CHAPTER 23 - Bryan Trevor #2
I see surprise flash across his face when Travis gets out.
“What the hell are you doing here?” my brother shouts, staring him down.
“I was trying to burn down a company, but your idiot brother showed up right on time and stopped me.” He glares at me and I walk to the entrance, climbing the three steps.
“You should thank me for that, or in a few hours you’d be in cuffs or dead,” I hiss, heading to the living room to grab a pack of cigarettes since mine’s empty.
I return to the porch and see Dominic sprawled in the chair beside me while my brother sits on the low wall.
I lean against the doorframe as I light the cigarette.
“You want to start explaining why you wanted to blow up DarkMed?” I ask, taking a drag.
“I have some unfinished business with him,” Travis begins, pulling a cigarette from his pocket—but unlike mine, his isn’t filled with nicotine.
“That’s great.” I blow out the smoke, watching him lean against the car. “So do I, so if we pool our grievances, we could burn Gavin instead of just the Dark.”
“We can talk, but first—how are you alive? You dropped off the map and word was you’d been killed,” he says, taking a hit.
“I’m not that easy to erase,” I retort with a mocking smile. “What did Gavin do to you?”
“It wasn’t anything to me directly,” he responds, but I see his jaw clench. “It was to Brittany.” The name rings a bell, and I quickly remember she’s his younger sister. “You have no idea what that bastard is involved in, Bryan.”
“Maybe I do.” I stub out the cigarette and cross my arms. “But what exactly are you talking about?”
“Is he trustworthy?” He points at Dominic, who almost growls in response. “I don’t know him,” Travis justifies with a mocking shrug.
“He already knows more than he should,” I reply, flashing Dominic a smile. “But he understands that one wrong move and I’ll rip his head off and send his mother to meet her maker.”
Travis smiles!
“I didn’t live in the neighboring city like I told you guys when we met,” he begins, and I frown. “I lived on the same side as Noah.”
“What?” I ask, completely caught off guard.
“I was ashamed of being from that side.” Disgust drips from his voice. “I wanted a normal life, without my father’s rules and all the fanaticism that came with him.”
“And you found that by hanging out with a bunch of delinquents?” Luke roars, and I’m certain the lie weighs heavier on him—after all, Travis was closer to my brother. “That’s why you never let us come to your house, isn’t it?”
“Trust me, I spared you guys, anyway…” He tosses the joint on the ground, crushing it under his boot. “My father is the town sheriff and a friend of Gavin’s.”
“Elias Thorne?” The name springs to mind immediately.
“How do you know?” he asks, confused.
“I have a list of the nine people closest to Gavin.”
“The list of leaders.” Hatred flares in his eyes again.
“What leaders?”
“Of the Primordial House,” he answers, and my muscles tense immediately.
“What do you know about it?” I close the distance—three steps and I’m in his face.
“I grew up without a mother because she was killed a few weeks after giving birth.” I furrow my brow, not seeing what this has to do with the damn cult.
“Until recently I believed she had run away, but then I found out my father killed her.” A trace of pain crosses his face, but it passes quickly—pain shows weakness.
“Now I get what you meant earlier!” Dominic declares.
“I grew up with a father who was fanatical about religion. He raised me to believe in a cruel God, and when the time came for me to join this shit, I refused because that wasn’t what I wanted for my life.
” He pulls another cigarette from his pocket—this time one with actual nicotine.
“So I disappeared from that damn city and started over in New York with no idea I only knew half of what this Primordial House really was.”
“Your sister stayed,” I state the obvious, and he nods, guilt written all over his face.
“Besides her being underage at the time, that worm Elias brainwashed her so thoroughly she believed God would punish her if she ran away with me.” He blows out the smoke, and I know he’s stalling. “But two months ago she called me in tears, begging for help.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s trapped somewhere!”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, damn it.” He steps away, pacing back and forth. “But I know it’s connected to this damn Primordial House, which is actually a fucking cult.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” my brother says, and I nod, even without looking at him. “We’re investigating this shit!” he explains.
“I need to find my sister, Bryan,” Travis says desperately.
“And you think you’d accomplish that by putting a target on your back setting fire to DarkMed?” I can’t resist pointing out the idiocy he was about to commit.
Impulse.
That shit will land anyone at rock bottom!
“He’s the one who locked her up, so I needed to hit him somehow!” he says defensively, but he knows he was about to make a fatal mistake.
“What an idiotic idea, Travis,” Luke responds, and our friend glares at him.
“Let’s take this step by step,” I say, starting to think it through as I return to where I was.
“Your sister is locked up, Gavin and your father are part of this Primordial House”—he nods—“Why did they lock her up? What do they do? What do they preach? Are there only these nine leaders or are more people involved?”
“Brittany didn’t say much because she managed to steal a guard’s phone.” I nod, not wanting to imagine what she’s going through. “She said she was locked in a basement, that Gavin had taken her on his father’s orders and that…” He stops talking and kicks the car tire.
“What?” I ask, and he looks back at me.
“That they touched her. Some son of a bitch touched my sister, Bryan, and only God knows how many times they did it!”
I absorb his words, letting them sink into every nerve in my body, and I’m unable to control the memories of that damn night when they tried to kill me.
With every new thing I discover, I draw more connections to what they did to Noah.
“We’re going to find her,” I state firmly, because I won’t leave her in the hands of those disgusting vermin.
“But first you’re going to tell me every detail you know about this cult, everything you grew up hearing, everything your father said.
You can’t leave anything out, Travis, because every piece of information is crucial to saving your sister and saving Noah from Gavin. ”
“I’ll do anything to destroy these bastards, including my son of a bitch father.” I like seeing the hatred in him.
Hatred is an excellent ally for eliminating whoever stands in our way.
“Let’s go inside,” I call, turning on my heels. I’m followed by more than just him.
“Holy shit!” Dominic curses, amazed when he sees all the cameras and active monitoring equipment in my room.
I grab the flash drive he got at DarkMed and insert it into the camera-free laptop.
The copied file starts loading.
“Dominic is a hacker, and besides giving me remote access to Gavin’s laptop, he also made a copy of all the saved documents,” I say, bringing both my brother and Travis up to speed. “Let’s see if we find anything interesting.”
An endless array of folders opens before my eyes.
Most have names from the distribution company, others are labeled with medication names, locations.
I narrow my eyes when I find one named salvation.
I click to open it, and several other folders appear.
Primordial House.
Doctrine.
Meetings.
Member Files.
“Open that one,” Luke says, placing his finger on the one labeled Purification.
I click on the folder and several photos and videos automatically open before us.
My stomach churns when I open the first one.
“What the hell is this?” Luke asks, and I press play.
There’s a huge room, and in the middle of it, a woman lies on a couch.
Around her are nine men, Gavin among them.
And all of them.
Absolutely all of them are naked, masturbating.
The girl is passed out, and I need every ounce of control not to break every damn screen in front of me when they all approach and spill their semen on her.
“I’m going to kill these bastards!!” Travis roars furiously.
“This is…” Dominic can’t finish the sentence.
“No… It’s not Brittany, but this shit must happen to all the girls,” he responds, and my thoughts immediately go to Noah.
She said she was on a couch, that there was a table with several chairs.
But there were no men.
Fuck, there weren’t any when she woke up, but before?
I close the folder and start searching through the others.
There are photos of them sitting in circles praying, with women kneeling in the middle. Sarah appears in several of them.