Page 17 of Muted Voices (Broken Ashes #1)

I allow that thought to overwhelm me for only a few moments before I pull my shoulders back and stand up tall. I can deal with whatever is thrown at me next, even if that’s by myself, because the guys are about to kick me out and wipe their hands of me. I actually wouldn’t blame them. I’ve already brought a lot of shit to their door, and they don’t even know the worst of it.

I need to tell them what I can over breakfast. They deserve to know, and that way, if they do decide to let me stay, they have all the information that they need and still want me to stick around. That means a lot to me, that they want me to stay.

I think it speaks volumes when I decide to leave Betty on my bed and not take her downstairs with me, she doesn’t have any bullets in and couldn’t do any harm to any of them anyway, but she is like a comfort blanket to me and I usually take her with me if I’m feeling unsure.

Evander was right earlier, I do still have a fantastic sense of smell when it comes to food, and I follow my nose through the vast corridors that are somehow still cozy until I get to the kitchen and grin triumphantly.

I point at Evander and say, “Ha, I told you that I could still do it.”

He chuckles, “Well done, come and eat.”

The food laid out on the table looks fucking delicious and smells amazing. There’s a variety of pasta dishes, salads, loaves of bread, and lots of carbs, which is exactly what I need right now. I’m still feeling the slight effects of the darkness, and the more food, the better.

“Wow, this looks delicious,” I compliment as I take a seat, and following their lead, I immediately start loading up my plate with deliciousness.

“I’m afraid we can’t take credit. We ordered in again. None of us are exactly great at cooking,” Ransom admits.

I shrug as I shove a fork full of food in my mouth and say, “Me neither. I don’t care who made it so long as it tastes good.”

“Good, let's eat first, and then we can get into everything afterward.” River suggests, already eating, and the others just make grunts of agreement as they start eating too.

I’m not ashamed to say that I eat almost as much as I did last night, but thankfully, not only did the guys seem to anticipate this, but they all grin as I practically eat my bodyweight in food. If anyone tries to talk to me while I’m eating, I am completely oblivious. I think I’m in the clear though, because when I look up, none of them are staring at me like they’re waiting for an answer, and in fact, several of them are still eating themselves.

“Better?” Doc asks, lifting a cup of what can only be coffee to his lips.

I nod and answer honestly, “Yes, I feel back to normal now, or at least whatever constitutes as normal for me.”

“Good,” he replies and then adds with a smile that has no right to be that gorgeous, “You keep eyeing my cup like it's water in the desert. Would you like some coffee?”

“God, yes,” I practically shout, and his eyes briefly heat before he chuckles and gets up.

When he brings me back a large mug, and I take my first sip, I have to stop myself from groaning because fuck me, it’s the best coffee I’ve ever tasted. Although that’s not really saying much because I know that the coffee I drink is shit, it’s the only stuff I can afford, so I make do.

It doesn’t take much longer until everyone has finished, and I help clear the table before we all head back, everyone with their own drinks, and we all take our seats again.

“Okay, so first,” Evander starts.

I interrupt him, knowing that if I don’t say anything now, I’ll just keep putting it off, and there may not be a better opportunity later down the line to say something. So it’s now or never.

“Actually, before we get into anything else, I need to talk to you all,” I say, my voice full of fake confidence, this is the moment that they realise just how much trouble I am, or worse, they don’t believe me and think I’m talking shit. That would really fucking suck.

Reed watches me carefully as he says, “Okay, we’re listening.”

“Yeah, what’s up?” River adds with a smile that instantly puts me at ease; he’s so bouncy and happy, it's infectious.

“Erm, I’m not quite sure where to start, so this might be all over the place. Bear with me and feel free to ask questions, I can’t guarantee that I will answer, but you can ask,” I start by explaining because, honestly, I’m not that great at explaining myself under normal circumstances, and these aren’t normal circumstances, I actually kind of wish I did bring Betty down.

That would make me look absolutely insane if I were to go back upstairs just to get my shotgun.

“Why do I feel nervous?” Ransom asks, his lips ticking up slightly at the corners like he’s amused at himself for thinking that.

I shrug and meet his eyes. Something about the look that I’m giving him makes his smile slip as his eyebrows furrow with concern.

