Page 197 of Beyond the Blue Horizon
He paused, and his throat trembled with reservation.
“But it was worse than just being less than good. I was abadman, Piper.” It was a coarse confession. “A fucking horrible beast.”
I shivered, and it didn’t have anything to do with the cold.
“Maybe it was formed in my years on the street as a teenager. Or maybe it was just who I was from the beginning. But I got to the place where the only concern I had was for myself. Consumed by greed and self-satisfaction and that unyielding quest for survival. Until I met my crew. River and Otto and Kane and Cash. Raven. These unlikely people who became my family. But beyond them? I had no care, Piper.”
He inhaled a haggard breath, and his teeth ground as he kept forcing out the revelations that I really should deflect.
Fight him off and get out of here before this got any worse than it already was.
But I couldn’t move.
The pain that oozed out of him had me locked tighter than the strong hand he had bound around my wrists.
Grief clouded his moonlit eyes. The spark dimmed in shame.
“Because of it…I lost—” He clipped off whatever he was about to admit, but my spirit was sure it had everything to do with whoever he referenced last night. Whoever he thought he couldn’t love and had failed.
“It became clear I couldn’t keep living the way that I was, and I guess maybe it all came down on my crew at the same time. This sinking realization that we were nothing but monsters. That we’d long outlived our desperation to survive and had become the beasts that we tried to endure when we lived on the streets. None of us could go on that way.”
Hesitation brimmed in him, the effervescence that wisped right before a pot came to a full boil.
“What I’m about to tell you can’t go beyond you and this family, Piper. Even if you turn and walk away from me right now, I am trusting you with this.” Theo ground through the words.
It was a burden I wasn’t sure I could withstand. But I couldn’t reject it, either.
Erratically, I nodded my head.
Theo’s tongue stroked out to wet his lips. “That life was destroying us, Piper. Stealing every good thing that we had. The mistakes we made coming back at us full force. Fiery arrows shot directly from Karma’s hands.”
Theo swallowed hard, and I shook beneath the weight of what he was confessing. “One night, River stumbled on this woman whose husband was coming at her with a knife. River took him out. God knows it wasn’t the first blood that any of us had spilled, but it was the first time it was done for the right reason. For protecting someone who couldn’t protect themself.”
He lifted his left hand and squeezed it again, flashing that same tattoo. “That was the night that Sovereign Sanctum was born.”
“Sovereign Sanctum?” I repeated the words as if it could bring me to understanding.
“Our secret society where we bring victims of heinous abuse to safety. Hide them away before we can give them new lives. And we get them there by any means necessary.”
A flashfire of everything I’d gleaned over the last several days blipped through my mind. The secret meetings, Emery’s covert words about them being involved in something deeper, and the way that Theo had acted around Alicia and Lucy.
The fear and overprotectiveness he seemed to watch them with.
The truth that I’d known Theo was truly dangerous.
And not just the surface kind.
Thiskind.
The kind where he had blood on his hands.
I could almost hear the ghosts of the bodies he’d brought to their end howl from the ink marked on his skin.
“Are you…” I paused, then whispered, “Part of some government agency?”
I already knew the answer.
Of course, I did.
