Defy Me (Shatter Me #5)(40)

It takes everything I’ve got to bite back my anger. To sit here, calmly, and say nothing. Somehow, my silence makes things worse.

“Dammit, Aaron,” he says, getting to his feet. “I keep waiting for you to move on. To get over her. To evolve,” he says, practically shouting at me now. “It’s been over a decade of the same bullshit.”

Over a decade.

A slip.

“What do you mean,” I say, studying him carefully. “‘Over a decade’?”

“I’m exaggerating,” he says, biting off the words. “Exaggerating to make a point.”

“Liar.”

For the first time, something uncertain flashes through my father’s eyes.

“Will you admit it?” I say quietly. “Will you admit to me what I already know?”

He sets his jaw. Says nothing.

“Admit it,” I say. “Juliette was an alias. Juliette Ferrars is actually Ella Sommers, the daughter of Evie and Maximillian Som—”

“How—” My father catches himself. He looks away and then, too soon, he looks back. He seems to be deciding something.

Finally, slowly, he nods.

“You know what? It’s better this way. Better for you to know,” he says quietly. “Better for you to understand exactly why you’re never going to see her again.”

“That’s not up to you.”

“Not up to me?” Rage flashes in and out of his eyes, his cool mask quickly crumbling. “That girl has been the bane of my existence for twelve years,” he says. “She’s caused me more problems than you can even begin to understand, not the least of which has been to distract my idiot son for the better part of the last decade. Despite my every effort to break you apart—to remove this cancer from our lives—you’ve insisted, over and over again, on falling in love with her.” He looks me in the eye, his own eyes wild with fury. “She was never meant for you. She was never meant for any of this. That girl was sentenced to death,” he says viciously, “the moment I named her Juliette.”

My heart is beating so hard it feels as though I’m dreaming. This must be a nightmare. I have to force myself to speak. To say:

“What are you talking about?”

My father’s mouth twists into an imitation of a smile.

“Ella,” he says, “was designed to become a tool for war. She and her sister both, right from the beginning. Decades before we took over, sicknesses were beginning to ravage the population. The government was trying to bury the information, but we knew. I saw the classified files. I tracked down one of the secret bunkers. People were malfunctioning, metamorphosing—so much so that it felt almost like the next phase of evolution. Only Evie had the presence of mind to see the sickness as a tool. She was the one who first began studying the Unnaturals. She was the reason we created the asylums—she wanted access to more varieties of the illness—and she was the one who learned how to isolate and reproduce the alien DNA. It was her idea to use the findings to help our cause. Ella and Emmaline,” he says angrily, “were only ever meant to be Evie’s science experiments. Ella was never meant for you. Never meant for anyone,” he shouts. “Get her out of your head.”

I feel frozen as the words settle around me. Within me. The revelation isn’t entirely new and yet—the pain is fresh. Time seems to slow down, speed up, spin backward. My eyes fall closed. My memories collect and expand, exploding with renewed meaning as they assault me, all at once—

Ella through the ages.

My childhood friend.

Ella, ripped away from me when I was seven years old. Ella and Emmaline, who they’d said had drowned in the lake. They told me to forget, to forget the girls ever existed and, finally, tired of answering my questions, they told me they’d make things easier for me. I followed my father into a room where he promised he’d explain everything.

And then—

I’m strapped to a chair, my head held in place with heavy metal clamps. Bright lights flash and buzz above me.

I hear the monitors chirping, the muffled sounds of voices around me. The room feels large and cavernous, gleaming. I hear the loud, disconcerting sounds of my own breathing and the hard, heavy beats of my heart. I jump, a little, at the unwelcome feel of my father’s hand on my arm, telling me I’ll feel better soon.

I look up at him as if emerging from a dream.

“What is it?” he says. “What just happened?”

I part my lips to speak, wonder if it’s safe to tell him the truth.

I decide I’m tired of the lies.

“I’ve been remembering her,” I say.

My father’s face goes unexpectedly blank, and it’s the only reaction I need to understand the final, missing piece.

“You’ve been stealing my memories,” I say to him, my voice unnaturally calm. “All these years. You’ve been tampering with my mind. It was you.”

He says nothing, but I see the tension in his jaw, the sudden jump of a vein under skin. “What are you remembering?”

I shake my head, stunned as I stare at him. “I should’ve known. After everything you’ve done to me—” I stop, my vision shifts, unfocused for a moment. “Of course you wouldn’t let me be master of my own mind.”