Chapter 5

The suite Emma had booked at The Penrose Hotel was the pinnacle of sterile luxury. It was a cavernous space on the 50th floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows offering a panoramic, god-like view of the city Chris had helped build with his own two hands. The carpet was a plush, sound-dampening grey that swallowed the sound of their nervous footsteps. The air smelled faintly of expensive lilies and the sterile ozone of a high-end air purification system. A bottle of ridiculously overpriced champagne sat sweating in a silver bucket, untouched. It was a perfect cage of glass and steel, a place designed to make you forget the messy, complicated world below.

It was the last place on earth any of them wanted to be.

Lisa arrived first, looking small and lost in the opulent surroundings. She wore a simple blue dress that seemed to make her paler, and she clutched her purse to her stomach like a shield. There were dark, bruised-looking circles under her eyes, and she moved with the hesitant, apologetic gait of someone perpetually braced for a blow. Her life with Alan was in tatters. Chris’s fifty thousand dollars had saved their business, but their encounter in her sun-drenched bedroom had shattered something far more fundamental. Alan’s fumbling, selfish lovemaking now felt like a pathetic, insulting joke, and she found herself flinching from his touch, her body and mind haunted by a memory that was equal parts violation and revelation.

Suzie arrived next, a portrait of quiet deconstruction. Her usually severe bun was gone, her brown hair falling softly around her shoulders. She wore no makeup, and her intelligent hazel eyes, no longer hidden behind the armor of her glasses, seemed wider, more vulnerable, and startlingly beautiful. She had left Mark. The day after Chris’s visit, she had packed a single bag, walked out of the house of books and lies, and never looked back. The evidence of Mark’s plagiarism remained on the dining room table, a meticulously arranged bomb she had left for him to discover alone. She was adrift, her entire intellectual framework for understanding the world destroyed. All she had left were the phantom sensations Chris had awakened in her, a terrifying and thrilling new language her body was still trying to learn.

Emily was the last to arrive, and her presence immediately changed the energy in the room, sucking the stale, perfumed air out and replacing it with something sharp and electric. She was a discordant note in the symphony of quiet luxury. Dressed in worn jeans, combat boots, and a plain black t-shirt that stretched across her lean, muscular shoulders, she looked like a predator that had wandered into a petting zoo. She moved with a silent, coiled grace, her sharp blue eyes scanning the room, assessing every angle, every exit. She had come straight from the debrief with Aegis, a debrief where she and Jax had fabricated a story of a cartel ambush and a heroic new guy, “Miller,” who had saved them before disappearing. She had protected Chris, an instinctive act that confused and terrified her. She was a soldier without a war, her internal compass spinning wildly.

Emma stood by the window, a glass of mineral water in her hand, her posture as rigid as the steel frame of the building. She wore a severe, tailored white pantsuit, an armor of wealth and power. But it was a brittle armor. Her fiery red hair was pulled back so tightly it seemed to be stretching the skin of her face, and a faint, purplish mark on her neck was barely concealed by the high collar of her blouse a mark she had to explain away to Evan as a gym injury. She hadn’t been able to look her husband in the eye since that night on the 45th floor. His touch felt like a ghost’s, his pronouncements of love and success like the ravings of a madman. Chris had broken into her perfect world and left a dirty, undeniable truth at its center.

For a long moment, the four sisters stood in silence, four corners of a broken square, separated by years of distance and now bound by a shared, unspeakable trauma. Emma, ever the one to take charge, was the first to speak. Her voice was cold, sharp, and laced with fury.

“Thank you all for coming,” she said, as if opening a board meeting. “I think it’s clear we need to discuss what’s happened. What he did.” She spat the word ‘he’ like it was poison. “He’s a monster. A manipulative, psychopathic monster. He attacked us. He violated us. What he did was rape. We need to agree on that, and we need to decide what we’re going to do about it. The police...”

“No.”

Emily’s voice cut through the air, flat and final. The single word held more authority than Emma’s entire tirade. All eyes turned to her.

“No police.”

Emma’s face flushed with anger. “No police? Emily, he systematically hunted us down and assaulted us! Are you insane? Or has your little tour in the third world completely rotted your sense of morality?”

“My morality is just fine,” Emily said, her gaze unwavering as it locked onto Emma’s. “It’s just more practical than yours. What are you going to tell them, Emma? That your brother, who you cut out of your life because you were ashamed of him, blackmailed you with your husband’s criminal negligence and then fucked you against a pillar in your husband’s unfinished skyscraper? How’s that going to look in the society pages?”

