“Lucian, what do you know?” To my surprise, Ethan growled the demand, but my big guy was prone to anger when really pushed. I held his hand in both of mine as Lucian got to the point.
“We never knew what happened. The local police got there before we could get any of our people out. They cooperated with us, but we couldn’t find anything definitive. It was only after Thailand that we found some evidence on a hard drive . . . Davis has offices all over the world—that’s not a secret—and he had a building in Tokyo. Apparently he had a lab in the basement levels. Not much on the drive we recovered was salvageable, but there is enough to suggest he was running experiments even then. We have no way to prove it, but the logical conclusion is that whatever he was doing down there went horribly wrong and resulted in the chaos and death above ground.”
“Why haven’t you said anything?” Despite his hard tone, Tyler sounded hurt.
“The techs only just delivered their report two days ago,” Lucian explained. “They’re still trying to get more information from the drive, and we’re nowhere near done going through all that we found in Thailand. He did a good job destroying most of it with the explosions, but we were able to recover a decent amount of evidence. Anyway, I was never planning to keep it from any of you. I’m done keeping secrets from my family.” He gave me a meaningful look. Memories of the night we’d stood on his balcony drinking scotch flickered through my mind. “I just wanted to give the techs another day or two to see if they could find anything more. I didn’t want to bring it up during this evening, but I can’t sit here and watch Evie blame herself for something that was not her fault.”
“Thank you.” I wiped the tears from my cheeks.
Rather than unleash a barrage of questions, the guys had all gone silent and introspective. If they were anything like me when it came to talking about their parents’ deaths, I couldn’t blame them.
After a few tense moments, a chair scraped loudly and Dot stood up.
“How about some dessert?” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. The others all murmured their agreement, and Alec and Josh returned to their seats.
“I’ll help you.” Charlie followed Dot into the kitchen.
Henry grabbed the open bottle of wine from the buffet, refilling glasses until it was all gone, then opening another bottle. Dot and Charlie delivered individual servings of tiramisu to everyone, and conversation got back to normal. It wasn’t as lively as earlier, but the heavy emotions had lifted.
I sat back and sipped on my third glass of expensive red, my tiramisu half-eaten. Lucian’s last few words kept repeating in my mind.
I can’t sit here and watch Evie blame herself for something that was not her fault.
No matter how I looked at it, that statement didn’t sit right, didn’t ring true. I wasn’t completely blameless. I couldn’t escape the fact that at least some of this was my fault.
I hadn’t set out to hurt anyone, hadn’t asked to be born this way, with this much Light and connected to such powerful Variants. I would never intentionally hurt anyone.
But at the end of the day, Davis was doing all this precisely because of what I was. He lied, manipulated, and tortured people in his dogged mission to figure out how my Light worked—so he could exploit it for money and power. He’d driven my mother and me from our home and family, from our Vital Bonds. He’d practically started a war between Variants and humans in an attempt to gain more power.
As I sat at the table with my new family, I looked at each one of them. We’d all lost people because of him.
I had two choices.
I could down another bottle of wine, wallow in my self-flagellating misery, and fall deeper into depression.
Or I could fight. I could do whatever I could to show that, despite the fact that my glowing Light could be dangerous, it could be good too. Even though I couldn’t fully understand it yet, I firmly believed my glowing was a tool. It would only be a negative destructive force if I chose to use it that way.
I couldn’t fight Davis with guns and abilities and secrets—Alec, Tyler, and Lucian had that covered. But I could do what I did best: figure out