Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Something made me stir from my sleep. Not a nightmare this time. Or if it was, I thankfully didn’t remember. I didn’t wake up in a sweat or in a place I didn’t recognize. I only awoke from a deep sleep, thinking I’d heard Emery calling for me.
When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, Emery’s form came into focus beside me. His chest rose and fell steadily, his arm draped across me, his leg nearly entwined with mine. For several minutes, I stayed still, listening to the rhythm of his slow, even breaths before carefully inching out from underneath him.
Sitting up in bed, I glanced around. Through the window, the rain continued, though it had softened to a gentle drizzle.
I also noticed a light coming from the hallway through a crack in the door.
I rose from the bed and crept over to the door.
I glanced back at Emery who hadn’t moved. Quickly, I put on a shirt and sweatpants and left the room.
Strolling across the passage, I peeked my head into the study, expecting to find Micheal or even Leslie.
But there was nobody inside. The lamp in the corner was on, but the room was empty.
Cautiously, I entered the study and looked in the corners, tension already setting at each shadow, waiting to see my phantom’s face.
But he never appeared. Even when I opened the door on the other end and looked onto the balcony. The church below lay dark.
I closed the door and eyed the files and the bulletin board. Maybe Micheal had come up to check on things and had chosen not to wake us in a screaming fit. Though I doubted that.
I went to the desk and opened the file on top. I had only skimmed some of them the last time I was in here. I sifted through them, finding files on those children who had been lost as well as a few of the nurses and doctors who had been employed in the warehouse. Something told me Andrea had helped Micheal find them.
I sat down and began to read each file. Learning more about the other kids, where they had come from, while also learning about the staff under my father’s watch. Some of them, I discovered, were now employed at Severfalls.
I must have sat there reading for what felt like hours, piecing everything together. When I got to the files on my father, brother, uncle, and even a file on me, I had to pause several times so as not to have a minor breakdown.
It’s hard knowing what they did, came Emery’s voice over my shoulder. I caught his shadow passing by the light. Hard knowing those below will never accept you because of what happened, isn’t it? But you’re so close now, Eve. Soon, you’ll understand. And you’ll be like us.
I gripped the table.
You’ll be just like us.
Eve.
“Eve?”
I looked over at the door and saw Emery standing there. My heart flipped thinking he was my ghost until I saw him wearing the pants he’d worn earlier and saw the actual concern in his eyes, then I convinced myself it was really him.
“You alright?”
I placed my hands on my lap. “Yeah, I think so.”
He tilted his head. “It’s nearly morning. How long have you been in here?”
I glanced at the files spread over the desk. “I’m not sure, honestly.” I smiled back at him. “But it’s okay. I’ll be right there. I’ll just…clean this up.”
He relaxed a little. “I’ll make you something downstairs when you’re ready.”
“Okay.”
He let me be to reorganize. Calmly, I closed the files and started to restack them. When I found the file on Dom and Lez again, I hesitated, realizing that, of course, Micheal didn’t have a file of his own. His focus had been on looking for the others.
I put the twins’ file on the stack. I didn’t have my laptop again, but maybe there was still a way to let their stories be told.
After cleaning the desk, I shut off the light, a chill creeping up my spine as the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. My ghost was watching me again, lingering in the dark. Shaking it off, I left the study and headed back to the bedroom.
The bed was empty. So was the couch.
Before I could call out for Emery, my attention caught on the light spilling from the bathroom. The door was ajar, just enough for me to see him standing at the sink with the water running. He leaned forward, hands gripping the edges of the sink, head bowed over the basin. On the counter beside him, an open pill bottle lay in plain view.
He looked like he was trying to not get sick. His eyes were closed as he took in slow breaths.
He took sips of water from the faucet before turning it off. He took a few more deep breaths before taking the bottle of pills and capping them.
When he turned, he saw me and froze. We locked eyes, and I found my voice.
“How long?” I said.
It took him a moment to answer. “Not long. A few days after I lost you.” He approached me, showing me the bottle in his hand. “I knew if I didn’t try again, I might not ever have you back. I wanted that more, so I got my ass into gear and Andrea was willing to help.” He shook the little bottle before putting it in his pocket. “It’s hard every day, but I’m getting better at it just like you said.”
