Truth: A Valkyrie Saga Book 3

Chapter 1 - Plans and Expectations

I was so far from okay right now, that I don't even really know up from down. Con and I grew up in the Blade Clan and almost everyone favored Con over me because he has three Gifts and I only have two. To ninety-nine percent of people that I called family, I was only seen as Con's lesser shadow. The mistake embryo that should have never existed. Tobias was the one person in Blade that always saw me separate from my twin brother. He even went out of his way to make me feel special. Tobias was the father that I wished I had growing up, and the person that I went to when I needed guidance and love.

Now he was dead. Nothing but ashes in the wind.

How is that even possible? How can someone who was such a constant in my life just be gone? In the years since Con and I left Blade, I haven't talked much to Tobias. I was too wrapped up in our new life and too angry about my past to give him my time when he had never failed to make time for me. I am a horrible person who took everything Tobias represented for granted. How am I supposed to protect and be supportive to Ray and the rest of my clan when I failed one of the only people to always believe in me?

-Blake Berg

I watched the fancy-looking analog clock tick away the minutes and tried to muster up some sort of concern that we were starting to run out of time. Queen Florence had rather tersely ordered me to be at Regina's Matching event this afternoon after I had failed to appear at any yesterday, and Elijah had advised me not to ignore her summons. But right now, watching the world's eligible Royal Valkyrie bachelors prance around trying to impress Regina was so far down my priority list that I couldn't find it within myself to care if we were late.

Amy was more important.

My young friend and claimed protected had gone to a house party hosted by the worst that Skyline High had to offer and ended up caving into peer pressure. Amy participated in a game where a bowl of multiple unknown pills was passed around, and everyone took turns swallowing 'party treats'. During the second round of the game, Amy must have taken something that didn't interact well with the first pill she had swallowed because she had ended up passing out in some dark corner. Through our connection, I had felt that she was in trouble, but at the time I had been in the city attending a stupid ball for Regina's Matching. Afterward, I had been absent when she was released from the hospital because a crazy Russian King had kidnapped me.

Long story short, I felt like I was dropping the ball left and right where Amy was concerned. As one of my protected, I felt responsible for her. I needed to protect her. And I had been failing miserably in the last month. I needed to stop trying to mitigate trouble once she was already in it. We needed to get ahead of this and give Amy the help and support she needed to turn her life back around. Because skipping class and getting addicted to drugs was not how I wanted Amy to finish her freshman year of high school.

Hence the reason that Jack and I were sitting side-by-side in an over-decorated waiting room as Amy had her first session with her therapist. The twins were here too because they refused to let me out of their sight since some unknown person had compelled Derik to attack me and I was kidnapped. Since I felt safer with them by my side, I had zero problems with them becoming my large shadows.

I allowed my eyes to scan over each of the twins' and Jack's faces and tried to gauge how they were doing with all of the excess drama that I had dragged into their lives. Jack looked exhausted, yet his knee was bouncing up and down with nerves. Jack and Amy had grown up the hard way with a junkie mother and a deadbeat absent father. In the trailer park where they had spent their childhood when things went bad, you did your best to power through on your own because you knew that no one else was going to slow down enough to help. Therapy was something that only rich kids could afford.