"She helped him." Ember says as she finishes drying her hands.
"Helped him?" I whisper, still too shocked to look away from the woman slightly swinging from a belt in her own washroom.
"Travis' mom captured and lured girls for Robert to rape." She starts wiping down the faucet and sink then reaches out and wipes down the door handle too.
"Oh fuck," I turn and use my sleeve to open the door, "I need to speak to Travis."
I walk back out and see that Travis isn't in here anymore. I wouldn't want to be either considering the scene in the bathroom. Vin comes out to grab the stool from Travis' mother's vanity and brings it back in the bathroom. So, they are masking this as a suicide. I leave the room and stand at the top of the stairs. I don't see him anywhere on the first floor, so I start opening doors up here. I open a few closets and a bathroom when I next come to a door with a hole in it. I open it and find Travis out on the balcony smoking a cigarette. I go and lean on the railing beside him and stare out at the surrounding landscape.
"She wasn't even my mother." He whispers as he flicks his butt out onto the driveway.
"What?" I look at him slightly confused.
"I was the result of repeated rape on one of the house staff. They decided to keep me since Christina couldn't have children. You know... as an heir to this fucked up legacy."
I don't know what to say, and I feel an overwhelming amount of sadness for him. To learn your father was a rapist and the woman you thought was your mother but wasn't, was helping him, is just too much.
"Who was it?" I ask.
"Sonja." He bows his head, "I can't find her anywhere."
"She's not here?" I ask him and he shakes his head. "We'll find her." Now that I think of it, Travis does have similar features to Sonja.
"I want to get out of here." He turns around.
Vin is leaning against his door frame and nods at him, "let's go for a drive."
Travis nods and slowly walks over to his brother. Vin wraps his arm around his shoulders and leads him out of the room and down the stairs. I hear the front door open and shut and watch them both get in the Hummer and drive away. Vin will look after him, I know this.
"Let's get the fuck out of this den of evil." I hear Ember say behind me.
"Yeah." I nod and follow her out and into her car. "Any camera footage?"
"Nope, she had everything turned off." She shrugs.
"That's weird." I hum.
"Worked out for us." She pulls out of the driveway without a backward glance.
“I’m really worried about Travis. Should you have done that in front of him?”
“Yeah, it needed to be done. Besides if he weren’t there, he wouldn’t have learned who his real mother was.” She quickly looks to me and then back to the road. “Thing is Emmett, our lives aren’t fucking fairy tales. It’s never going to be. He needs to start seeing what it is we all do. Then he can make the decision to stick around or not.”
“You’re right.” I nod because she is. I also know Travis has never had a fairy tale life and I’m worried about how much more shit this guy can take.
“He’s been handed a shitty stick in life,” she nods, almost like she’s reading my mind. “But I’m hoping he can see through all of us how to grab that shitty life by the horns and make it his bitch. Not the other way around.”
“Truth.”
We get home and it’s empty. No Travis and no Vin. I’m guessing Vin is doing the brother thing and showing Travis he still has family. I hope he realizes he has all of us for the rest of his life, unconditionally if that’s what he wants.
“You and I need to have a chat.” Ember says as she steps into my room. “Carm and I had a discussion in Spain and he let me know a few things about you.”
“Like?” I raise my brow at her.
“Calen?” She says through gritted teeth. “The fact that our father made sure his son was beaten occasionally as he was raised by a madman?”
“Occasionally?” I snort. “Yes Ember, my life wasn’t a fairy tale either. But I grabbed that bitch by the horns and killed it in cold blood.”
“He told me you killed him.” She nods, “with your knives.”
“Seemed fitting,” I shrug. “He made me fear them for most of my childhood.”
“How?” She asks.
"Whenever the beatings would happen, I would end up being holed up in my room for a couple of days, unable to lay on my back." I look up into Ember's blazing eyes, "we had a cook at the time. His name was Angelo. He would come to my room and apply a homemade salve to the wounds on my back and legs. Then he would sit with me until I finally fell asleep. Someone eventually told Calen and he pulled me into his office. I remember sitting on the chair as he berated me for being weak and soft. Then they dragged in a gagged and bound Angelo."
"This asshole is lucky he's dead." Ember growls.
"Calen forced him to kneel in front of me while I was seated on the chair. He then went on with his speech about how soft I was and that people could see my weaknesses and felt sorry for me, like Angelo did." I close my eyes and take a breath, "he then got up out of his seat and stood