Tears stung my eyes, and I blinked them away. “I always believed you would.”
I snuck back into my room just as the light slipped through the shades of the window, washing the area in gray-blue light. As I closed the door softly and went to lay next to her, Lena turned and fixed me with a suspicious eye.
“Did you lose yourself going to the bathroom?”
I pursed my lips. “Maybe,” I muttered.
She crossed her arms. “You were with him all night, weren’t you?”
I couldn’t keep my expression blank and looked away knowing she could see the guilt on my face.
Lena sat up. “Eve—”
“I can’t stay away from him, Lena. After everything, I’m sorry, I can’t. I won’t.”
Sighing, she reached out for me and I sat by her, taking her hand.
“As your other best friend, it’s my job to be honest with you because I love you. I don’t think you need me to tell you how batshit your relationship with him is. After yesterday, I was close to threatening that man’s life if he ever touched you. It’s all so fucked up it’s hard to believe.” She squeezed my hand. “I see how you look at each other. It kind of freaks me out. I don’t know how much of it is really you or if he broke you, then tried to make all those shattered pieces fit to his whim.”
I looked at our hands. “Truthfully, it might be a little of both. But I’d been broken for a long time and now I think we just want to heal. I know what it looks like. I know it’s crazy. But it just is. And it’s what I want.”
“Just please, Eve, promise me if he ever does anything to scare or hurt you again, you’ll tell me. You let me and Jamie protect you.”
“I promise.”
I heard the garage open and the rev of an engine as I finished drinking my coffee. The rain had stopped according to Leslie who had been in the garage before sunrise, working on one of his cars.
Emery had gone to help him after fixing me and Lena some breakfast tacos, which she took reluctantly, mumbling something about being sick of eggs. I’d nudged her, and she thanked him half-heartedly.
Not long after, Dominic appeared. He greeted us with a nod and smile before he went to the kitchen.
Leslie came in briefly to talk to his brother, and I noticed Lena tense when Lez glanced her way before returning to the garage. I felt bad that he still made her uncomfortable even if he appeared to be behaving himself.
As Dom sat at his computer with what appeared to be an energy drink and a bag of chips, I got up from my seat, letting Lena know I’d be right back.
As I approached Dom, he looked over at me, his brows raised as if surprised. He turned in his seat to face me.
“I meant to tell you, you have an impressive setup.”
He smiled again and signed Thanks .
I checked over my shoulder and caught Lena giving me a curious look as she sipped her coffee. I turned back to Dom. “Listen, I was wondering, you wouldn’t happen to have a spare laptop lying around, would you? I know this is kind of random but I’ve been working on my thesis for school. It was about Emery…is about Emery…but it’s kind of grown from just that subject alone.” I shifted on my feet as I tried to explain. “I’d like to add more about all of you. But I don’t have my laptop. I did save everything in the cloud and I figure if I could borrow a computer just for a little bit—”
He put up his hand to stop me then he wrote on a notepad next to him and showed it to me.
“Say no more.”
I let out a breath. “Thanks, Dom.” I smiled.
As he made for the garage, I went back over to Lena.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“I need to add some things to my thesis.”
Her eyes widened. “You aren’t serious.”
“I know I was in the final edits, but I think this is important.”
She covered her eyes and started to laugh. “No. I meant, you aren’t seriously going to try to work on your thesis here, of all places. Which, by the way, is no longer a thesis, it’s a damn book at this point,” she said, dropping her hand. “After everything that has happened, don’t you think it can wait?”
“No, I think this is the perfect time. Because I can talk to the victims and they get the chance to tell their side, to the person whose family destroyed their lives.”
“It’s definitely a fascinating social experiment, I just don’t know if you’re going to like what they have to say.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. Maybe it just matters that it’s said.”
We heard another car pulling into the garage and several car doors slamming shut. A minute later Leslie and Dom walked back in, followed by Emery and Micheal.
Dom came straight to me and handed me a slim black laptop.
“Wow, this is great, Dom.”
I went to open it, and Leslie shot around and snapped it shut. “Dom might be a little too trusting, but I know better. No internet and we check everything you’re doing.”