“So, because of the work I did with HID, as you can imagine, I’ve made a few enemies. The majority of them are human and not too much to worry about, but still, something that I think you guys should be aware of. You should, more importantly, be made aware that before I was with HID, I ran with some pretty dodgy people out of necessity and for some reasons that I'm not willing to get into right now. Because of that, I have some enemies, ones that are both human and supernatural. I’m not particularly worried about the human ones; they’ve got power but nothing compared to the main supe that would love to see me dead.” I start to explain, as I watch them all closely, I’m not exactly proud of my past but I am going to own it because it’s mine, and it helped shape who I am today. It also gave me some incredible skills that have saved my ass many times.

Predictably, all of the men are frowning heavily, but they’re all still listening, and they aren’t trying to interrupt, so bonus points to them.

I continue, trying to explain a bit more so they understand the severity of the situation that I’m in and that I’ve inadvertently put them in, “Something happened, and I ended up helping to put some of them away. I made a deal with HID since I wasn’t exactly a willing participant, and I’d help put quite a few of them away. HID proposed that instead of going to prison, where I would’ve ended up dead in minutes and considering that I was human anyway, they said I could avoid jail if I worked with them for a certain amount of time. Thanks to what I was doing before I had a good understanding of police work and a decent skillset that could make me valuable to them.

“Because I was there instead of prison, they paid me the minimum and sent me on dangerous jobs. The more I succeeded, the more dangerous the jobs became, and the more suspicious they got thinking that I was a supe spying on them. They put me through the tests at least once every three months, even though it always came back as negative. I’ve gone off track. What I’m trying to get at is if any of the people that I used to work for realise that I’m still alive and not under the so-called protection of the HID where they couldn’t get to me without risking relations between supes and humans, then they’ll come after me. For some of them, that would actually be quite amusing,” I smirk as these people flit across my mind; they’d be really shocked to see me still alive, “for others, they will kill me, and they’d take great joy in doing it. Silly fuckers don’t let shit go no matter how much you decimated them before.”

“What exactly did you help take down?” Doc asks, curiosity burning in his eyes.

I clear my throat. There’s a really big chance that they heard about what happened. After all, supernaturals were involved, which meant that SID was involved too. HID kept my identity hidden supposedly to protect me, and although I’m sure that some higher-ups in SID must’ve at least known of me, typical agents wouldn’t.

“There was a, I guess you could call it, an underground fighting ring, except lower level supes and humans were being sold to Dimitri to go up against his best fighters, strong supernatural’s that they had no chance against, they’d literally get torn apart. If, on the off chance, one of these humans or lower level supes won, they’d just be put into the next fight. They were treated like fighting dogs, worse in fact, and I gave HID a lot of names of some prominent people from the criminal underworld, humans and supes, which I assume they told SID about.”

“Fucking hell, we were there, it was absolute carnage. We knew HID had an informant, but no one knew who it was, you were responsible for putting a lot of high profile supes away,” Raiden comments.

I nod, “Yeah, and their followers, and more importantly Dimitri, are extremely dangerous. Dimitri didn’t get taken in and is still very much a threat to me; the only reason why he hadn’t done anything is because I was under the protection of HID, and it's well known that they are looking for any opportunity to break the very fragile truce that’s stopping there from being an all-out war.”

“Fucking hell,” Griff says, and then continues as something occurs to him, “When you say Dimitri, you’re actually referring to Dimitri Petrovich, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I reply, and then add, because I know that there are going to be more questions from them, “I don’t particularly want to get into that right now. What I am trying to get at is that there are some incredibly dangerous people after me, and you deserve to know exactly how dangerous it is to be associated with me. If they come for me, then you could get caught in the crosshairs, and that’s the last thing I want.”

I finish my speech. Now, it's up to them to decide whether they want to keep associating with me or cut me loose entirely. I wouldn’t blame them if that’s what they do. Of course, I didn’t tell them that some of these enemies had actually succeded in sending me to the darkness and would be extremely shocked to see me very much alive, but then again, that’s a whole other set of issues that we just won't get into, the important thing is that they now know the dangers and can make a fully informed decision about how they want to proceed.

“Thank you for trusting us with that information,” Doc says sincerely.

“We can make sure that you’re never in a position where there’s a chance that one of these people could recognise you, or one of Dimitri’s people could recognise you and report it back to him,” Ransom adds.

“Yeah, if I’m honest, anyone else that was there we could handle easily, but Dimitri has a vast influence, and it’s because of that no agency have been able to bring him in for longer than maybe a week or two.” Evander adds.

