Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Caleb is clanking around upstairs. He’s loud in his steps and, I’m assuming, stumbles.
I rub my burning cheek, resisting the urge to slam my head against the wall behind me. What the fuck has my life become? I didn’t sign up for this.
A particularly loud bang has me clambering to my feet and heading upstairs, worry lacing my movements.
I’ve never seen Caleb drink, not to the excess he has tonight.
I’m surprised Sash and Logan chose to leave him alone with me in his current state, but I suppose they don’t consider me to be much of a threat.
Caleb won’t allow himself to be vulnerable around me ever again, and I don’t realistically stand a chance in a fight against him. Even drunk, he could kill me with ease.
There’s another loud thud, the sound followed up almost immediately by a low groan. I quicken my pace. Did Caleb fall? How much did he have to drink?
“Evelyn!”
My movements falter as he calls out my name. Why?
“Come here!”
He sounds excited, which I’m not going to take as a good sign. Occasionally, on holidays and during special celebrations, the younger HPAW soldiers would find their way to my bedroom after too many drinks.
I’m the only marked woman—at least, the only one I know of—who lives within the facility, and men occasionally took that to mean I’d be an easy lay. I turned most of them away.
I never felt guilty for the ones I welcomed into my room, though.
If anything, I enjoyed it. I liked knowing I was giving away something the shifters valued.
I didn’t know Caleb, but I was eager to hurt him.
I never considered that Caleb would be a virgin, but I did expect his experience to be limited.
Should I tell him I wasn’t lying when I said I loved him? Probably not. He won’t believe me. I don’t really blame him. I wouldn’t believe me, either.
Caleb is swaying in the hallway beside his office door. He leans against the wall for balance, his fingers curling around the wooden door frame.
His mark is still white. Will it change now that I’ve destroyed our bond? Will it disappear? I could ask, but it would be a waste of breath. He isn’t going to answer.
Sash’s words seep into my mind. Is Caleb really going to take a new mate? Will he fuck her? He assured me he had no plans of doing so with Grace, but that decision had been made out of respect for the mate he’d never met. The situations aren’t the same.
The thought of Caleb with another woman makes my stomach churn. I hate it.
“Come on, now.” Caleb jerks his chin toward his office. “I want to show you something.”
He’s smiling, but it lacks emotion. His eyes are empty, void of the mirth and glint of excitement they usually reflect. I don’t trust it, but I follow his direction and walk into his office.
He leads me to his desk, forcing me to sit in the chair.
Then he stands behind me, leaning over my shoulder. His breath reeks of whiskey, and I grimace as he turns on his computer and begins sifting through his files. I’ve never been given the password to his home computer, and my eyes flicker over the hundreds of files stored here.
Caleb opens a folder. There’s a video and a text file inside.
“You’re welcome to watch the video, but I don’t recommend it,” he says.
“What is it?”
I can feel the weight of Caleb’s gaze on the side of my head.
“Those men you saw me kill, it’s a video recording they took of them torturing and murdering the little girl they kidnapped.
It’s graphic. I needed to search the video for clues, and it took me hours to get through.
” He pauses, then clears his throat. “There have been several over the years, but this is the worst. I should have taken the time to torture those men as they did Emilie, but…” He blows out a breath, whiskey hitting my face.
“I don’t know why I didn’t. I just wanted it to be over. ”
Caleb shakes his head, then opens the text file. “This is the case file. Read it.” He’s sauntering out of the room a moment later. As he exits, he raises a hand and smacks the top of the doorway. He’s still drunk. “Let me know when you’re done. I have more to show you.”
I swallow, then begin reading the file. It’s worse than I imagined. Caleb noted in detail the torture those men inflicted on the young shifter girl. They were experimenting on her, trying to test her shifter capabilities and limits.
There are a few rumors surrounding HPAW’s treatment of the occasional shifter they manage to obtain.
I’ve never seen them torture anybody firsthand, but I’m sure their methods aren’t friendly.
Still, I know with absolute certainty that they’d never do this to a child.
There’s no way the American government would sanction it.
My eyes are burning as I finish the report. My deep-seated distrust has me clicking on the video next. I make it less than two minutes in before frantically clicking out. Caleb wasn’t lying.
I wipe at my eyes as he returns to the room, lingering in the doorway.
“Would you have let those humans live?” he asks. “Granted them mercy?”
I shake my head. “No.”
Caleb pulls up another video. His hand falls to my shoulder, but he quickly removes it.
“One of my men was sent to the HPAW headquarters on a diplomatic mission three years ago,” Caleb says. “He was a messenger. Nothing more. He never returned, and this is what I received two weeks later.”
He begins the video and strolls out of the room. I shift my focus to the screen. My heart stops. I recognize this shifter.
It was brief. Daniel was escorting me back to my room, but I convinced him to let us take a detour to the second-floor cafeteria. It’s a heavily restricted floor where the medical team works, but this particular cafeteria has the chocolate-chip cookies I enjoy.
