Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ken
I.
cannot.
fucking.
BELIEVE.
THIS.
SHIT!
Ken ran, pushing himself as hard as he could despite it being dark, focusing on his breathing and trying to concentrate only on the sound of his footfalls on the dirt trail he followed.
And the worst part?
He was angry.
Enraged.
Because he knew Dewi was right.
She was absolutely fucking right.
There was obviously more to what Dewi saw in the woman’s mind than what Dewi showed him, meaning it had to be infinitely worse.
And she had done it safely.
She’d done it anonymously.
And despite the fact that he was angry, she readily acknowledged his anger and pain, and she admitted she was wrong.
But she was so fucking right that it sliced painful slivers out of his soul in ways he couldn’t begin to process.
Because had Dewi not done what she did, well, the potential consequences could easily be envisioned thanks to the hints Peyton finally broke down and allowed him to see about what they found during the lab raid.
Ken had wanted to make sure everything had been worth it and know what would still need to be done to track down the missing children.
Wanted to be sure it was all necessary.
While Ken had thought it would be horrible and beyond anything he could have imagined, that there was no way it could be worse than the knowledge Peyton had stored in his brain, the truth had been so, so much infinitely worse because it had really happened, and it wasn’t some monster from a different dimension who’d rampaged through the world like a horror movie.
It’d been people. Men. Women.
Children.
Sooo many children.
Humans.
They’d willfully done what they did. Deliberately.
Methodically.
And the only reason they stopped was because they’d stopped them. They would’ve continued doing it.
He pushed himself harder, faster, tuning out the nighttime sounds of the woods around him and focusing on Peyton’s memory of one of the victims who’d begged them for the release of death.
It had been horrible.
It had been compartmentalized in Ken’s brain, a focal point, a guiding channel marker to keep him from drifting too far into the shallows to second-guess himself and try to convince himself it wasn’t really that bad.
Especially considering Callum and Bryn had been rescued.
But now?
Now Ken saw how it all started. Oh, not the lab itself, but in general.
A human thinking shifters were inhuman. Tale as old as time—an “other.”
People not seen as human but categorized as animals.
Lab experiments.
How many countless millions of people had died throughout history for that very reason?
Too many to count.
And Dewi was right that Jacinta would’ve kept on pushing, looking, asking questions, until she caught the attention of someone else who thought it’d be a great idea to open another lab somewhere and study them.
And it killed him Dewi was right that Jacinta’s baby would’ve suffered, and he hated that Dewi was right about all of it, and he hated that he had to agree with her, because he never would have thought like that before his life changed.
He would’ve been unequivocally horrified, without any chance of changing his mind or tempering the force of his horror with mitigating factors.
He ran, knowing there was no way to run fast or far enough to escape all of this mental sewage roaring through him, now forever part of his existence.
Where does it end?
The lab was destroyed, all the records taken or destroyed, all the workers except for the head guy were unalived—and his time on earth was increasingly limited.
Is this it? Was that the worst?
He damned sure hoped so, because he wasn’t certain his sanity could tolerate “more.”
After running for at least another hour, he tripped and landed hard in the dirt, in a full sploot.
But he didn’t get up and brush himself off and keep going.
He lay there, face down in the dirt, and sobbed in rage and horror and grief.
His mother had died at the hands of a monster.
He hadn’t yet met Callun and Bryn in person, although they’d video chatted nearly every day.
The in-person reunion would happen in a few weeks when he went over with Carl, Mateo, Tamsin, and Aisling for a visit.
Hopefully Maya would be ready to come home then, too.
Carl had flown over once already, days after she was back, and spent several days there while Mateo stayed behind to help with the kids.
Eventually, he rolled onto his back and stared at the dark sky overhead. Enough clouds scudded past that he couldn’t get more than a glimpse or two of the stars.
Yes, Dewi had fucked up.
But Dewi had also done the right thing.
He had to come to grips with that, figure out how to process and live with it, and with the multitude of other horrors now filtering into his life.
He sat up, arms on his knees, and his head bent with eyes closed as he listened to his breath in his lungs.
To the sounds of nighttime around him.
The gentle breeze rocking the pine trees, the various creaks and soft pops of them giving way to it.
Same, trees. Same.
Worse, he didn’t know where he was right now.
I’m an idiot.
The entire property was fenced; they hadn’t yet installed a proper gate between them. He knew if he found the fence, all he had to do was follow it around until he came to the driveway. Unless he hit the driveway first, that was.
With the breeze he couldn’t hope to hear any traffic to home in on. Resigned, he started walking, following the trail he’d been on. There was a larger trail that ringed the property, following the fenceline, and many of the trails branched into that trail, too.
He didn’t know how long it took him, but he finally emerged at the fenceline, with nothing but woods on the other side, meaning he was likely at the northern boundary.
On the western side was the two-lane road, and on the eastern side of the property was a one-lane graded clay road that led to other properties nearby.
The southern fenceline also bordered woods, but there were more wetlands than on this end, and this felt like the northern end.
If it were daylight, he’d turn right to head east and approach the house from the backside. But he didn’t trust himself not to miss the trail—or not pick the wrong one—so he opted for what he knew would be the longer but certain way around, and that was to turn left and head west.
