Page 74 of Bears Not Included

I look down at him without an ounce of pity. For a moment, I wonder who I’ve become. Is this me?

“Gun,” I say. I watch as Yenin gets dragged back away from the glass, and while Mason keeps a knee to the middle of his back, Callen breaks his fingers, and Deacon shoves the gun up into the only hole he has.

It doesn’t end there for him. And I watch every single bit of it.

His screams will never replace the dead look in Faith’s eyes when I caught her looking at the camera.

When it’s all over, and Yenin is nothing but a lifeless heap of human waste, my gaze drifts over to the men who did that for me.

For the first time, I start to tremble. I want to go to them. I want them to hold me. But I can’t because Faith was upstairs, fighting for her life, no matter what Doctor Sandland promised me.

I turn away from them, and the instant I walk out of the door, Veronica is there. She takes me back to Faith.

I’m unsure how to tabulate my feelings. I thought I wouldn’t have the stomach to watch a man being gruesomely tortured—a hundred times worse than everything he did to Faith.

I heard his bones crack one by one. And his screams still ring indifferently in my head when they do to him what he did to Faith with his gun and a cane. I didn’t even flinch when they sheared off his pubic hair and deliberately snipped his penis.

I didn’t look away when his body was bent like a contortionist when they made him drink bleach. That was for what he did to Faith when he urinated on the wounds he gave her. I made sure to put it into my memory how he begged for his life. How sorry he was. And then I felt an unbelievable calm sail over me when I nodded surreptitiously to Deacon’s silent question to end his life, then watched his Deacon break Yenin’s neck. His dead body hit the floor with a satisfying thud.

Of all the different sides of me that they’d brought out of me, this side—this emotionless, stoic woman who can look death in the face—I don’t know if she’s the real me. I think she is. I think she was born the day I found my mom, with her skull crushed lying in between her flowerbeds.

But I’ve been away from Faith for too long and I can’t get to her fast enough now.

When I get to her, I don’t leave her again, not for a moment. I don’t think about what happened in that glass room with Deacon, Callen, and Mason. And Kirill Yenin.

Faith is my only priority right now.

Veronica brings me a fresh set of clothes. Another pair of track pants, a hoodie, and underwear. I allow myself ten minutes to take a shower in the bathroom that’s on the same floor as Faith. Veronica also makes me eat, but this time, I barely look at the sandwich.

“They want to know that you’ve eaten, darling girl. Can you do that for them?”

I glance at the older woman as if she said some magic word that snapped me out of my hypnosis. They have no right over me anymore.

“Livia,” Veronica says, her tone serious and stern. “You must know how much they love you. They may not be the kind of men who can say it in those three little generic words, but if you ask them to, they will burn the world down for you. They already did.”

I frown. There’s something there on the edge of my mind that’s been bothering me, and I couldn’t place it before.

Oh, my god.

I pull out my phone and read Demi’s message to me. Kirill Yenin had a no-harm protection order in his name. Without the majority share of votes on the Global Underground Six, they’ll be ousted.

They burned down their world for me.

Chapter Forty

Livia

I read Demi’s message three more times. I’m not misunderstanding it. They placed themselves in a dangerous situation for me.

No one knows that Kirill Yenin’s dismembered body is lying on the floor of the Ursid Syndicate’s house.

Oh, my god. It becomes even more crystal clear to me what they did and what it cost them. I force myself to take breaths, but it’s not helping. Nothing helps until I find myself kissing Faith’s hand and telling her I’ll be right back.

I rush through their house looking for them. They’re not in their study, not in the dining room. I open door after door. They’re nowhere.

I swirl around their massive house and I don’t know where to go next. Then I take a chance and go up to the bedroom. The one that was supposed to be ours.

I swing the door open and I stop.

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