October 25

Detention Center

3:40 PM

Lily Shield

"Initially, Emmeline began to lose faith in the cause our family had set up. If I had to guess, I would say that she stopped feeling her regular levels of dedication around the time I left, but it took a while for it to all catch up to her. When she started asking more questions and realizing just how little she wanted to be involved with this, then she reached out to me," Baltazar explained. "She wanted to know why I had left. I hadn't been able to talk to her or Belladonna about it at the time since I thought it was too much of a risk. But with her reaching out to me... How could I refuse?"

"So you told her everything you had found about the murder of your mother, and that was enough to sway her away from the cause completely," Yuri concluded.

"It was. She didn't want to be an assassin anymore, and she told me as much. Afterward, she tried to talk to Belladonna, and... Bella was too young to remember much about our mother at all, so it was fairly simple for us to convince her. She's young and easily manipulated because of it. Our father has always taken advantage of that, but this time, we were able to make it work in our favor," Baltazar went on. "Emmeline tried to talk to Raven about it as well, but..."

"You were originally hoping that this would be a clean sweep of getting every single child in the family turned against your father," I murmured. "But Raven was where things started to get a bit more complicated."

"Emmeline asked if she knew about what had happened to our mother. Raven barely seemed surprised when she heard that our father was behind her death. If anything, Emmeline said that she seemed... Apathetic," Baltazar said, choosing his words as carefully as possible."She said that Raven didn't seem to care at all. Instead, she just claimed that if it was what had been best for the family, then she trusted our father's judgement. If our mother truly was a traitor who was planning on stabbing all of us in the back, then he had done the right thing."

"She really fell for it that easily?" Victoria questioned, her eyes going wide.

"She asked our father about it to see what he thought. He just said that he had done what was best for the family. As far as he was concerned, our mother had been a traitor, and he had put her in her place to ensure the family was never placed in danger like that again. It was a blatant lie, but in his eyes, it was true enough. He was able to use that to keep Raven on his side, and any hopes the rest of us could have had of a clean sweep of turning everyone against him fell apart," Baltazar sighed. "Raven is the reason all of this happened. If she had turned against our father with the rest of us, then this case would have never occurred."

"The assassination plan involved three of you going after three different targets... Well, it was about your three sisters, but the point stands," Deirdre chimed in. "If two of the three had already turned against the cause, then that just means they had to try and do something about Raven."

"Precisely. No matter what, Raven wouldn't be swayed, and if she sensed any treachery, then she would have killed Emmeline or Belladonna on the spot," Baltazar frowned. "So we had to conduct our plans in secret. We couldn't outright prevent the Night of Calamity, but we could still try other things that would get in the way. Each of the three of them was assigned to take out a specific target, and that allowed us to easily keep two people safe and out of danger while focusing all of our attention on Raven."

"Who was supposed to target who?" I asked.

"Emmeline was set to go after the chief prosecutor. Belladonna was meant to restrain the child of the Wood family... Not kill her, but restrain her," Baltazar replied. "Raven was the one going after that friend of yours... She thought of it as a personal grudge, and she wanted to take care of her personally."

"That makes sense. Chrysalis was the first one who was able to find her guilty of murder months ago," Deirdre remarked. "In her mind, it was probably a matter of getting revenge against the one who had caused her so much grief."

"That's exactly what it was," Baltazar confirmed. "Raven was desperate to kill her specifically, and everything else about the night's plans had been shifted around that one fact... Though it was also why Belladonna was assigned to capture but not kill Niamh Wood."

"That confuses me a bit," Yuri chimed in. "I would have thought they would just want to kill her outright. Why go through the hoops of just taking her as a captive if they were going to kill her in the end anyways? Well, if Raven was planning on killing her in the end, I suppose."

"Raven wanted to be the one to kill her. She didn't think the youngest member of the family had any right to be the one to deliver the killing blow. Belladonna's still inexperienced, so she just asked her to restrain the girl instead," Baltazar said. "She would come back after she had taken care of her actual target to kill Belladonna's target. It wasn't a matter of mercy or sparing her younger sister from needing to take a life. She wanted to be the one to do it."

"So what went wrong?" I asked. "I know for a fact not all of that went to plan the way it was meant to, so what happened?"

