Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CLOVER
One breath.
Two heartbeats.
Three locks.
It’s not working. Why isn’t it working?
Four windows. Five taps. Six steps.
Nothing.
I curl up in the corner of Madi’s room and pull my knees to my chest because the one coping mechanism that has saved me a thousand times—grounding me, pulling me back from the edge of panic—does nothing against this.
He’s in the room next to me but so far away I can’t reach him.
He’s become my touchstone, and we’re both so confused, we can’t reach each other.
“Here.” Savvy holds out her hand, palm up.
My little honeybee carving.
When I don’t immediately reach for it, she presses it into my hand. The emptiness in my chest hollows out until I think I might be sick.
Counting isn’t working because this isn’t panic I’m feeling. It’s something far worse.
This is truth.
Ugly. Twisted. Tortured. Truth.
Valen killed my parents.
My fingers close around the wooden honeybee, my thumb rubbing against the grain on muscle memory.
Terra’s words echo in my skull like a bell that won’t stop ringing. I’ve tried to push them away, tried to find some angle where they don’t mean what they do, but there’s nowhere to hide from this.
There’s nowhere to hide.
That’s the cruelest irony of it all.
Bulletproof glass. Triple-locked doors. Refusing to drive.
I controlled all my variables, and in the end, it didn’t matter.
A sound escapes my throat. It’s not a sob—it’s the sound of a wound I don’t know how to heal.
Valen was just a child.
The boy I loved—the man I love—the instrument of my destruction and the savior of my soul.
How do I reconcile those two things?
My heart hammers in my chest, beating painfully as though it’s begging me to find him next door, hug him, allow him to console me while I take away his guilt.
But how can we find comfort in one another when all the pain we’ve ever known boils down to a moment in time, one flick of a wrist, one little boy seeking the affection of the one person it should have flowed from freely?
“Clover?” Madi’s voice is soft, careful. Her fingers trace my fist. I’m clenching the wooden bee so hard the edges are cutting into my palm. “Talk to us.” She steps back, her worried gaze on my hand.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, opening my hand to see a droplet of blood from where the wood pierced my flesh. The shame of it all makes my skin too tight and itchy.
“We don’t want sorry,” Madi takes my hands in hers. “We want you. The real you. Not the version you think we can handle. Not the curated, pleasantly palatable Clover. Just…you.”
“What if you can’t handle that version of me?” The words slip out, uncensored. The fear I’ve always carried, finally laid bare.
“Oh, Clove.” Savvy hobbles closer on her crutches before tossing them aside and sitting with me on the bed. “We’ve loved you through your house quirks, jump scares, fears of shadows and ghosts, and even your truly terrible taste in music. You think a few secrets are going to scare us off?”
A laugh escapes me, wet and broken but healing just the same.
“We have a lifetime to sort through your secrets, Clove.” Savvy pats my arm. “But the real question is, what are you going to do about Valen?”
It’s as though she wrapped her hands around my throat, constricting my air with her words.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you still love him?” Elle asks.
My answer comes from somewhere deeper than logic. “Yes.”
“Even knowing what he did?” Savvy is always guarded, but she lives up to her name. She’ll spoon-feed me questions until I come to a conclusion that my heart and mind will be happy with.
“He didn’t know what he was doing. Terra turned him into a weapon before he was old enough to understand there was a war. He’s as much a victim as I—”
He’s as much a victim as I am.
The emptiness shifts in my chest—a small, painful adjustment of perspective. The hurt is still there, but it’s wrapped in gauze and understanding. But most of all, it’s love.
“Have you told him that?” Elle asks.
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
A knock has me looking up to find Grant’s face in the partially open doorway.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “But there’s someone here to see Clover.” He pauses. Is it just me, or is Grant…nervous? “It’s my…FBI contact, and I think he can give you some of the answers you’re looking for.”
The man standing in Madi’s living room is a stranger with a knack for blending in, for disappearing. I’ve studied characters like him long enough to know that this man is a ghost.
Not literally—though with the week I’ve had, I’m not sure I can rule out anything.
“Hello, Calla.”
The name hits me harder than a physical blow. I have no recollection of this name belonging to me, but I feel it, somewhere deep in my soul, a little thumping that gets louder with each passing beat.
Calla. Calla. Calla.
“I’m Agent Craig Lamott,” he says. His voice is coarse, as though it doesn’t get used enough.