Emma flinched as if struck. The brutal, public summary of her secret humiliation left her speechless, her mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Emily’s cold gaze shifted to Lisa, who was trembling in her chair. “And you, Lisa? Are you going to tell them you took fifty thousand dollars from him and then let him into your house? That you fucked him in the bed you share with your useless husband after he gave you every penny he had?”

Lisa let out a choked sob and buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. “He was so angry ... I was so scared...”

“We were all scared,” Suzie said, her voice quiet but clear. She had been observing, analyzing, piecing things together. “But Emily has a point. From a legal standpoint, our positions are ... compromised. There was coercion, duress, absolutely. But there was also a transaction. A debt being collected. He was very, very smart about it.”

“Smart?” Emma shrieked, her voice rising with incredulity. “You’re defending him? After what he did to you? To your life?”

“I’m not defending him,” Suzie corrected, her voice still calm, a scholar laying out a difficult text. “I am analyzing him. To understand what happened, we have to understand his motivations. We have to be honest about our own actions leading up to this. He didn’t just snap. This was planned. This was a campaign. And we gave him all the ammunition he needed.” A heavy silence fell over the room as the weight of Suzie’s words settled. This wasn’t a random act of violence. It was a consequence.

Suzie stood up and walked to the minibar, pouring herself a glass of water, her movements deliberate. “Let’s quantify the debt,” she said, her tone turning academic, as if laying out a thesis. “Let’s start from the beginning. He was twenty years old when our mother died. Twenty. He had his entire life ahead of him—college, travel, love. Instead, he took on four little girls. Four different fathers, four different sets of problems.”

She looked at Lisa, her gaze soft but unsparing. “He changed your diapers. He stayed up all night when you had a fever. He worked two jobs to make sure you had food and a roof over your head. A roof, I might add, he helped you get the down payment for. Then he paid for your wedding. And then, when you came to him and asked for his entire life’s savings, the one thing he had set aside for his own happiness, he gave it to you. Without question.” Lisa’s sobs grew louder, a sound of pure, gut-wrenching guilt.

Suzie’s gaze moved to Emma. “He paid for your cheerleading uniforms, your prom dress, your first car. He bragged about you to anyone who would listen when you got into college. He was so proud. And in return? You erased him. You were ashamed of him. You called him ‘a relative’ and told him to keep his distance so he wouldn’t tarnish your new, rich life.” Suzie’s gaze hardened, her analytical mind making a sharp, cutting leap. “And Emma, you called him a monster, but what about those concrete reports Chris found? What were you going to do about them?”

“I...” Emma stammered, her bravado failing her, her face paling.

Suzie scoffed, a soft, sharp sound of contempt. “You were going to do nothing. You are the worst monster in this story, because you were ready to sit on that report about your husband, and let thousands of people work and live in a building that could collapse. You were ready to let them die to protect your comfortable life.”

Emma sank onto a pristine white sofa, her armor cracking, her face pale. The accusation was so vicious, so true, it stole the air from her lungs. She was worse than Chris. So much worse. Then Suzie looked at her own reflection in the dark glass of the minibar. Her voice dropped, filled with a self-loathing that was profound. “And me. He bought me every book I ever wanted. He built me bookshelves with his own hands. He stayed up with me, quizzing me for exams, his brow furrowed in concentration, trying to understand concepts that were foreign to him, just so he could help me succeed. And I repaid him by calling him an imbecile. I told him we had nothing to talk about. I dismissed his entire existence as intellectually barren.”

Finally, she looked at Emily, her eyes filled with a sad understanding. “And you, Emily. He worried about you the most. He saw Mom’s wildness in you, and it terrified him. He tried to protect you, to keep you safe. Maybe he was clumsy about it, maybe he was overbearing. But he did it because he loved you. And you threw it back in his face. You told him he wasn’t your father and ran off to get yourself killed. You didn’t contact him for ten years. Ten years he spent wondering if you were alive or dead.”

The air in the room was thick with their collective shame. Suzie had systematically stripped away their victimhood and left them naked with their own betrayals. They weren’t just victims. They were co-conspirators in Chris’s destruction, and ultimately, in his monstrous rebirth.

“He gave us everything,” Lisa whispered through her tears. “And we gave him nothing.”

“We gave him less than nothing,” Emma said, her voice a hollow shell of its former arrogance. “We took, and then we abandoned him. We left him alone.”