"The three targets for the night received letters asking them to come to the Council of Six's headquarters. The crime was to be carried out there so everyone was in a single location. It made things easier for everyone involved, or so Raven seemed to believe," Baltazar started. "Emmeline did nothing with the chief prosecutor since she was too busy keeping an eye on Raven. She was following Raven around for much of the night, so in the eyes of the chief prosecutor, nobody came after him at all. As far as he was concerned, it had all been a pointless errand."

"And that's why he was able to go in and out without anyone asking any questions or catching him," Victoria finished for him. "That makes a lot of sense... I guess he was the luckiest person involved with all of this, huh?"

"He certainly was," Baltazar nodded. "Raven was on the prowl throughout the entire building looking for the girl from your agency... And I believe we all know the real reason for her being targeted beyond just a personal grudge."

The room went stiff and quiet at that, and all of us glanced to one another uneasily. Deirdre was the first one to speak up, and she just shook her head. "I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to," she told Baltazar, her tone making it clear that we would be dropping the subject as soon as possible.

"I understand," Baltazar hummed as he closed his eyes. "Either way, the fact of the matter is that Raven was searching for a target, and she found someone... But it wasn't who she was looking for. Instead, she found Niamh Wood."

"She found Niamh first?" I asked, my eyes going wide in shock.

"She did. She assumed that Belladonna had failed in her mission, and so, she attacked," Baltazar went on. He refused to look at any of us, instead finding the floor to be the most fascinating thing in the world all of a sudden. "She decided to kill her first, and she started off by restraining Niamh in one of the rooms. She was tied to the leg of the couch with no easy way of escaping... But before Raven could deal the killing blow, her actual target passed by outside."

"And it was a chance she couldn't pass up on," Yuri frowned. "She knew she had to go after Chrysalis first, so she left Niamh where she was in favor of going after her real target for the night."

"Precisely," Baltazar explained. "Emmeline and I had been following Raven from behind throughout all of this, doing our best to stay out of her line of sight. She turned to confront Emmeline just before she went to kill her target, still unaware that I was there. She told Emmeline to stay out of her way and that her cowardice surrounding the family business was no reason to ruin her job for the night. Emmeline pretended to back off, but she was still there."

I nodded slowly at that. Even if Baltazar was trying to avoid delivering the answer to us on a silver platter, we all knew where this was going. He had essentially just told us exactly who the killer was, and he had to know it. If he was honest when he said that he wasn't the one behind the crime, then that left only one possibility, and everyone in the room knew it. Nobody said a word about it so as to not distract Baltazar from the rest of his story, but the truth hung heavily in the air regardless.

"Meanwhile, Belladonna snuck back to find Niamh tied up against the couch. She helped her out and explained the situation, saying that if she wanted to live, then she would need to come with us. As I'm sure you can imagine, Niamh hesitated at first. She didn't think she could trust us after everything that had happened previously, and I don't think anyone could blame her even if they tried," Baltazar sighed. "But it was the best we could offer her, and when she realized that Raven would be coming back for her, she agreed. She decided to let us defend her since she had no other choice. She came with us willingly, and we took her into hiding once the night had ended to ensure that our father didn't try to pursue her after realizing that Raven had failed in her mission."

"I see..." Deirdre murmured. "I can certainly understand why she would want to agree to something like that under these circumstances. She thought she had no other choice if she wanted to survive, and she did what she had to as long as she was able to keep herself safe. She was backed into a corner with no way out."

"I know she was afraid and hesitant," Baltazar told us. "She didn't want to be there with us because she feared we would put her in even more danger, but given that Raven was still after her, she knew there was little else she could do. She probably chose the option she thought would have a higher chance of helping her survive, and she chose correctly. She's still alive now, and it's all thanks to her deciding to come with us."

"I'm glad she decided to go along with it," I confessed. "I don't even want to imagine what could have happened if she had tried to fight off Raven on her own. I know for a fact she wouldn't have been able to fend off a trained assassin no matter how hard she tried."

"She knew it too, and that was why she agreed," Baltazar nodded. "I understand that we can't keep her hidden forever, but we need to make sure she stays safe until all of this blows over. It's the least we can do after everything that has already happened. Our father ruined her life in so many ways. Our father was the one who killed both of her parents, took her eye away, and..."

