The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

“That’s disgusting,” Maddox whispered, echoing my thoughts in a much more direct fashion.

“I know,” Dylan replied, an undercurrent of anger in her voice. “And it gets weirder. I did a search to see if any known DNA records matched the DNA of the father, hoping to find the sicko. No luck, obviously, or else I would’ve marched his ass up here to talk to you directly. But something odd did come up. Apparently, Frederick Hamilton shares a distant relationship with these people. Cousins, at most, but the relationship is there.”

I sucked in a breath. I knew from the files Jasper had uncovered that Salvatore had been Sadie’s candidate in the Tourney—and the one she’d unleashed the sentinel for—but Hamilton had been another suspect, because of his relationship to Ezekial Pine. Lacey had assured me that her family had wiped Pine’s out, and that Frederick’s survival had been an oversight on her part… but had it been? Or was Frederick a child of two legacy families? Had his branch of the family managed to escape because of his other family, who kept him hidden when the slaughter began?

Was that the legacy family we were dealing with today? Was Dreyfuss or Sage one of them?

Or worse, had Lacey’s family missed someone else? Was the father somehow one of Ezekial Pine’s descendants, too? If so, who was the male in the equation? Presumably another person Lacey’s family had missed, but who?

My gut told me it was Dreyfuss, but there was a chance it could be Sage, or even, on a very off chance, Plancett. All three men had been around twenty-five years ago, and were the only ones still alive who were old enough and connected to this in any way. And while Sage was a possibility, I found it hard to believe the man would have anything remotely resembling a libido (or maybe I just hoped he didn’t). He was 115, for crying out loud, and far too busy to be fathering child after child. Unless he was having those women artificially inseminated.

God, I really hoped he wasn’t. The thought made me want to throw up.

Plancett was a possibility as well, but one that didn’t strike me as quite right. By all accounts, he was working for Sparks, and then later Sadie. Then again, he did at least have the letter P in his name. Maybe they had obfuscated his role in the organization to keep him hidden and safe. That way, if anyone came close to learning the truth, all signs would point to him being complicit, but not entirely guilty. It was smart.

But so was Dreyfuss. He was next to nothing on paper, a retired Knight manning a stall in the Lion’s Den. Kept in the background so that he could continue to strengthen their numbers, like some sort of stud bull. His position as a food vendor suddenly made a bit more sense, too—or at least, it would if I were in their shoes. Food vendors were practically invisible but talked to everyone. His people could come and talk to him in the open, under the guise of getting food, update him, and get their new orders right then and there. Nobody would ever suspect him. It would be the perfect place to hide. It’s what I would do, if I were them.

And it was smart, in its own disgusting way. He could run everything in secret while ensuring that if anyone came after them, he could escape before they realized his significance, and then turn around and start a new family, ready to take over where the others had left off. It might take them years, but they had proven their method worked. Their family had survived.

That didn’t leave me with much, and I turned my mind back to Frederick, deciding to add him to the list of people we would need to arrest. He might not have the same father as the rest of the legacies seemed to have, but I had no idea where he stood in all of this, and the DNA connection was too strong to ignore. If I left him out and he disappeared, the cycle might start all over again. And I couldn’t take that chance.

As for who the father was… Well, we just had to do everything in our power to figure that out.

“We’re going to have to find out who this man is before we do anything,” I said, intending it for Maddox.

“Well, of course we have to find out who he is,” Dylan replied, cocking her blond head at me. “But what do you mean, ‘before we do anything’?” She looked back and forth between us, her blue eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What’s going on?”

I bit my lip and looked at Maddox. “Did we find any evidence that points to her being involved?” I asked, rudely talking about Dylan in front of her.

Maddox shook her head. “Not so much as a message between them. There was a file on her, but from how it reads, it looks like they were gathering intelligence about her, not working with her.”

“‘Her’?” Dylan interrupted, crossing her arms over her chest. “Do you mean me? And who is ‘they’? The people who tried to rig the Tourney?” She frowned, as if a thought suddenly occurred to her. “Wait, have you uncovered new evidence? Do you have suspects?” She took a step forward, her entire body reflecting the intensity of her interest.

I cocked my head at her. “It doesn’t bother you that we suspect you?”

“It would, but you don’t,” she replied. She stuck her thumb out to point it at Maddox. “She just said that there weren’t any messages between myself and whoever you’re monitoring, so…” She trailed off and shrugged. “Up to you, but if you know something about who this man might be, then I want to know. This—what he’s been doing to these women—it’s disgusting. He needs to be stopped.”

“I agree,” I replied. Even if he wasn’t the father of all the legacies, I would still agree. He was taking women and forcing them to bear his children, until they died from it. It was beyond sick—it was downright evil.

I considered what Dylan was saying, and Maddox’s report that they hadn’t found anything implicating her as working with Sadie, and took a deep, calming breath. I’d been suspicious of everyone for so long, but I had to start trusting at some point. Maybe I’d already started with the Patrians—I’d let them take my brother with them, after all—and for the first time in a long time, I decided to let another person in.

“I’m going to let Maddox catch you up on everything in a minute,” I told her. “But for now, all you need to know is that we have three potential suspects: Marcus Sage, Emmanuel Plancett, and a former Knight who is now living in the farming department with his daughter.”

“Great. I’ll go down there and…” Dylan trailed off and frowned. “Did you say Marcus Sage? As in the head of the Medica?”

I nodded grimly. “I’m not certain yet, but—”

“What if the father is someone other than those three?” Maddox asked pensively. “What if we’re wrong to have only them on the list of suspects?”

I hesitated. I was banking on the idea that whoever the father was wasn’t content as a simple sperm donor—that he was someone important to the family itself and had known about the outsiders right from the start—but there was every possibility that I was wrong. Still, the three men were the only leads we currently had. I had no doubt that if we looked up their DNA profiles in the database, it wouldn’t be a match. Undoubtedly they would’ve been smart enough to upload a fake genetic profile to avoid situations like this. We couldn’t trust any comparisons to what was on record. We needed to collect their DNA personally and handle the testing ourselves.

If the DNA didn’t match, we would figure it out later.

“We’ll worry about it later. For now, we need to get DNA samples from all three men and do a comparison. That will tell us what our next move is.”

“All right,” Maddox agreed. “Who do we go after first?”

“First, you fill Dylan in on what we are doing,” I replied. “Then we’ll figure out the rest.”





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