12. Hunter

TWELVE

HUNTER

W hen Leo and I purchased the building in Chevy Chase, it marked a new era for BwP. No longer were we the scrappy startup working out of leased space that we quickly outgrew. We were the big boys now—a full-fledged organization.

Staring at the rubble of the building, tracking the flow of smoke and steam and dust as it rises to the sky, causes a curious sort of bittersweet grief to rush through me.

The sweet: I’m free from BwP in a way. With our main headquarters in rubble, we have a solid excuse to shut down. Insurance will pay out; the government will step in.

We can get rid of Panacea as if it never existed.

But the bitter? Four hundred and thirty-two people are dead from the explosion. That’s not just bitter. It’s downright vile.

Walking next to me, Leo answers all the questions the law enforcement officers and detectives throw his way. I stay silent.

Silent and complicit.

Four hundred and thirty-two people.

Four hundred and thirty-two people were slaughtered because of me.

I peel away from Leo while he talks to the officers. Their voices sound like I’m listening from underwater. I try to focus, but I can’t because even from two hundred yards away and behind the crime scene tape, I see a body. A thin arm, an angular face, brown hair. Most of the body hides under rubble, but still.

I see it.

And the corpse morphs into August and?—

I don’t fight against nausea rising up my esophagus. Instead, I puke into one of the rubble-clogged sewer drains.

“Fuck,” I mumble, stumbling away from my vomit. I feel drunk off…something. This energy, maybe. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that these people, The Legion, want so badly to control me that they’d hurt innocent people.

Four hundred and thirty-two people—one of which looks like my son.

Before I found Winter at our bedroom door, I was searching for Leo, determined to tell him that the time for bullshitting around with Misha was over. I planned to tell him that I was going to take matters into my own hands and annihilate Morris Winthrope.

Morris Winthrope is just one man. I can get rid of one man. Then we’d leave Misha and all this shit behind. Because what do I really care about? Getting rid of the immediate threat to my family—and that threat is Morris Winthrope. So Misha and his wants and desires can get fucked.

After all, Misha might be my half brother, but I’m not convinced he has any familial feelings for me.

And that’s fine. I don’t need more people to care about in my life.

I won’t let them—The Legion, Morris Winthrope, Benjamin Fucking Brigham—steal another thing from me. So my plan becomes simpler: step one, get rid of Morris Winthrope. Step two, leave the rest of Misha’s bullshit behind.

One man.

Morris Winthrope is just one man.

The Architect is an abstract concept that, up until this moment, seemed almost benign. Inconsequential.

I’d resolved to let it all go as I allowed myself the privilege of intimacy with Winter, even if I could only let it go for just a moment.

But as I lost myself in Winter, four hundred and thirty-two people took their last breaths.

And I cannot allow any truth to exist except this one: My inaction led to this massacre.

Because this is The Legion, and the dread in my stomach is because I know this is only the beginning.

“H, they want to talk to you,” Leo says, coming up behind me. He hands me a bottle of water, and I chug it. Two agents who look like they work for the Department of Justice come up beside us. The shorter, blonde one looks like he’s a two-pack-a-day smoker, and his suit jacket looks a little small on his frame. His partner is his opposite—dark-skinned, tall, and a woman.

“Hunter Brigham,” I say, sticking out my hand to the woman first, then her counterpart.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” the woman says.

“My loss?” I say, incredulous. “What I’ve lost is minimal to what the families of all those people are experiencing.” I look past them.

Four hundred and thirty-two.

From the best we can tell, a string of dirty bombs were placed inside BwP’s basement floor. But whoever put them there didn’t stop just at my building. They placed bombs around the whole city block.

They went off at lunchtime on.

While four hundred and thirty-two people milled around the greenspace, stopping at one of the six food trucks, a countdown started to their deaths.

Too quickly for anyone to run or hide, the explosives went off. And then, what remained of the labs in my building caught fire.

I focus back on the agents. “My apologies. Leo and I just wanted to see everything for ourselves, but I’m sure if you have questions for us, we can meet you at your office, correct?”

Normally, if there were anything involving me and law enforcement, I’d have them come to my territory. In this case, that would be Amelia Manor. Except Amelia Manor is also devastated.

First the raid, now this.

All this…because I refused to play along.

“ Suuuure ,” the shorter man says, elongating the word. “We’ll be in touch, so stay close by.” He stares me down with a hard gaze, and I feel the rising accusation in his expression.

I open my mouth to speak, but Leo jumps in first. “We’ll be there,” he says.

The shorter man nods and, sharing a look with his partner, turns from Leo and me.

“Why do I get a feeling they think we’ve got something to do with this?” Leo mutters once we’re several feet from the spot. In my periphery, the body in the rubble stands out like a beacon. My mind is playing tricks, amplifying the position of the hand, the arm, the head, but even knowing that I can’t help seeing it.

“H,” Leo grinds out, pulling me to a stop with a hand on my forearm. “Where’s your head at?”

