Page 197 of The Sinner's Bargain

“I would never let anyone hurt her,” I said with all the calm I could muster.

Malcolm raised an eyebrow and shifted his eyes to where Naya lay on the bed between us. “I’m having some trouble believing that.”

What could I say? He wasn’t wrong. She was in the hospital because of my uncle. She’d nearly been eaten by a wolf a few hours before that and nearly died in the lake before that. That wasn’t including all the other smaller times she’d nearly died.

I faced Naya, unable to face the truth in her brother’s eyes.

I was doing a shit job protecting her.

“Sir?” Cyrus stood in the doorway, expression tight. “Could I borrow you for a second?”

It was the fact that I knew he wouldn’t ask unless it was beyond an emergency that had me forcing my body to rise and move to the door.

“The team went through the passageway,” he murmured, voice low enough for only me to hear. “You’re not going to like what they found.”

I drew in a slow breath. “I’m not leaving. I don’t care what they found. It can wait until I go back with Naya.”

A tick worked in Cyrus’s jaw. Not annoyance. Apprehension.

“It’s really bad.”

I shook my head. “I’m not going. I’m not leaving her side until she wakes up. Tell them not to touch anything until I return.”

Cyrus grabbed my arm when I tried to return to Naya. His grip was bruising. “Thoran.”

I faced my friend fully. “What?”

Navy blue eyes shifted to Malcolm who hadn’t moved from his seat, but wasn’t making it a secret he was listening in.

“You need to see this.”

I was ready to tell him I didn’t care if Jesus Christ himself had built a home in the walls of that house, I wasn’t leaving, but he held up his phone and I could just make out a live feed. Cyrus pulled his earpiece off and handed it to me.

I took both and slipped the earpiece over my ears. A male voice filled my head matching the video.

“It seems to go through the entire house, sir,” the guard was saying as he maneuvered a narrow gap with only a single flashlight bobbing along dusty walls and swaying cobwebs that were batted aside.

The cameraman reached a latch and twisted. The door opened and I recognized Naya’s old bed. Her clothes. The angle was across the room, near the windows. I had to bring the layout to mind, but the camera swung around to show the wall dividing the room from mine. The one I’d wanted to knock down.

Then I thought of the night Naya had thought someone was in her room. She’d said she’d heard someone. Someone had turned her light off. I had chalked it up to an old house and faulty lamps, but what if...?

The camera was moving back into the crawl spacing and diving deeper. He stopped at different doors and different spaces I had no idea held secret compartments.

I glanced away for a second to check on Naya before lowering my gaze back to the screen.

“We’re back to the room,” the voice said as he panned along walls containing liquid filled jars and grimy shadows.

There was a large patch of blood still wet across the floor from where I assumed Oliver had fallen after getting shot in the shoulder by Cyrus. He panned over a puddle of vomit across one of the tables. It was at an odd location unless Naya was on the table when she got sick.

“This is what we wanted to show you, sir,” the man in my ear said, voice tight even across the headset. “We don’t know what we’re supposed to do with these.”

Rusted barrels lined a short alcove. One was open. The lid slightly ajar.

I’d thought I’d seen something move just over Oliver’s shoulder. It had been a mere flicker, a quick movement, but then everything happened, and it had slipped my mind, but now, as I watched the camera tilt down, my stomach roiled. My chest heaved as I tried to make sense of the atrocity writhing at the bottom.

“What the fuck am I looking at?” I growled, mainly to myself, but the man on the other end must have heard me.

“An unholy abomination, sir,” he said quietly. “Nothing that should exist. There are eight other barrels. None of us want to open them, but we think it might be the same.”

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