Page 79 of Shattered Silence Duet

Jasper’s eyes search mine, clearly looking for the truth.

“Something pierced your skin. What was it?” Atlas asks, still staring at my injury like he’s unsure what to do.

Me: A thin piece of metal.

Jasper’s eyes meet his brothers, and I see them all exchanging looks. They don’t believe me. They know I’m lying. They hate me now—I know it. This proves I can’t tell them all my secrets.

I stare down at the phone in my hands. Tears blur my vision as blackness creeps in. I’m not breathing—it’s another panic attack. This time, I welcome it. I want out of this situation, away from their angry, disbelieving looks. It’s worse than what happened with Brad. I lift my phone and send one quick group message before I black out.

Me: I’m sorry.

Chapter 48

Gideon

Seeing this tiny, broken girl constantly passing out is killing me. I only want her to be safe and happy, and we can’t even manage that in our own home.

Between me, Jasper, and Atlas, she doesn’t move an inch when she loses consciousness in our arms. Then we hear our phones chime all at the same time.

“Let’s clean the wound while she’s unconscious, so it’s less painful,” Ben says, shifting into doctor mode. He’s not a doctor, but he’s smart and often plays medic for all our non-life-threatening injuries.

Jasper scoops her up and sits in a kitchen chair with her in his lap. I help position her injured arm on the table and step back to let Ben work.

Pulling out my phone, I read the message she managed to send before passing out.

“Why is she apologizing?” I ask.

“What?”

“Right before she passed out, she texted us saying I’m sorry. Why is she apologizing?”

“Because she lied,” Jasper says, staring at her arm. Well, yeah, it was obvious to all seven of us that this injury wasn’t from falling,but I have no idea what caused it. It doesn’t look like a knife wound, we’d seen a few of those over the years. This was a circular shape, like a little hole. Although it looked infected so it was hard to tell what the original injury looked like.

I wonder how long she’s had it. Have I touched her arm and caused her pain without even knowing? Didn’t she seem to be in pain when Tucker hugged her the other day?Bullocks!How long has she been hiding this from us? We could have helped days ago.

After a few minutes, Ben comes in with a handful of supplies. He places a towel under her arm and starts cleaning the wound.

“Shit. It’s badly infected,” he says, grimacing as he works. “I think this could be what caused her fever.”

“That’s bad. It means the infection’s in her bloodstream. Shouldn’t we take her to the hospital?” I look around at the guys to gauge their thoughts.

“They’ll contact her mother,” Dom states, his eyes fixed on her unmoving form. “There’s no way she wants a hospital record of Mina. It could have bad repercussions.”

“Thisisn’t bad?” Atlas snaps angrily. “She can’t go back there.”

“She’s under eighteen,” I say, sounding like a broken record, even to my own ears.

“I don’t care!” he yells. “This has to stop.”

“Nothing has changed, Atlas,” Dom says, pacing the room in agitation. “Either her mother is helping hide her from someone worse, in which case, she’ll take Mina and run, and we’ll never see her again. Or her mother is the killer and?—”

“And that means Mina is in danger in that home, and she can’t go back there,” Atlas quietly yells, not wanting to wake her.

“What do you think will happen if we keep her here and don’t let her go home?” he asks Atlas calmly.

“She’ll finally be safe.”

“What do you think her mother will do? She’ll go to the police and tell them her daughter’s missing. It will take them all of five minutes at the school before they know she’s been hanging out with the twins and they end up on our doorstep.”