Chapter 18
Ileant against the doorframe of Cole's room, watching my best friend sprawled across his bed like a broken marionette.
The curtains were drawn tight, casting the room in a gloomy half-light that matched the atmosphere.
Cole's eyes were glassy, unfocused, the nearly empty whisky bottle at his side telling me everything I needed to know about how he'd spent his day. Ryder sat in the chair by the desk, his legs stretched out, looking both wired and exhausted at once. I had come up after spending dinner with some of the housemen. I knew that Cole wasn’t going to show, and Ryder was trying to take care of him. I had at least expected Cadence to come to dinner, as per the rules, but even she hadn’t shown up.
One of the housemen told me that she had come back around lunchtime and had been locked in her room ever since.
I was ready to start kicking some ass and getting this house back on track, but one look at Cole told me that we really needed some work.
"How long has he been like this?" I asked Ryder, keeping my voice low as I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. Ryder glanced up, the usual playful spark in his blue eyes dimmed to almost nothing. He shook his head.
“I dunno,” he shrugged. “At least since I got back from class. Found him here trying to drink himself into oblivion.” Cole muttered something unintelligible, his eyes refusing to meet mine.
The sight of him twisted something in my chest. Cole was always the steady one, the one who kept his shit together when Ryder and I were falling apart.
Seeing him like this, fragile, broken, was like watching a pillar crumble.
"We need to talk about what we found," I said, pulling up another chair and sitting down. "About Lissa, or Alyssa, whoever the fuck she is." The name hung in the air between us, heavy with implications. Cole flinched visibly, turning his face away.
“The fucking devil,” Cole slurred, before going quiet again.
"What's there to talk about?" Ryder's voice was sharp, brittle with tension. "Her mother is Alyssa Knotty, wife of Dexter Knotty, one of the most notorious paedophiles in Dominic Blake's circle. She’s the woman who brought her five-year-old daughter to the Palace."
I felt bile rise in my throat at the words, at the image they conjured.
A little girl with purple ribbons in her hair, standing in that hellhole where Cole had suffered for years, where my mother had died.
I wasn’t stupid; I knew what was going to happen to me, what Cole was trying to protect me from.
If it wasn’t for my father, I doubt I would have survived that night.
The man may be a bastard. But I owed him my life in that respect.
But the idea of that happening to anyone was enough to make me sick.
It was the reason why I was going along with my father’s plans to get me into the inner sanctum of the Trivium.
He played it well, but he had a vendetta against Dominic Blake for allowing what happened that night to happen, and I shared it with him.
It was the reason I even entertained university.
"She was going to sell her," Cole said suddenly, his voice so quiet I almost missed it.
I looked over at him, my eyes wide. He pushed himself up to sitting, swaying slightly.
"Just like my parents sold me. That's why she was there that day.
For the lineup." The silence that followed was deafening.
We all knew what the "lineup" was, Blake's sick tradition of parading new victims, be they children or adults before potential buyers.
The thought of Cadence, our Cadence, standing in one of those lines made my blood run cold.
"But she didn't," I said, trying to find some thread of hope in this nightmare. "Cadence ended up with her grandparents instead."
"Something must have happened," Ryder agreed, running a hand through his already dishevelled hair. "Maybe the grandparents found out, stepped in?"
“Yeah, something about it all doesn’t add up,” I said, thoughts pushed through my head like a train rushing towards me. I could see the light and the danger was staring me right in the face but something had me frozen. There was some vital piece of information that just didn’t fit.
"Maybe Blake didn't offer enough," Cole said bitterly, reaching for the whisky bottle. I intercepted, moving it out of his reach. He glared at me but didn't fight it.
“That’s the thing,” Ryder said. “Why would Dominic Blake give up on something as potentially valuable as…” Even he couldn’t say it. None of us could.
“Exactly,” I said. “Which could mean that Blake was put off somehow. But that doesn’t mean he will be put off for long.”
“Are you saying that Blake could come after our girl?” Ryder asked. I nodded, the horrible weight in my stomach that I had been living with feeling so much heavier at the implications.