Emery came around behind me to stare Leslie down. “She’s innocent.”
“I’ll see it when I believe it.”
“Alright, I’ll check her work. Or do you not trust me either, Lez?”
“Honestly, no. You got wet dick syndrome.”
“I’m about to have bloody knife syndrome here in a second.”
“Why does she need the laptop?” Micheal asked.
“It’s for my thesis,” I answered.
“She’s doing it on all of you,” Lena added.
“On us?” Micheal asked.
“Yes. It started with Emery, but after I found out about the warehouse and Project Redbird, I started adding more to it. Now, I’d like to get words from the survivors.”
“You want to interview us?”
“That’s right.”
Leslie scoffed while Dom seemed intrigued. Micheal only eyed my curiously.
“Can I read what you have so far?”
I gave him a surprised look. “Sure. But I’ll need the internet to get my thesis off the cloud.”
“Dom can help you with that. But I have to agree with Lez, just out of precaution, no internet.”
I didn’t argue. Dom placed the laptop on the table and, once he opened it up and got online, I directed him to my storage box.
After it was downloaded and made available through a writing software, he gave the laptop to Micheal.
“It’s not fully edited yet,” I explained. “I still have to finish that and tweak a few things.”
“But it’s good,” Emery commented. I looked at him and he smirked. “From what I’ve read so far at least.”
“That’s because it’s mostly all about you.”
His smile widened. “I know.”
I rolled my eyes at him as Micheal went to sit on the couch and started to read.
“Dom, make sure you check what she’s doing,” Leslie said as he slunk back to the garage.
“I’ll try to talk some sense into him,” Emery whispered before following him.
“Any chance I could get my phone back, Dom?” Lena asked. “I got a load of work to finish too.”
Dom gave her a sad little smile and shook his head before returning to his station. He wrote something out and showed us. “No can do. But Andrea will be around to take you out to make some calls soon.”
“Great,” Lena mumbled. She turned her chair toward the hall. “Well. I need a shower. Mind helping me get in at least?”
I followed Lena to the bathroom, helping her get undressed and in the shower, telling her I’d be back in fifteen to get her out. When I returned to the community room, I sat at the table, watching Micheal’s face as he read my paper.
When he finished, his eyes met mine. Without looking away, I went over to him and sat down.
“This is…really something,” he said.
“It’s a lot.”
“You discovered the reports about us?”
“Yes. I still have them.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “This is honestly fascinating, Eve. I don’t think anyone will ever have the insight you have into such a…unique situation.”
“Probably not.”
He gave me a serious look. “And you really plan to publish this? Even though it’s about your father’s company?”
“I do.”
He wiped his mouth. “That would…greatly benefit us. I wish it was enough to stop the experiments even now.”
“I will mention Severfalls. And Kennedy too. But I agree it would likely only start a defamation lawsuit and nothing more.”
“When we stop them for good, hopefully it won’t matter.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Either way people will know.”
He cleared his throat. “I assume there was information about me in the reports?”
“Some, yes. But I think adding more than just what was said in those files would benefit this, don’t you think?”
The corner of his lip twitched a little. “Yes, I think so.” I dared to believe he might actually start to trust me. “Alright. I’ll talk. Can’t say the same for the others. But I’ll give you a page of my thoughts.”
While he set up a space for us to talk in private, I helped Lena out of the shower. I returned to Micheal who picked Andrea’s exam room, giving me a chair to sit while he sat on the side of the bed.
I asked him some questions and he gave me a recount of his childhood. His father had died in a work accident, his mother, whether from grief or some underlying condition, started to lose herself. If she wasn’t having a fit of rage, she was drinking, leaving him alone at the age of four. From what he was told, the neighbors had found him one night in his own filth with flies on him and maggots in a festering wound that his mother hadn’t taken him to the doctor for. She had been gone for three days and all he had was water from the sink.
They took him away. He was in foster care from then up to age eleven when he was sold to the Martel company and from there tested in the warehouse. He got out of there at an early start because he had stabbed one of the nurses.
