MALACHI My brother’s jaw clenches. My gaze drops to the phone in his right hand. I watch his fingers wrap tightly around it. A little more pressure, and he might shatter the device into pieces. “Take it back, Sarah.” His shoulders quake as he speaks. With eyes glued on the phone screen, he doesn’t seem to see or care about anything else. “No.” My chest hurts…terribly. I slide my hands into the side pockets of my pants. “You don’t mean that, Sarah. Take it back, please.” She laughs. “I don’t mean it? You’re really looking at me right now, and you think I don’t mean how much I hate you?” Another scoff follows. “I was wrong about you, Ronan. You sure as hell do not know me at all.” “Sarah…” “It’s bad enough that you have a past so…twisted. But I cannot blame you for that. You should have told me…” her voice breaks. “I would have…I would have tried to understand. But you three, all of you, looked me in the eyes and lied to me! Not once, not twice, again and again and again!” She’s losing her shit, and we deserve it. I hear her ragged breaths from her end of the line. “Is he the only one?” She asks, sniffing in her tears. Ronan’s brow raises in confusion. “What?” “Is he the only one you three have ever tried to kill?” Ronan raises his head and looks at Jaxon, then to me. I catch it immediately. The look of guilt in his eyes. Kevin's noisy breathing echoes in my ear. I narrow my eyes on my brother. H plans to lie to her again. He plans to tell her our father is our only victim. He wants to soften the blow, to make her see us as normal humans again. But we’re not. We’re far from that. And I’ll be damned if I let him keep her rose colored lenses on. Enough is enough. “Sarah…” He starts to speak, but I cut him off. “No.” He whips his head sideways, sending me a deadly glare I ignore. “What?” Sarah’s fear and confusion is evident in the tone of her voice. I move closer to the phone. If she didn’t hear me the first time, she certainly would now. “He was the first body we tried to get rid of. But he wasn’t the last.” A bitter chuckle rips out of her throat. “How many have there been?” Eyes closed, a tired sigh escapes my dry lips. Even the air feels very harsh to breathe. “We’ve never counted. However, if I’m to give a rough estimate, I’ll say a hundred.” “Malachi.” Ronan snarls. The anger in his blue eyes burns bright. Extremely bright. For the first time in my life, I’m going against him. “A hundred?” Sarah screams at the top of her voice. She takes deep breaths in and out, loud ones at that. “What…I don’t understand. Do you just go about killing people? What are you? Serial killers? I don’t get it…how? How?” “When you desire to rise to the top as much as we do, there are sacrifices you have to make.” “In the form of other people’s lives?” I close my eyes and ignore the sting in my chest. One shaky exhale, and I’m ready to respond. “Yes.” “You’re finally seeing them for who they are, Sarah. This is what they did to me. This is how they took my wife away from me and ruined my life! They’re evil, the lot of them.” Luke’s voice is like a fly buzzing in my ear. My hands clench into fists. When I lay my hands on him—which won’t be long—I will carve out his tongue myself. I swear on everything that I am. “I can’t believe it. I can’t…” Thinking about it, I recall the morning I spoke to Ronan in Greece. When I told him I was worried we were going to make Sarah as miserable as Luke made the only mother we’ve ever known, he told me we were nothing like him. Which is true. But he was still fucking wrong when he said we are better men than he’ll ever be. We are worse. Luke HawkThorne was a monster through and through, but the one thing he never did was lie. He showed our mother and us exactly who he was. We didn’t. Everything we’ve ever shown to Sarah, the men we’ve pretended to be outside the bedroom, is a fucking lie. Love? Who the fuck did we think we were to be capable of something as pure as that? “Was any of it…at any point…was anything you three showed me…was there any part of you that was truly good?” Jaxon takes a step forward. There are tears in his eyes, but his resolve is evident on his face. The truth and nothing but the truth. No more lies. “I cannot speak for my brothers, Sarah. But I must tell you the truth. If you’re asking if I regret any of it…” he sucks in a deep breath. “I do not. I never have. Thinking that this scoundrel was dead and I was the one who killed him gave me peace, a type of peace nothing else has ever given, nothing except you.” Ronan offers Jaxon a small smile, and speaks next. “I’m not going to stand here and try to play the victim. I’m not going to tell you I wish things were different, or that I wish we hadn’t done many of the things we did. That would be a lie.” “So you want to tell the truth now? Of all fucking times, Ronan?” Sarah fires at him. I can feel all the anger in her heart through her voice, through her words. We did this to her.