Page 11 of A Touch Of Death

She shakes her head, the emptiness in her eyes growing until they almost look dead. I really don’t like that look. "I don't know what kind of place it was, but I know it was hell. Every single day was hell there. They experimented on us. Cut, starved, and tortured us. One thousand, nine hundred and thirty two days we were in that place. I kept track of the days through the small window in the room where we were kept, watching the sun disappear and reappear with every new day."

Her voice is completely void of emotion. She looks like an empty shell, speaking like it's a reflex. The urge to tear her from the couch and hold her nags at me, but I brush it aside, focusing on the conversation at hand.

With a soft voice, Zayn asks, "What happened, Novia?"

He doesn't have to elaborate for her to understand what he means.

"They took us in the night. Every last one of us. They snuck past our barriers, all the security we'd had in place, and not a singlefae heard or sensed them. They moved like ghosts and just snatched every one of us from our homes. Not a single fae was left behind, not even the children. I don't remember much after that. My next memory is of waking up caged in a damp, scant room scattered with other cages like my own, filled with my people. My-" She cuts herself off when a sudden flare of emotion seems to choke her, but she wrangles it back and pushes through, her mask slowly slipping back in place. "My father and older sister, Dahlia. They were in the cage next to me. They put them together but left me by myself in my own cage. Everyone else was paired but me. I was always alone. You've already seen what they did to me."

We all look at Zayn. His expression is pinched, and a murderous glint appears in his eyes. He didn't tell us what he saw earlier in the kitchen when the same look took over his face, and Novia whispered an apology, so I'm just as clueless as the rest of my brothers. Something that's taken care of pretty quickly when Novia decides to tell us anyway. "I don't know what happened to the others, butit doesn't take a genius to know it wasn't any different or less so than what they did to me. They'd take me away and strap me to a medical table. They cutmy skin open while I was awake and watch me heal as I screamed and begged them to stop. Often they wouldconduct these experiments to see how fast I'd heal from every injury they inflicted.Beaten black and blue to time how fast the bruises would fade or when the broken bones would fuse back together, only for them to start all over again. They tore my nails away to see if they'd grow back, broke my fingers to determine the length of time they'd snap back into place and could function again. They tied me to a set of machines that would monitor my brain activity and would suffocate me, checking if I had all of the functions of my brain when I came to after passing out. There's a long list of the ways they made my life a misery. An endless stream of new ideas on how to torture me and experiment on me, all while watching me under a microscope. It was worse after my immortality hit."

She shakes her head, and a stray tear trickles down her cheek. My heart is beginning to ache painfully. I know - just as Nix does - all too well how excruciating the change is, having suffered it myself when I was twenty-six. Not allNaturalsare born immortal. Some are born the equivalent of advanced humans until the change hits, and some are born immortal, but they will age until they reach a certain age in their lives. Zayn and Ezra were both twenty-five when they’d stopped aging, while Nix was a month shy of turning twenty-five when his immortality came. It’s not a process I’d wish on anyone. The pain is agonising, and it lasts for hours.

And this woman suffered her change in a cell away from her family and home.

My knuckles are white, clenched tightly enough that I know I'm marking and drawing blood from my nails digging into my palm. My jaw is clenched tight enough that my teeth grind against each other, but Novia doesn't notice. She doesn't see the pure rage that's likely evident on my face. On my brothers’ faces. She's unaware of the murderous atmosphere that threatens to choke us all because she's so deep inside her own mind that she's lost to whatever memories haunt her. She carries on, blissfully unaware of the unadulterated anger that taints the air.

"As soon as they realised there was even less of a chance they could kill me, they stepped up their game. When it wasn't my turn, though, I could hear the screams and cries of my people. I heard their pleas and begs through the door of the room I was caged in. Then one day, they didn't come for any of us. Or the next day. Or the day after that. I thought we'd been left to rot in our cages, maybe because they didn't have a use for us anymore. I counted seven days of no pain other than hunger and thirst. On the eighth day, the boss came. I was so disoriented that I didn't hear what was being said or to who. I just know the Top Psycho was there in the flesh for the first time since we'd arrived. Then they killed them." Her voice lowers until it's just above a whisper. "They killed every singlefae in those cages but me. Every one of my people died in minutes. The sound of gunfire still echoes in my head, the sound of bodies dropping, and the cries and shouts just before the rest died. My father and sister’s last breaths. My father telling me to run and never look back, the very last words he'd ever say to me. It's all embedded in my brain like a virus, spreading until sometimes it’s all I can think about or hear."

She's suddenly quiet while she continues to stare at the ceiling. My chest is feeling tight and uncomfortable, and taking a breath is an incredibly difficult thing at the moment. I catch Ezra wiping away a tear from my peripheral. Nix coughs a couple of times, no doubt trying to cover his emotions, while Zayn sits like a stone in his seat, eyes latched on to the woman who's just shattered each and every one of us without even knowing or trying to.

