinking I’d gotten our brother killed, and you believed him.”
Ages-old rage and betrayal resurfaced as I recalled how Mikey and I had screamed at each other after Auren’s funeral. “Like a good little puppet, you believed I’d gotten our brother killed on purpose. You knew me better than anyone else, yet you chose to believe that monster over me.”
“Sariel—”
“Did you actually believe I would purposefully take Auren somewhere he’d be hurt?” I interrupted, my chin resting on my palm as I looked at him. “Were you really that brainwashed?”
I wasn’t expecting his fist to fly out, so I didn’t have enough time to dodge it when it came towards my cheek. Michaelson was weak, but his raw power was enough to snap my head to the side and jostle me in the chair.
“I wasn’t fuckingbrainwashed!” he snapped, reaching for my collar and dragging me up so that we were facing each other. His expression was a mask of rage. “I had to listen to mom mourn Auren forweeks, while you had slunk off to wherever the fuck you were! I had to listen to those gut-wrenching sobs every day!”
His fist drew back again, and I let him get one more hit in. “She would come to his room in the morning the same way she came to ours, to wake us up to have breakfast with her in the gardens, except she would go into his room andcry, Sariel. You weren’t there!”
He kept yelling as I wrestled my shirt out of his grasp and subdued him. “You were a goddamn coward, whether you got Auren killed or not! You left! You justleft!”
He was crying now. “Mom didn’t lose one son when Auren died,” he gasped out. “She lost two. And she didn’t fucking have to.”
I felt like he hadn’t fully listened to me.
“Mikey,” I said slowly, shoving him into the mattress face first. “Azazel tried tokill me,” I repeated as he rolled himself back to glare at me with damp eyes, “and it wasn’t the first time.”
That gave him pause.
As I stood staring at my brother, I suddenly realized that after that first change—the one where our father had tried to maim me—I had never shifted around my brothers. I’d tried to stay clear of them wherever our father took them flying, or had stuck around long enough for them to get off the ground, then conveniently find something to do while they were airborne.
Better late than never.
I shifted. It didn’t take much effort for the change to overcome me. My wings stretched out, and I winced at the soreness in them; I needed to go flying soon to properly work out those muscles.
I folded the black one into my back and shimmied down the length of the room so that he could see the scarring.
“Our father did that when I turned sixteen,” I said softly.
“You have a white wing,” he breathed in awe as he scrambled back onto the bed. “Holy fuck.Holy fuck.”
“He tried to cut it off,” I explained. “Do you remember when I was attacked? Patrol found me bleeding in the garden after hearing me scream.”
“That was—” Michaelson paused to gulp. “—that wasdad?”
I tried not to be irritated by the way he called him ‘dad’ despite him having more demonic qualities than fatherly ones. “Yes.”
We were silent for a moment as Mikey stared at the cut running the length of my wing. And then, he dragged himself up to the head of the bed, bent his knees, and wrapped his arms around them.
“He never stopped hitting me,” he whispered, and my heart dropped to my stomach.
He looked so small, so innocent, curled up on the bed with his chin on his knees and his overgrown hair dangling over his forehead.
I retracted my wings and crawled onto the bed with him. I didn’t hold him. I just let him talk.
It took Herculean effort not to rampage at some of the atrocities that had happened to my little brother while I’d wallowed in self-pity like a fucking idiot. He showed me scars along his arms and spine from where Azazel had belted him—they made my claws protrude, and my jaw ached with the need to rip into something with my bare teeth.
By the time he was done, I had wrapped my arms around him and hugged him into my side.
“He’s scary,” he said quietly. “A real-life monster.”