"And what?" Victoria prompted after a brief moment of silence passed. "What else has your family done to her?"

"That... I can explain it more after I finish the story of what happened that night," Baltazar eventually replied, though I could tell he was uncertain about the subject. "Belladonna took Niamh to safety while Raven was... Dealt with. She had managed to corner the third target of the night, and she was moving in for the kill. We did what we had to in order to take her out of the picture, and afterwards, we were left with the unconscious body of Chrysalis Starr. She had passed out from shock as a result of witnessing the murder from up close."

"Her Magatama had broken during the struggle, so you shoved it in a plant and moved her away from the crime scene," I said. "That was how it came to this in the first place."

"We didn't want to leave her there with the body and risk her remembering what she had endured when she awoke," Baltazar explained. "It would traumatize anyone, and we wanted to avoid that to the best of our abilities, so we moved her away from the crime scene. Afterwards, I called someone who I knew would be able to protect her... A brother who knew how to fight with a sword."

"Pieter," Victoria cut in. "You thought he would be able to look after her once you had to leave. He knows how to fight, so if anything happened, then there would be an extra line of defense in between Chrysalis and anyone who came to try and hurt her."

"But that wasn't what happened. Chrysalis woke up before you were expecting her to, and Pieter didn't find her. Instead, he stumbled into the body, and the entire case started from there. With no suspects and no knowledge of what had happened that night, the police had to arrest him as the sole suspect for the murder," Deirdre finished.

"It was far from ideal," Baltazar confessed. "We had been hoping it would go a little bit better than that, but we couldn't afford to stick around and look after her or try to remedy the situation. Emmeline, Belladonna, and I had to get out of there to make sure we were able to keep Niamh safe. We never meant for anyone else to end up arrested for this crime. Instead, we were just hoping to keep the targets of the triple assassination safe... And in many ways, we succeeded, though it was far from being the clean rescue we had been aiming for."

"All three of them are still alive... Though you won't be able to keep Niamh with you forever," I frowned. "She's going to need to return home soon enough. What are you going to do when she has to come back?"

"I'm not sure," Baltazar admitted. "I wish we had a plan for that, but... No. Our father has been watching all of this happen from afar though. He was the one who planned all of this. As far as he was concerned, it was a mercy that he allowed the children of the family to perform this assassination rather than doing it himself. Perhaps it was a test. Maybe he knew we would either fail and root out the traitors or kill the ones who had been a thorn in his side for so long. Either way, he's been uninvolved from the start, and we'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible."

"And that leads us to where we stand now... You took Niamh in because you thought she would be safer if she was hidden rather than spending her time with another one of the targets of the assassination attempt," Yuri said. She looked down and shook her head. "When this case started, I never would have thought that would be where it was set to end... I don't think any of us could have imagined something like this."

"Ideally, we wouldn't have needed to go this far at all. I had been hoping Raven would just agree with us when she heard about why our mother had died. She was too far gone though. She believed that our father had done the right thing, and there was nothing we could have said or done to change her mind on the matter," Baltazar sighed. "But now... Everything is the best it could possibly be as far as finding the truth behind this case is concerned. You've come far and done an admirable job thus far. I wish we weren't in this situation in the first place, but here we are."

"If you don't mind my asking... Why didn't the culprit come forward to testify about all of this when the time came?" Victoria asked. "I understand you're trying to protect them, but you seem to have already made your peace with what's going to happen next. You know what has to come now that you've come forward, so... Why did you come forward instead of the killer?"

"I've gone rusty since I was working for the rest of the family," Baltazar began. "I knew from the start that the two of them would make for better protectors if push came to shove and we had to defend Niamh from anyone who wanted her dead. If our father figured out what was going on, then it would have all been over. We decided to leave the people who could look after her behind. I know a few things from my training with the family, but there are many details that have faded from my mind over the years."

"I see... I guess a lot of what we've found out about this case comes right back to that in the end," Yuri hummed. "I never would have thought I'd see the day we would have to ally ourselves with an assassin, much less multiple, in order to find the truth behind a case."

