Suddenly, Bron seems to come to life. “We have a lot of answering to do?” Rage awakens in his hazel eyes, and he steps closer to her, towering over her small frame. “You fuck with our minds, disappear, and end up in this cursed place and you think we have a lot to answer for?”
“How about for lying to me?” she says, her voice low and threatening, and I swear all three of us flinch. “How about for knowing the truth about my brother and hiding it from me? How about for having something to do with his death?”
The air rushes out of the room.
“No--” Bron begins.
I cut him off. “She deserves the truth.”
Bron and Lucian look at me, and I know we gave our words. I’ve never broken my word before, but if there’s anyone I would lose my honor for, it’s Esmeray. Lucian and Bron might think that we can come back from this, but I know the truth. My family might be known as warriors. We might be feared by most people. But we also knew that it’s hard to run from the truth.
“Tell me,” she says, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
Bron doesn’t back down. “We can’t, because we can’t trust you to be smart with this information. You’ll go and get yourself killed.”
“And what does it matter to you what I do?”
Lucian speaks, his voice gentle. “You have to know how we feel about you…”
And that’s when I see it for the first time. Surprise. Confusion. Does she really have no idea?
Hell.
“Wh-what…” She freezes. “I just want to know the truth.”
Bron closes his eyes. “Esmeray. What can we say to get you to let this go?”
“Nothing,” she answers with ease.
And I believe her, even if I can’t sense her emotions any more.
“Your brother was murdered.” It feels strange to say the words aloud, but when those grey eyes fall on me, I know she’s relieved I said it too. “He became obsessed with knowing the truth, and no matter what we did or said, we couldn’t stop him. So, at first, we humored him. We decided it was better for us to be with him than for him to get hurt alone. But no matter how hurt he got, no matter how many close calls there were, it was never enough for him.”
Suddenly, I can’t speak anymore. I can’t find the words to tell her what we did. And it kills something inside of me. I’m a warrior. If I can’t face the woman I love with the truth, then I’m not half the man I thought I was.
“What happened, Dwade?” she asks, and I’ve never heard her sound so small.
I have to swallow around the lump in my throat. “The week your brother died, we sat him down and said that we’d had enough of his obsession and that we wouldn’t enable him anymore. We told him if he was going to keep doing dangerous things, he’d have to do them without us. We thought losing us might be enough to finally get him to see reason. But instead…”
Bron opens his eyes and the pain of losing Rayne all over again suddenly flows off of him. And for the first time I realize how much he’s been holding back, because the pain he feels echoes through my very soul. And so I decide to be brave too. I drop the walls around my emotions, and a second later I feel Lucian do the same. The room is suddenly filled with such an intense sense of loss that I feel tears prick my eyes.
But it’s Bron who finishes our story. “Your brother didn’t stop. Each night he was gone longer, which meant he was going deeper into the tunnels, until he didn’t come back. He was always back by morning, but the day he died he didn’t return. We went into the tunnels looking for him, and we found…his blood.”
Her eyes are filled with tears. “Why didn’t he just go to you, then? Why did he come to me? If he’d have stayed on campus, maybe...”
Bron releases a slow breath. “There’s no cell phone reception down here, so he couldn’t have called us for help. However, awhile ago we found a rare transportation crystal. The user needed only to think of a place and they could go there. When we found his blood on the walls, we looked in our room for the crystal, but it was gone, so we knew he’d used it. The club I found you at that night is owned by a healer Rayne used to date. I thought maybe he used the crystal to get there. When I couldn’t find him, I realized I was wrong.”
“We didn’t know the weapon that had injured him was poisoned until we learned of his death,” I say, remembering the horrible moment we found out. A moment that will live in my memory forever. “We thought he’d gotten badly injured. We never thought…”
Esmeray slowly sits down, and tears track down her cheeks.
I settle beside her, but I don’t touch her.
“Are you okay?” Lucian asks, kneeling down at her other side.
The agony in the room only increases, but still, I can sense Esmeray keeping the walls tightly up around her emotions. I almost ask her to pull them down, to show us how she feels, but I realize that maybe it’s better if I don’t know. If she blames us now, if she hates us now, I’d rather her say it than have to feel it.
At last her gaze locks with mine. “What was my brother researching?”
That was the last thing I expected her to say. “Esmeray. You understand that this information consumed your brother, right? It led to his death.”
“If someone was willing to kill for it, then we should find out what he found
