Secret Unleashed

“Well, the wolf king would agree with you, Logan, but if your file has any press clippings on me from the past year, I think you’ll understand why I don’t feel the same.”

“Lucas Rain is the werewolf king?” Logan lost any pretense of decorum in that moment, becoming more excited than a child on Christmas morning. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

Oops.

“You guys sort of suck at researching this paranormal stuff, you know that, right?”

“That’s why we have you now,” Logan replied.

“Awesome. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Desmond Alvarez is in the room next door. If you are willing to sit and talk with me a few minutes longer, yes, I will give you a private audience with him.”

My heart flip-flopped, and I stared at the wall as if I might have newly acquired x-ray vision and could potentially get a glimpse of him. Sadly my powers remained limited, and sarcasm was not the same as being able to see through walls.

Tyler handed Logan another folder, and this one was passed along to me. I opened it, then immediately shoved it back at him. “Forget it.”

“Secret…” Tyler started.

“Why are you doing this to me? I’ve answered every question you’ve asked, and I just want to see Desmond. I don’t see why I need to go over all this again.”

Logan reopened the folder and pushed it back to me. “I understand this is difficult—”

“I don’t think you do. I think this is words on paper to you. I don’t think you have the faintest goddamn idea what I went through.”

“Then explain it to me. Because right now, Dr. Kesteral’s fate is up to me to decide. So you explain to me what he did, and maybe I’ll have a better handle on how to deal with him.”

I glanced down at the folder, and a glossy eight-by-ten photo of The Doctor stared back at me. Bruises under each eye made the blue of his irises even colder. He looked sick, making me think the photo was taken recently. I wanted to know if they had any pictures that showed what I’d done to his chest, but I thought better of asking.

The tab stuck to the side of the folder read Friedrich T. Kesteral. Friedrich. It wasn’t a name to strike fear, but I didn’t think I’d ever be able to think of someone named Fred the same way.

I turned the photo over so he would stop staring at me, and what came next almost made me throw the folder in Logan’s face. Apparently The Doctor had meticulously documented the things he’d done to me, because the file continued with more photos. Here was my chest opened up for the world to see, and next to it pictures of my split belly.

My hands shook violently as I flipped the photo over. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I tried to pretend they weren’t there as I paged through a half-dozen more photos showing things he must have done while I was unconscious.

The last photo of me was the most recent and had been taken after my arrival at the hospital. My eyes were closed, and they had been kind enough to give me some false modesty by covering my body from chest to thigh before photographing me. My arm hadn’t yet been set in the photo and bent sideways at an awkward angle. I’d likely rebroken it when I crammed my hand into The Doctor’s chest.

Pink faded scars still showed where he’d cut me open, though they’d mostly healed by that point from the extra blood I’d had before the FBI team arrived.

It was my face that upset me most. The deep blue bags under my eyes looked like bruises, and my skin was so pale I could have passed for dead. This photo more closely resembled autopsy pictures than evidence of a living woman.

The next photo was Holden when he’d arrived, looking like he’d just wandered out of Auschwitz. There were no photos of him during his stay with The Doctor, and I thanked my lucky stars for that.

Before going on I hesitated. “Are there…? Is Maxime in here?”

“No. We thought it best to… We didn’t think it was necessary to include those.” Meaning the photos existed, but not in this file.

“You couldn’t have extended your consideration to the photos of a man wriggling his hands around in my guts?” I snapped, my fingers clenching hard on the photo of Holden, wrinkling his face under my palm.

Tyler appeared sheepish, but Logan was unapologetic. “I need you to remember this, Secret. I need you to tell me everything.”

I flipped the page over, and an unfamiliar face stared up at me. No, not unfamiliar, but…new.

I’d always thought I looked more like my mother because we had the same nose and the same curly hair. But the man in the photo staring back at me could have been my younger brother.

And not the younger brother I actually had, who looked nothing like me.

As with the photo of me when I’d arrived at the hospital, Sutherland was unconscious in his portrait, making it impossible for me to tell if his eyes were the same brown as mine, but so much else was similar.

His hair was the same pale blond. We shared the same mouth, the same sun-starved complexion and the same ears. I touched the photo tentatively, not letting myself see the unhealed wounds marring his chest and arms, because all that mattered was his face.

This was my father.

It was hard to wrap my head around the idea at first since the man in this photo was younger than me, forever frozen at seventeen. But I couldn’t deny the resemblance, and my heart and stomach both flip-flopped to see his face.

“Is he…? I never asked. Is he okay?”

“He took longer to heal than one would expect from a vampire, but yes. He’s up and moving again, doesn’t seem worse for the wear. Physically anyway.” Logan emphasized the last part, and I understood what he was telling me. Sutherland was nuts.

I tried to empathize with him. My father had been turned against his will. He’d tried to murder his family and almost succeeded. He had no vampire sire to ease his transition into living with the council, but he’d still tried to be good.

And he’d been punished.

Punished because of me.

Using the heel of my hand, I roughly wiped tears from my cheeks and closed the folder without looking at any other photos.

“We couldn’t help but notice the resemblance,” Tyler commented. “Now that he’s recovered it’s…well, it’s uncanny really. Are you two related?”

I nodded, grating my fingernails down the front of the folder. “He’s my father.”

“Your…father?” Logan sounded unconvinced.

“Vampires don’t age,” I reminded him. “He’s my biological father. He was turned at seventeen, right before my mother gave birth.”

Logan nodded, and Tyler reached across the table to retrieve the folder from me before I dug my way though the cover.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” I said. “Any details not covered by the notes, anything I have to give you, it’s yours on one condition.”

“I’ve already promised you can see Desmond,” Logan told me.

“And I’ll hold you to that, but I want you to promise me one more thing.”

“It depends on what it is.”

“When you have everything you can possibly learn from him and there’s nothing else he can tell you, I want you to put me in a room with Friedrich Kesteral. I want that room to have no windows, and I want you to leave me alone with him for an hour.”

“I don’t think that’s a good—”

“When this man’s usefulness to you is spent, you will put me in a room with him, do you understand? Because he’s going to die one way or another, and whether it’s sanctioned by the government