“I would have ended up like the others if I hadn’t fought back early on,” he explained. “I was down there for a little over six months, and I’ll never forget it. I still have nightmares. I can’t imagine how the others coped.”
“And you want to take out those responsible even now?”
His expression turned icy. “My rage is for the others more than myself. Yes, they did things to me, but I saw worse. Much worse. I won’t be able to let it go until I know they are done for good. Now that they are working on pregnant women, I’m even more prepared to let that rage take over. But we are all we have left. And…I want to keep the others safe. So I want to do things right, I want to finish this. But where we can still make it out and move on with our lives.” He tilted head, studying me again. “You understand that to an extent now, don’t you?”
I did. And I told him so. I wasn’t going to stop them. But I agreed I wanted them to come out of it all unscathed.
“Thank you,” I told him when it was all done. “And thank you for helping Emery. He might not say it but, he needed you. They all do.”
He gave me a small smile even though his eyes held a tired soul. “I think we can appreciate what you’re doing, Eve. Giving us a voice. Coming from you, it means a lot. I’m sorry that you became a victim too in the end.”
Those words held more meaning than either of us could guess.
When we were done, I saved the notes I’d made, looking to add them to the paper later. As we left the room together, we found Andrea sitting with Emery, talking.
“How was your shift, Andrea?” Micheal asked as she greeted us.
“The usual.”
“Can we talk?”
She rose from her seat, wiping her hands on her nurse uniform. “Of course.”
Micheal dipped his head. “See you around, Eve.”
I stepped away so they could talk in her room in private. I took Emery’s hand as I stood beside him, noticing Dom wasn’t at his station. “Lena not come out of the room yet?”
“Haven’t seen her.”
“Dom or Lez?”
“Lez left the garage a little bit ago when Andrea showed up.”
I got a weird feeling in my gut. I left him for a moment to check inside our room.
Lena wasn’t inside.
I looked back at Emery concerned and he got up to join me. We walked down the hall until I noticed one of the doors to what I thought had been a storage room was cracked open, and I heard voices within.
Without knocking, I pushed the door open. Inside, I found Lena sitting at the end of a long table with Lez leaning on the edge close to her, holding a gun. I hardly noticed the wisp of smoke in the air and Lena trying to hide something on the other side of her chair.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Lena’s face darkened with a blush. While Lez looked irritated that I had the gall to interrupt him as he pointed his gun at the ground.
“What?” Leslie snapped.
“Why is Lena alone in here with you?”
“She’s not. Dom’s here too.”
I glanced over and saw Dom leaning up against a counter. He put up his hand in greeting. Around him were all sorts of guns of different sizes on the wall, including a set of throwing knives also of all shapes and sizes and I realized this was their little armory.
“Okay. Why the fuck is she alone in here with you two ? And why are you pointing a gun at her?”
“I wasn’t pointing the gun. I was showing her. This is a Colten 45 cal—”
“I don’t care what kind it is, why are you showing it?”
Leslie smirked, his cat-eyes sharp with amusement as he tilted his head. “She asked.”
I didn’t believe him at first until I realized Lena wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Lena?”
“I…was just curious.”
I raised my brows. “You let him bring you in here?”
“Not without a little persuasion, right, sweetheart?” Lez smiled at Lena, offering the gun to Dom who put it away.
Lena frowned. “Don’t call me that. And it was only for a second. I didn’t really want to.”
Lez snorted. “Well, if you're not going to finish that blunt in your hand, at least let me.”
I didn’t think Lena could blush more, but she did. She revealed the hand she’d been hiding on the other side of her chair and gave the blunt to Lez. He took a hit and blew the smoke up to the ceiling, looking smug.
Lena looked everywhere but me until she finally cracked and glanced my way. “I guess I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I needed something to take the edge off. And it ain’t bad weed,” she mumbled.
“Got a great dispensary up the road,” Lez added, taking another hit. He offered the blunt back to her and she turned it down, pretending to be offended. “Suit yourself.”
I glared at Emery who wiped his amused expression away, clearing his throat. “You mess with her at all, and we are going to have a problem.”
“She didn’t look too upset to me.”
Lena pursed her lips and turned her chair. “Is Andrea here?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
“But she’s talking with Micheal.”