His voice is low, and I lift my gaze to see him focused on me. I inhale as if I haven’t done so in a while. “They think we’re responsible because we are responsible. Well, I am, at least.”

Leo blinks before looking to his left and right and ushering me back to the bulletproof Tahoe. It’s unlikely for anyone to make a move on us with so much law enforcement hanging out, but stranger things have happened.

Get into the vehicle, Hunter.

When the door slams behind me after I slide into the back, I stare at the seat in front of me and wait for the man to my side to speak.

The AC is on, so I’m acutely aware of the sweat that freezes and dries on my skin in contrast to the heat from the debris and summer sun.

Leo sighs in the passenger seat as Jared puts the car in drive.

Misha insisted that he and Jared accompany us to our headquarters as soon as I announced that I was going. Leo, of course, was already on his way to the garage in search of an armored vehicle.

Now that we’re headed back to Misha’s mansion, I send up a prayer that we can get through the ride back to the compound without input from the pakhan. It seems that God stopped answering my prayers a while ago, though.

“Three more people just died in the hospital,” he says, scrolling on his phone. “Fifteen more are in ICU. Some others are in trauma, but they’re expected to survive. Physically, at least,” he adds.

I turn my head away from his words.

“You know, Morris Winthrope is the one who has the real vendetta against you, Brigham. It’s not just that he wants Ella in his possession.”

I stare at the back of Leo’s seat, so I notice when his shoulders tense.

Misha continues, “What I think you fail to understand is that the entire Legion is after you.” He darkens his phone and drops it on the seat next to him.

“They’re after you. Your girl. Your children.”

“Stop,” I grind out, still not looking at him.

Four hundred and thirty-two people dead. Make that four hundred and thirty-five, and this is on top of the thirty people who died at Amelia Manor during the raid.

So much death. So much death because of me.

“You think I’m being dramatic, perhaps, when I say that they’re after full-scale destruction. Maybe you think, who could possibly accomplish such a feat?”

Jared’s hands tighten on the wheel as he navigates us onto the highway. Four other armored vehicles make up the detail, guiding us back to base.

“But if it doesn’t take more than four hundred people dying today to convince you to take action, I’m unsure what will,” he finishes.

I glance at him out the side of my eye.

“You done?” I reply.

Misha glares at me for a long moment before returning to his phone.

The ride is silent for more than half an hour. Once we hit the road that Misha’s compound claims, I decide to say something.

He opens his mouth, ready to needle me again when I cut him off.

“You think I’m some lazy asshole. You think I’m selfish and entitled.”

He raises his eyebrow, and I want to punch him again. But I promised Winter I wouldn’t get into any more fights with the Ukrainian.

“But I am a human. That was the thing that my father wanted to kill the most—my humanity.”

His face changes, and he looks somber.

“We’ll take them all down,” I say.

Leo shifts in the front seat, but I know he’s with me.

After entering Misha’s home, Jared and Misha go in one direction, and Leo heads off in the opposite.

“Where are you going?” I ask him. He doesn’t respond and I’m too tired to press more.

Left standing alone in the foyer, I head to the one place that’s turned into a sanctuary: the courtyard.

It’s quiet here now, and in any other case, it would seem peaceful. Not even the birds jump from tree to tree. Instead, the silence feels eerie and unsettling.

I sit on the short staircase of the gazebo and put my head into my hands. The familiar tug on my roots comforts me, but only for a moment.

I’ve decided, and that’s it. Part of my resistance to diving into this shit with Misha is that doing so requires me to face some fucked-up shit.

Misha says he wants information, a retelling of the horrors I experienced on Isla Cara. And I just know that in the process of laying all that out, I’ll have to tell, in detail, the things I did.

It requires me to tell them the shit they did to me.

It requires me to tell….

I surge to my feet and turn to the post holding up the entrance to the gazebo. And because it’s the closest thing to me, I hit it with my closed fist.

Then I hit it again.

And again.

And again and again and again and a?—

“Hunter.” I pull my punch when she speaks, but I don’t look at her. “Are you okay?”

I let the moments tick by in my mind.

“Can we sit?” she asks.

I think about it. This will be the closest my mother and I will have been since I got here.

This is the first time it’s just the two of us.

And I’m here, facing down all my demons, and I’m not too sure who’s winning.

Breathe with me, Hunter….

I look at Amelia. Her face is neutral, her hands clasped in front of her. Patient. Waiting.

Am I prepared to be alone with her?

What do you want your relationship with your mother to look like? Winter asked me all those days ago.

She told me to think about it, and I haven’t allowed myself to.

But as she stands in front of me, just the two of us, I admit the truth of what I want.

I want my mom.

I want the woman back who was my soft place, my safe place. I want to know that the first person to care about me, the only person to love me as a child, is still there.

I want to be a man that she would be proud of.

I look at my palms before rubbing them on my thighs.

But maybe I’ve done too much damage for that to ever be possible.

“I don’t have to stay,” she says, her voice a whisper.

