Chapter 6
896 Words
ALESSIA
Nobody argued. But nobody moved, either, for a long moment after Ryker said it — the five of us sitting in the warm hush of a living room that had just watched me choose something irreversible.
It was Logan who finally spoke.
"There's something else," he said. "Before we plan anything else. You should know the rest of what Ethan holds over us."
I looked at my brother. His hands were folded too carefully in his lap, the way they always were when he was about to say something he'd rehearsed and still didn't want to say.
"The estate my parents live in," he said. "The tuition that got me through the Academy before I was hired here. My apartment. Ethan's family financed all of it, years before he ever claimed you. Officially, through New Orleans Pack scholarship funds. Unofficially, it was him." He met my eyes. "He never let any of us forget it. Not directly. He'd just mention it, the way you'd mention weather. A reminder that we were all standing on ground he'd paid for."
"That's why you never fought him," I said. Not a question.
"That's why I never fought him," Logan agreed. "I told myself it was gratitude. It wasn't. It was leverage, and I let it work on me for eight years."
Aiden's jaw was tight. "We bought out the scholarship fund in October. Quietly. Your parents' mortgage, too. It's done — Ethan has no hold on your family anymore. We should have told you sooner."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because telling you meant explaining why we'd been watching your family that closely for years," Carter said. "And that meant explaining the prophecy before you were ready to hear it."
I let that settle. It was, I was learning, the shape of nearly everything they'd done for me — protection arriving disguised as distance, love arriving disguised as silence, because they had decided somewhere along the way that the truth was a weight I shouldn't have to carry until I asked for it.
I was asking for it now.
"There's a girl," I said. "Mia. My maid. She's the one who found the gifts and gave them to Lillian." I hadn't said her name aloud since the chapel. It cost more than I expected. "I keep thinking about her. She's seventeen. She didn't hate me. I don't think she even wanted the money Lillian gave her. I think she was just lonely enough to be used."
"She was," Ryker said. Flat, but not unkind. "We looked into her before we came for you. Her father owes money to half the pack. Lillian found the one place in your household soft enough to press."
"Is she in danger?"
"From Ethan? No. From herself, maybe, once the guilt catches up to her." Ryker studied me. "You're not asking because you're worried about her comfort. You're asking because you want to know if you're allowed to forgive her."
I hadn't put it in those words, but he was right, the way he was usually right about the things I hadn't said yet.
"I don't know if I do," I said. "Forgive her. But I don't want to spend whatever's left of my life hating a seventeen-year-old who was as trapped in that house as I was."
Nobody told me I was being too generous. Nobody told me I was being naive, either. Aiden simply nodded, once, like he was filing the information away for later use, and said, "If she ever writes to you, we'll know before you do. You won't be blindsided again."
"And Ethan's other lie," Jasper said, quieter than I'd heard him all evening. "The one Aiden's been circling around all night without saying it."
Aiden's expression didn't change, but something in the room did.
"Say it," I said.
"Ethan is our brother," Jasper said. "Half. Illegitimate. Our father's, before he ever met our mother." He watched my face carefully, the way you watch something you're not sure how to brace for. "We've known since we were eighteen. It's the ugliest secret in Shadowcrest, and it's the reason he's spent his whole life trying to take something that was always going to be ours."
I had already half-known — the phone call, the things Aiden hadn't finished saying about Ethan's father. But hearing it named outright, in a lit room with all four of them watching to see what it would do to me, was its own kind of impact.
"Does he know you know?" I asked.
"He's known we know since the night Logan came to us with a split lip and a story that didn't add up," Carter said. "It's why he hates us more than he hates most things. We're proof of the life he thinks he should have had."
"That doesn't make him less dangerous," I said.
"No," Aiden agreed. "It makes him more dangerous. Men who believe they were owed something rarely stop at reasonable methods of collecting it."
I looked around the room — at four men who had just handed me every ugly piece of the last five years without softening a single edge — and felt something settle into place that had nothing to do with fear.
"Thank you," I said. "For not deciding, on my behalf, what I could handle."
"We're done deciding things on your behalf," Aiden said. "Starting tonight."
- Writer
