“Martin is not his father, Renee.”

“Really, it doesn’t matter. Why did he lie about him, Jacob? Why did he tell us he killed the owner of this place and cleaned it?” I said, getting angrier by the second. “Why did he act like he had only been here for a short time? He’s known.” I spun looking Jacob in the eyes, with tears falling out of mine. “He’s known all along.”

“I wouldn’t want others to know my father had done these horrible things,” Sydney came up behind me.

“Perhaps he was saving you the pain of knowing what he had come from,” Jacob added, with too much sorrow in his eyes for my liking.

“He has never spoken of his father to us,” Garvin mentioned. “Nor did we ever hear tales of it in the home of our maker.”

“Are y’all kidding me? You’re actually taking up for him?” I said in utter disbelief at the response.

“I say he’s a lying no good piece of dog shit,” Derek replied, standing behind the desk and looking up at the painting, then, out of nowhere pulled his blade, jumped up and stabbed it into the forehead of the character on the painting and let the blade rip through the canvas as his body dropped back down.

“Thank you, Derek. I happen to agree. I was raised to believe that there was never a good reason to lie to those you care about…never, and that if the truth couldn’t be told to others then just don’t say anything,” I responded to them all, dropping the plaque back into the filth of the spider’s waste where it belonged. “When he gets back there’s gonna be hell to pay.” I stormed past Jacob, who had disappointed me to the very core by seeming to have compassion for the likes of anyone who would lie about this and so many other things; not to mention, doing it while looking us right in the eye. Where I came from, that made a person worse than the liar that told tales behind ones back.

Cates and Fala had the wall close to the floor when I leapt up on it and helped bring it on down; that hadn’t been my intention in the least. I just wanted out of the deranged room of sick deception and lies. My maker was the son of a baby killer; one who left the mothers to either die on top of the dead bodies of the ones there before them, or killed them out right before rolling their corpse off the birthing table. As I was making my way as fast as I could up the stairs and out of the hell we had discovered, another morbid thought crossed my mind. Father Lebrun could have been sick enough to remove the infants himself, and more than likely helped, in one way or another, to make the stupid spiders treat his belongings with so much respect that nothing in the dark study below had any of the black web or the spider’s black gore on any of it. I could hear Tanda and Tammy calling out my name as I ran up the last of the steps. I ran out into the kitchen then headed for my room and locked my door. I took a quick rinse in the stone shower and lay down on top of the covers on the bed in the same gown I had worn the night before. I wished so bad that we had had enough time to get back to the safety of the shelter in the tunnel. I wanted out of this place and would do so first thing when I woke. No one knocked on my door when I heard them coming down the hall. I just heard the doors to their rooms open and shut, and, with the exhaustion of the night, I closed my eyes and let sleep take me before the dawn had its chance.

Chapter Fourteen

I woke to silence, no fire coals crackling in the fireplacetonight. But, when I sat up to focus my eyes to the darkness of my room there sat Jacob, in the high-back chair, looking at me. He had turned the chair around so that he could do so, and my anger came back to life. “How did you get in here? I had my door locked for a reason, ya know?”

“I know,” he softly replied. “It was an easy entrance.”

“That’s not the point, Jacob. And why is that you keep waking up before me when I was waking before you on the ship?”

“You are very exhausted and you sleep past the setting of the sun, not just from the pull, Renee. You need to talk about what we found last night,” he said, coming to the foot of my bed and sitting down.

“Talk about it? What the hell is there to talk about? The facts speak for themselves,” I loudly replied, pulling my knees to my chest.

“I, too, would keep something so appalling to myself if I had been in his shoes.”

“How can you say that and why are you defending him?”

“I am not defending him, just his manner of deception, Renee. As I said last night, Martin is not his father and all who have known him, knows this. Was it a lie that he killed the one who owned this? Do you know he did not put a stop to his father’s wicked ways?”

“No, but he could have explained to me that his father was a bad man, not some fancy pants that Yvette used to get his family fortune. I wonder if she even used him? I wonder about a lot of things, now, when it concerns how he became a breeder and exactly how that came about,” I said, thinking of the things he had told me. “It could have all been lies.”

“Do you see it a lie when he tells you that he loves you?”

“I thought he was telling the truth about everything else, Jacob. I was looking in his eyes then too.”

“Were your words true when you said that you loved him?”

“That is one of the stupidest questions that I have ever heard,” I said; as I tried to get off the bed, with him taking me by the arm and pulled me back down.

“Please, answer my question.”

“Of course I meant it, why do you think I brought us all the way to this forsaken place? I have loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him,” I answered, lowering my head so he couldn’t see my pain.

Jacob removed the note that he and the others had retrieved from the castle gate of Inara’s home and handed it to me. “I wasn’t going to show you this, but with the events that have happened, I think it best that you see it.” I looked at him confused and took it. I had to read it twice; first, in order to understand the writing, then, to try to figure out about the writer being sorry about ‘our’ Martin.

“What does it mean?” I asked, looking at him and holding the paper so lightly it drifted from my fingers and landed on the floor.

“It means that he was taken from the tunnels by one of the houses; more than likely, one of the sisters. For what reason, I cannot say.”

“We have to go get him.”

Jacob raised his brow.

“Maybe I want to be the one to kick his ass, not let one of those horrible sickos.” I looked down at my ring finger on my left hand and my heart began to melt. “Why do you think they would take someone like Martin?”

“It could be for a number of reasons, but, if they found out that he was the maker of the demon coming to destroy their happy homes, no matter how sick they may be… I believe they would use him to get to you.”

“Then I guess that we have new plans to make. Are we going to use the secret tunnels to get into Inara’s, or do you think that it’s a trap as well?”

Jacob told me ‘trap or no trap’ we needed to seek out the entrance and see what came from exploring it. He also said if Inara hated her sister as much as her sister hated her, then maybe we could use them against each other without either one knowing about it. When I asked how, he just turned his smile at me and leaned back on the foot post of the bed. “Bait,” he said, then explained that we would allow one of us to be captured, letting them think that they had one of the highest members of our group. They would have to lie well and be convincing enough to make whichever sister we choose believe that the rest were wounded or killed in the tunnels. Giving them a much smaller number than what they were thinking was coming into their territory in the first place.

“And who do you have in mind for the, bait?” I asked, thinking he was going to say my name but hoping he wasn’t.