Page 18 of Twisted Truths (The Sunburnt Hearts #4)

Chapter Thirteen

HADLEY

I expect to be in trouble when I return to cabin twenty-seven with flushed cheeks and tingling lips. However, Ascendent Sierra simply asks if I’m feeling better and suggests I go lie down as I still look quite peaked.

Confused, I do as she suggests, only to have Gianna fill me in on what happened after I ran out of the guardian’s house, abandoning my role.

Gabriel covered for me, explaining he had delivered bad news of a sick family member in Sydney, and blamed my hasty departure on me being overcome with emotion.

I try to look as forlorn as possible to sell the story, but inside, my mind is reeling.

Why is Gabriel covering for me? What does he get out of it?

My mind can’t accept this version of him.

In my three years at the Sunfire Circle, I’ve been conditioned to fear him.

I think it all stems from Seraphina warning me away from him when I first arrived, but it’s more than that.

There’s something about Gabriel that makes people uneasy.

His presence is like a storm cloud that hasn’t decided if it wants to thunder or break open.

While I’ve heeded Seraphina’s warning all these years, I’ve still watched him from afar. It’s almost been impossible not to.

He doesn’t play by the rules—proven by his unorthodox behaviour in introducing Zara as his Chosen—he’s powerful, distant, and dangerous. Yet, this past week, all I have seen is kindness. Okay, there was a little bit of intensity and menace … but mostly kindness, and protectiveness.

It’s perplexing, and I can’t let it go.

By morning, sleep-deprived and buzzing with questions, I pull on my boots and sneak out before sunrise, careful not to wake Gianna. While she’s been a kind roommate, she’s also too curious for her own good, and I can’t have her getting caught up in whatever this is.

The commune is quiet at this hour, with only the sound of twigs crunching underfoot and the distant chatter of birds waking up to keep me company on my mission.

A mission that, if I’m caught, could get me exiled from the Circle …

or worse. Thoughts of Zara cause my pulse to spike, and I try not to overthink what I’m doing, even though my heart is pounding like I’m about to undertake a forbidden ritual.

Guardian cabins are set apart from the others.

They like to pretend they’re part of us, but they always keep their distance.

When I reach the edge of the path which opens up to their homes, I hesitate, glancing around.

As the eldest son, Gabriel’s cabin is right next door to his father’s, and I cannot risk Seraphina seeing me.

Not that it will matter if her son’s reaction to me showing up to his residence uninvited is unfavourable.

Sneaking through the trees, I circle to Gabriel’s back door, and before I can talk myself out of it, climb the steps and knock. As I wait, I cast furtive glances over my shoulder to make sure no one sees me. Doubt starts to creep in.

What if I’m making a mistake ?

What if I misread the entire situation?

What if I’m about to wake the serpent?

Before I can lose my nerve, the door creaks open.

Gabriel’s steel-grey eyes widen when he sees me, but he overcomes his surprise quickly and pulls me inside, shutting and locking the door behind me. “You shouldn’t be here,” he rasps, his voice rough with sleep. He moves to the kitchen window and peers outside.

“I…” My voice trails off as I realise the magnitude of what I’ve done. Showing up at a guardian’s cabin like this, especially when I’m of age, is reckless and irresponsible. What the hell is wrong with me?

For three years, I’ve kept my head down, following the rules and settling into life at the Circle, but since Zara arrived six months ago, my eyes are open to the darker side of the Sunfire Circle, and now I’m taking uncalculated risks. I want out, but I’m terrified after what happened to Zara.

She had a family to return to, and she still wasn’t safe. I have no one.

No one will realise if I go missing. That knowledge is sobering.

Nash seems convinced it was Gabriel or someone from the Circle, and while I’m unsure on the second option, my gut tells me Gabriel would never hurt Zara, and I’m praying what I heard yesterday was the truth.

“What are you doing here, Hadley?” Gabriel asks, his voice resigned. “This isn’t very proper of you.” His derision at my words from the other day hurt. He turns away from the window and stalks over to his fridge.

Ignoring his dig, I shift on my feet. “I have questions.”

He arches an amused brow. “I’m sure you do.”

“I heard you yesterday. ”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” he says, pulling out some vegetables and a carton of eggs. “Omelette?”

“Not unless it comes with a side of answers.”

A smirk pulls on his lips. “There she is.” He busies himself chopping spring onion, mushrooms, capsicum, and tomatoes.

My brow furrows. “Who?”

“Madeline.”

Pain lances through me at the sound of her name so reverent on his lips, and I stagger over to a stool, sinking onto it before my legs give way.

Gabriel pauses and looks at me like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls out a pan and places it on the stove. After it heats, he adds oil, and the sound of sizzling vegetables fills the silence.

When I can’t take it anymore, I have to ask. “Why did she come here?”

He cracks a couple of eggs into the pan, and I wonder if he’s simply going to ignore me. But after a long moment, Gabriel speaks, his voice quiet and vulnerable, even more so than yesterday when I heard him talking to my sister’s grave.

“I fell in love with her the moment I saw her,” he says. “She was standing on a street corner in Sydney, her hair piled on top of her head like a volcano as she yelled abuse at a magpie that had snatched her sandwich right out of her hand.”

I blink, trying to process his words. “What?”

He huffs a soft laugh, lost in thought as he keeps an eye on the pan.

“Called him a beady-eyed sky goblin and told him she hoped his next swoop would end in a faceplant. I knew right then she wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met.

I called her firecracker, and it stuck. She said she hated it …

but I think she secretly loved it.” A flicker of a smile ghosts his lips, but it dies quickly.

