I stiffened. “How do you know that?”
“My magic can sense it. I don’t know. I’ve never sensed something like this before, but I think…I think I can bring it forward….”
I flicked my gaze back toward the slab, and a chill shot down my spine. “Do it.”
“This place is already trying to force the memory out,” he told me, his gaze searching mine. He was in full demon form, now. As if he was searching for the memory in my subconscious. “It’ll be easy for me to bring it out. Are you sure?”
I hesitated.
The thought of seeing what my mind had locked away made my stomach churn, but the pressure in this grove was suffocating me. My father’s voice echoed at the edges of my consciousness, cruel and sharp. I knew this wasn’t something I could keep buried forever.
“Sybil has fucked with all of us. It could be connected to her,” Dex muttered.
“If it can help with this mission, it may be good to try it,” Hunter agreed, and Jesper nodded his agreement.
“Bram?” Reed raised a brow. “What do you want me to do?”
“Do it.”
Reed’s fingers brushed my temple, and the world around me dissolved. I wasn’t in the grove anymore.
The repressed memory slammed into me like a spiked club to the skull, something Father had done to me many times before. Suddenly, I was in the past. I was a shadow of myself watching from the outside.
It was a day after Grandfather died.
My father’s grip was tight around my wrist as he dragged me forward and tossed me in front of the slab—the exact same one that loomed before us now.
The scent of blood clogged my nose, fresh and old all at once.
A man lay on the slab, trembling, his eyes wide with fear. “Stop it! I’ve done nothing to you!”
“You were born nobility.” Father’s voice was cold, devoid of any humanity. “Watch, son.”
I didn’t want to.
I tried to turn away, but my younger self stood frozen in place, horror locking my muscles as my father raised the blade.
I’d seen this before. It was a recurring nightmare…only in the nightmare,Iwas the one on the slab.
The man gasped, one final breath before the blade sliced through flesh, and blood splattered onto the stone.
The vision shattered.
I gasped as I came back to the present, knees hitting the ground. My head pounded, my heart racing as I clenched my hands into the dirt.
Chaos let out a sharp whine as he manifested, pacing furiously around me, unsure how to help.
Pandora’s voice cut through the haze. “Bram?”
I staggered, breath hitching, and I grabbed my head. More memories flashed before my eyes, flooding into my brain rapidly. My father’s cruel voice dripping with disdain as he spoke of nobility, of their corruption, of their supposedsins.
That wasn’t his only victim. He…killed more than one person on that stone. The one from my memory Reed had helped me access opened a floodgate.
“Bram,” Pandora pleaded with me. “What’s happening? How can I help?”
I barely registered her on the ground next to me. My hands clenched into fists against the dirt.
The weight of the past bore down on me, suffocating.