She's suffered so much. So fucking much. More than any person should ever have to suffer. How she's still functioning the way she is after going through the very definition of hell is beyond me. The strength she must have to keep standing, to keep going, is something to truly admire. Five years of around the clock torture, and she's still here.

Doesn't mean I don't want to fucking tear each and every bastard that ever touched her to pieces. She survived, but that’s not to say the ones that hurt her should be offered the same courtesy.

She groans and blinks rapidly, then shakes her head before slapping her hands over her face. She mumbles something into her hands that pulls a surprised laugh out of Nix and draws a bemused smirk to Zayn's mouth.

I'm still feeling like a homicidal maniac, but when Zayn flashes a memory in my head, I find myself calming down enough to contain the rage to a tolerable level. It's the very image of what I just saw myself, but I hear her clearly mutter,'Way to overshare, you dumbass. Now you've scared them'. My lips twitch, but I don't give in to the smile that's waiting to be set free.

My anger is still bubbling under the surface because not only was hearing how hard her life has been for so long incredibly difficult, we now know the facility she was trapped in is the very same lab we've been watching for three and a half years. She's been there, suffering, the entire time we watched the building. She was trapped and gathered useless intel that we can't do anything with. What the actual fuck?

The others must catch on to the same thing because the humour dies, and the room grows tense enough that the hairs on my arms stand on end. The entirefae race was in the building we’ve been watching, and we didn’t truly know it. It was only rumoured that fae were kept there, though the numbers of fae was never spoken of. We didn’t know they were all captured and kept in the building we’d been analysing for so long. Which means they know how to cover their tracks, know how to keep shit on the down low, and know they’re being watched. How could we be so stupid?

Novia slides her hands off her face and tilts her head to look at us. She raises an eyebrow and asks, "What am I missing? Why do you all look like that?"

We share another look with one another, and, sure enough, each of us is wearing various expressions of disappointment, anger, and self-loathing. How could we have not known that an entire race ofNaturals was inside that building? Surely we should have seen, heard, or even sensed something, right?

We should tell her.

Zayn is right, and the others nod in confirmation. It's the least we owe her now. She's been open and honest with us, and after failing her and her people already, it's only right we offer her the same courtesy.

I open my mouth, the words on the tip of my tongue, but Zayn beats me to it. "Novia, before I explain who we are, you need to know we would have done all we could have to rescue you and the others if we had known."

Novia's eyes grow wary, and she sits up in her seat, intently watching the vampire. "Explain what? What are you talking about?"

The vampire inhales and lets the air out slowly. "After the fae were taken, the councils sent in teams of mercenaries to find and retrieve them all. For a year and a half, six different teams went in undercover but never returned. There's been no sign of them since. We've assumed they were captured and killed. Three and a half years ago, the last team disappeared, and we were called in. We're the highest ranking hired mercenaries to ever exist. The four of us have been a team for decades, creating and growing a bond that every other team never had. We've been searching for the fae for years, and the closest we've come is finding a lab that we knew to be disguised as a simple testing facility for pharmaceuticals and such. We had no idea that's where you all were. There were no traces or any indicators pointing at you all being in the very building we'd been watching for over three years. We only heard the lab was related to the disappearance of the fae. Stupid, now that I think of it. I don't understand how we didn't put everything together before now. Anyway, after the two year mark, the council decided to abandon the cause because we weren't making any progress after finding the facility. We've been working as rogues for a year and a half now. We knew something was happening inside the building, and we've just been working on trying to find out what."

"So you were sent to find me and my people, but you had no idea we were in the building you were watching?" Novia asks. I can't get a read on her expression now, and the tone of her voice doesn't give anything away.

"Yes, we didn't know any more than the facility was related to the disappearance. We've been working on trying to figure out the connection. And we're all feeling incredibly stupid for not realising it before now. We could have found you sooner."

Zayn looks down with a guilty frown, and Novia tilts her head slightly to the right. The room is quiet for a moment before she breaks the silence. "Okay. I believe you. And anyway, you rescued one fae at least."

Wait, what? My eyes snap to the woman, wide and confused. She believes him? Why isn't she angry? Why is she so calm and reacting like we didn't tell her she suffered for years because we were too incompetent to find her and her people?

As though Nix has finally developed the ability to read minds, he asks her the same thoughts I had. "Why are you believing us so easily? And aren't you angry? We could have rescued you all sooner if we had adamnclue."

With the softest voice I've heard from her, she says, "It wasn't your fault. I know you mean what you said, that you would have rescued us if you could, but you wouldn't have been able to. We were captured fae, remember? We have a vast range of abilities, one of those being the ability to glamour. I wouldn't be surprised if they used some of my people to hide us all. They did worse, so what's not to say that abusing our glamour isn't a possibility? As for believing you... again, I'm a fae. One of my abilities is to sense dishonesty. I know when you're lying, and there wasn't even a flicker of a lie in any of your words so far."

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