“She was chaos and warmth and defiance, and I couldn’t stay aw ay. ”

Gabriel scoops the eggs and vegetables onto two plates, pushes one across the counter towards me, then leans back against the bench like the weight of his past has anchored him.

“Maddy was lost when I met her. Your foster brother had just moved away for university, and it was like her compass broke. But it wasn’t only that.

She felt like she’d failed you. ” He looks at me, and all the air huffs from my lungs.

“She told me she left because she thought you’d be better without her.

That she was too much, and she’d only screw things up for you. ”

I shake my head slowly, trying to breathe through the ache blooming in my chest. “She was wrong.”

“I know,” he agrees. “I told her every day. But the Circle offered her a home, a place to start over. Only … she was a wildfire in a glass box. Every rule and tradition—it smothered her. She tried to play along for me. I was born into this family, so I have no choice, but she couldn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t for long. ”

My fingers curl around the edge of the bench top. “She didn’t go through the Awakening prep. She wasn’t of age.”

Gabriel’s jaw tightens. “No, she wasn’t.

My parents warned me, especially Mum, but I didn’t listen.

I didn’t care. I loved her, and I refused to let her go.

We snuck around for months when she first arrived at the Circle, before we could officially be together.

” He laughs bitterly. “She was the first person I broke the rules for … but not the last.”

I swallow, realising he’s talking about Zara. My heart aches for both my sister and my friend, but now it also breaks for the man who lost two of his Chosen in horrific ways.

“Maddy got pregnant not long after she was announced as my Chosen,” he continues with another ghost of a smile.

“We were terrified, but so damn happy. She would lie with her head on my chest and her hands wrapped around her swollen belly, talking about how the baby would look like you. ‘Same fierce eyes,’ she’d say.

She missed you, Hadley. More than anything. ”

A tear slips down my cheek, and I brush it away. “Why didn’t she try to see me?”

“She did.” His fists clench by his sides.

I don’t think he even notices. “When she was about seven months along, she begged me to take her to see you. She was homesick, aching for you in a way I didn’t understand.

I tried. I pleaded with my parents, but they said no.

It was too close to her due date, and she wasn’t allowed contact with anyone outside the Circle until after the birth. ”

I’m barely breathing from his revelation. “So, what happened?”

“I told her to write you a letter. I thought it would help, and it did. She seemed more … free. Relaxed. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.”

Tears fall freely now, but I don’t brush them away.

“She went into labour three weeks before the due date,” Gabriel continues.

“I knew something was wrong from the start. They said the baby was breech. There was no medical assistance. Nothing but me, my parents, and our healer. It wasn’t enough.

” He swallows hard, his voice cracking. “I lost them both. Maddy, and our daughter.”

The silence that follows is earth-shattering. I’m gripped by the pain of losing her all over again. Hearing all these details about how she suffered in her last moments, surrounded by strangers.

“I found the letter in her drawer a few days later.” His voice is barely more than a whisper.

“I didn’t read it. I couldn’t. Her words were meant for your eyes only, and to be honest I was scared of what would be in it.

Did she resent me for bringing her here?

If she did, I didn’t want to know. Selfishly, I wanted to believe she was happy here.

The guilt ate away at me, so I took the letter to a contact in Rafters Falls, to a law firm I knew would hold onto it and send it for your eighteenth birthday.

I needed you to know, Hadley. Even if I couldn’t face you. ”

I can’t speak, can’t think. Gabriel’s words feel unmoored, drifting somewhere between sorrow and fury as he portrays the kind of love that stretches across realms. It’s a twisted fairy tale. A romantic tragedy for the ages.

“You loved Madeline?”

He nods.

“What about Sierra and Zara?”

His face twists into a grimace, and my stomach turns. Is this all a show?

“Hadley, I love your sister and little Annie more than life itself. There’s not a day goes by I don’t think of them.

They weren’t simply a chapter in a book.

They’re my whole goddamn library. When I lost them, I realised some darker things about my parents and their plans for the Circle.

They barely allowed me four months to grieve before they all but forced me to take Sierra as my Chosen.

As you know, if a Chosen doesn’t fall pregnant within a year, she’s either remarried or becomes an Ascendent.

But Sierra didn’t have fertility issues.

She didn’t fall pregnant because I refused to touch her. ”

He bows his head. “My parents don’t know, and I threatened to spill one of her secrets if she ever told them.

As for Zara, she was never anything more than a friend searching for refuge.

When I lost Madeline and Annie, I made a promise that I would help anyone in need I crossed paths with.

This was what I believed the Circle to be until I did some digging and uncovered something a little more sinister.

I don’t know what Zara told you, but her danger didn’t lie within these walls, at least not at first,” he mutters, as if to himself.

“I thought I was protecting her by bringing her into the fold. While I’m still not sure I did the right thing, my intentions were pure. ”

“But Franklin?—”

“Isn’t mine.”

His words lay heavy in my stunned silence. While he has answered my questions about my sister, he has left me with so many more unanswered.

Gabriel is not Franklin’s father.

Zara was not pregnant with his child when he announced her as his Chosen.

So who is the father?

Does this have something to do with her murder?

Did Guardian Solomon and Seraphina know?

As my brain tries to process the revelations he has trusted me with, Gabriel moves around the counter, stopping in front of me.

“The only woman I’ve ever loved—will ever love—is your sister.

I’m not protecting you because I owe her.

I’m protecting you because I love her. It’s what she would want.

She’d want you safe. She’d want you free . ”

I meet his grief-lined, guilt-heavy eyes, seeing not a monster, not a guardian, but a man who lost everything.

And I believe him.

Then he drops the next bombshell on me.

“This is why, for your protection, I’m announcing you as my next Chosen.”