Page 54 of Choosing Her Alpha
That was not the answer they were looking for. Their anger ratcheted up. "What is wrong with you? I thought they were going to kill us. Lilla and I were with Davila. We were getting the ingredients to make the soap."
"We thought it would be fun for you," Lanny added.
"Guardsmen just swooped in on us with their long guns ready and everything. They put all the servants, all the drones, in one room."
"We were locked up for a couple of hours. No one said anything. We didn't even know why or for what, Sasha."
"And then they started asking questions of all the servants in the building."
Sasha started to feel very small.
"We answered their questions, but we didn't know anything." Lilla rubbed at the tears in her reddening eyes. "I thought we were friends. Like sisters. Equals."
She had hurt them, Sasha realized. She hadn't been thinking. She'd wanted to get away from Kane and his rejection, so that was what she’d done. She’d given no thought to what would happen to her friends.
Merrick had used the drones to punish Sasha. Most often it was a whipping that he forced her to watch. Sasha had been told that Kane reserved corporal punishment for breed, but was known to just kill those who failed him.
She knew the guard who touched her was dead, but he hadn't said what had happened to Zinanno and the guards she'd managed to outwit. Feeling selfish, she realized she hadn’t asked.
Volatile man. She felt it in his touch that he would never hurt her, but that left the rest of the world vulnerable to his displeasure.
Sasha wrapped a towel around herself. Even if she had planned better, she wouldn't have been able to tell them her stupid plans. It was better they hadn't known so they couldn't be accused of helping. She had protected them.
The way they protected her.
Sasha looked at Lilla. "Did my father ever do anything to you?"
The twins always gained color in their faces when they were angry, but they both blanched at the question. Their angry scents turned sour.
"Did he and his friends do stuff... bad stuff to you and the others?" Sasha asked again. She rattled off the names of all the female drones she could think of. Remembering that Kane said shine worked on men to relax them also, she mentioned a couple of the young males too.
She could see their answers on their faces. They had protected her. They had all sheltered her, kept her in the lie of a life her father had built for her.
"You had your reasons for not telling me," Sasha said. "And I had my reasons for not telling you."
The following silence wasn't just awkward, it was painful. Sasha wasn't angry, but their deception, and her father's deception, rankled.
Her entire world was shattered. Her father, the man who told her stories, set her on his shoulders and bounded her around the yard, tickled her to submission, taught her how to make lemon gin and honey mead... That man was an evil man. His sudden death had been the most terrible thing to ever happen to her.
Until now.
She would have lost herself in sorrow if her mother hadn't come home with Merrick. Merrick, a prowling, hungry alpha wanting the throat of all her beloved people. Ironic that she had survived her grief because the threat of him kept her from getting lost in her own head.
"Did Merrick do the same? Did he use you?"
Lanny made a disgusted face. "Not for sex. But you know he relished being lord of the manor and taking every bit of control from us."
Lilla nodded. "He loved being in control. Humiliating all of us was fun for him. But he never even got hard like most men do when he was tormenting us."
"And my father?"
At the mention of her father, the twins grew uncomfortable again. They didn't want to talk about it. Sasha tried to be respectful despite her morbid need to know more.
She took the dress from Lilla. "Who is the company today?"
Subdued, Lanny said, "Nurse Sara, Doctor Bruns, and the queen."
"What?" Sasha gasped.