"And yet, you've believed everything I've said since the start of this," Baltazar remarked. "I must confess that I'm shocked. I would have thought you would want nothing to do with it when you heard what I had to say."

"We were hesitant to believe you, but Chrysalis remembers what you said happened," I explained. "She told us that she remembered being attacked by the victim. It happened exactly as you claimed it did, and she remembers it now. We can't exactly deny the truth when it's sitting right in front of us like that, you know."

"I suppose you make a good point," Baltazar hummed. "I'm glad to hear that you believe what I have to say about all of this though. I know for a fact that it's not easy to hear... And it's only going to get harder to hear from here."

"That's right... You had something else to tell us, didn't you?" Deirdre questioned. "You said you were going to let it wait until after you had shared other details with us about the case. What exactly were you referring to?"

Baltazar faltered at that, and I could tell he was starting to regret telling us that he would do something to share the truth with us. He stared down at the ground once more, no doubt demanding internally that he stay calm regardless of how difficult it was going to be. "I... I was thinking about something else our family has done to ruin the life of Niamh Wood," he murmured. "My father was responsible for the deaths of both of her parents. He took away half of her vision after cutting her over the eye. And... We also took away her best friend in the world years ago."

"You did?" I echoed, my eyes going wide. "I don't remember ever hearing about anything like that. Just what did you do to cause something like that?"

Baltazar stared down at his hands, clenching his fingers into a fist. "Years ago, Niamh was set to live with her mother and father. That all changed when my father, Augustus Emsthorpe, murdered her mother, Alianna Wood, because of her connection to the rest of the family," he started. "At that point, she was sent away to live with her aunt and cousin. Her uncle had already been manipulated into joining our family, though he's long gone now... And at her hands no less. I can't say I blame her in the slightest for what she did. Even when you remove the crimes he committed at the time that led to his death, there was something else... Another reason for her to hate him and so many others."

"What do you mean?" Yuri asked, starting to get irritated with Baltazar's vagueness. "You can't just say things like that and not elaborate. What happened for her to end up suffering so much because of the actions of your family?"

"Her uncle was manipulated into joining our ranks since we wanted to get someone else on our side who was close to the heart of the family. He may not have been the closest person ever to the Wood family, but he was easy to manipulate, and if we said we needed the help and were willing to pay enough, then he was willing to side with us," Baltazar started. "He never cared much for his wife or son after he learned what we could offer to him. He left them behind easily enough before Niamh went to live with them. After we lost track of her though, we tried to find her again... And we needed information when we finally came in close. We realized she was with her aunt and cousin, and we did what we had to in order to get our hands on the truth... Including kidnapping."

"Wait... Kidnapping?" Victoria questioned, her eyebrows raising. "What exactly did you do?"

"The truth behind Niamh's apparent disappearance was that she had gone to live with her aunt and cousin. For a long time, she was out of our reach... That is, until an unfortunate incident took place and had her hiding place, Ashbrook Academy, plastered all over the news," Baltazar said. "When we realized she was there, we started to target the school to take her. We needed information, and the plan in the end was to capture her cousin, Zachary Moore, to hear what he knew on the matter. We took him away from the school, but since we didn't want anyone to ask questions or associate us with the crime when we were so close to our suspect, we wound up hiding the truth from the world by claiming he had committed suicide and vanished as a result."

"What?!" Yuri yelped. "You mean to say that... All this time, Zach has been alive?!"

"He never killed himself. There's a difference," Baltazar countered. "He wasn't killed in the midst of our torture. He managed to escape, though I doubt he was able to get far with those wounds. We decided that capturing him again was a pointless effort since he had nothing else of value to share with us. Whatever happened to him after that is out of our control. I somehow doubt anything happened at all though. He was severely injured when he left us, and he probably passed away from the extent of his injuries soon afterward."

"I... I don't know what to say..." Victoria murmured. "He was just a child, and your family still..."

"That was one of my greatest regrets. I wish I had done more for him... But it's much too late now. I wish I had helped him, but I can't change the past. All I can do is try to make sure that Niamh survives in the present. That was what Zachary Moore would have wanted the most," Baltazar told us. He let out a small scoff with a shake of his head. "The one who captured him in the end was his own father. He didn't recognize the man's face, and his father didn't care about what he was doing to his own flesh and blood either. He was a greedy man, willing to do anything as long as it would serve his own ends or give him the money he wanted. That was all it took for him to kidnap and torture his own son for months on end."