"There's more," I said, hating what was going on in my head. Both guys looked up at me, and I could see the mirroring despair. "Killingham has already been showing an unusual interest in Cadence since the beginning. We know this. And at the Halloween event, both he and Harrison were watching her."
"Three High Lords," Ryder said, connecting the dots immediately. "Killingham, Harrison, and if Blake knows who she is..."
"Three of the most powerful men in the Trivium," I finished. "Three of the most powerful men in the fucking country, period." Cole laughed, a hollow sound that contained no humour.
"And they all want our girl."
"The only thing protecting her right now is that she's our Consort," Ryder said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. "Trivium law is very clear on that. A Consort is untouchable by anyone but her Regents."
"But she's not fully ours, is she?" I countered, voicing the fear that had been growing since we discovered the truth. "She's fighting us at every turn. She's not bonded to us, not truly."
"If she doesn't submit, if she doesn’t stop trying to actively escape us.
Fuck, if she doesn't accept her role as our Consort in every way…
" Ryder trailed off, but we all knew what he was thinking.
The Trivium had ways of adjusting contracts, of reassigning failed Consorts who were considered a threat or who weren't properly "claimed. "
"She could be taken from us," Cole said, his voice breaking. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "And given to them. Or worse, sold into the lower circles."
The lower circles, the underground networks that operated beneath the Trivium's cover of respectability. Places like the Palace and its hidden Underground, where people disappeared and monsters roamed free.
"We can't let that happen," I said, my voice hardening with resolve. "We won't."
"What choice do we have?" Ryder asked, his eyes meeting mine. “They are already trying. This fucking new rule is Killingham’s doing already. He has our balls in a vice and is squeezing the grip. And it’s getting harder and harder to resist.” The raw emotion in his voice made my insides clench.
I could feel his desperation. It wasn’t just about teaching her a lesson any more.
It wasn’t even about proving ourselves and keeping our plan in place.
This was about protecting her. It was all about this woman who had come crashing into our lives and turned everything we knew upside down.
“We need to break her,” I said with certainty. “It's the only way to keep her safe. We need to do whatever it takes to make her give in to us. And we need to do it in the next week.”
"Break her?" Cole repeated, looking up sharply. "She's not a fucking horse, Logan. How does this make us any better than what Blake would do to her?"
“Because we love her,” Ryder whispered. I looked at him in shock.
“What the fuck?” I asked. “I get you have this obsession going, but you are reaching if you think-”
“That, you, the almighty Logan Bale could actually love someone?” Ryder asked with a smirk.
“Yeah, that’s what I am saying. You can deny it all you want.
” He glanced over at Cole, “You both can. But I can see the way you both look at her. But let’s face it, when has a woman ever so fully got under your skin the way she has.
There is a reason I call her Poison, you know. ”
“If we loved her so much, then we would let her go,” Cole said. And Ryder laughed.
“I said we loved her, not that we were saints. We are all still selfish arseholes.” I stood up, pacing the small confines of Cole's room, tension coiling in my muscles. I didn’t like where this was going.
Sure, the woman irritated me, but that was it.
I still needed the world to know that I couldn’t be disrespected.
That was the only reason why I was interested in her at all. Wasn’t it?
“Why a week?” Cole asked suddenly. I stopped, confused.
“What?” I asked.
“You said that we had to break her in the next week. Why?” Oh, that. I was surprised neither of them had thought about it.
"Because the Alumni Dinner is next week. Everyone will be there, all the High Lords, former Regents, the whole fucking Trivium circus. And we will be expected to be there."
"If she shows up still fighting us, still showing defiance..." Ryder didn't need to finish the thought.
"They will be able to tell. Fuck, Killingham already knows. They'll see it as weakness," I said. "They'll start making moves."
"They'll take her," Cole whispered, and the raw pain in his voice made me turn to look at him. His shoulders were hunched, his hands trembling. "Just like they took me."
The admission hung in the air, heavy with shared trauma. Cole rarely spoke about his time at the Underground, about the horrors he'd endured there. The fact that he was bringing it up now showed just how deeply the discovery about Cadence had shaken him.