“I—I don’t think I want to be Calla,” I say through a wall of emotion. “I don’t remember being her. Clover is me, it’s who I’ve fought to be. It’s—”
“Your choice,” Grant says.
“Your father was a good man,” Agent Lamott says, grabbing my attention.
“You—you knew him?”
He casts a cautious smile my way. “We were…partners, of sorts. I worked the cases that rescued victims, while he—and eventually your mother—found places for them to heal. We…” He rubs roughly at his jaw.
“We had no idea you were still alive. No idea what Terra was turning ROS into. Not until Vivian fell ill and finally tracked me down. She knew she was dying and needed help, but my work…it’s complicated.
I’m not someone you can just call up and ask for. ”
On wobbly legs, I sink into a chair on the far side of the room.
“I honestly have no idea how she did manage to track me down.” He chuckles sadly. “She was one determined mama bear when I finally agreed to meet her though. She used her connection to your parents to get help shutting down ROS, and then, years later, to find me, I suppose.”
The room is too quiet, and I find myself scanning the space for Valen.
He should be here for this. I want him here, but I won’t ask for him. Not yet. Not when he has so much of his own turmoil screwing with his mind right now.
I’m vaguely aware of my friends behind me. Of Grant and Roman, flanking the stranger as though they’re not completely sure they want to trust him.
“Why?” That question has haunted me for years. “Why didn’t she find me? Reunite me with Valen or, at the very least, tell me what was going on?”
Agent Lamott sits down across from me. “After Vivian went to retrieve you and Valen that night at ROS, some of Terra’s most stringent supporters vanished when she interrupted Valen’s beating. Vivian tried to locate them for over a decade.”
He crosses one leg over the other, his ankle resting on his knee.
It puts me on edge. “That’s why she and Miriam kept Terra locked away.
Vivian couldn’t trust that Terra hadn’t exposed Valen’s secret or that she wouldn’t use it as a bargaining chip if she went to jail.
So they were hoping the drugs would not only keep her docile but would also wear her down—that she’d eventually slip somewhere.
Until that happened, the very best thing she could do for you was keep you hidden. ”
I shake my head. “That wasn’t her decision to make.”
“It was the only choice she had,” he says sadly.
“What I learned from Vivian is… Well, it’s something you would write about, Clover.
Your parents thought entrusting Terra with ROS would give her purpose.
Meaning they had no idea how far Terra’s ideologies had already twisted away from their mission.
From Vivian’s records, Terra took something that started from a place of hope and rebirth, and turned it into something dark, something she could control.
She started gathering followers, people who went against everything your father stood for. And then she started planning.”
“To kill my parents?”
“To take you.” His voice softens. “You and your money were always the goal, Cal—Clover. We don’t believe she meant for you or Brooks to be in that car though. She underestimated how much he loved you and your mother.”
I feel sick.
“We believe that Terra went after Edward Harrington, Valen’s father, for his money and connections as well. Both he and Valen were always a tool for her to use, not to be loved. She didn’t account for the whirlwind that was Vivian though.”
“Why did Terra escalate now though? In the last six months?” Roman asks. “Is it really as simple as my mother and Miriam passing away?”
“That’s…part of it,” Agent Lamott hedges.
“It also appears that it took some…coercion to get her followers back.” He adjusts his cufflinks.
“Terra’s delusions are even more warped now than they were all those years ago.
She didn’t have the power she once had, so rebuilding her army took longer than she liked. ”
“She did all of this because my father didn’t love her?” I mutter to myself.
“I think,” Agent Lamott says, “that it started from a culmination of things. A lifetime of feeling unloved was one of them, but I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not sure we’ll ever truly understand her thought process. That’s something you’ll have to come to terms with—the never knowing.”
I don’t want to talk about Terra anymore, and I clutch my arms to ward off the chill she still infects me with.
“What…” My stomach twists painfully. “What will happen now? Valen was just a child…” Oh, God. Is that why he’s here? He can’t hold Valen accountable for what he did as a child. Can he?
“Clover, take a breath.” Grant stands in front of me, his gaze pleading.
“No, Clover.” Agent Lamott says. “Valen didn’t know what he was doing, but that man sure has spent his life trying to atone for those sins anyway.”
What does that mean? I’m not ready to face Valen yet, but I’m not ready to lose him either. I didn’t think I had any more tears to cry. I was wrong.