50. Samantha
50
SAMANTHA
I couldn’t process what this person was saying.
My sister.
My God. My brother.
They were both here.
I… How could I process this? But Sabrina wasn’t mine. He’d gotten to her. He took her away from me. He turned her against me. I stood here and listened as Sabrina talked about this new secret society. How great it was. How powerful. How elite.
The punchline was her.
Park Sebastian wanted to hurt us and he won in the end. He was a part of the new secret society, even from prison. He orchestrated everything.
Jesus Christ. Did Garrett know how much in contact Sabrina had been with Park? I couldn’t imagine he’d be okay with it. He knew what Park tried to do me, and my sister was telling me that Park wasn’t a serial rapist. That we set him up.
She believed it. Everything he said. She believed every damn word.
No.
I made up my mind.
He didn’t get to have her. I didn’t care how long he spent grooming her, making her believe his bullshit. I wouldn’t allow it.
“Where is he?”
My sister shut up. I tuned her out because everything she was saying was on repeat. There was nothing new. It was crazy rhetoric. Half was about how amazing the new secret society was, and the other half was how enraged she was on Uncle Seb’s behalf for what the old secret society did to him. Round and fucking round.
“Who?”
“Park.”
Her eyes got wide before more glee beamed from her. “He’s still in prison. They got him convicted for being a serial rapist, remember? Such bullshit charges, but he has a new lawyer and there’s a new judge in the secret society. They’re going to get him out. It’s a matter of time now. I can’t wait.” She rubbed her hands together.
Bullshit charges. I shook my head. They weren’t bullshit charges. I looked over her head to Mason, saw the concern he had for me. He knew what Park tried to do to me.
But Garrett left, seemingly to protect me, and what? He left his daughter behind? How the hell had Sabrina been in contact with Park all her life? Why wasn’t she in Europe with her parents?
I needed to talk to Garrett. I needed Sabrina to shut the fuck up. She was spouting nonsense. And I needed to talk to Steele. He’d been quiet since her arrival.
“You need—I need to talk to your father.”
She stopped talking again, but then a wicked smile stretched over her face. “But you haven’t asked me the best part. The big reveal, sister. Don’t you want to know the real reason I’m here? Why I sent Steele to go to school here ahead of me? It’s really good. I promise.”
God.
I didn’t want to know.
I didn’t know if I could stomach it, whether it was real or bullshit.
I started to tell her just that, but she tilted her head to the side, softening her grin. “It has to do with Maddy.”
I went still, hearing that.
My daughter.
What did my daughter have to do with whatever dark plans my sister had concocted? Steele too. I sent him a scathing look, but he was watching his sister with confusion.
“They changed the recruiting rule. You remember how it worked the last time, right?”
I did, remembering when Park himself explained it all to me.
The families were legacies. My grandfather. My father. It made sense why they tapped Sabrina to join the new one. Park’s family started it all. They initiated my mother, except she was blacklisted. They tried to initiate me. They wanted Mason, Logan. They really wanted James Kade, though he was considered a special exception. The recruiting happened in college. They pulled people in through friendships and bonding, finding out their secrets and using that to keep them inside the society. It was a cult. If you left, all of your secrets were released and your life was ruined.
The power of The Network had been terrifying. If this new one was worse, that gave me chills.
My mouth was dry, feeling like I was scraping over bark as I asked, “How did they change it?”
“We can recruit in high school now.”
Oh, God.
She sent Steele here. He was in the same school as Maddy.
Steele was cool. Popular. That was obvious to see. His group of friends seemed to be friends with my daughter.
I shared a horrified look with Mason, both of us realizing what she was trying to do. I rasped out, “You’re trying to recruit my daughter?”
Her eyes were soulless. She tucked her hands behind her back and swung her shoulders from side to side. All demure-like and the devil incarnate. “That’s the thing. Right? The dangerous part of secret societies. Cults. Once you get in someone’s head, in their emotions, you can’t get out. I’m in Maddy’s head. The guys were nice enough to introduce us, to let us hang out at Beltraine’s house on the weekend. Your daughter is real nice. She looks up to me. She likes me.”
Axel’s nose was wrinkled. His top lip curled up in disgust.
Steele’s eyes were bulging out, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Beltraine shared the same, but there was an undercurrent with him. A darker feeling. He was plotting and the way he was staring at Sabrina, those thoughts were about her.
God.
Was it true? Did Sabrina already have a handle on Maddy? Was she so far in that we’d never be able to get Sabrina’s influence out of her? We were seeing the real life product of this recruitment in person. My sister was proof of how powerful, how dangerous that type of recruitment could be.
I had no idea what kind of person my sister might’ve been because she was all Park Sebastian personified. She was his puppet.
No.
I shook my head, eyes closing. It couldn’t be true, but I thought Maddy had been spending time with different friends. I met them. Thought they were great influences. I didn’t know it had all been a lie, but Maddy had consistently been lying since James died.
