Page 91 of Half Truths (Secret Society 1)
“Oh yeah.” I nodded. “That was an actual building?”
“Very long time ago.” Nora smiled. “Which is why it’s said that’s the body of water with the octopuses. She threw them out the window there.”
“That’s a weird thing to do.”
“I think they took away her funding, but I’m not sure. Point is, she built this society and modeled it after her favorite creature—eight legs, eight members, intelligent, camouflage, etcetera.”
“Dr. Henry Blackwell started The Swords. He was a mad scientist. Where his wife was a marine scientist, he experimented on people. It is said, he bought the old church not only because of the cemetery, but because once upon a time these lots were combined and that was where the crazy owner of this house killed all of her lovers. Her husbands she made seem like natural causes or accidents. The lovers didn’t get that lucky.”
I shivered. “This house is totally haunted.”
“Both of them are.”
“I barely like sleeping in the dark, so I’m going to pass on the horror stories for now,” I said. “I have an overactive imagination and watch too much crime television so I feel like anything and everything is going to happen to me.”
Nora laughed, pointing at the paper. She drew two arrows beneath both societies that met at the bottom and wrote The Labyrinth Initiative.
“No way.” I gasped. “It’s connected to both?”
“Yep. Think of it as a shell company,” she said. “So T.L.I. actually files under non for profit. This part is what we all know. This . . . ” She drew another line beneath that and wrote Mentorships and Sugar Babies. “Is the part we’re still trying to figure out, but it’s pretty obvious to those of us who have been around, and it’s definitely obvious after seeing these albums.”
She walked away and pulled three albums off the far-end bookshelf, placing them in front of me. Unlike the black leather-bound albums around the room, these were red and black. My hand shook slightly as I opened the first one and shut it right away.
“What the hell is this? Porn?” I looked up at Nora, wide-eyed. I didn’t want to see naked pictures of my father.
“Relax, members are all clothed,” she said.
“Relax,” I repeated, opening the album back up. “Relax?”
I couldn’t imagine anyone relaxing as they flipped through this album. One picture, in particular, made me pause and stare, a disgusted taste in my mouth. Three men in suits sitting in chairs while three naked women lay on the floor with their legs spread open, touching themselves as the men looked on. One man had reached down to seemingly help the girl, mid-picture. That man was my father. And that girl looked a lot like Lana. I slammed the book shut again.
“I can’t look at this. I’ll be sick.” I placed a hand on my queasy stomach. “Why don’t you show this to people before they go through initiation? This would be the exact kind of hazing that would scare people away.”
“We need you in.” She shrugged, a small smile touching her lips. “You’re a Bastón, you were always meant to be in The Eight.”
“I don’t know if I want any part in this. If I’m expected to walk around naked for these old guys—”
“No,” Nora said quickly, eyes wide. “These were things we recently discovered. You’d never be part of this.” She tapped on the books, then picked one up and opened it to the very first page, which I’d completely bypassed. Written in script was: Labor Union.
“Labor Union?” I said loudly. “This is disgusting.”
“It’s extremely complicated even for a crash course, but technically, they have this mentorship program and within that program is another in which girls are basically . . . prostitutes.” She gathered the books and walked to the shelf, sliding them in their place.
“It’s like a damn never-ending matryoshka doll,” I said, looking at the paper. “How did you find out about this?”
“The short story? Lana told a friend about it and that friend started showing up here, lurking in the woods out back, parking in front of the gates and looking in. It was creepy. I thought it was someone’s ex-girlfriend or someone Fitz pissed off.” She cringed as she said it. “Sorry. But Lana was here one day, for a gala, and saw the girl and said it was a friend of hers. She went outside and asked her to please leave. Apparently, the girl wanted to make sure she was okay.”
“You don’t buy that?” I asked.
“Lana worked for the paper. We all knew she wanted to tear the societies down from the inside and we all agreed she shouldn’t be here.”
Her words sent a chill down my spine. If she had been unwanted . . . was that why my brother was arguing with her in those pictures? Telling her to stay away from The Eight? From The Lab? From our father?
