The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Fifteen

I'd known the truth would be worse than the lies. I'd lived a life experiencing that, a life of coming to terms with all of the things that have been lingering behind me, ready to stab me in the back when I'm not paying enough attention. I had spent months recovering from the havoc that Caitie and Helford wrecked on my life the first time, the shock having made it hard to get out of bed some days, the realization sinking into my bones like the worst kind of fever. I had intimate experiences with learning the worst of all truths.

This was even worse.

I thought I was going to be sick right then and there as I watched Shawn Masterson from so many years ago staring back at us on the screen, his eyes wild and desperate, pleading for someone out of time to understand, to help him, even though he knew it would be too late. And it turned out we had had the wrong monster this entire time.

Shawn's voice was shaking as hard as his hands as he pleaded, "It's worse than mind control. Worse than manipulation. It's like—I don't know how, but he's sucking the life out of me. He's torturing me and twisting me into how he wants me, and I'm too tired to keep fighting. I'm so sick and tired of fighting. You know how, in the military, they break you down, they form you into another person? I know that ache, too, of losing yourself just a little, but that—that made us stronger. This isn't made for strength. It's made to make us the worst person we could be. It's made to make us desperate enough to stop it that we will allow ourselves to be that worst person."

Shawn stopped talking suddenly, so suddenly that it was jarring. I thought for a moment that there must have been someone behind the camera, that someone must have walked in, but then Shawn just took a shaky deep breath, and I knew that there was no one there.

"It's a prototype," Shawn whispered, swallowing hard. "They're throwing around a lot of names for it, but I think they're going to keep it. They're calling it Operation Changeling."

Matthew flinched. My father looked over but, by then, Matthew was stone-faced again, sitting very still.

"It's robbing me of myself," Shawn told the camera, naked fear in his eyes. It was strange to see him like this—not young, necessarily, although it was jarring to realize that even murderers were kids once too, but seeing him scared. He was terrified—of his own shadow, of the man we all thought we could trust; in that moment, he was so painfully human. In that moment, Shawn Masterson didn't know that he was going to be the Changeling that went wrong, the one that Helford could only dream of controlling once it was all said and done. He had no way of knowing, in this moment, that it would drain him of everything until he morphed into the psychopath that chased us through Paris, that I watched shoot my best friend right in the head in an execution, that I would later watch on film taunting the girl I loved moments before she sacrificed herself to wipe him off of the face of the Earth.

Helford twisted the people they recruited. Some more than others. They took the bad parts of a person and brought them out, amplifying them to inhuman proportions until they had the agent they wanted. It's what they did with the Changelings and, it seems, it's everything that went wrong with Shawn Masterson.

"Listen to me," Shawn pleaded from the screen, as if he could feel my thoughts drifting back in time, to when he was simply the enemy and no more complicated than that. Shawn rubbed his face, his nails scratching at his skin, making it red and raw. "I don't know when this will be found, or who will find it. Maybe it'll get destroyed before it can mean something. Helford has this way of knowing everything. They can cover their tracks and cut away all the loose ends and no one would be the wiser. But I have to hope. I have nothing left."

Shawn closed his eyes. I could look away, so disturbed at seeing this man I knew as a monster suddenly so real and human.

"I don't want him and the others to keep getting away with this," he affirmed, looking up, holding his chin as high as he could keep it. The angle brought out the bruises on his neck, and I could make out the shape of fingers. "The world deserves to know about all of it, but most of all this, and the man who's running it. Jasper Woodburn is not the man any of us thought he was. He's manipulative, and cunning, and he's been playing us all from the beginning. And I know that, when he turns me into something else, this might count for something. Maybe, in twenty years or however long it takes, you can all look at me now and look at me later, and you can know with all of whatever integrity that I have left, that this is because of him, and no one else."