Because he knew Dewi wasright.
She wasabsolutelyfuckingright.
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 fuckingrightthat 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 besureit 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,somuch infinitely worse because ithadreally 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.
