The silence under the bleachers was absolute.
I had knelt in the dirt in that valley. I had screamed Lucas’s name as the mortar fire rained down. I had spent six years waking up screaming because I couldn’t reach him before the compound collapsed.
And my father had traded him.
“You sold my husband,” I said, my voice eerily calm, detached from the nuclear explosion happening in my chest. “To be tortured. To be a ghost. So I could live.”
“He agreed to it!” my father pleaded, reaching for my hand. “Lucas knew! When he realized the scope of what Halcyon was, he told me to do it. He sacrificed himself so you could come home.”
I slapped his hand away. “Where do they want us?”
“They don’t have the full key,” my father confessed, shrinking away from me. “I only gave them half. I told them if they ever touched you, the other half would be released to the press. It was my insurance policy to keep you alive.”
