Page 125 of Oathbreaker

I stare at Amelia Brigham’s face—the bright eyes I only see in my memories. Father had all the photos of Mom burned and deleted any recordings of her in our possession.

He not only killed her, he quite literally wiped her from the Earth.

Nameless Three barks something, and the group speaks rapidly in Ukrainian.Unease grows at their agitation. They say we’ve found nothing, but to me…it seems like we’ve found everything that could possibly matter.

I put my mother’s ID in my pocket.

“What the fuck?” Leo exclaims. He stands in front of a closed black file cabinet, and he holds a folder in his hand. I move over to him and slap my hand over the depraved image. Leo drops it as if it’s burned him.

“There are definitely more,” I say.

“Shit,” Leo says when I pull a drawer open and it’s full.

I pull out a manilla envelope and turn away with a sharp inhale, holding down a retch at the sight of a bloodied female body being eaten by five grown men. Her mouth is open—toothless and crimson-stained.

Her eyes still maintain an energetic pop of consciousness.

Leo’s breath escapes between his clenched teeth.

When we’ve both got control of ourselves, we turn our backs on the evidence, busying ourselves as the men search through the other side of the large room.

I whistle to get their attention.

“Is this it?” I motion toward the file cabinet where a black, leather-bound book sticks out.

Nameless One walks to me with a determined clip. Leo and I step to the side, parting so the file cabinet and television are between us.

He stares at the object for a moment, his beam of light focusing on the front of it for several moments. He picks it up, thumbing through the pages and looking at both sides of the cover. From my vantage point, I can tell it’s an address book or diary.

“No,” he growls but drops it in a crate nonetheless. He turns his lethal gaze on me, then walks back to his team members with a flurry of Ukrainian bursting off his lips.

I look at Leo and then down to my feet. The mismatched black and cream tiles give me pause. I never analyzed the vault floors on the rare times I was allowed inside, but now….

Shining the beam of my flashlight over the dark, symmetrical tiles, I slowly pace the stretch of the design to make sense of what I’m seeing.

An eye.

One of the Nameless shouts, stepping up to his comrade, and I lift my flashlight in their direction.

“There’s one other place if this isn’t it. We can check the safe in my father’s office,” I tell them. They keep speaking in tense spurts, but after a moment, they all turn to look at me. I leave the vault without a word.

Heading to the office means going up another level, over the T-shaped catwalk, and just past the giant opening that allows a view of the four-story main ballroom below.

But as soon as I raise my foot to go up the next flight of stairs, an unmistakable stench hits me.

“Oh, no,” Leo says, putting his forearm over his nose.

Something’s dead in here.

I turn to Misha’s men.

“It’s not safe to keep going,” I tell them, trying to breathe through my mouth. Thinking better of it, I lift the neck of my shirt to cover the lower half of my face.

I take a step down the stairs, and Nameless One stops me with a menace-filled command.

“You keep going.”

I don’t look away from his pitch-black eyes.

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