Page 61 of Her Reborn Mate

“I am sorry,” Maurice said in a tone that was so subservient that it was hard for me to believe that it was Maurice.

“And how much are you aiding in the process, Ralph?” the mystery man asked. “Did you manage to smuggle the chemicals required for the prototype? I heard they had to be imported from Romania. How do you fare on that front?”

“I had the batch shipped to Blair. All the balls are in his court right now, Master Fredrich,” Ralph said. “I just want to know how someone can do this to their brother?”

“Family can be a pain in the ass, Ralph, as I am sure you will one day understand. When my brother threatened the Grimm legacy, I had to make sure that he was destroyed. But before he was destroyed, I had to see to it that he was crippled emotionally and physically. Now that Blair’s father has failed in this regard, it falls on you three to make sure that Wilhelm and his broodmare are vanquished. If it weren’t for him, I would still be a lord of the lands in Germany, tending to our estate and enjoying the luxuries of wealth. Instead, here I rot in the squalor of this infested hamlet.”

Never in a thousand years would I have guessed that it was Fred who had been conspiring against Will all this time. How was I ever going to show Will this and have him believe that his brother had been his biggest enemy for the past seventy-something years? It would break Will’s heart.

How did he do it? How did Fred manage to come across as kindly, meek, old, decrepit, and weak while living a completely different life in the shadows all this time? How fierce was his hate against his brother that he was capable of doing something so vile to him?

“But even though you’re his brother, sometimes I feel pity for what the man has been through,” Blair said.

“I do not pay you to pity your foes,” Fred said. “Remember the fact that he killed your father. Does that not move you to seek revenge?”

“I understand that my father was a big old cunt who couldn’t get enough of torture and parlor tricks that he liked to call magic. If I were to torture someone for seventy years, I’d understand if they’d want to kill me in return. While I do harbor hate in my heart for your brother, I’m just saying that I do understand his point of view.

“The next time you empathize with my enemy will be your last, Blair Beckett. You keep reminding yourself of that, and you may yet live,” Fred said.

So many recordings just like this one, with Fred giving out commands to Blair, Ralph, and Maurice and them obeying him completely. The more Fred talked in these recordings, the more I understood why he was so bent on destroying Will.

I had to show these recordings to him immediately. His life was in danger.

While I did not know exactly how to work computers like a whizz, as Maliha could do, I did know the fundamentals of copying and pasting documents. I even had a flash drive for that purpose with me. I put it into the computer and copied the contents of Blair’s server folder into it.

***

I entered the building at around seven in the morning. By the time I left, it was two in the afternoon. The town looked completely different than how it had looked in the morning. There were ribbons, flags, and banners all over the streets, covering the skyline. The town square was being carpeted red, and a tent was being hung over the roster at the center of the erected stage. It took me a second to realize that tonight the results of the mayoral election were going to be announced.

That would explain the frills, the balloons, and the people walking around holding cotton candy in their hands and smeared paints on their faces. It was as if the mayoral election had been turned into a big carnival of sorts—nothing strange; it was just how these things worked in America.

What it did do was create a lot of trouble for me. With the streets packed with people eager to find out the results of the election, there was such a crowd everywhere that I wasn’t able to find my way out of downtown as quickly as I had wanted. With Will being back there in the commune with Fred right there beside him, my heart panicked, knowing full well that something terrible was going to happen very soon if I didn’t stop it in time.

Chapter 26: Will

My mouth was dry. What Alexis had just shown me beggared belief, defiled all logic, and hurt me deeply. My brother? So what my own story came down to was as simple as the biblical tale of Cain and Abel? Perhaps fate was feeling lazy the day it decided to write my destiny, plagiarizing from the commonest of tropes out there.

When I came to think of it, all that had happened to me so far in my life—the war, the hunger, the famine, the migration from one continent to the other, the unrequited love, the kidnapping, and torture, all of it proved to be such a derivative tale that the gods had written for me.

“Will? Will you speak something? You’re scaring me,” Alexis said. My mind was so far away that I did not notice that her face was strained and she was holding my hand. I was thinking as far back as I could, realizing in the biggest of all hindsight epiphanies that Fred had been conspiring against me all along. When we were about to set out for America, the only person in the pack who had vocalized his disdain at my decision had been Fred. When we came ashore in America, he despised my decision to settle in Fiddler’s Green. At every turn, my brother tried to resist my decisions. What a fool I had been to believe that he was just displaying the spirit of brotherly rebellion. Had I known that Fred had been so vile as to conspire against me, to lock me away and throw away the key, and to destroy the life that I had built for my pack, I would have taken the necessary steps back then.

But what steps were those, precisely?

“Will!” Alexis tugged at my arm.

“You went without telling me,” I said. It wasn’t a matter of her betraying my trust. I was not angry. I was just shocked at finding out that she had done this all on her own without even letting me know what she had intended to do. “And you managed to find out that Fred had been covertly doing all these misdoings all the while. I bet that somewhere in those call logs, there’s something about him having your parents killed.”

“I did what I had to. I knew that you’d never choose to willingly go to Beckett Pharma’s building,” Alexis said defensively. I raised my hand to let her know that I wasn’t planning on reprimanding her. If I weren’t reeling from the heartbreak that my brother had been deceiving me, I’d be impressed at Alexis’s resourcefulness.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s against the code of the alpha. I do not blame you for choosing to keep me in the dark. You did an excellent job, and I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

“I understand how hard this must be. I do not pretend to know what it feels like, because I do not know how something like this would feel. I don’t have any siblings. I was never betrayed in the way that you are. My heart weeps for you,” Alexis said.

“Mine doesn’t. I’m not sad about Fred. I’m angry. He took away years of my life, all for what? He was my brother, goddammit. We came from the same womb. All my life, I blamed fate for weaving this web of horrors that’s my life. Edward, Blair, Ralph, Maurice—they all mean nothing now. It’s always been, Fred. I should have known. How foolish could I have been?” With my hands holding my head, I let myself be consumed by all the many emotions that were surging through me as I remembered the events of another lifetime.

“I have to tell you something,” I said, looking up at Alexis. “A truth I never shared with anyone before.”

***

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