She tries to smile, but it falls.

I don’t recognize my voice when I say, “You can stay.”

I drop to the step.

Her shoulders lower as if she’d tensed every muscle in her body as she waited for my answer.

I slide over to the side a few inches, giving her space to sit.

When she’s next to me, I realize that she still smells the same. Lavender and vanilla.

It’s a soft scent and fitting for Amelia Brigham as I knew her. I’m unsure if it fits with who she is now.

Do I have any clue who she is now?

“I’m really sorry about BwP,” she says.

I quirk my mouth to the side. I’m not sorry about BwP. I had one foot out of the company for the longest time anyway.

But I’m devastated by the lives lost. I’ll carry the weight of their deaths for the rest of my life.

Four hundred and thirty-five lives and counting.

“It’s…” I don’t want to say it’s okay because it’s not. “It is what it is.”

“Yeah,” she says. She puts her hands next to her hips and rocks forward a fraction.

I say, “Sorry I’ve been a dick?—”

She says, “I don’t know how I’ll ever apologize?—”

We start talking at the same time, and we both release a chuckle. When we look at each other, her functional eye crinkles with amusement.

As I register her words, though, my jaw ticks.

“You haven’t been a dick, Hunter.” She grins a bit. “Sorry, I’m always getting used to the fact that you’re a man now.”

The words are like ice water to the face.

“Yeah, you’ve been gone a long time,” I say.

What do I want my relationship with my mother to look like?

I flex my hand, not surprised that I’ve cracked the skin of my knuckles.

“I realize I haven’t been exactly fair to you. I haven’t let you get a word in edgewise,” I say. Progress. This is progress.

We’re silent again.

“I don’t want you to think I’m making an excuse for my absence, Hunter. But I’d like to explain why I stayed away.”

Tension wraps around my spine. Am I ready for this? At all?

I nod, dragging my eyes to look at her. She rubs her top lip with the back of her thumbnail.

“Okay, so here it goes.” She takes a deep breath. “When I regained consciousness after the acid attack, it took me several months just to remember who I was. Dr. Whitney said it was a trauma response rather than any type of neurological damage, but I don’t know.”

I bite my lip, listening to her words. I want to keep her gaze while she speaks, but I can’t. I stare off into the darkness instead.

The way she looked before they dragged her away will haunt my memories forever. Her raw skin, mottled and bursting….

“That’s understandable,” I mumble.

“After that, I was so filled with rage and anger and grief because I didn’t want to be alive. Not like this,” she says, pointing toward her face.

I take a moment to examine her. The skin on her right side is taut in some places and saggy in others. The long, straight scars crisscrossing her flesh appear to be surgical—tissue grafts and donations pieced together to repair the damage. Her prosthetic eye is different from the one she wore the first time I saw her outside Misha’s front door.

I couldn’t look away from her on that day, but I’ve been trying my best to avoid looking at her since.

I allow myself to face her now.

She’s able to use both hands and her legs, but the gnarled skin stretches tight over her affected limbs. I notice she extends her right leg out in front of her, but her other leg remains bent.

“Does it hurt?” I ask, nodding to her leg. She grimaces and rubs her knee.

“Just my knee. They broke the kneecap, so it took some time to heal. And when it did, it always had a bit of a twinge.”

She leans closer to me slightly. “Plus, I’m getting old, Hunter.”

She lets out a soft laugh, and I feel the side of my face turn up. A smile.

We fall into silence again, and she’s the one to break it.

“I have so many sins to atone for,” she says, her voice strained as she looks at me.

I jerk at the word “atone.” It’s the same word Winter used when describing how I should reach August.

My mission was to atone for the wrong I’d done to him. It started with an apology, doing better every day, and never making the same hurtful choice again.

My mother’s eyes bore into me as if she’s trying to stare into my soul and find the little boy who she left behind.

“Hunter, I am sorry ,” she says, her voice wobbling. The words burn as they land in my chest. I try to face her, but the sight of her tears guts me.

I shake my head and look away.

“When?” she asks. “How many times?”

My back straightens as the nausea comes back.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“How many times did they hurt you?” Her voice is thin, choked. “I know I have no right to ask, but the other day it all came together. What you went through. They hurt you after I left, didn’t they? Maybe even before?”

Oh, God.

I surge to my feet, unable to stand the line of questioning.

“He was a monster, and he didn’t know any boundaries, but I never thought he’d go that far. You were too important to him—to The Legion. But then when you said?—”

“ Stop, ” I grind out, my voice rough and bile sharp in the back of my throat. I spin to look at her, and I’m aware that my breaths saw in and out of my chest as if I’d run a marathon. As if I’d sprinted around the entirety of D.C.

She covers her mouth, her hands shaking with the damaged one over the healthy one.

Sliding her eye shut, she says, “I’m so goddamned sorry, Hunter. I’m sorry for my part in it.”

With my heart thudding in my chest and my brain spinning, spiraling, I rush out of the courtyard, leaving her behind.