She slumped back in her seat.
I went inside. Lez slid off the table so I could place the laptop in his spot. “Will you two let me interview you?” I asked.
Lez glanced at Dom. “Did Micheal let you?”
“Yes.”
Lez tilted his head back to assess me. “How do we know you're not using it to get us in trouble. Maybe get some kind of confession and throw us to the feds?”
“Micheal read my paper. You’re welcome to as well. It’s not for a confession.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“You have access to my storage so in the end if you think I’m full of shit and going to rat on you, you can delete the updated file with your information. How about that?”
“Eve…” Lena started to say but I put my hand up.
“But I want to get your side,” I said, giving him the truth. “I’m going to publish this piece, and I want others to read it, to hear it.”
“Why? What’s in it for you?”
“Nothing. Just the need to give you back your voice, to tell your story, so others can know. Because you deserve that.”
Dom tapped on the counter and Lez looked over as he signed to him.
Lez frowned. “We don’t know that.”
“Please, just let her,” Lena said this time. “If you do…” She looked torn by her next words. “If you do, I'll hang here with you, and you can show me more of your…collection.”
“Lena, you don’t have to—”
It was her turn to put up her hand.
Lez rubbed his chin and throat. He glanced at Dom then back at me, giving a low grunt. “Fine.”
I took a seat at one end and Leslie took a seat at the other with Dom still leaning against the counter behind him. Lena moved by the door with Emery standing guard against the doorframe.
Like Micheal, I asked them to give an account of their childhood. I knew some things already from their file, but I wanted to hear it in their words.
They only knew their mother for a short time. They never knew of their father. Like Micheal, their mother neglected them, falling on hard drugs until she overdosed some time around their sixth birthdays. They knew she was of Mexican descent while their father they determined was European of some kind but only because of a DNA test the foster care had them take years ago. Still, they were never told who their father was and were forced to speculate.
“Probably some rich asshole that our mother worked for,” Lez mentioned. “Got her knocked up then kicked her to the curb.”
They had no other family and often wondered if it was because their mother had run away at a young age—possibly to be with their father. After her death, they were placed in the system, bouncing from one foster family to another.
Dominic had always been quiet, though far from perfect. He got into his share of trouble—stealing, running off without telling anyone, and causing minor mischief. Leslie, on the other hand, was a full-blown troublemaker. He was constantly in fights for disturbing pranks, like stuffing a bag of cockroaches into a teacher’s coat after being punished or setting his room on fire, though he swore it wasn’t intentional.
“We got traded from one family to another from age six to eight. One foster dad made us work in the garage of his car service business for no pay. That’s when we learned the basics on fixing cars,” he explained, laughing a little. “That’s when we hotwired our first car and attempted to drive it. We barely made it out of the parking lot before we crashed into a sign, remember, Dom?”
“At eight?” I said, shocked.
Dom signed something, and Lez translated. “We were quick learners. Still took us several tries to even hotwire it on our own, from what we can remember. Dom swiped one of our foster dad’s notebooks and found instructions there. Safe to say, he wasn’t thrilled when he found out—we got kicked back into the system after that.
"When we were nine, we got separated for the first time. Dom ended up with this creepy couple. I got stuck with some crazy militant bitch and her spineless husband, along with four other foster kids. I was the worst with her, though. She was ridiculously strict, and I was determined to find a way back to Dom.”
Lez shifted in his seat, the memory visibly uncomfortable for him to recount. “She thought sending me to some ‘troubled youth’ camp one summer would fix me up. She was dead wrong. It was just a place where kids got abused. One almost died before I stepped in. Lost ten pounds in a week. Crazy thing is, that was only the second-worst experience of my childhood. Would’ve been number one if not for the warehouse.”
After running away repeatedly, the twins reunited in the foster care system—only to end up under Martel’s control. That’s when things got worse. They were sent to the warehouse, where they stayed for years. Dom lost his voice there. Lez lost his sanity, even cutting off part of his ear before they stopped him.
Eventually, the twins were released—not because of mercy, but because they became unmanageable. Lez kept self-harming, and Dom started having what Lez called "berserker moments.” Dom destroyed equipment, even broke down the door to his room. The staff couldn’t contain them no matter how hard they tried. They let them go after realizing they’d lost control.
