Page 26 of Beloved Sacrifice

“The first time he…” Rose swallowed hard. “I tried to run. Your mom was there. She sat me down and explained about how all trinities need a Dom, a switch, and a sub. That they were training me to be a perfect sub. That I was lucky to be trained, that this was something I had to do.” Her sentences were short and choppy, her breathing fast and uneven. “That it was going to be hard, and he would have to hurt me, but I had to go through it. She called…called my dad. He told me to do exactly what they said and to be a good girl.”

“Elroy kept tabs on you and Caden. He changed out cell phones regularly, but Victoria didn’t. I was able to hack it and install software that did voice-to-text transcriptions of any phone calls she had and sent those transcripts to me.” He paused. “Did you know they were watching you?”

“We knew. We did our best to keep them in the dark.”

Weston nodded, as if that made sense. “Elroy didn’t trust Caden. Didn’t think he was committed to the cause.”

“No one ever said he was dumb. Caden wasn’t committed to the purists.” She spat the last word. “But he, we, danced on their strings.”

“You said Caden thought he was close. Close to what?”

“I don’t know. There was always another puzzle, another clue. Caden was sure they were hiding something—something more than the tunnels and the art.” She shook her head. “He still had hope.”

“And you didn’t?”

She wanted to say “no.” Since she was sixteen, she’d been under their control—nearly half her life, and all of her adult life. It would be beyond stupid to still hope. Yet she had. Without that hope, she would have been nothing more than a hollow husk by now.

She didn’t answer his question. Weston waited. If he thought she’d be intimidated into answering, he was wrong. Though the submissive in her was screaming that she had to answer the question or she’d be punished, that same impulse also helped her stay quiet—a good submissive was silent.

Weston cleared his throat. “Caden was right. They were hiding something. Something that they couldn’t risk the Grand Master finding out.”

“And you figured it out?”

“Most of it.”

Rose shook her head. She’d heard that before.

“I need to finish this. Flying to the U.S. threw off my timeline. I was able to reschedule with—”

“Flying to the U.S.? Where are we?”

“England.”

Rose looked out the window again. A little cottage in the English countryside. Her stomach twisted and it felt like there was a lead knot just under her breastbone.

“Six months,” he said softly. “I figured six more months and then I’d be able to get all of you out.”

“The end, the solution, they’re always just around the corner. One more puzzle, one more game.”

“I’m serious.”

“And you think I’m not?”

Weston’s jaw clenched and he looked away, only his one remaining eye moving. She swallowed.

“The art and artifacts in the secret tunnels—you know about them?”

Rose winced, remembering a cold day spent bound and almost naked, being whipped so Caden would work faster, and more recently following Christian and his trinity down there. It has seemed like a fitting tomb. “I know about them. How do you know about them?”

“Barton took me to retrieve something when I was still in high school. That’s when he told me our family were guardians of important secrets—elite even within the Trinity Masters.”

Rose snorted. “A nice way of phrasing it—prettying up being racists by calling yourself purists.”

“It was true—they were guarding a secret.”

“The map, the tunnels.” She huffed out a laugh. “They gave me what I thought was the only copy of the map—I got to pass it out to the other purists. But even that was a lie. I didn’t have the real map.”

“It’s not about the tunnels.”

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