Several soldiers were bringing a shifter to the medical team for testing. It had been years since HPAW had last captured a shifter, and even longer since that shifter had been brought to our particular facility.
Daniel tried to usher me away the moment he realized what was happening, but it was too late.
I caught a glimpse of the shifter. He was heavily drugged and strapped to a metal gurney.
His hair was freshly buzzed, and his lower half was covered in a thin, white sheet.
I distinctly remember thinking he didn’t look that frightening.
He was so tall that his ankles dangled off the end of the gurney, and his upper body was covered in rippling muscle, but he was limp and unconscious.
Daniel later told me that the shifter had been captured during an attack on one of our smaller towns near the border.
He said the wolves had infiltrated our lands in the middle of the night and struck in the early hours of the morning.
Hundreds of humans had been murdered—innocent families torn to shreds.
It was all over the news. I saw the images and heard stories from the few survivors. Did HPAW make it up? How? A lie at that scale would be impossible to cover. Surely, somebody would speak out about the inaccuracies.
Did Daniel know? Was he lying to me, or did he believe the stories he was being told?
Our medical team put the shifter under and used him for testing. We needed to gain a better understanding of shifter anatomy and their physical tolerances.
This man on the screen is not under anesthesia. He’s wide awake, and he screams and writhes as he tries to break free of his restraints. They’re metal and cemented into the ground. He’s not going anywhere.
The medical team remove the sheet covering his lower half.
They begin with simple slices, their voices quiet as they give out numbers and figures for recording. They monitor how long it takes him to heal before inflicting more wounds. Things progressively get worse. I look away when they start testing regeneration.
“Watch,” Caleb orders.
He’s standing in the doorway, silently monitoring my movements. I didn’t notice his approach.
I shake my head. “I don’t want to.”
He’s on me in a second, his fingers pinching my chin and forcing me to look. The medical team saws off the shifter’s leg.
“I didn’t know,” I say, trying to break free from Caleb’s rough, borderline-painful grip. “Please, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Caleb refuses to release me. He holds my head steady as the man in the video continues to scream and plead.
He says that he has a family. He says his mate and children are waiting for him at home.
He says he’s a good man and doesn’t mean any harm.
He’s here on a diplomatic mission. The shifters want to find common ground.
The medical team ignores him. Some even laugh. Only one woman looks hesitant, her gaze filled with guilt as she glances between her hands and the shifter. It’s noticed, and she’s excused from the procedure.
“I was sent this video, along with three others,” Caleb says. “They kept him alive for weeks.”
Word spread when the shifter died. The medical team wanted to determine how quickly shifters recover from mercury injections. Something about their kidneys. One of the doctors injected too much, and the shifter died instantly. The doctor lost her job.
I wonder now if it was a mercy kill.
Caleb pulls away from the video, then opens another file.
“We don’t correspond much with the American government, but here’s everything dating back ten years.
We’ve tried to find common ground with HPAW, but they refuse to accept any terms—even those most favorable to them.
They want us to submit entirely and reacclimate into your society and government. They want to control us.”
I drag a hand down my face. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
Caleb barks out a laugh. “Why didn’t I tell my nervous human mate how atrocious her kind are?
How much we fucking hate Americans? I wanted you to acclimate, Evelyn.
I wanted you to feel comfortable around us.
I wasn’t going to insult your kind or speak poorly about them.
I would never lie, but I wasn’t going to say anything unless you explicitly asked.
I figured you would eventually. It’s called having patience. ”
Caleb scratches at his chin. He shaves daily, but he didn’t this morning. I assume that slitting his throat threw a wrench into his daily ritual.
It’s hard to believe that was just this morning.
I look through the files Caleb pulled up, reading about every bit of contact the shifters and HPAW have had within the last decade. There isn’t much, and what I see has my blood boiling. Caleb isn’t lying—not about a single damned thing.
Caleb stands behind me, silently reading over my shoulder.
The silence grows deafening, and every report adds to the weight in my chest. I gnaw at my bottom lip, continuing even when it hurts. What have I done? There’s no fixing this. I’ve thrown away everything over lies.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I had no idea. I thought… I didn’t know.”
Caleb takes a moment to respond. He absentmindedly slides his thumb over the faint scar on his neck. “You asked me to cum inside you.”
I look at my hands.
“You took everything I held special. You took it knowing how much it meant to me and how little it meant to you,” he continues.
“You’re selfish, and now I have nothing.
If you’re pregnant…” Caleb pauses. I can practically feel the tension oozing off him.
“If you’d succeeded in killing me and everything went according to your plan, what would you have done with my baby? ”
I dip my chin, too ashamed to answer. I wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Answer me,” he demands.
“I wouldn’t have kept it.”
“Adoption?”
I shake my head, my breath hitching. HPAW would never let me give birth to a shifter, especially not one fathered by Alpha Knox. It would be a liability.
“Say it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Say it, Evelyn.”
“I would’ve had an abortion.”
Caleb storms from the room, slamming the door shut behind him. I drop my head into my hands, my thoughts splintering. What the fuck am I doing?