How unlikely it is that I should have been granted a bond with someone like her.
“You should know some things about me,” I tell her.
“Tor—” There’s a definite warning in Finch’s tone, but I shrug it off.
“She deserves to know. Not just what she might be lumbered with if we can’t fix or remove the bond.”
“Remove? Who said anything about removing it?”
I pretend I don’t hear Reva’s whispered response, ploughing on ahead with the words I need to get off my chest. Because if not now, then when?
“Had you heard of Deadwood Cove before Northcliff mentioned them?” I ask.
Reva hugs her knees to her chest, cocking her head to one side. “Only vaguely.”
“You’re probably too young to have heard the stories,” I reply. My chest then goes tight as I try to bring myself to tell her one of those stories. Even after all these years, the scars on my back ache at the memory of that place.
“They’ve always been the same,” Cap says. “They’re filled with a strange, wild kind of magic and are always shifting location at random, making them almost impossible to track.” He smirks. “You’d think they’d be perfect for criminal dealings, wouldn’t you? Instead, our dear king decided they were perfect for his purposes instead.”
“What purposes?” Reva’s asks softly.
Finch clears his throat, avoiding her eye as he responds, “Word from his war room was that he was obsessed with his kingdom being besieged. He wanted to make his own perfect army of soldiers who would do his bidding, no matter who the enemy was or how overpowered his army was.”
“It was like a laboratory and training camp all in one,” I add, unable to keep the bitter edge from my tone. “Over decades, he rounded up hundreds of poor idiots who didn’t have any prospects and promised them a future.”
Reva swallows, and even Jack looks uncomfortable. He’s the only one of us who avoided a stint inside the Deadwood Cove labs but I don’t begrudge him that. Not when he’s the only reason I got out.
“King Wildrake’s people cursed the place so that everyone outside of it would forget about it, which meant he had free rein to do whatever he wanted with us,” I continue. “Decades spent experimenting and pushing us to the brink, only to bring us back.”
Reva’s trying to hide her confused frown, but she’s not doing a good job of it. And I don’t blame her. Whatever messed up shit she might be thinking they did to us all, it was ten times more fucked up than that.
“I wasn’t born with the bear inside me,” I tell her. “I was human. Mostly. Had a beast-borne grandfather, although he could turn into a fox and not a bear.”
Her eyes widen, and I see the realisation hit her in real time. “I’m never going to go into detail about what they did to us,” I tell her. “I don’t remember all of it since most of it was a mess of pain and being out of my head with rage. They put the bear in, and then when I didn’t die from that, they added the spikes.”
“What the hell,” she whispers.
“Kit was human too,” Finch adds. “He still is, more than the rest of us. With me, they bit off a little more than they could chew.” He grins, and his hat gives a little wiggle that no one can miss. “Tried to kill me at least a dozen times, but it never quite took.”
“Some of the cursed magic on the place must have rubbed off on him,” Jack adds thinly. “Kit broke himself out, and it was about a month later when I first met him. I’d been looking for Torin for years.Years,” he spits the word, shaking his head. “And between us, we let the rest of them loose.”
I remember the bloody chaos right after.
It was glorious.
Not all the lab rats survived. But between us, we slaughtered everyone involved on the other side.
“And then Kit worked out he could stretch out the curse on the place. Make it so that no one remembers what happened there, other than us. As far as we know, the king himself doesn’t know a thing about it.”
“After we escaped, there was always the chance word would get back and we might trigger the king’s memories of what he had planned for us, since Kit was never too sure how long the curse would stick .”
“So we joined a pirate ship,” Jack says. “But the first one didn’t take, and after a while Cap found us again.”
Reva’s eyes dart around the room, her brow furrowed in thought. “Are all the crew—”
“Not all of them are failed experiments,” Finch replies. “Some, but not all. Some are a mess in different ways. All are equally mad.”
His hat gives another dangerous wobble at his words, and he grins widely while Reva just looks bemused.
