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She stared at Vivienne with those tears shimmering in her eyes.
But she couldn’t say it. One look at Vivienne and I knew she couldn’t say it either.
“You would protect her, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “You’d do whatever you could.”
“Yes” she said softly.
“And me?” My heart hammered. “Would you do the same for me.”
“Yes,” she hissed, wrenching a savage glare my way. “Yes, I would do the same.”
I risked another step. “Would you hurt someone? Would you hurt many someones? Would you lie and cheat? Would you lose yourself and become a…a monster?”
She flinched, those blue-green eyes darkening. A tremor rose inside me. She knew what I was about to say. She knew. Still, she answered. “I don’t know.”
Vivienne looked her way.
“Would you, Viv? Would you become a monster?”
I didn’t even have to ask. I knew she would. Because she had become a monster. Colt stepped toward her protectively, drawing her focus.
“Yes,” my sister answered. “Yes, I’d become a monster for those I loved.”
“So would they,” I murmured, and looked at Riven. “The most savage, ruthless and soulless bastards that ever existed.”
“You’re seriously not trying to blame love for the things these men did, are you?” London snarled.
I stilled, hating this. But I looked at Riven, then Kane and Thomas…and lastly Hunter. This secret wasn’t mine to expose. Not after all they’d done to protect it.
“Tell them,” Riven croaked.
Kane gave a slow nod, same as Thomas.
“Do it,” The Priest looked away as he spoke.
“Hunter?” I asked, looking at the towering man hidden behind the mask, who’d barely made a sound. He met my stare, searching my eyes. One slow nod. That’s all it took for me to turn back to my family, who still stared from face to face.
“Hale has their sister,” I said carefully.
I barely knew their secret and yet here I was, taking a rusted hatchet to a festering wound.
“He what?” London jerked his glare at Riven.
But Riven’s skin was pale, and his lips had gone ashen.
“Her name is Melody.” Kane stepped forward. “She was taken from the park where we all played as children when she was six years old. The police were called, then her name and her face were splashed all across the news, but they never found her. Not one person came forward saying they had seen anything that day. It was just…silence. It destroyed our parents. Our father ended up packing his bags and leaving in the middle of the night. We were alone with our mother, who slowly sank into depression and even though she had the three of us left to love her, she ended up taking her own life three years later. We were shipped around from one foster family to another, until finally we were old enough to track each other down. Only then did we discover the truth. There was information about that day. A number of witnesses had come forward, each describing three men wearing black suits who came and took her from the swings, pushing her into a car they had nearby, and drove away. One of those witnesses even took down the license plate. But all that was swept under the rug. All because of some twisted cult, one that would eventually change under the vile rule of one man and become?—”
“The Order,” London whispered.
Kane gave a slow nod.
“Holy shit.”
“Yes,” Kane murmured, his voice breaking. “Holy shit. It took us years to find her. When we did, we were gutted. She’d been brainwashed and tortured. We were older then, so we tried to infiltrate and get her out of there. But the night we planned to invade and get her, the compound mysteriously burned down. She wasn’t dead. That we knew. We picked apart those ashes, searching every inch of that place. But they were all gone. Every single one of them. There were whispers that they were taken by a man called Haelstrom Hale. A man closed off from the rest of the world. A man who made his own world. One so corrupt and vile that it rips out everything that’s good inside you and corrupts it.”
“You did all this to find her?” Vivienne wrenched a glare toward Riven. “YOU did to US what they did to your sister?”
His eyes widened, there was a sickening look of desperation. One that physically hurt me to see. I swallowed hard.
