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“You don’t know everything,” Rook put in, but he was wrong. I did. I wished I didn’t. But I’d done my fucking homework on them, too.
I knew all about the fucker at Barrett’s Home for Boys who liked to defile his charges. I knew all about his time at the Sanitorium. The drugs they fed him. How long they kept him in that padded room. And how often they tied him down.
I knew.
They deserved to know about me, too.
“My last name is Adler,” I started, hating how that single word tasted on my tongue. Souring my stomach. “My father was Douglas Adler, the cult leader responsible for the deaths of a combined twelve people. It would’ve been a lot more if the cops hadn’t figured out what was going on and stopped the three other families involved from ascending too.”
“How old were you?” Sparrow asked, folding her hands tightly between her knees.
“Seven.”
I didn’t look up. Couldn’t handle seeing her face.
“I didn’t know much about what my family was caught up in. Only that people came to the house a few times a week and they would all go downstairs, to the basement, and… breathe.”
“Breathe?” Grey asked.
“Yeah. Like, weird, fast breathing. Loud. Rhythmic. And then my dad would talk for a while and they would hum. Always the same tune.”
The tune that had stuck with me, playing in my unconscious mind at all hours of the day and night, keeping me from sleep for the first month after they died. It had taken me years to finally rid myself of it.
“When my father decided it was time for us to ascend, my mother had doubts.”
“She tried to stop it?” Rook asked, his expression darkening, hand closing to fists where they were crossed over his chest. I knew he was picturing ripping my father’s throat out with his bare hands. I pictured the same thing for years.
“She told me to hide. Tucked me under my bed behind some bins and said not to make a sound.”
Ava Jade’s chin quivered, and I swallowed past the burn in my throat, needing to continue before I changed my fucking mind. “She said she was going to get my little brother next, but that was when my father came into the room. He told her Emmanuelle had already ascended and was waiting for them on the other side. I didn’t know what that meant at the time.”
I settled the tremor in my core and sat up straighter, disconnecting myself from the story. A tactic I was cautioned against when the therapist at the hospital told me I may be developing a dissociative disorder.
“She was hysterical,” I went on. “But my father calmed her down, promising her it wouldn’t hurt and that it would be over soon. He asked her to go and get me, but she told him that she’d already sent me away. Told me to run and to keep running and not stop until I got to town.”
“He was angry, but said that I would find my own way to my ascension. That they needed to be strong so that the others would follow their lead into eternal life or some other fucking shit. The memory is all fucked up, but I do remember what happened next very vividly.”
“My uncle came in, and my mom lost it. She was screaming and fighting them. I remember… I remember trying to plug my ears to keep from hearing it. I… I remember the smell of my own fucking piss in my nose. Most of all, I remember feeling completely helpless while they held her still. While she choked. Then it was Uncle’s turn to choke and then my fathers. Through the small passages between the bins, I could see contorted, blurry images of them. Pale. Still. And the red. So much red. Soaking the beige carpet. Streaking their soft white skin.”
“I don’t know how long I stayed there. A long time, I think. But at some point I crawled out. Past their bodies. I remember thinking that they said Emmanuelle had ascended and I didn’t know what that meant but I thought I needed to check on them because my parents weren’t going to. They were never going to again.”
“I found him in his crib.”
Ava Jade choked on a sob, pushing the back of her hand to her mouth to try to keep it in. I tried not to feel it; what I felt when I looked down on my tiny little brother still, bloodless, and lifeless in his crib, surrounded in a puddle of dark crimson. A hollowness to complete that I didn’t think anything would ever fill it again.
But then something did.
Anger.
A toxic rage so complete and so out of control that the state almost sent me away to juvie at eight years old. But Diesel found me. He recognized my anger. Taught me how to use it. To wield it when I needed to, and control it when I didn’t. He was the one who helped me see that the anger was directed at myself, not anyone else.
I was angry because I’d sat there, hiding my face in the carpet, plugging my ears. Crying into my pajamas. Pissing on myself.
I was angry because I did nothing to stop it. Because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Because I didn’t see it coming.
Diesel told me if I wanted, I never had to feel that way again, and I never had. Until recently. When Sparrow flew into my world and turned it upside down, a fucking faceless wolf on her heels.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sparrow said. “You know that, right? You know you couldn’t have done anything to stop them? You were just a kid.”
