Page 78 of Betrayal (Corrupt Empire 1)

Chapter Fifteen

Avery

I didn’t feel like talking about the things I’d found out about my family. I shoved those emotions in a hole and locked them up. The pain was too real. Too visceral.

“Aiden, you’re squishing me.”

He let me go, his eyes wild with too many emotions to decipher. Leaving his arms always tore at my heart.

Stupid girl. You just sealed your fate. Stupid, stupid girl.

I sat in the cupboard, waiting. Indecision plagued me. When it came down to it, I couldn’t leave. I picked a side. I picked Aiden. The man who gave me such a complex array of emotions, I could barely get them straight in my head.

Aiden could help me make this right. Help me change the course of history.

Stop my family. End the abuse. Abuse of power. Abuse of people.

Their greed. A sickness. A curse.

“We need to talk about your family. What you learnt, what you saw, that’s not everything,” he said.

So I wasn’t getting out of a conversation with him about it.

Great.

“What else could there possibly be?”

“It goes beyond money and girls. They know powerful people. People who rely on their services and keeping each other’s secrets.”

“What services?”

“You saw the video. Do you think that’s normal? Trust me, there’s more. Playing out their sick fantasies in exchange for silence. In exchange for underhand business dealings.”

My stomach dropped. What I’d seen Frazier do. I never wanted to see anything else like it.

“They’re monsters.”

He gave me a sad smile.

“And you think I’m not one too?”

“Do you take women, rape them, force them to do unspeakable things, mutilate them?”

His eyes flashed with pain.

“No. Those aren’t the only things that make people monsters.”

“Then what makes you a monster?”

“I killed your parents for a start and I took you.”

In my eyes, it didn’t necessarily make him a monster. Not anymore. Not now I knew what my dad had been involved in. What he’d allowed. Perhaps the fact he’d taken me and broken my fucking mind made him a shit person. That didn’t seem to matter to me any longer. I’d sort of forgiven him for it as fucked up as that was.

“And what else?”

“You wouldn’t want to know.”

“Try me.”

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