“After they tossed us to the streets, we ran off and got involved in a local gang. Started going up the ranks real quick when they learned all the shit we could do to break into cars. Would drive around stolen cars, got into juvie several times for that. But those were fun years, weren’t they, Dom?”
He nodded in agreement.
“We had our share of psychotic moments. Especially from the drugs,” he continued. “It’s rough some days, if we get triggered by something or have a week of bad dreams. But we're surviving.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I said, saving what I wrote. I happened to look over at Lena whose face was ashen. When she glanced at Lez, I thought I saw a look of pity in her eyes.
I turned my gaze to Emery whose expression was dark. I could imagine the memories he was trying to keep away that were triggered by their story.
“Now that’s done with.” Lez moved off his seat and toward the counter and picked up a black-coated knife. He pointed it at Lena. “Come here and I’ll show you how to throw one of these.”
Lena’s eyes widened. “Um, don’t think I’ll be able to do that from my seat—”
“Oh, you will.”
Lena glanced at me and rolled her eyes. “Psycho,” she whispered as she moved past me.
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine. Hopefully, Andrea will save me soon and I can get my phone back.”
“We’ll make sure of it.”
Reluctantly, I left Lena with them, knowing trust needed to go both ways. “Now for the hardest one,” I said as I stood by Emery in the hallway. I glanced over at Cassidy’s room. “You think she’ll scream at me if I knock on her door?”
“Only one way to find out.”
I took a deep breath and walked toward her room. I hesitated only for a second before knocking.
“Cassidy?”
No response. I knocked again softly then dared to try the doorknob. Her room wasn’t locked. I opened the door a crack and found the room empty.
“She has to be here, her car is parked outside the garage,” Emery said behind me.
We looked at each other and, without a word, moved for the stairs.
The church was still dark even with the dim light breaking through the windows. The sunlight which cut through the window at the back made a long strip of red light cast across the aisleway. We walked down, careful of where we stepped until Emery shoved the door to the garden open, blinding the church in white light.
“Can’t think of where else she might be,” Emery said as we stepped outside and walked toward the fountain.
We stood by the gate of the garden, searching across the graveyard. Then Emery pointed to movement just beyond a crooked willow tree.
“Looks like her there,” he said. “You want me to come with you?”
“I think I’ll talk to her alone this time if that’s okay.”
“I’ll be right here waiting.”
I turned for the graveyard and made my way toward the figure crouching beyond the willow. Clouds rolled above, some dark, but they didn’t give the threat of rain. Grass and dead leaves crunched under my feet as Cassidy came closer into view.
She was kneeling down on a plot of land with several colorful plants spread over the ground, some with a velvet-like texture. It seemed way too late to be planting anything, but, I found as I got closer, she wasn’t gardening at all, she was painting. A canvas laid out on the ground before her with bottles of paint next to it.
I stopped just a few feet away, watching. She didn’t wear her police uniform today. Just some black cargo pants and a gray T-shirt. With her back to me, I could just make out the colors of red, white, and black as she took her brush and made aggressive strokes.
“What do you want?” she asked without looking at me.
I didn’t ask how she knew I was there. Like Emery, they all had an inhuman ability to sense things others couldn’t.
“I was hoping I could talk to you,” I said quietly.
“About what?”
“I’ve been working on my thesis for school. It started off as a paper on Emery, and how we interacted after everything happened. But it’s grown into something much bigger. About the victims of Project Redbird and the warehouse.”
She didn’t respond as she continued to paint.
“I’ve gotten interviews with the others. I was hoping to get the same from you.”
She made a few more strokes, then put her brush down. I braced myself for her rejection, but was surprised when she wiped her hands on her pants and turned my way.
Her expression might have made anyone else flinch, but I forced myself to hold her gaze. Her jaw clenched as she assessed me, a sneer forming on her face. Then it slipped away.
“Alright.” She sat with her knees up, her elbows resting on top.
“Alright?”
“You wanna ask me what it was like? Go right ahead.”
