Page 138 of Warrior

I have a feeling I’m going to need it.

39KADE

Ouranos sitsacross from me in Madness. While he appreciates the grandeur of Bow & Arrow, he doesn’t quite appreciate the way Gabriel ventures closer to insanity there.

I didn’t know where my sister ended up.

Terror—and the meaning behind it—was never on my radar.

When I met Gabriel, he told me a vague story of a sex trafficking ring. It didn’t include most of the horrors they both went through. But then learning about it through Artemis, and seeing the shell of the place with my own eyes…

It hurts.

It’s like I’m standing over her hospital bed all over again, trying not to see the white scars on her skin, or the thinness of her frame.

I didn’t grow up with my father. He and my mom split, and he married her mom. They had Lyssa a few years later. My mom and I lived close to them, though. Close enough that I witnessed the aftermath of her terrible trauma. When she was six, she was attacked by a boy. Sodomized, injured,terrified…

My heart aches when I consider her pain. All of it, from childhood straight through to her escaping Terror with Gabriel.

I was too young to protect her, but I followed from afar. Got to know her in the quiet moments of her life. Visited her on the Isle of Paradise, where she spent years living as a teenager. She knew I was her half-brother, even though we only shared the faintest resemblance in our smiles.

Her parents gave up on her, and I took over behind the scenes. I made sure I was listed as her emergency contact with the trauma center, with the hospital and on all her medical records, even her old school.

Just in case.

And then she vanished, and no one could fucking tell me anything.

And it came in handy, because years later, I got the call that she had been checked in. It was like hearing about a ghost.

One condition of working with—for—Ouranos?

He holds all our secrets.

I don’t know if he put together that the Lyssa I lost was the same as the one Gabriel still keeps safe at Isle of Paradise. He hopes that she will one day wake up, and it’s exactly that hope that destroys him over and over.

There’s no escaping his pain.

I… I’ve dealt with it. Sort of.

But Gabriel can’t, and I think it relates back to Terror.

“Kade.”

My attention snaps away from the secrets Ouranos holds, to the man himself. He has a glass of whiskey in front of him, although it doesn’t look like he’s touched it. In the years I’ve known him, one thing is for sure: those familiar vices?

He has none.

“Saint Hart,” he says.

I try not to react, but I find my spine straightening, regardless.

“Tell me about him.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I reply. “What do you want to know?”

He waits.

The seconds tick past, and I dip my chin.

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