Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 133531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 668(@200wpm)___ 534(@250wpm)___ 445(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 668(@200wpm)___ 534(@250wpm)___ 445(@300wpm)
Rose pressed trembling fingers to her mouth. “You can’t imagine how horrible it was. Laurel couldn’t breathe. I remember she tried to get into the ring with those terrible animals to stop them, but one of the guards stopped her. I think Whitney would have let her. I think he hoped the dogs would turn on her. She fell to the floor and went into convulsions. There was a doctor there and he went to her. She was carried out. Whitney called her a disgrace. He said she wasn’t strong enough to be a soldier and never would be. He always talked about her like that.”
“If you were ten,” Mack said, “and she’s younger than you, she had to have been seven or eight.”
Rose nodded. “After that, he sent her on mission after mission. She was forced to sleep in an attic. It was horribly stuffy and dirty. We tried to go up there to clean it, but he had guards to keep her from getting out or us from getting in. After every assignment, he would force her to go into that place.”
“When did he give you the tattoos?” Rhianna asked.
“It was just a couple of weeks after he killed our puppies. None of us would cooperate with him. I think he thought he needed to do something that would turn everything around, and it did. We were all young enough to want to have a parent. He was all we had. Each one of us had artwork that was beautiful and specially designed just for us. We were very excited. Laurel loved her tattoo, but she wasn’t like a couple of the girls. She didn’t trust him. I don’t know if he had expected she would fall for his gift and fawn all over him, but when she didn’t, he went back to sending her out on as many assignments as possible. Then one day, she just wasn’t with us anymore. He never said where she went. Whether she was alive or dead.”
“Did Whitney act upset, as if she had escaped him? Or did you think he sent her away to another facility?” Mack asked.
Rose sat up straighter, obviously trying to remember. “It was a long time ago. He detested so many of us. None of us ever pleased him. He’d sent her out on a mission with two of us, and everything went wrong. We were trying to get away and Ivy was wounded. It was clear we couldn’t outrun the men following us. The terrain was sandy. The air was dry. There were these formations like dunes but made of rock, dirt, sand and grass. One had a bit of a hollowed-out area. Not much. You could see it plain as day, even though it was night.”
Sebastian, as if knowing his mother was reliving a bad experience, reached out with his little baby fingers and touched her face. She immediately took his hand and kissed it.
“I’m fine, honey,” she reassured him. “This happened when I was a little girl.” She took another deep breath. “Laurel indicated the ground swelling and told us to press tight against the wall of dirt and not to move or make a sound. Just to trust her. She was wheezing bad and trying not to cough. Then she went silent. I did what she said. To this day, I don’t know why. I thought it was crazy. Anyone should have been able to see us. We were right out in the open. She put her body in front of ours, especially in front of Ivy’s. The next thing I knew, I was looking through what appeared to be a gray veil. That’s the best way I could describe it.”
“A gray veil?” Javier echoed.
She nodded. “The men following us came running straight at us. They were so close we could have reached out and touched them. They were carrying semiautomatics and cursing up a storm because we’d stolen the plans to the underground fortress and tunnel system that had just been completed. Nearly everyone who’d worked in the tunnels or on the fortress had been killed, at least according to Whitney. My guess is those guards were going to die for letting us get away with the plans. Those blueprints were kept in a vault under high security.”
“The blueprints should have been burned,” Mack said.
“It was a maze down there. I think Angelo Perez, the man who had it built, was afraid he might get lost,” Rose replied. “In any case, the guards didn’t spot us even when they looked right at us. It was so weird. Ivy was bleeding, but they didn’t see the bloodstains. Laurel was no longer coughing or wheezing, and even our normal breathing was muffled to the point I couldn’t hear it.”
There was silence in the room filled with GhostWalkers. All of them were used to the various psychic gifts the others had, but Rose was describing something a child of seven or eight had done to protect others under extreme circumstances.