I tried to hide my look of surprise as I took a seat there, crossing my legs and setting the laptop on my lap. “Can you tell me about your childhood leading up to the experiments and what happened after?”
She sat very still, only her one hand clenching into a fist. “I lived with my grandma at a young age. My mother had left me, and my father was in prison. Grandma died when I was seven. I went into foster care. No one picked me up until age nine. That’s when Martel took me.”
I tried not to react as I typed down her words. “How long were you in the warehouse?”
“Five years,” she began, her voice cold. “They told me I was making progress with the drugs. I was the fastest at solving their puzzles, acing their tests. They said I showed promise. Then they’d throw me into a think tank for hours, watching how it affected me.
“They’d dunk me in ice-cold water until I was on the verge of drowning, then force me to complete another puzzle—faster every time. They’d stab a large needle into my back until my spine felt like it was on fire and make me memorize a dozen equations. If I didn’t answer fast enough or got one wrong, I’d be shocked. It was all because they wanted the perfect soldier—one who could think up an escape plan or a strategy even while being tortured. Someone who could endure any pain and still get out.”
She tilted her head, a sneer curling her lips. “When I deliberately botched a test, they nearly beat me to death. That’s when they started the hypnosis program. Can’t have their bright little soldier disobeying orders, right? Just a few special words, and I’d snap to attention, ready to do whatever they wanted.”
Her eyes narrowed as she leaned forward. “Whatever… they… wanted. Your brother, I remember, used those special words often. He liked taking me into a room alone for his own ‘tests.’ Made me do things that would leave me retching later. Made me want to bash my head into the concrete walls of my room. Eventually, I did. They had to patch up the crack in my skull.”
Her voice wavered slightly, but the venom remained. “When I started failing their expectations—too many side effects, losing sight in one eye—they quit me. Just threw me back into foster care. But no one wanted the broken girl with the bad eye. I had fits, and it wasn’t long before I was sent to a mental institution. Drugs numbed me there, and when I got out, I ended up on the streets. That’s when Micheal found me. Saved my life, told me he wanted to make them all pay for what they did. I didn’t need convincing. I was ready.”
Her sneer grew sharper. “We waited, bided our time. Until Emery got to your brother first. I should be glad, but honestly? I wished it had been me. I wanted to be the one there that night, slitting your brother’s throat.”
The silence grew between us. I sat frozen, unable to speak. I’d missed typing half her story as I just sat there and listened.
“Let me guess, you don’t believe me? Don’t believe your brother could—”
“No,” I interrupted, finding my voice. “No, I…I believe you.”
I didn’t want to believe it, but there was no reason for her to lie. The pain she carried was written across her face, unmistakable. After everything that had come to light, I had slowly come to terms with the truth: my father and brother were capable of unspeakable acts.
No matter how I remembered them—my smiling brother climbing into the treehouse to play with me, giving me the necklace as a gift, wrapping me in so much love—I had to face the reality. No matter how much it hurt, I had to accept that beneath all of that warmth and kindness, he could also be a monster.
Cassidy made a face at me, both confused and angry. “Is that because you knew?”
“No. I swear I knew nothing.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said softly. “Just like you told Emery, right? How you didn’t mean to find his sister. How you didn’t mean to get her caught. Yeah, I heard your conversation. Honestly, I’m surprised Emery didn’t kill you on the spot.”
She shifted onto her knees, leaning in closer, her glare cutting through me. “I knew her too. She was in the room next to mine. We talked through the walls, trying to comfort each other. I remember her cries, her screams. And then, one day, they just stopped. She was gone.”
Her head tilted slightly, the glare in her eyes hardening. “Emery might not blame you, but that’s because he’s lovesick. Me? I’ll never trust your word. You’re not one of us. You’re just the one who got lucky and lived. Be sure to write that down in your paper.”
She turned from me and picked up her brush, dipping it in the red and continuing her strokes.
I tried to steady my shaking hands as I took the laptop and closed it. I stared at her back for a moment and saw the picture she painted over her shoulder. A picture of rabbits, their heads and bodies twisted, crushing each other until they seemed to meld together into one. Eyes, tails, feet, and open mouths screaming as they fell into a black void.