Page 213 of Sins of the Hidden

"Fifteen years old. Soaked to the bone. Wearing nothing but a torn T-shirt so big it hung to his knees. His hands—" Chet's voice caught, a sound like tearing fabric in his chest. "He was covered in bruises shaped like fingerprints from head to toe."

The back of my throat burned, nausea curling sharp and sudden as the image seared itself into my mind. Tears spilled hot down my cheeks, cutting paths through what wasn't mine.

Each word drained more color from his face, but he couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, as if this confession was the only thing keeping his heart beating.

"He stood there in the rain, waiting for his mother who wasn't coming. Thought we were there to hurt him too. But he followed us. He didn't have anything besides his bat and the shirt on his back." Chet's expression darkened. Something icy settled in my chest as pieces started clicking into a terrible place.

His hand found my face, leaving sticky trails down my cheek as he forced me to look at him.

"Nobody ever loved that boy, Oakley. Not once." His eyes burned into mine, boring through bone and tissue to sear his dying truth directly into my soul. "You're the first goddamn person he believed might save him."

My body went rigid with understanding, muscles locking so tight I thought my bones might snap. My fingers clutched at Chet's jacket, holding on because if I let go I might shatter completely on this blood soaked floor.

"I stayed because I saw myself in that boy," Chet's voice cracked, stripped raw with emotion he'd buried for years. "My old man used to beat me until I couldn't stand. One night, I fought back. I was twelve when I put him in the ground." His eyes glistened, not with hurt from his wounds but with something older, deeper. "Nobody came for me. I had to save myself, and it broke something in me that never healed right."

His voice broke completely on the final words. "No child should have to kill to stop their own hurt. No child should stand in the rain waiting to die because they think they deserve it. No child should grow up thinking they're a monster when they were just trying to survive."

The boy who'd been broken so thoroughly had stopped being human long before he found me. The boy who'd become my V. Fifteen years old, abandoned in the rain, violence born from survival. Everything suddenly made terrible sense—his obsession, his emptiness, his desperate need to possess. To never be left again.

He gripped my arm tighter, desperate to make me understand. "When I saw that kid standing in the rain with that bat and those dead eyes, I knew. I fucking knew what he'd done and why he had to do it." A single tear tracked through what covered his face—perhaps the first he'd shed in decades. "Every time I looked at him, I saw the kid I couldn't save. The one who was gonna grow up to be me. But he didn't." He grabbed me hardenough to leave bruises. "Because of you. You keep him from becoming me."

My vision blurred, edges darkening as my mind struggled to process what my heart already knew. Salt and copper flooded my tongue as my body rocked slightly with the force of revelations too enormous to contain. Everything about V suddenly shifted—his obsession with permanence, his fear of abandonment. The way he watched me as if I might vanish. The way he claimed me because he'd never been claimed. The way he held me like I was sacred because no one had ever held him at all. "Make sure he knows he was worth saving, sweetheart."

His hand trembled violently as he reached inside his soaked jacket, fingers slipping on something hidden within. With the last of his strength, he extracted an antique pocket watch. The silver case worn smooth from years of handling, dented on one edge, tarnished where sweat had eaten into the metal. His fingers left smears across its face as he pressed it into my palm, curling my fingers around the metal with a gentleness impossible from hands that had just taken lives.

"Give this to my boy, Rurik," he whispered, his voice breaking on the name. "Tell him I'm sorry I couldn't make it back to the farm." With shaking fingers, he pried open the case, revealing a faded photograph protected behind scratched glass—two children and a younger Chet in flannel and jeans smiling back at me. "Take care of him for us, Oakley."

Sobs wracked my body as his lungs struggled, each inhale a wet, rattling effort. The corner of his mouth twisted upward, incongruously gentle amid the carnage surrounding us. "Don't be sad, sweetheart." His voice carried such peace—the kind V might never know. “I’m finally free.”

