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He was wrong and no one was willing to be named a witch next or get on the wrong side of the “law.”

I sighed when he flinched. “Yes, I’ve killed. I’ve killed many, but I’m not—”

“I know. I know, Ellie,” he whispered, kissing my hair. “I’m not judging. I know you did it for the right reasons and when you had to.”

“You’re just realizing how old I am?”

“And how hard your life has been. You talk like Mum and Da about the tough choices they had to make before we were out. I’ve not had much interaction—my mates are all my age.”

Fair enough.

“What I arrived to was monstrous,” I whispered, still feeling the fires that night the “good” people of that town set. “People were watching with awe like it was an air show or something cool instead of people about to be burned alive.”

“So you rescued them and killed the bad guys?” he checked.

Yes, yes, I had. One of my biggest regrets was leaving after I was outed and trusting they had the situation in hand. I told Ha-joon that and what happened after when I came back and found the family dead, nailed to crosses and clearly having been left there to die that way. There was nothing to show they had been stabbed or killed then hanged.

No, the monsters of that town had mounted a family oftenonto crosses to die of dehydration while people went on with their lives. The girl was seventeen, but she had younger siblings who were killed. The children would have died first, and the rest would have had their last moments filled with agony because of that.

“What did you do?” Ha-joon whispered when I stopped talking.

“Something just as monstrous,” I confessed. “I found some other vampires I’d come across who were fighting and told them the truth. We handled it.” I scrubbed my hands over my face and snorted. “That was how ASH came about. The founder was part of that.”

“It’s nice something good came from something horrific,” he whispered, his voice sounding hollow.

Yeah, it was a horrible story and it gutted me as well.

I wondered how people would feel if they knew the actual site of the massacre we unleashed on those evil humans wasactually the center of ASH? That was why it was built in Atlanta of all places. That girl and her family were buried deep under the atrium garden of the main, original building of ASH.

After her torturous death, she fulfilled her wish of bringing comfort to those in pain. I saw more patients and staff enjoy that garden and haven over the years than I could count.

And it was time to get back to those roots.

It was time to get back to being the woman who was brave enough to found ASH even if I originally fought for it to be for humans too and failed. I wanted it to be a haven from evil, a place for healing that saved those worth saving.

Yeah, it was definitely time to get back to that.

20

Ha-joon

My lover was the founder of ASH.

Justthinkingit sounded insane… But I knew it was true. I knew it in my soul more than the clues I’d gotten from Da. He said he thought that the founder’s last name was Miller.

Fine, Ellie was Reed-Miller,butshe didn’t go by that, and I would bet anything that Da wasn’t the only one who might remember the name of the founder. They’d probably doubt it was Ellie, but too many people were stupid.

And I wasn’t.

Then when she told me the heartbreaking story she lived—I knew. It was the story Da had said about how ASH came about. It was more than that though. It was the haunted and disappointed look Ellie had as she finished and talked about other things.

Like she wasn’t living up to being the founder.

I’m in love with my idol. How about that turn of events to fuck with a man’s mind?

“Can I make a recommendation?” I checked when we were done with breakfast and I was heading out to get ready for work.

“Of course,” she said with a smile and looked up from her tablet. “You’ve been a huge help already.”