Chapter 10
Sins of Blood
The temperature plummeted. Stone’s protective hold transformed to iron restraint, his muscles coiling beneath sweat-slicked skin with barely leashed violence. Marigold tried to back away, but he jerked her to his side. The tender man who seduced her moments ago was effectively gone.
“Just fucking say it,” Stone’s voice was deadly quiet, each word carved from Arctic ice. “Who is she?”
Hunter’s smile brimmed with malice. “Marigold Elena Calder. Twenty-four years old. Daughter of the late Evangeline Calder and that bastard Harrison Calder. Half-sister to—”
“Jordan Calder.” The name spat from Stone’s lips like a curse as he shoved her away.
Marigold’s blood crystallized to ice as she stumbled into the wall. “I can explain—”
“We don’t want more of your lies!”
She drew back at the barely contained violence in Hunter’s voice. When she looked to Stone for help, he looked away in disgust, only to glare at her with dark accusation. “Is Jordan your fucking brother?”
“Half-brother.” But why did they hate him? Knowing Jordan, he could have done anything. “We’re no—”
“No more lies!” Hunter snapped, his expression shifting from cruel to something far more dangerous. “There’s been a change of plans.”
It was clear they harbored hatred for her half-brother, and she knew all about that. What wasn’t clear was what this now meant for her. So she ran.
“No!” she yelled as Hunter snatched her off her feet, too fast for her to get away. His fingers dug into her ribs like talons.
“Hunter, wait!”
But he ignored Stone’s warning, dragging her into the hall. She kicked and fought, but he was too powerful.
“Your brother’s about to get exactly what he deserves, little liar.” Hunter’s voice was gravel and broken glass.
“Stone, help me! Please!”
But Stone only watched as Hunter dragged her off.
The way he called her a liar made her stomach lurch with dread. This wasn’t the teasing endearment Ash had used or the possessive claim Stone favored. This was an accusation. A condemnation. A declaration of war.
“Hunter, please,” she whispered, desperately trying to reason with him.
He covered her mouth with his enormous hand, blocking her nostrils and making it hard to breathe through her panic. Her muffled scream didn’t make him loosen his hold any more than her clawing. So she bit him.
“Fucking bitch!” He turned into a random bedroom and threw her onto the bed.
She sprang to her feet, bolting to the far side of the room where several pieces of furniture separated them.
He slammed the door, locking them in what might as well be a tomb.
“A little over a year ago, your dear brother attended one of our events. Uninvited. Unwelcome.”
Just like her, she thought, wondering if the irony would be her death sentence.
“I didn’t know that.” She mirrored his steps, desperately trying to keep her distance as he closed in.
“We never allow uninvited guests pass the front door, but he had friends who vouched for him, so we... accommodated his presence.”
She jerked as Stone pounded on the door. “Hunter! Open the fucking door!”
Hunter’s breathing had gone shallow and harsh, each exhale carrying the weight of barely contained fury. Stone continued to pound on the door.
Marigold searched the walls for a camera and found one above the bed. “Do something!”
Rage radiated off Hunter in waves, a hatred so deep and cold it made her bones ache with sympathetic pain. She didn’t know what Jordan had done, but she always thought the worst where her half-brother was concerned.
“He was only supposed to observe,” Hunter continued, his accent thickening with every step as he rounded the bed. “Our rules are crystal clear. First-time guests observe. They learn. They earn the privilege of participation through respect and understanding.”
“Hunter.” Stone pounded, but his voice sounded almost... broken. Then the pounding stopped.
She felt the moment Stone abandoned his rescue and left her there to fend for herself. “Please…” she begged, certain he could kill her without even breaking a sweat.
Hunter’s obsidian stare bore into her with untethered hate. “You deserve to know exactly what kind of monster shares your blood. What kind of poison runs through your veins.”
“Please,” Marigold begged, backing into the wall.
“She was a child.”
“I’m not like him!” She closed her eyes, covering her ears.
He snatched her wrist, ripping her hands away and forcing her to listen. Panic spiked as his strength dominated her into submission. He twisted her body, pulling her away from the wall. “First, he drugged her.” The words exploded from Hunter like artillery fire, each syllable designed to destroy.
“I don’t want to hear this!”
“Tough!” He pinned her hands at the base of her spine, forcing her body to bow forward as he spoke directly in her ear. “Our sweet, innocent sister. Eighteen years old, as gentle as summer rain, fresh as morning dew, and he fucking drugged her.”
“No,” she cried, shutting her eyes as if she could somehow escape what was coming.
