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“Well, you’re not going to be alive for much longer if you keep shit from me!” I ripped my hands away from him and pointed to Gaian. “That bullet that Gaian was shot with was coated with a poison that affectsallspecies and paralyzes them on the spot.”
“How do you know that?” Darius said. “You’ve watched your father use it?”
Suddenly, I smacked my lips closed and stared at him. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted toavoidthis conversation, not make it about me. I couldn’t make it about me. I didn’t want them to know how weak I had been these past four years.
I wanted to be strong, not only for myself, but for them too. I had adored wolves for far too long, since I’d met these guys, and every day, I aspired to be as strong as them. How would they look at me, a human who had been taken advantage of by her own family? They already thought I was weak because I was human. All species did.
“Did they experiment on you?” Gaian asked, stepping forward.
All I could do was glance down at my feet. Pain shot throughout my entire body, and I felt the hands of all those creepy men all over my body. I wanted the memories to vanish forever, so I didn’t have to remember how helpless I had been.
Lying in my bed. Unable to move. Letting man after man come inside me.
I didn’t know why Dad had allowed it.
I didn’t understand why he hadn’t protected me from them.
Ever since I’d been a young age, he had told me that he would do anything to protect me. So, why the hell hadn’t he protected me from all those filthy guys? Why had he willingly let them sleep with me every single night, before I could even understand what was going on?
“Yes,” I finally whispered. “For years, even before he took me away.”
Thayer let out a ferocious growl. “I’m going to fucking incinerate him.”
Calder placed a hand on Thayer’s chest to hold him still. “What did he do to you?”
My chest tightened. I opened my mouth to say something, but the only thing that came out was a deep cry that I had been trying to hold back for years. I didn’t want to reopen this chapter of my life because it hurt too fucking badly.
This wasn’t even the beginning of everything. There was so much more.
They all stared at me, as if they were waiting for me to continue, but that was all that I would tell them for now. That was all Icouldtell them for now. The memories were far too atrocious to remember all of them.
“It’s okay, Pretty Bird,” Gaian whispered, moving closer to me. “You don’t have to tell us anything else right now, if you don’t want to. We’ve, uh …” He looked at the others. “We’ve been at war with your father for the past four years. He had two men waiting for Thayer and Calder at your house on your eighteenth birthday. Those goons nearly killed them.”
“He did?” I whispered, feeling even more betrayed by my own blood somehow.
I glanced up at Calder and Thayer, who both refused to make eye contact with me. In fact, Calder glared at Gaian and bared his teeth, as if Gaian wasn’t supposed to say what he had. Thayer glared out the window, his dark eyes flashing a fiery orange color.
“We’ve been killing all the men he sends to us,” Darius said.
“Killing them,” I whispered, tasting the words on my tongue.
All these years, I’d wanted to kill them myself. Every night, as I lay paralyzed in my bed and they pounded inside me, I would stare up at my bland ceiling and think about how I would kill them. I had dreamed about things far worse than biting or slapping them the way that Thayer had made me do to him last night.
I wanted to feed them that green poison and torture every last one of them the way they had to me.
“Is that what you did with Dr. Stormmark?” I whispered.
Darius and Gaian shared a tense look. They didn’t have to say anything for me to know that they had gone back to Durnbone after my doctor’s appointment and slit her throat for making mecry.
Darius and Gaian had both been so sweet four years ago, and now … now, they were just as deadly as Calder and Thayer.
“The men are taken care of for now,” Darius said, looking at the others. “We have guards posted all over Durnbone and the land around the city. Why don’t we take an afternoon to relax?” He glanced down at Gaian’s abdomen. “I think we all need it.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The tavern, but … we have to make a stop first,” he said. “To the trinket shop.”
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