"I'm going to be sick," I whispered, wrapping one hand around my torso. No matter how much I tried to ground myself, I could never quite force my mind to focus on the situation at hand again. Zach Moore wasn't dead after all... Well, he hadn't committed suicide as a result of the Ashbrook incident, at the very least. He was probably gone now if he had really been as hurt as we had been led to believe when he left behind the captivity of the Emsthorpe family. He had been tortured for information all that time with no way of escaping until the day he got away. All this time, everyone had been sure that he killed himself as a result of the stress he had been put under with the death of his mother and the Ashbrook incident, but... That had been wrong.

"We have to tell Niamh about this," Yuri said. "I don't think any of us are looking forward to seeing her reaction, but she deserves to hear the truth of what happened to her cousin. The two of them were so close back then, and..."

"It would be better if she heard it from you rather than the rest of us," Baltazar pointed out. "For the most part, our father and Zachary's uncle were the ones involved with torturing him, but... He was also used as training for us kids. If we could learn to hurt people without remorse, then we could learn to kill them. Our father was desperate to ensure that we learned how to harm others, and he was a starting point. Even if we weren't the main ones responsible for all of this... It was still enough to ruin his life, and I'll never be able to forgive myself for it."

"At least you kept Niamh safe this time," Yuri murmured, though I could only assume she was trying her best to be optimistic so she didn't fall apart at the thought of someone who should have been her age being tortured.

"Yes... At least," Baltazar hummed. "The only reason she stayed safe last time was because she was determined to find the ones behind the Ashbrook incident. She left the school behind before we had the chance to find her again. We eventually found her once more with time, as I'm sure you've realized given what happened to her eye and her father, but it took a while. Now though... We may not be able to defend her fully from our father, but it's a step in the right direction."

I nodded vaguely, though I wasn't paying as much attention to the conversation anymore. My stomach had long since sunk into my feet, and I wished there was something I could do to make this awful dread go away. I doubted it would be that simple, but here we were. I bit down on my lip and shook my head. I wasn't looking forward to telling Prosecutor Wood about all of this, but I knew we were going to have to share it eventually. Of course we were. She couldn't be left in the dark about all of this. It wouldn't be right.

"For now, I think we can call our investigation finished for the day," Victoria murmured. "I don't think we should talk to Pieter after all. I don't think we're in a good place to tell him what we've learned, and... If he hears about all of this, then he's just going to spend the rest of the night even more stressed than before. He's been through too much of that to be okay with what we've just heard, and I don't want to make things any worse for him."

"You can share the truth with anyone you can trust, but I would advise not going beyond that. I doubt my father has any reasons to stop people from knowing about Zachary Moore's abduction and torture at this point, but it would be safer to keep the truth to yourselves unless you believe the person absolutely needs to know," Baltazar told us, his eyes going dark. "I don't want anyone else to get hurt, and they will if they hear too much about all of this."

"I... I understand," I said softly even though there was no heart behind the words at all. I didn't now how anyone could keep a secret like this without feeling as if they were going to burst, though I supposed that was why it had been kept as a secret in the first place. Nobody wanted to hear about something like this because of all the damage it could do. I barely wanted to think about it minutes after I had been told. The Emsthorpe family always seemed to get worse even when it felt like we couldn't dig any deeper.

"We should go back to the agency for the day," Deirdre suggested. "I believe everyone else there will want to hear about everything new we've uncovered. I doubt they're going to like it, but they have a right to know."

"I look forward to seeing you tomorrow... The day of our last judgement," Baltazar remarked, a loose and strained smile on his face. With that, he retreated from the visiting room, leaving the four of us on the defense team alone in the silence.

I stared down at my shoes for a long time after he had left. No matter what, I could never quite bring myself to feel better about what we had heard. Nothing could fix this, and I knew it. We just needed time... And we needed to tell Prosecutor Wood the truth. She deserved as much. What she did with the information beyond that was up to her, but she had a right to know.

How did everything somehow find a way to get darker even now? I wish I knew, but I hated having to ask at all.

things that are messed up

-Digital