“Your father knew the risks when he agreed to participate. He wasn’t the first to die during Selection.”
“So my father was just... collateral damage?” The words taste bitter on my tongue.
Hunter’s jaw tightens. “After I saw how you’d processed it—believing it was suicide—I didn’t see the point in telling you differently. You’d found a way to live with it.”
Something breaks loose inside me—rage, hot and clarifying.
“You didn’t see the point?” My voice rises. “Do you have any idea what it did to me, thinking my father chose to leave us? That he jumped off that cliff because staying alive—staying with me—wasn’t worth it?”
Hunter remains silent.
“I’ve spent twelve years wondering what I could have done differently. What I could have said to make him want to stay.” Tears blur my vision, but I refuse to let them fall. “And you knew. You knew he didn’t choose to die. He was killed. How could you not understand the difference that would make to me?”
Hunter takes a step toward me. “Aurora?—”
“No.” I hold up my hand. “It was never your choice to make. You watched my father die, and then you touched me, you held me, and you said nothing. And what about Olivia?” My voicecracks. “Where is she right now? With Jax—the man who killed my father?”
Hunter’s face contorts with something resembling guilt. “We’re doing everything possible to find her.”
“Like you did everything possible to be honest with me?” The words fly from me, sharp as broken glass.
He runs a hand through his hair, wincing as the movement pulls at his injured shoulder. “Aurora, there are things about the Vipers you don’t understand. Confidentiality is paramount. We take oaths?—”
“Confidentiality?” I laugh, a hollow sound that doesn’t belong to me. “My father’s murder wasn’t some corporate secret. It was my life! My trauma!”
“I was bound by?—”
“By what? Your precious code?” I step closer, trembling with rage. “While I poured my heart out about standing at that cliff, trying to understand why my father would leave me—you sat there knowing the truth and said nothing.”
Hunter reaches for me, but I step back.
“I thought we had something.” My voice drops to a whisper. “But it was built on lies.”
“What I feel for you is real.” His eyes flash with desperation. “More real than anything I’ve ever felt.”
“But not real enough to tell me the truth.”
He falls to his knees suddenly, his imposing frame crumpling before me. “Aurora, please.” His voice breaks. “I was wrong. I should have told you everything from the beginning.”
In another life, seeing Hunter Reed on his knees might have moved me. Now, I feel nothing but a vast emptiness.
“I don’t know if I can forgive you for this.” The words come out calm. “Not just keeping it from me—but watching it happen. Standing there while Jax pushed my father to his death.”
“I didn’t know—” He reaches for my hand. “I was twenty-one. A recruit myself. I didn’t know who he was. Not until?—”
“But you knew after.”
His fingers graze mine, but the touch that once electrified now leaves me cold. The disconnect between us stretches like an uncrossable chasm.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life making this right,” he whispers.
I look down at him, this powerful man brought low, and feel nothing but exhaustion.
“I need space,” I whisper. “I can’t process any of this with you here.”
Hunter looks up at me, still on his knees. For a moment, I think he might argue or try to convince me of something—his love, his regret, his plans to make everything right. Instead, his expression shifts into resignation.
He rises slowly, wounded shoulder making his movement less fluid than usual. The Hunter Reed I thought I knew would never show weakness like this, but perhaps I never really knew him at all.
