The Lewisons didn’t answer, so I pushed into my memories, both childhood and more recent, trying to connect the dots. Of course, the moment I did, a sharp pain slammed into my temples, but for the first time, I didn’t release the memories. Instead, I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and forced myself to push through. The pain was a barrier to whatever I wasn’t supposed to remember. I’d been shying away from it, but fuck, a little brain stabbing was nothing compared to having parts of my life stolen from me.

So I pressed harder, barely managing not to scream at the relentless and intense attack on my entire body. It got so bad that I had to blindly throw open the car door, falling out so I could vomit on the ground. Still, I did not release the hold on my memories, not even as I heaved and clawed at the grass.

I heard shouts, and no doubt Simone’s parents were about to be in trouble for seemingly hurting the alpha-mate, but I was too close now to lose focus of my goals. Memories were there—I felt them hovering below the surface. I just had to break through to the next level. Maybe then I would know what path to follow to claim back what had been stolen from me.

Come on! I screamed internally, my wolf howling with me as she rose to try to absorb some of my pain… but she couldn’t. This was my fight alone, and I was fighting like my life depended on it.

With a burst of light, I broke through the top layer of darkness, my mind’s eye slamming against a barrier woven with light and dark beams. As if rays of sunlight had been bonded to beams of moonlight. They wrapped around each other, crisscrossing until one was almost synonymous with the other.

This was the barrier.

This was what I had to destroy to reveal my memories.

When I mentally reached for it, I was blasted back by an intense heat, which took me by surprise since there hadn’t been an ounce of warmth until I’d gotten closer.

“Mera!” Torin’s voice was a deep roar as he yanked me up off the ground, and it was at that point that I had no choice but to release my hold on the pain, letting it fade away.

Feeling like a failure since I hadn’t broken through the barrier, I at least tried to console myself with the fact that I was still on the right path. Yesterday I hadn’t seen the barrier, so that was another step closer to the truth.

“What happened?” Torin shouted, his voice grating on my already aching brain as he pulled me closer. “Who did this to her?”