We switch to another room, flipping on the light and exposing another dusty nightmare, but I think this might actually be the right room. Here, there’s a big spot of cleared dust like a beacon pointing the way.
“I just hope it’s true. You shouldn’t trust good news from a liar,” I say while I choose a box to look through.
“Yes, but the implications of what the four families did are heavy,” he shakes his head. “The things that came out after his death were heinous. If the four families did that to him, it makes me wonder what he did to deserve it and what motive they had in pinning it all on him.”
“You think they’re the guilty ones?” I ask, feeling a little sick at the idea. They are the ones who came up with the concept of the Offering, so it doesn’t seem completely unbelievable, but I still always thought our father had his limits. “The Briarwicks are a wealthy, well-connected family. Maybe they were growing more than they should,” I suggest. “A simple power struggle.”
“The people hurt were real, whether Sable’s dad is guilty or not,” he argues. I’ll be honest that I only saw limited details of his crimes, but it was enough to make me sick. Soren tsks and goes to another section of the room, abandoning the boxes and searching through other materials over the shelves.
“None of this has been casual,” I agree. “ButNina”—I try to use the new name—“could be lying or wrong. What if she is actually Sable’s half sister and she just doesn’t want to believe her dad is a child rapist?”
“I don’t know for sure,” he agrees.
“I think they bet Sable would be a fragile heiress and would run from the humiliation, so they were making a point by bringing her here,” I say. “But even if her dad was guilty, they had to have a reason for wanting to do that. They wanted to humiliate him through her.”
“But instead, she whipped us all into shape?” he asks. “Now thatisembarrassing.” I can’t stop myself from chuckling. Damn, I’m happily whipped.
He stops looking, eyes far away like the puzzle is starting to form inside his head. Soren has always been smarter than me, and that used to bother me a lot. He’s the firstborn, yet he never cared about the Rook name when I did everything I could to be ready to take over the family. Yet it was Soren who my dad put his hopes in, the son who never cared about anything. I used to resent his sharp mind and position as the favorite. Now, I don’t care that much. That’s fucking wild to realize. Sable has changed everything about me, and now all I want is to be right for her. As long as she loves me, I don’t need anything else.
“So whatever Sable’s dad had on them was so big they wanted to kill every last Briarwick. And now not only is Sable alive, but she has our loyalty above theirs,” I say, summing things up.
“Maybe it was the sex ring that Nina claims he was innocent in, or maybe it was something else entirely. We just don’t know.”
“Shit,” I curse.
Once again, I feel the ticking hands of the clock in my bones. Sable is the center ofeverything,and she needs to go somewhere safe. The four families have eyes on her, and at this point, I don’t care to learn anything else. We know Sable is in danger, so we need to take care of her.
“I really think we need?—”
“Found it,” he cuts me off.
Soren turns around, holding wooden boards, bigger than the usual notebook.
“How do you know?” I ask.
He turns them, showing me the X’s Nina wiped into the dust.
I clear the table closest to me, and he drops the boards. Like everything in this school, it’s over the top. The Gothic-style letters carved into the wood catch my attention. The first board is for Morwen. I scan it quickly, but I don’t know enough about Lex’s family to make sense of what we are looking for.
“Find ours,” Soren tells me.
I move the Morwen to the side, and underneath is Vale. Then Hollow and finally ours. We weren’t born yet, so it doesn’t have our names, but I expected that. It all looks okay, so I turn the board over, expecting to find a secret message or something, but it’s truly just our family tree. I wonder if our parents asked the teachers to keep this alive. Keep talking about the four families, making us seem like living legends. I always thought we were, and I never once wondered how we became that way.
“Orion?” Soren’s voice is weird, and I snap my eyes from the board to him.
“What?”
“There are five boards,” he says, the old memories filtering through his voice and playing in my mind’s eye.
“Fuck.”
Of course. How did we not ever consider them? The fifth family is long forgotten, but we all know they existed. That door proves it did. I put the Rook board away and lift the last one.
“Colefax,” I read the name on top.
“Does it ring a bell?” Soren asks, and I shake my head.
“Let’s bring them all to the others,” I decide. “We can think about this whole thing better when we aren’t breathing in all this dust.”
