Chapter 92 The same man

Chapter 92 The same man
NATE

The air under the rusted metal bleachers was damp and smelled of decaying leaves and wet iron. Damon and I stood in the shadows, our breath fogging in the crisp autumn chill.

Footsteps crunched heavily on the gravel, and Cole materialized through the support beams. He was agitated, his pupils dilated, his jaw clenched so hard the muscles jumped beneath his skin.

"Give me a cigarette," Cole demanded without greeting us, holding out a shaking hand.

Damon pulled a silver case from his jacket, handed him one, and flicked a lighter. Cole dragged so hard the paper practically flared orange, blowing a dense plume of smoke into the shadows.

"Are you okay?" I asked, eyeing the tension in his shoulders.

"Did the witch call you back?" Cole snapped, his voice vibrating with frantic energy. 

"What?"

"The witch. Celeste. Did you hear from her?"

"She texted an hour ago," I answered. "She said she’ll meet us in person by the end of the week. I think she’s out of town or something…"

"Fuck!" Cole kicked a rusted support pole, the metal clanging loudly above our heads.

Damon stepped forward, frowning. "What the hell is wrong with you, Cole?"

"We have to hurry this up," Cole hissed, his eyes blazing with a terrifying, unhinged urgency. "We have to kill him. Now. Today."

"We've been through this," I said, keeping my voice low and level. "We can't rush this blindly. We need the paralytic, we need an alibi, we have to—"

"Have you actually looked at Iris today?" Cole cut me off.

Damon and I exchanged a brief, confused glance.

"Yeah," I said slowly. "We all saw her at breakfast. Then we drove her to school."

"Well, apparently she said something to piss Ernest off last night," Cole rasped, taking another frantic drag, "and he fucking strangled her."

The words hit like a physical shockwave.

I looked at Damon, waiting for him to tell me Cole was exaggerating, waiting for some rational, clinical explanation to tear the statement apart. But Damon was completely frozen, his dark eyes wide in sheer disbelief.

"I saw the bruises," Cole muttered, his voice cracking into pieces. "Finger marks all over her throat. He beat her face so bad she had to cackle on half an inch of makeup just to hide it."
My stomach dropped into a bottomless, freezing void.

I couldn't process it. My brain violently seized, trying and failing to bridge two entirely incompatible realities.

The man we were talking about—the man we had sworn a blood oath to slaughter—had once been my absolute hero. He was the father who spent hours in the backyard teaching us how to grip a baseball. He was the man who taught me how to tie a double Windsor knot before our first formal gala. On Sunday nights, we used to pile onto the sofa to watch action movies, and all the way up until we were thirteen, Ernest had been strong enough to scoop all three of us into his broad arms and carry us up to bed when we fell asleep.

Those exact same hands.

The hands that had tossed a baseball with me, the hands that had patted my shoulder with pride... Were the hands that were now pinning Iris down, molesting her, beating her, and violently chocking her.

The man who had raised us with warmth and discipline was a predatory monster who had neglected Iris for twelve years, only to decide he wanted to destroy her.

A sickening, suffocating nausea climbed up my throat.

"We need to come up with something to keep her away from him," Damon said, his knuckles white as he jammed his hands into his pockets. "Until we execute the plan. Any ideas?"

"Look at how he's acting," I replied, forcing my voice to stay steady through the trembling in my chest. "He's getting more paranoid and violent by the day. If we try to openly intervene or physically stop him, he'll just double down to reassert dominance. At this point, he’s capable of anything."

"Right, but we have to do something!" Cole yelled, stepping into my face. "We can't just sit there and watch him choke her out again! We have to do something!"

"We will," I said, putting a firm hand on his shoulder. "We'll find a way to stall him. Just... don't do anything stupid, Cole. If we slip up now, we end up in a cell or straight up dead."

"At this point, I don't give a fuck!" Cole snarled, knocking my hand away.

"Well, you better start giving a fuck!" I snapped back, my own aura flaring hot against his. "Because if we end up dead, Cole, who stops him?! If the three of us are out of the picture, we are literally handing Iris to him on a silver platter!"

Cole froze.

The words hit him like ice water. The wild, manic fire in his eyes dimmed, replaced by a cold, horrific realization. He swallowed hard, looking down at the gravel, his chest heaving in silent, bitter defeat.

He wasn't stupid. He already knew this. He knew I was right. We couldn't afford a single emotional mistake. If we went down, Iris went down with us—headfirst into the abyss.