Chet's face softened, as if understanding my confusion. His mouth opened, perhaps to clarify, to give me the missing piece that would make sense of his cryptic confession.

"Do me a favor," he said, bubbles forming between his teeth as he forced what passed for a grin. Eyes glazing, as if seeing something beautiful—something he'd never reach. The wink that followed was so jarringly normal amid this carnage that tears sprang to my eyes, blurring the edges of his face. "Tell V I said hey broth?—"

A knife tore through his throat from behind, punching through cartilage and muscle with a wet, sickening sound before erupting through his neck. The spray hit my face with such force it felt like being slapped—hot, viscous fluid spattering across my skin, into my open mouth, my eyes. The knife jutted from the ruin of his throat, the metal slick, gleaming with what was left of him. Behind him, Daphne twisted the knife deeper, a sickening grin spreading slowly as she savored every twitch of his dying body. Chet's eyes bulged in his suddenly pale face, not from hurt but from the terrible understanding that he'd failed. His body convulsed violently against mine, spine arching in protest of its own destruction.

His life filled my mouth—scalding copper flooding my tongue, forcing its way down my throat before I could spit it out. I gagged on the taste of his death. My jaw stretched in a cry that couldn't escape my seized lungs. The world tilted and spun as Chet's heartbeat pumped directly onto me in thick, rhythmic gushes that matched the thunder in my ears. Each pulse weakened against my skin, the space between them growing longer. His mouth worked silently, lips forming shapes for sounds drowned in his own fluids. Behind him, Daphne's fingers twisted the blade, grinding metal against bone. Chet's gaze found mine one last time, widening not with fear, but with something worse.

Vision tunneled, darkening at the edges until his face filled it completely, those eyes dimming like stars being swallowed by night. The roaring in my ears drowned everything else, adeafening rush of heat and horror. Something deep inside me cracked—a fault line opening in my soul, collapsing everything I thought I knew about the world. Muscles locked in rigid witness to the slaughter.

Chet's massive frame buckled, knees giving way as he collapsed forward. Still, even in death, he fell toward me—his final act as a shield, his body a barricade between me and the monster behind him. A wet, gurgling noise as warmth bubbled past his lips, spattering my cheeks, my forehead, my lips.

The scream tore from my throat, ripping through vocal cords strained beyond capacity. The sound of something breaking permanently inside me—innocence, hope, the belief that good people could survive in this world. Chest convulsed with sobs that had no air behind them, lungs refusing to expand under the crushing weight of witnessing death this intimate. Tears scorched tracks down my face, cutting through the mask of another man's life that coated my skin. The world beyond this room ceased to exist, collapsing to this single moment—this death, this floor, this blood soaking into my clothes, my hair, my soul.

A shadow fell across us both, blocking out the dying afternoon sun.

Daphne stood above me, knife gripped loosely at her side, that empty, doll-like gaze staring down at me as she crooned softly, "Now it's your turn."

“Your turn."

Daphne's knife whistled through the air above me, missing my face by inches as I twisted sideways. With a grunt, I heaved against Chet's shoulder, creating just enough space to slide partially out from under him. My fingers brushed against something rigid and metal on the floor—the knife Chet dropped. I clutched it tight alongside the watch, careful to keep both hidden from Daphne's view.

Daphne grabbed me by the hair, yanking upward with savage force. "Get out from under him. He's dead."

Agony exploded across my scalp as she dragged me from beneath Chet's body, clumps of hair tearing from my head. My skin caught on broken glass, each shard slicing shallow cuts that stung like paper cuts dipped in alcohol. His body rolled lifelessly to the side as I was pulled free, the vacant stare of his eyes following me.

She threw me down hard onto the destroyed living room floor, my head bouncing against it with enough force to make my vision splinter into fractured light.

She squatted down, getting in my face. "Men are only good for a few things, Oakley. What's in their wallet and what's between their legs."

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