CHAPTER 48: CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

Chapter Forty-Eight

Malachi’s POV

I was seated in the garden when Travis walked in. The moment I saw him approaching, something inside me went cold and hard. He sat beside me on the stone bench without asking, already making my blood boil just by being there.

"Mother had nightmares every night after you left," he said, his voice flat. "Every single night. She’d wake up screaming, clawing at the sheets."

I kept my eyes on the rose bushes ahead of me, saying nothing.

"She always saw blood on your hands and all over your body," Travis continued. "Blood that wouldn’t wash off, no matter how hard she tried to clean it away."

I didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t give him the satisfaction of any reaction at all.

Mother was always self centered. That was just a fact, not an accusation. She cared more about her image, her status, what people thought of the Blackwood name. But she did love her children, in her own broken way. Maybe that’s why the nightmares haunted her. Maybe some part of her knew what we’d all become.

Travis shifted beside me, and I could feel his eyes on the side of my face. "Emily’s death must’ve really broken you," he said quietly. "Must’ve shattered whatever was left of your humanity."

My jaw tightened at the mention of that name. Emily. Just hearing it made something twist in my chest, something I’d spent years trying to bury. I turned to look at Travis then, really look at him. His face was older now, harder. But I could still see the guilt lurking behind his eyes, no matter how well he tried to hide it.

Travis must’ve had a hand in her death. I was almost certain of it now. The timeline never made sense. The way everyone avoided talking about that night. The way he couldn’t meet my eyes whenever her name came up.

"Her death broke you too," I told him coldly. "Broke you into pieces you didn’t have the courage to pick up."

He was broken. Resulting to alcohol and venting on my Alicia.

Travis laughed bitterly at that. It was a harsh sound, empty of any real humor. He stood up and walked a few steps away, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

"You don’t know anything about what I went through," he said, his back still to me.

"I know enough."

He turned around then, his eyes blazing. "You left, Malachi. You ran away and left the rest of us to deal with the fallout. To deal with grandfather. To deal with all of it."

"I had my reasons."

"We all had reasons to leave. But some of us stayed."

For a moment, neither of us spoke. The garden was quiet except for the wind moving through the trees. The tension between us was thick enough to cut. This was why I hated being near him. Every conversation turned into an accusation. Every word was a weapon.

The Blackwood mansion was always so cold and unsafe. Even as children, we felt it. The long hallways that echoed with our footsteps. The locked rooms we weren’t allowed to enter. The secrets whispered behind closed doors. It was a place that bred paranoia and mistrust, where everyone watched everyone else, waiting for weakness.

Emily was the one to warm it up. She had this way about her, this light that seemed to cut through all the darkness. She would laugh in those empty hallways and the sound would fill the whole space. She made games out of nothing. Turned the mansion’s coldness into an adventure instead of a prison.

She warmed my childhood up in a way nothing else ever could.

The Blackwood family had adopted her when her parents died while on a business trip. Some kind of accident overseas. I was only seven when she came to live with us, and she was six. Small and quiet at first, clutching a stuffed rabbit that had seen better days.

She was never sad even after their death. At least, she never showed it if she was. She adapted quickly, smiled easily, fit into our strange family like she’d always been there. But I was sad for her. I was sad because I knew what it felt like to be abandoned, even if my parents were still technically alive. I understood what it meant to be alone in a house full of people.

Father and mother left us in the hands of grandfather and were all over the world chasing wealth. Building the Blackwood empire, they called it. Making connections. Securing the future. They were gone more than they were home, and when they were home, they might as well have been ghosts for all the attention they paid us.

We were just kids in the mansion back then. Me, Travis, Emily, Tyson, Michael and Sasha. Six children growing up in a fortress of secrets and lies. We should’ve been closer. Should’ve bonded over our shared isolation. But the Blackwood way didn’t work like that. Even as children, we were taught to compete. To see each other as obstacles instead of allies.

Except for Emily. She never played those games. She loved us all fiercely, stubbornly, even when we didn’t deserve it.

Then, something unexpected happened. Something none of us saw coming, though maybe we should have.

Emily got pregnant and died during labor. Just like that. One day she was there, alive and terrified and trying to be brave. The next day she was gone, and there was a baby crying somewhere in the mansion, and everything felt wrong.

She was my only friend. The only one who ever truly saw me, past the Blackwood name and the expectations and the armor I’d built around myself. She knew my fears. My hopes. The parts of me I kept hidden from everyone else.

But she hid things from me. Important things. Things I was yet to discover, even now. I didn’t know she was pregnant until it was too late. Didn’t know who the father was. Didn’t know what she was so afraid of in those final months. She would look at me sometimes with this desperate expression, like she wanted to tell me everything but couldn’t find the words.

She tried to tell me once. About the pregnancy. About whoever the father was. But I was too caught up in my own problems to listen. Too focused on surviving in this family to notice she was drowning.

She died leaving a child. A little girl with Emily’s eyes and a cry that echoed through the mansion. For a few months, that baby was all we had left of her. I would stand outside the nursery sometimes, just listening to her breathe, trying to feel some connection to Emily through her daughter.

Then the child died in a fire accident Mario had orchestrated. Everyone said it was an accident at first. Faulty wiring. Old building. These things happen. But I knew better. I did my research. Followed the threads. And they all led back to Mario.

"That baby was innocent," I said, my hands curling into fists. "She had nothing to do with any of this."

Travis went still. "What are you talking about?"

I didn’t bother to reply.

The baby. That’s what I can’t figure out. Why would he kill Emily’s child when she wasn’t even a member of this family? Not by blood, anyway.

Just pure evil. That was the only explanation that made sense. Mario killed that innocent child for no reason other than he could. Because he enjoyed the power. Because destroying something pure and helpless fed whatever darkness lived inside him.

But something about that explanation felt incomplete. Too simple. The Blackwoods never did anything without a reason, without calculating the gain. There had to be more to it. Something I was missing. Something they all knew and I didn’t.

Travis stood up abruptly. "I need to go," he said, not looking at me.

"Running away? That’s more my style than yours."

He stopped but didn’t turn around. "Some conversations aren’t worth having, Malachi. Some truths are better left buried."

"Is that what you tell yourself at night?"

"It’s what keeps me alive."

Then he walked away, leaving me alone in the garden with my thoughts and my ghosts. Emily’s face flickered through my mind. Her smile. Her laugh. The way she used to look at me like I was worth something.

We sat there in that garden for those few minutes, two brothers who barely knew each other anymore. Two men shaped by the same poisonous household, twisted in different directions. And in those brief moments before he left, I realized something. Travis knew more than he was saying. He always did.

Emily’s name hung in the air between us even after he was gone. She was always there. A ghost I’d never escape. A reminder of what the Blackwood family did to anything good and innocent that crossed its path.

It destroyed it. Every single time.

And somehow, I was going to find out why they destroyed her daughter. Even if it meant tearing this whole family apart to get the truth.