Theo
Icouldn’tfigureoutwhythey didn’t just kill me, why they kept me alive for any reason other than to torture me. But for what seemed like weeks, dragging on without an end in sight, the bastards had me confined, isolated.
Fed and watered, alive for something. I just lingered, existed, stopped my mind from fraying in its entirety by focusing on Vi. When everything was at its bleakest, when I felt close to exiting this world, my mind showed me ideas, guesses and nightmares. Everything Vi and I had done to Rafael’s people — maybe he was seeking revenge? Building to something.
Maybe Violet had escaped, and he was waiting for her to be in his grasp before presenting me for death at her feet? Plenty of things could have happened after they knocked me unconscious. Maybe both my sisters had managed to get away; maybe Connor had killed a few fuckers and was now keeping his nieces safe somewhere. Fuck me, screw coming back for me in that case.
I had to hope they’d fled the fucking country at this point, that they were far away, on a different continent or off the damn planet, but when that darkness crept over, it seemed far from possible. They had been as surrounded as me, Amy bleeding out, Connor bellowing, Violet hidden.
For weeks, I’d been alone with those thoughts. Contemplating, bargaining, all of it.
And Violet, my sweet Violet. Despite the hope, I knew she was here in this hellhole somewhere. Unless the guards were playing tricks on me, which I hoped, with mad desperation, they were, they liked to taunt me with her.
Flickers of conversations heard as they wandered past me, spoke of her being alive, being tortured, locked up somewhere because of what she’d done to their friends.
They must be lying to hurt me more.
She’d escaped. She had to have escaped. It would all be worth it if she was free now. Living a good life far from here.
But when I believed the reality before me, I at least had that she was alive. That was good enough to keep me breathing until I figured out a way to escape. It was the flicker of hope I needed. For as long as she took air into her lungs, I would too, if only so I could help liberate her.
Now, for the first time since being thrown into what can only have been described as a dank cell in the pits of the house, I was back out of it. Two guards whose names I never bothered to learn came and collected me, kicking the back of my legs and digging their nails into my skin as they dragged me through the opulent mansion.
They tied me to a chair at the dining room table, the place we’d had that post-wedding breakfast, and I watched Violet almost crumble. I was two seats down from the head, my mind swimming, struggling to get into fucking focus.
And I wasn’t alone.
Food laid out, a fucking banquet of rich dishes that made my stomach cramp from just the smell. The rare sandwich and bottle of water that sustained me was so plain, the thought of introducing anything else clawed at me. My mouth salivated for it, but my stomach ached. They’d kept me fed, but on the edge of starvation the entire time. Just enough that I remained cognizant. Able to taunt.
Just what did the fuckers have planned for us? This was macabre.
My mother, of all people, sat at my side, her spine stiff and straight, one leg crossed over the other, and her focus on anything but everyone else in the room. She stared at the gold-framed paintings, studied the cutlery or her nails, and steadfastly ignored us all. Because it wasn’t just me, her, and two of Rafe’s men in the room. Margaret was here, at the head of the table, her arms also tied to the chair.
Margaret, like Mother, still maintained that pompous air that was all I’d ever known of her, even as a small child. Cold and stony. Even though she was as much up shit’s creek as all of us, she glared at Mother for not acknowledging her, and ignored me when I tried.
As far as Margaret was aware, she had succeeded in her duty. We were back; she was under Rafael’s roof, at his table. She was here, tied up and fucked, but she didn’t look abused. Her skin was healthy; her eyes shiny.
But shewastied up. No better than me, her disgraced brother whose mind was on the turn.
“Margaret,” I said her name again, rolling my eyes when she did nothing but twitch, acting like I didn’t exist. Pathetic. Anger heated my throat, but there wasn’t anything I could do.
Then the door opened, and my heart dropped when another guard dragged Amaryllis into the room too, rough-handed as he tied her to the chair on the other side of me. She whimpered and struggled, but it was half-hearted, like she’d given up. She didn’t fight them. She was alive, at least. Another tick. Patched up, by the looks of it, but not very well. Pale, but not close to death.
I turned to her when the guard left the room, tried to catch her eyes and show some hope, give her a glimmer of something — I hadn’t given up. But she ignored me, met my gaze for less than a second before turning away, gulping.
“Amy,” I said her name, but she turned her head further. I saw the moment her eyes met Margaret’s, and the slump of her shoulder when Margaret tipped her nose up. We really were all fucked if we couldn’t even get along.
That rage, the impotent, boiling rage, had me twisting back to my mother, leaving my broken sisters to sit in their own emotions.
“Are you okay with this?” I spat at Mother, the only of us that wasn’t tied down, the only one of us that could fucking do something. She sipped her wine and shrugged, not sparing me a glance.
“Rafe offered me a good deal on my children,” she said, heartless bitch, cold-voiced and half-cut from the wine. “With your father gone, I don’t know what choice I have…”
I scoffed, staring at her incredulously. How could she? How was she a mother? Right now, she was worse than Father, the man who’d instigated it, because all she did was sit around and nod her head, let things like this wash over her while she got high or drunk. After birthing four children, she cared for none. At least he was rotting in that random woodland.
“Father’s gone?” Margaret’s voice sounded, something to get her attention at last.
A dry laugh in my throat, I turned back to her. “You didn’t know? Didn’t Rafael inform you when he was doing god knows what to you?”