But feel like the realization that we technically couldn't do anything now drove him insane every single time. I couldn't blame him, it was absurd indeed.

"It’s easy for you two to push this 'sit down and do nothing' bullshit..." Cole roared, ripping away from me, his eyes bloodshot and wild. "You didn't see it! You didn't see him kissing her lips while she was unconscious! You didn't see the finger-shaped bruises all over her neck! You have her crying her eyes out in your chest! You didn't have her coming up to your room, begging you to take her virginity so that motherfucker wouldn't—"

Cole abruptly choked on his own words, cutting himself off.

The world went dead silent.

Damon and I froze in place.

"What?" I breathed.

Damon took a slow, menacing step forward, his analytical mask shattering into pieces. "She did what?"

Cole stood there, looking like he had just accidentally spilled the most dangerous secret of his life. He looked between Damon and me, his jaw trembling as he tried to backpedal.

"That was before," Cole muttered defensively, running a shaking hand over his mouth. "Before her panic attack. Before I caught him. He was already doing some shit to her, and she came to my room one night... We didn't do anything. I... I kept thinking about the Pureblood thing and how they could come after her if we restored the bond..."

Damon let out a bitter, caustic laugh that had zero humor in it. "Well, what a shame. If you had fucked her, maybe she’d have her super strength right now and she could've crushed Ernest’s skull with her bare hands."

"We actually don't know that, Damon," I cut in sharply. "The only thing we know for a fact is that Iris's father was hunted down and murdered less than a year after awakening the powers of his bloodline."

"Then you might have just missed a nice opportunity, Cole," Damon sneered, crossing his arms and glaring at our brother. "We also don't know if the Pureblood curse needs all three mate bonds restored to awaken the prophecy... Or just one."

Cole’s face flushed dark crimson, veins bulging along his neck. "Is this some kind of fucking joke to you? Do you think that was an opportunity?! That sick fuck we call father is so obsessed with her virginity that he had a private doctor come to our house to inspect her not long ago, remember? What you're calling an opportunity was her so desperate to escape a predator that she was begging for any way out! I don't... I don't think she actually wanted it..."

Damon stepped right into Cole's face, his voice dripping with icy venom. "But I bet you did."

Cole went dead quiet.

His fists were shaking, his knuckles white, raw fury rolling off him in suffocating waves. He was drowning in guilt, trauma, and rage, and Damon was standing right in front of him, relentlessly picking at the open wound. Cole looked like he was about to test the effectiveness of those meds and throw a punch that would shatter Damon’s jaw.

I stepped between them before blood could spill, shoving both of them apart with an iron forearm.

"Can we forget about it?!" I hissed, glaring directly at Damon. "Yeah, Damon, Iris likes Cole better. Suck it up. It doesn't change a single damn thing right now. Let's just... focus on making sure whatever happened to Iris last night never happens again."

Damon scoffed, looking away, while Cole stared at the dirt, breathing hard through his teeth.

The silence between us was fractured and bitter, but the fight died down.

When we got back to the manor late that afternoon, the house felt like a ticking landmine.

The three of us established a perimeter, taking turns silently patrolling the hallways, watching the doors from the shadows. We had already agreed on contingencies: if Ernest tried to force his way into her room, we would shatter a vase, trip the security alarm, or dial his private office phone repeatedly to distract him.

Fortunately, Iris stayed completely barricaded in her bedroom all evening.

When Mrs. Gable brought up a dinner tray, Iris only opened the deadbolt wide enough to slide the food inside before locking it again. Her  excuse was that she had an upcoming AP Chemistry midterm she needed to cram for.

Ernest apparently bought it. He stayed buried in his ground-floor study, locked away with stacks of work.

Back in my own room, I sat at my desk, trying to force myself to read through a chapter of political theory. It was impossible. Every two minutes, my phone buzzed violently against the wood.

Jessica: Are you ignoring me?
Jessica: I barely saw you at school today.
Jessica: I miss you, baby.
Jessica: Nathaniel, pick up!

I stared at the screen with absolute detachment. I typed a quick, cold response—Studying for midterms. Talk tomorrow.—before flipping the switch to silent and tossing the phone facedown onto my bed.

After a while, I heard a gentle and polite double knock on my door.

I jumped slightly, my head snapping toward the sound. I had this stupid, ridiculous hope that would be Iris knocking on my door tonight...

Mrs. Gable was standing in the doorway, her hands folded neatly over her apron, her face carefully devoid of expression.

"Mr. Crawford," she said quietly. "Your father has requested your presence in his study. He is waiting for you right now."