The words caught on the edge of her throat, but she finally gave her answer. “It’s your home. You can do as you please. But if you kill him, I won’t ever be able to forgive you.”
“Yes,” Mag whispered, eyes melancholy. “Yes, I know.”
It still didn’t make sense that she covered for the bastard, but we wouldn’t go against her wishes. So much had happened to us over the years. If she turned her back on us, it would mean betrayal. However, it was her call, and we would trust her until that trust was broken.
The three of us h locked his unconscious body inside, checking the chains to make sure he couldn’t escape. To
block out the sounds of his cries, we stretched a thick cloth over the cage itself. He wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Adeline walked into the tent and sat on the beast-skin rug in the center. The area was much bigger looking on the inside, and I was sure she’d find it adequate in comparison to the old and decaying hostel building near the edge of the forest.
She placed her bag between her legs. As she unzipped it, she kept her eyes focused on us in silence. Finally, she grabbed a simple brush and began combing her hair. “You see the hallucinations, too?” she asked, plainly.
I bowed and nodded. “It’s not something I enjoy admitting,” I said.
“But this is your landscape. Why can’t you live in peace here?” she asked.
I turned to Mag who then turned to Cadmar. It was hard to know what to say without freaking her out. He sat next to her and placed his hand on her thigh. “We should not exist. We are an abomination.”
“Would an abomination help me so eagerly?” she asked.
“What he means to say is we weren’t always this way,” I said, knowing I had already told her too much.
She stirred, unable to sit still. “I’m tired of everyone hiding things from me. Please, I need to know the truth about this realm. About you. About... everything,” she pleaded.
I turned my eyes away. All I wanted to do was fix all that had been done to everyone involved, but I couldn’t. The hard truth was, despite my strength, I was still ultimately powerless. We all were.
Cadmar had been better at dealing with what had happened than any of us, but he was a man who accepted the cards life gave him. He had always been like that, even before it all happened. “We have had a long night. We should focus on nicer things,” he said. And before she could protest, he swayed his hand over hers. “There’s so much to show you.”
The three of us gathered around her, lying across the floor like Neanderthals. We had been waiting for her to come back for decades. In the grand scheme of things, it might not have seemed that long. But she was a godsend. She broke through the barrier when no one else would. “You woke us,” I said to Cadmar’s dismay. He didn’t want to get into the heavy stuff, but she deserved to know, and I knew she could handle bits and pieces if we started slow.
She perked up, leaning forward on her kneecaps. Taking my hand, she squeezed and gave the sexiest smile I had ever seen. Her eyes even seemed to glow in her excitement. “I remember!” she exclaimed. “There was a rock or something. And blue electricity. Your eyes opened. It was all so peculiar. My father never talked to me about it. For the longest time, I thought it might have been a dream.”
“It was no dream,” Mag said.
Every single day. Every single night. Hour after fucking hour, we’d waited for her. We knew it would take time. She was far too young to jump back in. The effects would have destroyed her brain had she tried. Now, she was a grown woman. She was tall, curvy, and capable. Her eyes were a healing heather green. Not to mention, she had the most delectable scent imaginable. She was the most exquisite creature I had ever laid my eyes on, and it wasn’t due to my years of anticipation either.
“What if I told you this place, this world, was engineered?” I asked her.
I could feel the burning of Cadmar and Mag’s eyes, but I didn’t care. The more I told her, the more attention she gave. And the more she knew, I thought, the more she would want to help us.
She shook her head in disbelief. “I’d tell you it is an impossibility. There is no architect with such genius.”
A tear ran down Cadmar’s cheek. I tried not to look at him, but it broke my fucking heart. “There was,” I said, staring right at him. “He was the best damn architect this world has ever seen.”
“No,” Cadmar said, gritting his teeth. “He wasn’t.”
“Shut your mouth,” Mag growled and flexed his forearms.
Cadmar wasn’t shutting anything. “The architect abused a naturally occurring phenomenon. It was a complete accident this place was made.”
The glow in her eyes intensified. She needed to know more, and she practically fell into his arms with curiosity. “My God,” she muttered a few times, incredulously. “It was you.”
“We don’t need to talk further,” Mag said, angrily.
She ignored the brute and focused on Cadmar. “You were the one who made this place,” she said.
Tears welled in his eyes, but he did not let himself cry any more. She didn’t know the half of it. He’d punished himself for years. It had been quite some time since he’d mentioned his experiments. Even I was interested in hearing about it, despite how much it hurt me.