A long silence stretched. The unspoken truth, the memory of the sex, the feel of his body, the taste of him, hung in the air, a forbidden, magnetic center of gravity.

It was Lisa, the quietest, most fragile one, who finally dared to speak it. Her voice was a trembling whisper.

“When he ... when it was happening ... Alan was all I could think about,” she confessed, her cheeks burning with shame. “Alan just ... rolls on top of me. It’s quick. He doesn’t look at me. He’s thinking about himself. But Chris ... he looked at me. He was angry, he was cruel, but he saw me. And when he touched me ... God, I hate myself for this ... but I’ve never felt anything like that. He made my whole body catch fire. It was awful, and I ... I think I came three times.” The confession hung in the air, shocking in its honesty. Emma and Suzie stared at her, not with judgment, but with a dawning, horrified recognition.

Emma was next. She laughed, a short, bitter, ugly sound. “Evan has a routine,” she said, staring at her perfectly manicured hands. “Tuesdays and Saturdays. Ten minutes, missionary position. He reads the financial news on his iPad afterward. It’s ... neat. It’s part of the contract of our marriage. With Chris ... it was a fucking hurricane. It was brutal and humiliating and I was pressed up against cold, rough concrete. But he was focused entirely on me. On my body. On breaking me. And he did. He broke me, and I felt more alive in those ten minutes than I have in eight years of marriage. It was the most intense, incredible orgasm of my entire life. And I hate him for it. I hate him for showing me what I’m missing.”

Now all eyes were on Suzie. She took a deep breath. “Mark was a fraud. In every sense of the word. He treated sex like a literary analysis pretentious, overly complicated, and ultimately unsatisfying. He was all theory and no practice. Chris ... Chris was the opposite. He didn’t talk. He acted. He explored my body like it was a new world. He was ... methodical. An artist. He found places ... he did things ... I didn’t even know were possible. He shut my brain off and turned my body on. It was a complete re-education. It was terrifying. And it was the most liberating experience I’ve ever had.”

Three confessions, raw and devastatingly similar. They had all been used, all been violated. And they had all experienced a physical pleasure, a primal intensity, that was completely absent from their chosen lives. Chris, in his rage, had shown them a brutal, undeniable truth about their own desires.

Finally, they all turned to Emily. She had been silent throughout the confessions, her face unreadable. They expected a story of violence, of a battle of wills, a savage encounter in the jungle.

Emily looked at her sisters, her gaze sweeping over their tear-streaked, confused faces. Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet and steady, but it held the weight of a decade of loneliness.

“You’re all wrong,” she said softly.

“Wrong about what?” Emma asked.

“About him. About what he did with me,” Emily clarified. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t about breaking me. It was...” She struggled for the word, a foreign concept to her. “It was gentle.”

The other three stared at her, completely stunned. Gentle?

“We were in the jungle,” Emily continued, her eyes distant, reliving it. “My team was pinned down. We were going to die. And he saved us. He got us out. That was the deal. I owed him. But when it happened ... he just held me. He kissed my scars. He was slow. He was tender. He made me feel ... safe.” She let out a shaky breath. “He made me feel human again.” She paused, letting the weight of her next words settle before she spoke them.

“And he was my first.”

The bombshell detonated in the silent, sterile hotel suite. Lisa gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. Suzie’s analytical mind simply stopped working. Emma just stared, her jaw slack. Emily, their wild sister, the soldier, the mercenary who danced with death for a living ... was a virgin?

“What?” Emma finally managed to croak.

“I was never with anyone,” Emily said, a profound sadness in her voice. “The men in my world ... they’re not the kind you get close to. It’s all just ... empty. A transaction. I was always waiting for ... something. Someone. A real connection. I guess I was waiting for him.”

The room fell into a deep, profound silence. This final piece of the puzzle changed the entire picture. Chris hadn’t just taken from them. His campaign of vengeance had been nuanced, tailored to each of them. For Lisa, Emma, and Suzie, he had used sex as a weapon, a tool of revenge to show them what their passionless lives were missing. But for Emily, the one who had run the farthest, the one who had rejected him most completely, he had offered something else entirely. He had offered her the connection she had been starving for. He had participated in an act of creation, not just destruction. He had taken her virginity, not in a brutal assault, but as a shared, sacred act in the midst of chaos.

They finally understood. This was never just about revenge. This was about love. A twisted, broken, monstrous love, born from two decades of sacrifice and betrayal, but love nonetheless. He had forced them to see him, to acknowledge him, to feel something, anything, real.