Page 39 of Twisted Truths
Gabriel’s jaw tightens. “No, she wasn’t. My parents warned me, especially Mum, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t care. I loved her, and I refused to let her go. We snuck around for months when she first arrived at the Circle, before we could officially be together.” He laughs bitterly. “She was the first person I broke the rules for … but not the last.”
I swallow, realising he’s talking about Zara. My heart aches for both my sister and my friend, but now it also breaks for the man who lost two of his Chosen in horrific ways.
“Maddy got pregnant not long after she was announced as my Chosen,” he continues with another ghost of a smile. “We were terrified, but so damn happy. She would lie with her head on my chest and her hands wrapped around her swollen belly, talking about how the baby would look like you. ‘Samefierce eyes,’ she’d say. She missed you, Hadley. More than anything.”
A tear slips down my cheek, and I brush it away. “Why didn’t she try to see me?”
“She did.” His fists clench by his sides. I don’t think he even notices. “When she was about seven months along, she begged me to take her to see you. She was homesick, aching for you in a way I didn’t understand. I tried. I pleaded with my parents, but they said no. It was too close to her due date, and she wasn’t allowed contact with anyone outside the Circle until after the birth.”
I’m barely breathing from his revelation. “So, what happened?”
“I told her to write you a letter. I thought it would help, and it did. She seemed more … free. Relaxed. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”
Tears fall freely now, but I don’t brush them away.
“She went into labour three weeks before the due date,” Gabriel continues. “I knew something was wrong from the start. They said the baby was breech. There was no medical assistance. Nothing but me, my parents, and our healer. It wasn’t enough.” He swallows hard, his voice cracking. “I lost them both. Maddy, and our daughter.”
The silence that follows is earth-shattering. I’m gripped by the pain of losing her all over again. Hearing all these details about how she suffered in her last moments, surrounded by strangers.
“I found the letter in her drawer a few days later.” His voice is barely more than a whisper. “I didn’t read it. I couldn’t. Her words were meant for your eyes only, and to be honest I was scared of what would be in it. Did she resent me for bringing her here? If she did, I didn’t want to know. Selfishly, I wanted to believe she was happy here. The guilt ateaway at me, so I took the letter to a contact in Rafters Falls, to a law firm I knew would hold onto it and send it for your eighteenth birthday. I needed you to know, Hadley. Even if I couldn’t face you.”
I can’t speak, can’t think. Gabriel’s words feel unmoored, drifting somewhere between sorrow and fury as he portrays the kind of love that stretches across realms. It’s a twisted fairy tale. A romantic tragedy for the ages.
“You loved Madeline?”
He nods.
“What about Sierra and Zara?”
His face twists into a grimace, and my stomach turns. Is this all a show?
“Hadley, I love your sister and little Annie more than life itself. There’s not a day goes by I don’t think of them. They weren’t simply a chapter in a book. They’re my whole goddamn library. When I lost them, I realised some darker things about my parents and their plans for the Circle. They barely allowed me four months to grieve before they all but forced me to take Sierra as my Chosen. As you know, if a Chosen doesn’t fall pregnant within a year, she’s either remarried or becomes an Ascendent. But Sierra didn’t have fertility issues. She didn’t fall pregnant because I refused to touch her.”
He bows his head. “My parents don’t know, and I threatened to spill one of her secrets if she ever told them. As for Zara, she was never anything more than a friend searching for refuge. When I lost Madeline and Annie, I made a promise that I would help anyone in need I crossed paths with. This was what I believed the Circle to be until I did some digging and uncovered something a little more sinister. I don’t know what Zara told you, but her danger didn’t lie within these walls, at least not at first,” he mutters, as if to himself. “I thought I was protecting her by bringing her into the fold.While I’m still not sure I did the right thing, my intentions were pure.”
“But Franklin?—”
“Isn’t mine.”
His words lay heavy in my stunned silence. While he has answered my questions about my sister, he has left me with so many more unanswered.
Gabriel is not Franklin’s father.
Zara was not pregnant withhischild when he announced her as his Chosen.
So whoisthe father?
Does this have something to do with her murder?
Did Guardian Solomon and Seraphina know?
As my brain tries to process the revelations he has trusted me with, Gabriel moves around the counter, stopping in front of me. “The only woman I’ve ever loved—will ever love—is your sister. I’m not protecting you because I owe her. I’m protecting you because Iloveher. It’s what she would want. She’d want you safe. She’d want youfree.”
I meet his grief-lined, guilt-heavy eyes, seeing not a monster, not a guardian, but a man who lost everything.
And I believe him.
Then he drops the next bombshell on me.
