The Scarlet Dagger (The Red Sector Chronicles, #1) by Krystle Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

if they found out I’d been changed. Somehow I had forgotten that. Thank you for reminding me.
     
    “ I didn’t want to change you,” Aden said, “but you hardly left me a choice. With you, we finally have an advantage in this blood feud.”
     
    Paris snorted under her breath. “She’s more of a liability than anything else,” she muttered.
     
    Aden shifted his weight, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. One sleeve was rolled up. The tip of a white cotton patch hovered right above the crook of his arm, like he had just given blood.
     
    We are in a hospital. Maybe Paris had to check his blood to make sure it was free of Scarlet Steel toxin.
     
    “ How long have I been here?” I asked.
     
    “ One week,” Aden said breezily.
     
    One week , I repeated mentally. Then Leo and the others will definitely know something’s wrong by now. I wonder if they’ll come looking for me?
     
    Once again, Aden was staring at me. I followed his pensive gaze to my birthmark, a few petals of which showed slightly above the collar of my gown.
     
    “ You know,” he mused, “if you stare at it with your head tilted at this angle” – he cocked his head about forty-five degrees to the right, keeping his eyes glued to my birthmark – “it almost looks like a forget-me-not.”
     
    I tried to look down but my neck spasmed, and I rapidly snapped my chin upright.
     
    “ Rather unusual, don’t you think?” he said off-hand, as if thinking aloud. “I’ve only seen one other with a marking as unique as yours.”
     
    It took a split second for his remark to register, then my eyes widened to the size of tennis balls. “Orion? You’ve seen my brother?”
     
    “ I have,” Aden said without pause.
     
    I was so unbelievably excited, I could hardly stand to lay still. My brother. Someone had actually seen him! If I could find out when he had last been seen, maybe I could track him down and finally bring him home. Then, maybe an inch of normalcy would return to my life. Being reunited with him sounded so wonderful, it nearly brought tears to my eyes.
     
    “ Well, where is he?”
     
    Aden looked at me long and hard.
     
    “ Your brother is dead.”
     

Chapter 5
     
     
     
     
     
    No amount of grief I had experienced in my short life could come close to the pain I now felt. As Aden’s revelation took form in my head, Orion’s smiling face shattered in my memories, which were all I truly had left of him. Though he had been gone for three years, and despite that Leo and several others had kept telling me to accept his loss and move on, a part of me still clung to the hope that he was somehow miraculously alive. It made the pain more bearable if I had something, no matter how small, to hold on to.
     
    “ How do you know?” I asked in a tiny voice.
     
    Aden was silent, running his hand methodically over his mouth. “I saw his corpse for myself.”
     
    I couldn’t be sure what he said next. My brain had refused to listen after the word “mutilated” came out of his mouth, until his voice was a mere drone in the background of beeping machines and the rapid beating of my own miserable heart. Hot blood pooled in my cheeks, and a single tear traced its way down my face, splattering on my birthmark.
     
    Aden at last finished and bowed his head, not apologizing. “I’m sorry” seemed inadequate anyway, and I was glad he didn’t say more.
     
    At first, I tried to deny that Orion was truly gone, to console myself by believing in the impossible. But after those first early seconds of denial had passed, I was rendered nearly immobile by shock. My lips wouldn’t move. My ears had become deaf to the sounds around me as two guards came to undo the cuffs and escort me to a cell, like a common criminal. They had even given me a black prisoner uniform to wear, stamped with a number which had become my name.
     
    I wobbled to the mat/bed and sat down with a heavy plop as the barred door rattled closed with a