Another twenty minutes later, he finally reached the north-south road the driveway fed into on the western side of the property and breathed a sigh of relief.
He knew he was less than forty-five minutes out at this point.
In the past, several times he’d jogged down the driveway and then turned north and ran along the fence until this point before returning.
Finally, after reaching and following the driveway, the house came into sight.
Instead of going inside the front door, he rounded it and entered through the lanai door.
Next to the pool he stripped his filthy clothes, dropped them onto the pool deck with his shoes, and jumped in the deep end, naked.
He’d never win any swim meets, but at least he felt comfortable and confident in the water now. After completely dunking himself several times and running his hands through his hair, he floated on his back with his eyes closed. He still wasn’t ready to face Dewi yet.
Did he owe her an apology for yelling at her and taking off? Usually, he was the calmer-ish one of them.
But she had violated his trust.
She had deceived him even though it wasn’t an outright lie.
In some ways, this was worse.
After a while he shivered a little despite the warm water and moved to the hot tub, turning on the jets but leaving the light off.
He sat there, eyes closed, trying to shut down his noisy brain. He didn’t open them when he heard the sliders slowly open and close again, and the soft pad of bare feet across the concrete.
He knew it was Dewi.
She approached the hot tub but didn’t speak or make any move to climb in.
When he finally opened his eyes, she stood there outside it, leaning on the edge with her arms crossed, the baby monitor in one hand, watching him with a morose expression.
But he resisted the urge to rush to comfort her.
Not this time.
“Do you want to talk?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“I know I violated your trust.”
“But you still did it.”
“I hated to do it,” she said.
He felt that, too.
That was another sucky thing about this—he felt how badly she felt. She didn’t just do it for shits and giggles.
She knew it was the only option.
And, ultimately, he knew she was right.
Didn’t make it feel right to either of them, though.
“How do I trust you, Dewi? How do I not weigh everything you say now and try to figure out every way possible to question you so I’m sure you’re not looking for a loophole?”
She slowly nodded. “I know. I promise from now on, unless it involves planning a present or a good surprise, like a party or something, I will never do that again. But there will be times you don’t like my decisions.
There will be times I have to ignore or overrule you, or get Peyton to make you understand. ”
“I’d rather not like honest answers than worry what the truth really is.”
She nodded again.
It killed him that, yes, he felt her remorse. It rolled off her in sickening waves.
This morning, she’d talked to a woman in Mexico who was now dead by her own hand.
Technically, Dewi hadn’t killed her. She had given the woman a choice.
He held out his hand. “I want to know. All of it. Show me. The unredacted version. If I could survive with all that ugly fucking sewage in my brain that Peyton gave me, I can deal with this. Besides, he showed me some of what happened at the lab, and the people they couldn’t save.”
She rounded the hot tub and held out her hand.
Taking a deep breath, he took her hand, and she replayed the entire conversation in her mind, including showing him what she’d seen in Jacinta’s mind.
By the time they finished, he felt sick, but at least he knew.
He knew.
He lay back in the hot tub. “You did the right thing,” he quietly said. “I know you did. But I don’t agree with you doing it the way you did it, meaning lying to me and Peyton. And in a situation like this, an omission as big as the Grand Canyon is the same as a lie, Dewi.”
“I know,” she quietly said.
“I will get through this,” he finally said. “We’ll survive this. But I need time to process it and get to that place. Okay?”
“I understand.”
“I love you, baby.” He crooked a finger and she leaned in so he could kiss her. “I’ll be up in a while.”
“Love you, too.”
He felt her reluctance to leave him like this, but he needed this time alone to process.
Yes, Dewi absolutely was justified. Had he been there, he wasn’t certain he might not have killed Jacinta then, as horrific a woman as she was.
Their hands were clean, so to speak.
Jacinta made her choice, when it would’ve been so much easier to walk away and enjoy her rich life, creepy old husband or not.
But to actively want to harm people just because they fell outside her arbitrary standards of what was “normal?”
Yeah. The world was better off without that woman in it.
And the baby was, ultimately, better off.
And that wasn’t something he ever thought he’d think.
A couple of years ago, past Ken would be horrified by present Ken.
Killing people—yes, self-defense or justified, okay—but actually handling a gun?
He’d never even shot a gun, and only a few weeks into his relationship with Dewi he’d killed a guy everyone said he shouldn’t have been able to kill, unwittingly avenging the murders of Dewi’s parents and the attack on her while saving his life and hers.
He survived driving off the side of a fucking mountain and kept himself and Nami alive.
Okay, with a massive assist from Duncan, sure, but he hadn’t gotten them killed before Duncan showed up to help. And then, after Duncan set the trap to ambush their pursuers, Ken had shot the fuckers chasing them, executing them without remorse.
He’d killed Manuel Segura. Right there in their backyard, before they woodchipped his body.
Who the hell am I anymore?
Because now when he looked at all that…
It was just another day ending in Y. It should’ve sent him hiding in a closet with his thumb in his mouth, and yet…
All this time, he thought he was just trying to adapt to the insane new circumstances of his life while remaining apart from it, just trying to adapt. Except he wasn’t merely adapting.
He was morphing into someone he didn’t recognize, and it was stupid that he hadn’t processed that before now.
I’ve changed.
And now, forced to confront that, he wasn’t certain if that was a good thing.