“I know,” I reply and then frown, “I had some pretty extensive information on him that I gave HID. It should’ve sent him away for a good few years, at least. I thought it had, actually, until I’d stopped working off my prison time with them and decided to carry on doing the jobs because I liked helping people so much. I gained a bit more access, not much since they didn’t trust me, but enough that I found out that my information never sent him away.”

The guys share a look, and Reed asks, “I don’t suppose that you still have that information?”

I pause, following their train of thought surprisingly easily, “You think that the corruption was happening then and that Dimitri has someone at HID working for him, so the information I had never got to SID so they could use it to put him away?”

Van nods, “It’s certainly looking that way.” He then gives me a knowing look, “I know you, I highly doubt that you’ve changed that much in ten years, at least not with this. Do you have the information still?”

I smirk, “Of course I fucking do.”

“Good girl,” Doc grins.

I have to admit that it does something to me that I honestly had no idea it would, and now is not the time to be focusing on my needy vagina, so I tell her she’s a ho and then promptly shut that shit down. Fortunately, I don’t think that anyone has noticed that I got distracted.

“There’s only a slight issue,” I reply with a wince.

“Oh god, you didn’t swallow it, did you?” River asks, looking as horrified as he sounds.

I burst out laughing, “Of course not. It is in safe keeping in Ireland though.”

“Ireland, Ireland?” Raiden asks.

“Yep,” I reply simply because that’s a story in a half and we definitely don’t have enough time for that right now.

Everyone looks at Evander and waits to see what he’s going to say. He smiles, “Alright, we need to go and get it, but we need to sort out the corruption with the HID and know for certain who isn’t under Dimitri’s influence. I hate to say it, but someone in our agency could be under his influence too, so we need to tread very carefully with this. It’s safe where it is, right,” he looks back at me to confirm, and I nod, “Good, then we’ll leave it where it is. We don’t want to risk the information falling into the wrong hands.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say with a smile. “In all honesty it could take months before we’re at a point where we can take him in and then present the evidence. We’d need to build a case again; the information isn’t going anywhere, and we have things that need our more immediate attention, like the corruption in HID and the hybrids.”

“Well said,” Reed agrees.

“That brings us nicely onto the subject of the plan for the hybrids,” Evander starts.

I interrupt, though, because something has been bugging me, and I desperately want to know, “That’s something that I’ve been thinking about actually. How did you guys know that someone got attacked?”

River arches an eyebrow, “You mean how did we know that you got attacked?”

I roll my eyes but nod, “Yeah, that.”

They all share another one of their looks, and Ransom says, “We’ll tell you if you tell us how you weren’t writhing in pain or transitioning.”

I think about it for a second; there’s really no reason not to tell them, although I think they’re going to be disappointed at my answer because it really isn’t that interesting.

Nodding, I say, “Yeah, that seems like a fair exchange.”

“You are aware that I’m a gargoyle,” Griff starts, and I nod in agreement even though I didn’t really need to because it wasn’t a question. He smiles ever so slightly and continues, “One of my gifts is visions. They either show me the past, present, or the future. I had a vision of a woman with no face or distinguishing features getting attacked. I couldn’t even see hair colour, hence why I didn’t recognise the woman as you. The only identifiable feature was the fact that she was wearing a shirt that said Bobby’s. We were fairly certain that the woman would be dead or in transition when we got to town, but obviously, we couldn’t leave it. There was either a woman in need of guidance or dead and a rogue shifter that needed dealing with. Then, we showed up and found you. It still didn’t click that you were the woman in the vision until your hair moved when you were inspecting the hybrid that you shot. How did you realise something was off with it anyway?”

“Wow, that’s actually pretty cool,” I reply, thoroughly impressed at his gift, and then answer his question, “I recognised that there was something off with the shifter because I’ve actually come across a hybrid before and it had similar features. Also, as for why I didn’t turn or die agonizingly, I actually have no idea. I do know that it has nothing to do with the fact that he was a shifter though. It just doesn’t work on me.”

“You mean you’ve been scratched or bitten before and didn’t turn?” Raiden asks incredulously.

I nod, “Yeah, I told you that they gave me the most dangerous jobs.”

“Neith, they shouldn’t have been sending you on jobs where there was even a suspicion of a supernatural presence. If the HID suspects that a supe may be involved, then they are supposed to inform us so we can take over immediately.” Doc explains.

I raise my eyebrow and reply, “Exactly, that’s why you never got informed god forbid they admit that they are capable of doing a case.”

Doc frowns, “Yeah, okay you make a good point.”

“I think we need to fill the boss in on your situation,” Evander says, watching me closely for my reaction.