It was a loaded statement, filled with more emotions than I could name. Exhaustion? Anger? From the tidbits I’d gotten so far, I knew he and Sabrina had been through something terrible.
“Tell us what happened to you.” I sat in the wingback chair across from them. “And what Emerson Mahn has to do with it.”
He rubbed a hand over his face and cracked his neck. “I told Kane some of it already. God, it’s fucked up. You’re to blame, really,” he said, his eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head. “But if you hadn’t sent me after Jolyn, I wouldn’t have run into Sabrina, so I guess I should be thanking you for the two weeks of torture instead.”
I straightened in my chair, stomach sinking low and fingers tight around my glass. “Torture?” He’d called Emerson Mahn a psycho, but torture?
“Yeah.” He ran his hand over his face, as if to wipe away the memories. “I’m not going to tell you what they all did to me. It was sick and twisted, and they controlled me with a collar. The same kind Brooke had on when Kane found her. Sabrina was in one too, and they put her in a cage—were going to sell her off to some fucking hunter, put her in an arena. They could make you shift at will, or keep you stuck in human form to run their experiments.”
My stomach churned the more he spoke. The collar was my fault. Not once while we developed it had I considered how it could be used as a torture device. We were making it to save lives, to stop rabid shifters from hurting others and exposing our kind. It was my breach in security and it had caused my friends real harm. Nausea crawled up my throat. Had Jolyn been an active participant in this torture?
She’d said she planned to bring down her brother’s empire, but how culpable was she in my friends’ abductions? My anger with her had cooled since this morning, but it began ramping up again.
“Was Mahn acting alone?” I croaked, the need to roar scratching up my throat. My bear itched to rampage in reciprocal suffering.
Walker shook his head and ice-cold dread of his next words crawled up the back of my neck. “Mahn employed this sicko named Croskey,” he said. “Mahn got away, but Croskey’s dead. I made sure of that.” There was a grim sort of satisfaction in his tone when he said the last part.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed, my mind spinning. “Are you two okay?”
“We are now,” he said with a nod.
“And Jolyn was a part of it,” I stated, a question even though it didn’t come out that way. I prepared myself to hear the worst and squeezed the glass in my hand, needing to ground my body as the world spun around me.
“Not of her own free will. She seemed trapped like we were, only she wasn’t in a literal cage.”
“She didn’t help you.” I clenched my jaw, ready for a renewed surge of anger.
“Dude. She was theonlyone who helped us.” When I said nothing, he continued. “She burned every bridge she had in that place to do so. There was no way she would’ve been able to go back—not like the place is still standing, anyway—but it would’ve cost her everything.”
My grip on my glass loosened as his words sank in. She wasn’t part of it. She’d done what she could. It was all I could have asked in a place that sounded like hell on earth.
But she hadn’t been truthful. She hadn’t told me my friend was being tortured. What were her exact words?I saw him a few days ago and he was fine. Spunky, even.
Spunky. Yeah, a great description for Walker breaking out of that place and the hell he would have wrought on those who got in his way.
And she hadn’t admitted to knowing Sabrina even though Walker had said they kept her in a cage. Maybe she hadn’t known Sabrina’s name.
And if she’d come to work for me to steal…and her brother used the collar to control shifters…
My stomach dropped again. “Then Jolyn—” I almost couldn’t get the question out, cleared my throat, and tried again. “She knows what we are?”
Walker’s emphatic nod froze the blood in my veins. “She definitely knows about shifters. Too many humans knew at that place. It was enough to make me want to rip off my own skin.” He ran a hand over his head, exhaling. “My friends at Clyborne Inc. are looking into it. They’re going to be combing through all of Mahn’s connections who have excess knowledge of our species, trying to minimize the fallout and eliminating the more dangerous ones.”
Internally, I winced, not wanting to delve deeper into the statement, but knowing if others were doing the same to shifters, they needed to be stopped. I’d heard Walker mention Clyborne Inc. before, knew Astrid Clyborne, the owner of the shifter-run mercenary group, had offered him a job with his old crew, but he kept turning her down.
He must have seen the question in my eyes, because he explained, “I called them for backup in Alaska. They helped destroy the fucking place. Emerson Mahn was apparently already on their radar.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Wouldn’t tell me because I’m not on the payroll.”
I could tell from his posture it bugged him to be left out of the loop. Was he reconsidering Clyborne’s offer?
But that wasn’t what was making me feel queasy. Jolyn knew about shifters. It tipped my world on its axis. She’d stood in front of me and hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t looked at me with fear or suspicion because of what I was.
Maybe she doesn’t know about me.
Neither her or her friends gave any indication they knew I was different. There was that “paws” comment from Alina, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything, just a turn of phrase.