James…
Oh—no, no, no .
No—I locked eyes with Mason, but…
He knew. He already knew.
He’d been waiting for me to get there.
The old secret society wanted James. Badly.
The new one… They were about revenge, apparently.
They hadn’t come after me because of my father, but there would’ve been nothing to keep them away from James.
My stomach twisted. I covered my mouth as vomit churned up my throat.
Dear Lord. No .
My sister quieted as she watched me. As I pieced things together, her smile only grew.
Her face wasn’t even human right now. If I’d been told a demon possessed her, I would’ve believed it. Her eyes were bone chilling. She was so eager. Her head inclined toward me, and she tucked some of her hair behind her ear. “Did you figure it out? Are you there yet?” She was so breathless from her excitement.
I couldn’t voice it.
I couldn’t put into words what I was thinking because it would’ve been a nightmare come to life. I couldn’t do that to Mason. To Logan. He’d been their father. My children’s grandfather. But he would’ve been vulnerable.
Analise died and he’d been lost, missing her.
“You’re there, aren’t you? You can tell me. Give me a hint. I don’t want to jump ahead if you’re not there yet. It’s best if you got there on your own. More fulfilling that way.” She took two steps my way, the exhilaration vibrating off her body. Her eyes were wild, gone, as if she were on drugs. “Give me a hint. Come on. Something.”
I shook my head, taking a step away from her. Wrapping my arms around myself, I couldn’t stomach being around her. She wanted to boast about it. She was begging for me to let her spill all the horrible details.
“Sam,” Mason murmured, starting for me.
“Don’t!” I held up a hand, stopping him. I bit out, “Don’t. What they did—” I couldn’t finish. My throat spasmed, choking me. “It was them, Mason. They did it.”
“I know.” His words were quiet.
This was what he was referring to when he said we hadn’t learned it all. This was the rest.
I couldn’t handle it if there was more.
I was going to snap. My sanity would shatter, and I’d be like my mother. It was genetic. I was predisposed. Just needed the right type of environment and I could follow in her footsteps.
“You’re there. Aren’t you? Come on.” She was writhing, whining as if we were having sex and she was pleading for more, more, more. “I already told you about Maddy, but there’s one more. Can you guess? I need you to guess. He told me I couldn’t say anything until you brought it up. He said that’d be burying the lead, whatever that means. So. Come on. Puh-lease. Just say his name—”
I couldn’t give her the satisfaction.
Holding Mason’s gaze, seeing the sadness and yearning in him, he wasn’t going to say his father’s name either.
“Okay. I know. I’ll give you a hint.” She clapped and bounced. “Oh! This is so exciting. So, first hint is that we never thought we could get him to kill himself—”
“Shut up,” Mason wrangled out in a menacing warning.
It was enough to silence Sabrina. Her face went blank. She blinked a few times before she tipped her head back and laughed. She laughed and laughed and no one could say anything to stop her.
What she just acknowledged was—I didn’t have the words.
She took away a person’s life.
“ How ?” I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was animalistic. Wounded.
Her laughter dried up abruptly. She gave me a slow blink, assessing me calmly before a pitying grin took over her face. “How did we get him to take his own life, you mean?”
I flinched, hearing it put into words again.
She migrated to me, one step. “I never thought he’d do it, not that quickly. We hoped. It’d been in the works, but then we heard the news that the great Mason Kade was retiring and his family was moving back to Fallen Crest. It was all lining up. The time was perfect. James was sixty-eight. Guess how many members from The Network killed themselves from the email you leaked?”
What?
She leaned into me, breathing on me as she whispered, “Sixty-eight. Sixty-eight people took their lives because of something you did. That’s your destruction. One email got sixty-eight people killed. It was only fitting if we sent James the same type of email, right? Guess how many emails we needed to send him?” The ends of her mouth curved up in an impish grin. Her eyes were sparkling. She was loving this. “We sent him sixty-eight emails. Though, I don’t know if he opened them all, but we felt it was symbolic. Sixty-eight people died. James was sixty-eight. Sixty-eight emails, all laying out how someone that terrified Mason’s daddy was coming to hurt his family. Course, we made it about the company, but Park helped me with the wording. There was an undercurrent threat that Kai Bennett was coming to take his family away.” She cast a look over her shoulder to him, her tone turning coy. Almost seductive. “It worked. We couldn’t believe it.”
My mind was spinning. Sixty-eight people killed themselves because of the email we leaked? That… Was that on me? The information on there had been their secrets, but it was leaked to the other members. We only wanted to have them turn on Park, which they did. We were told they did. Clearly they hadn’t stopped there.
I tore from the room, going to the bathroom across the hallway.
I killed those people. Their lives were on me.
I landed on my knees in front of the toilet and I spewed.
I couldn’t stop.
It kept coming up.
Self-disgust.
Self-loathing.
Self-hate.
I killed all of those people.
I was the reason James was dead.
This was all about me.