Chapter 68 The Man She Trusted
The silence between us stretches until it becomes unbearable.
Darius is still holding me, but I pull back this time. Not violently. Not angrily. Just enough to look at him to really look. His face is drawn tight, like a man standing on the edge of a cliff he’s known was there all along.
“You knew,” I say again, quieter now. The rage has burned itself down to something colder, sharper. “You knew the truth about my father.”
He nods.
Just once.
“I knew enough,” he says. “Enough to convince the Council to buried it for a reason. Enough to know that if you learned everything at once, it would shatter you.”
I let out a hollow laugh. It doesn’t sound like it belongs to me.
“So you decided for me,” I say. “Just like they did. You decided what I could handle. What I deserved to know.”
“That’s not….”
“It is,” I cut in, my voice trembling.
He flinches at that. I see it land. I don’t feel satisfied.
“I was trying to protect you,” he says quietly.
“No,” I whisper. “You were trying to control the damage.”
His mouth opens, then closes again. For once, he doesn’t argue.
I swallow hard. My chest aches, like something is pressing inward, folding me in on myself. “Is there anything else?” I ask. “Anything else you haven’t told me?”
The bond goes taut. Tight. Warning.
Darius doesn’t answer right away.
That’s my answer.
I step back from him fully now, my hands curling into fists at my sides. “Say it,” I demand. “Say it before I hear it from someone else.”
His eyes search my face like he’s memorizing it, like he’s bracing himself for the moment he loses me entirely.
“You weren’t an only child,” he says at last.
The words don’t make sense at first. They slide past me, harmless and unreal.
“I—what?”
“You had a twin,” he says. His voice is steady, but his eyes are not. “A sister.”
The room tilts.
“No,” I say immediately. “No. That’s not possible. My father would have told me. My mother—”
“She was taken,” he interrupts. “So was your sister. They disappeared the same night. When we attacked the facility after learning of the experiments your father was doing .”
My heart starts pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears. “Taken where?”
“We don’t know,” he says. “That’s the truth. By the time we arrived, it was already done. Someone got to them before the Blood guard and I could.”
Someone.
The word echoes, heavy and ominous.
I shake my head slowly, trying to push the image away. “You’re saying my mother did die during child brith,” I whisper. “You’re saying I have a sister.”
“I’m saying they were removed,” Darius replies. “Cleanly. Professionally. Like someone had planned it.”
My legs give out, and I sink back onto the edge of the bed.
A sister.
A twin.
Somewhere out there, another version of me exists,or existed. Someone who shared my blood, my beginnings, maybe even my curse.
“Who?” I ask hoarsely. “Who could do something like that?”
The door opens behind us.
I feel him before I see him.
That scent—familiar, grounding, dangerous all at once. My stomach drops.
Fred.
I turn slowly.
He stands just inside the doorway, hands raised slightly, his expression careful. Measured. The same face I trusted. The same eyes that once looked at me like I was something precious instead of something broken.
“So,” I say, my voice shaking despite my effort to steady it. “You’re just going to keep walking into my life with answers I didn’t ask for?”
“Lyra,” he says softly. Too softly. “I didn’t know he was going to tell you like this.”
I laugh again, a sharp, ugly sound. “Tell me what, Fred?” I demand. “That my entire life is a carefully curated lie? That everyone around me knew more about me than I ever did?”
He looks at Darius, then back at me. “I was assigned to observe you,” he admits. “To report on your stability. Your integration. Your potential threat level.”
There it is.
The truth, laid bare.
“So it was all fake,” I whisper. “Every conversation. Every smile. Every time you made me feel like I was more than just an abomination.”
“No,” he says immediately. “That part was real.”
I stand up again, my hands trembling. “How would I know? You lied about who you were. You lied about why you were there.”
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
“Then why should I believe you now?”
Fred steps closer, stopping a few feet away like he knows any more would be dangerous. “Because I could have walked away,” he says. “I could have handed in my reports and disappeared. I didn’t.”
“You still reported on me,” I snap.
“I did,” he admits. “At first.”
My chest tightens painfully.
“At first,” he continues, “I was doing my job. I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise. But then I got to know you. The real you. Not the subject. Not the file. You.”
I look away, my vision blurring. Memories flood in unbidden, late-night talks, quiet laughter, the way he listened like my words mattered.
“You said you loved me,” I say. “Was that part of the assignment too?”
“No,” he says firmly. “That was when I stopped being able to pretend.”
Darius stiffens beside me, but says nothing.
“I wanted to run away with you,” Fred continues. “Not because it was convenient. Because it was the only way I could think of to keep you out of their hands. Out of his.” He nods subtly toward Darius.
I whirl on him. “Don’t you dare put this on him,” I snap. “You don’t get to rewrite your lies as heroics.”
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m telling you what I felt. What I still feel.”
I press my hands to my temples, my head throbbing. “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I whisper. “Everything I thought I knew keeps collapsing under me.”
Darius finally speaks. “Lyra….”
“Don’t,” I say, holding up a hand. “Not right now.”
I look between the two of them,two men who claim they wanted to protect me, who both decided the truth was too dangerous for me to handle.
“I trusted both of you,” I say quietly. “And now I don’t know which parts of my life were real.”
Fred’s face tightens with something like regret. “The way you made me want to be better,that was real.”
Darius’s voice is low, raw. “Everything I feel for you is real.”
I close my eyes.
A twin I’ve never met. A mother taken from me. A father whose love and cruelty are now impossible to separate. Two men standing in front of me, each holding a piece of the truth like a weapon or a shield.
When I open my eyes again, my voice is steady,but empty.
“I need time,” I say. “And space. Because right now, I don’t know who I am without all your secrets wrapped around me.”
Neither of them moves.
Neither of them stops me as I turn away.
But I can feel it,the bond pulling, the unanswered questions clawing at me, the truth waiting just beyond reach.
And I know one thing with terrifying certainty:
Whatever took my mother and my sister is still out there.
And it didn’t take them by accident.