Chapter 37 #2
I nodded, my eyes falling again. “Seven weeks, roughly.” I had already had many pointless breakdowns over the fact that I couldn’t see it yet.
I couldn’t see the bump, I couldn’t see any changes at all, which our doctor assured me was normal at this point, but it didn’t ease my severely dramatic emotions.
I broke down at the thought that there was a real possibility Scarlett would never see me pregnant, that I could have a baby, announce it to everyone else, and she wouldn’t be here.
She needed to be there. I needed her to be there.
“Some people don’t show at all,” I said, staring out the dark windows across the room. “During their first one, I mean. I might never show more than a small weight gain. Especially with how good of shape I’m in.”
“Let’s hope,” he said, causing my heart to freeze. “In this line of work, wild rose, that will keep you safe,” Azrael responded. “Don’t take for granted the blessing you were given, protect it and we will do the same. You have my word.”
The tears easily fell and I immediately wiped them away.
We needed to get her back. If this was what she gave us, I feared the man she would create if her heart stopped.
For now, I found comfort in the idea that, whether I needed it or not, I had two Shadows watching out for me in case things got sticky.
Not even Evie knew and at the thought, I couldn’t help but wonder how angry everyone would be when they found out Azrael knew first.
“What did you learn the day Isabella came?” I asked, trying to change the subject back to Scarlett. “I saw the look in your eye when you came back up. You realized something, but you didn’t share it with anyone. You were…renewed for a moment there.”
His hand tightened. “It led nowhere.”
“It led nowhere but a phone call,” I pushed, knowing there was a chance he would shut me out again. “You made a call to Mr. Raine. Why?”
He watched her heartbeat for several seconds, not even a single muscle twitching.
“There was a woman,” he revealed, his voice nothing but an echo of an echo in the empty office.
“Lady Elise. The cub had said he wondered if Malachi had sent me there to see if he could break me. I was, after all, the only one he couldn’t completely control. ”
I saw the slight bare glance he had thrown my way before returning his attention to the screen, but I held no disagreement.
From all the stories I had been told, watching them all together now, it was plain to see.
The other boys had complied easily, they had been given a purpose, a reason for their existence.
Azrael? His purpose had been far greater, and he had always known that.
“She was there,” he went on just as Scarlett’s heartbeat jolted. “She was there to greet me, to oversee my punishments, to make sure I complied under the name of God. I was nothing if I wasn’t holy.”
Her version of holy, I hope he knew that. Her version, not the right version.
Scarlett’s heartrate picked up and Azrael visibly tensed.
“The asylum was located in the mountains of Russia, but I don’t know where. I arrived by helicopter, I was blindfolded, and escorted. Every window, there were only mountains and snow. When I escaped…”
His mind had already cracked far more than it ever had been before.
The others had said as much. When Azrael had come back from the asylum, there was a kind of untethered rage that lingered in his eyes.
Rage and chaos and insanity. He smiled, he watched the clock, and he schemed. That’s all there was.
“He and his children have been searching, but they have yet to find anything.”
I nodded, noting the tightness in his words, the way his knuckles had turned white.
“You came out of that place with an agenda. You found out about what Malachi was doing in that building. What exactly led you to that conclusion—to the beginning of that conclusion,” I corrected.
Azrael didn’t work in absolutes until he had verified them himself.
My belief was that he heard a whisper that linked itself to Malachi’s name, which pushed him to risk everything just to get out and verify what he had heard.
I couldn’t imagine his thought process through that. If my father had sent me to an asylum and while in that asylum, I found out that he was behind a pedophile ring, my initial anger at being there would be enough for me. Yes, he did it, of course he had.
But Azrael had never been led by such emotions. Not until now.
“One of her henchmen mentioned his name in passing. Mentioned a ‘group of believers’ who were enjoying virgin women that had sworn themselves to them at a young age. He was leading them. That henchman must have found out too much because he was dead an hour later, but I was already making my plan.”
Some guy overheard a conversation and decided to open their mouth about it in front of a prisoner only to die for gossiping? It was easy to believe considering where we were now.
If that man had spoken in front of any other prisoner, we wouldn’t be here now. Well, maybe. I think Azrael would have always put it together, eventually, but if not for that man, who knows when he would have found out about what Malachi was doing.
“So, Grey made a comment and now you believe Lady Elise is helping Malachi?”
“Employed by,” he corrected, staring unblinkingly at that screen as her heartbeat raced. “Partners,” he suggested. “Maybe he never would have gotten the idea about putting it in a church if she had not been there.”
“So, if she’s not in the mountains anymore, then she’s…” Oh. I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Fuck, Az.”
“Finish the sentence,” he commanded, his voice a deadly whisper.
I found his eyes again before turning to the screen, watching Scarlett’s heart pound, knowing exactly what she must have been feeling. “She’s running it.” The same woman who broke him, who turned him into this, was now the same woman torturing his wife, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.