“Then, he took what he wanted and left her bleeding and broken in a room that was supposed to be her sanctuary.”
The world tilted sideways, reality fracturing like glass under pressure. Marigold was once again drowning. Once again on that cold slab being strapped down, forced to tolerate the unthinkable.
“Big breath in....” Her mother’s voice echoed from a distant corner of her mind, but her heart pounded louder.
“Blow it out small…” Hands. She could feel their cold hands pushing her down.
She pulled her hair as her mouth and eyes squeezed shut, already tasting the rubber as she tried to breath ‘just right’ like her mother had taught her.
She could smell the disinfectant on the floors, taste the sweat on her lips. “Big breath in…” But phantom hands were all she could feel. Pushing. Pulling. Until every breath was shallow, cold, and wrong.
“Get off me!” she screamed, opening her eyes to find red carpet not linoleum.
Hunter’s voice was a blade against her throat, sharp enough to draw blood. “He drugged a girl barely out of school.”
She panted. Her mind breaking under the weight of fear.
“Raped her.”
Reality splintered. Was this real? Or was this a hallucination? There were three. But now there was only one. She gasped, every shallow breath hiking up her anxiety until she was in a full-blown panic attack.
“Not only did he leave her in a mess of his own making, he left her pregnant and traumatized, going back to whatever hell-hole spawned him.”
Pregnant. The word hit her like a physical blow, driving the air from her lungs as the door burst open.
“Hunter, get off of her!”
She was thrown onto the bed, too afraid to do more than cover her head. Russian explicative exploded from each of them as Hunter was thrown into a wall. This was too real to be a hallucination.
She pinched her arm, validating that everything taking place around her was real.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Ash shouted.
Marigold flinched when he placed a gentle hand on her back.
“Are you okay?”
She cowered away from his touch, unsure who she could trust. They were all liars. Like Jordan, the golden son who could do no wrong. The perfect heir to the Calder empire.
“I’m sorry,” she cried.
“Not yet, but you will be,” Hunter threatened.
“Enough!” Stone shoved him back.
“Why should we protect her from the truth?” Hunter snarled at his brother. His black eyes found her. “Our sister lost the baby at twelve weeks. She attempted suicide twice before that. After the miscarriage, she stopped eating, stopped speaking, stopped being our bright, beautiful Katya.”
Katya.
Their sister had a name, a face, a life that Jordan had destroyed with casual cruelty. And Marigold shared his blood, carried his DNA, bore the same family name that had become synonymous with the suffering he caused.
“Now, it’s our turn to make things even.” He lunged for her and she screamed, scrambling off the bed and running to Ash.
“Stop!” Ash curled his body around her trembling body. “What the fuck, Hunter? Get control of yourself!”
She sucked in a jagged breath, then another. Her mother’s voice couldn’t penetrate her panic. “Please…” she begged. “I swear, I didn’t know. I’m not lying.”
Hunter’s tone was as cold and unbending as ice. “Not lying like you swore you were Mary Langford?”
She twisted in Ash’s arms. “Jordan is everything wrong with my family,” she sputtered. “Everything I was running from. If I’d known what he did—”
Her words cut off as his hand closed around her throat. Ash and Stone shouted for him to let go, but when they touched him, he shoved them away with merciless force.
“You’d what?” Hunter’s grip tightened as he towered over her with the presence of an avenging angel. “Turn him in? Testify against him? Make him pay for what he did?”
She tried to pry the fingers around her throat loose, desperate to make him understand. “Yes!” The word tore from her throat like a battle cry. “Yes, absolutely, whatever it took—”
“Lies!” he bellowed, shoving her into the wall. “Calders can’t be trusted. Deceit’s written into your fucking DNA.”
“Hunter!” one of the brothers snapped, but she couldn’t see past his looming presence. Lack of oxygen was making it difficult to hear.
“I’m not like him. I’m decent. That’s why I was trying to escape.” Tears burned her eyes as she sputtered for breath. “I hate him,” she rasped. “He’s the reason I’m running!”
“Why?” Hunter demanded, his fist knotting painfully in her hair. “I want the fucking truth.”
“Because I know what he is.” The confession stuttered past her lips on a narrow wheeze. “I knew about the women he brought home. I saw how they looked afterward. Hunter…please.” She clawed at his unbreakable grip and wheezed, “You’re choking me.”
“How did they look?”
She flinched when the brothers tried to pull him off of her, his unbreakable grip jerking her around by the neck like a ragdoll. Blackness bled into her periphery.
“Broken.” She gasped for air. “Empty. Wrong.”