Chapter 458
Three hours had passed since Evenson left for the unnamed alien planet.
Gideon Malick and Stephanie were still waiting.
Stephanie remained relatively calm. She sat quietly to one side, flipping through a stack of files.
Perhaps that was because she had not yet inherited the Malick family’s responsibilities. Her father had never formally passed the family’s burden and mission on to her, and there were still many secrets surrounding the Malick bloodline that she knew nothing about.
Gideon, meanwhile, was having a much harder time sitting still.
He felt as though someone had stuffed a hyperactive husky into his chest and locked the door.
He was caught between excitement and dread.
On one hand, Evenson was the most promising candidate Gideon had ever seen for crossing the portal and actually coming back alive.
If Evenson could retrieve the Hive, the god of Hydra, from the alien world beyond the portal, then the Malick family’s thousand-year mission would finally be fulfilled.
The prophecy of their ancestors would become reality under his watch.
The achievement alone was enough to make Gideon’s blood race.
Then there were the rewards.
But beneath all that excitement lurked a much darker fear.
The Malick family appeared, from the outside, to be fanatically devoted to its mission. Their ancestors had sworn an oath thousands of years ago, and generation after generation had treated the recovery of the Hive as their highest priority.
But underneath that devotion was a history of selfishness and deception.
Thousands of years was an absurd length of time for a species as short-lived as humanity. Countless generations had inherited the same responsibility.
Could anyone honestly believe every single one of those people had remained loyal?
If fulfilling the mission had merely required money, effort, or inconvenience, perhaps it would have been manageable.
Unfortunately, the founding Hydra families had established another tradition.
At regular intervals, the various families would gather their most promising young members and conduct a lottery. One unfortunate soul would be selected and sent through the portal to the other world, where they were expected to rescue their master or serve him.
And nobody ever came back.
The earliest generations had accepted this with genuine fanaticism. To them, being chosen was the highest possible honor.
It was almost like some ancient sacrificial ritual where the winner was the one who got his head chopped off.
But how long could that kind of fanaticism survive?
Surely, somewhere among the descendants, someone had eventually wondered whether throwing people through a portal to die was actually worth it.
For centuries, countless people had sacrificed themselves for the mission.
Yet the mission had never sacrificed anything for them.
It had never rewarded them.
Surely someone had thought about that.
Of course they had.
Human nature practically guaranteed it.
They simply hadn’t dared say it aloud.
The rules had been established collectively by several Hydra families. Anyone who openly questioned them could easily be branded a traitor and attacked by the others.
And after enough generations, people simply became numb to it.
But there was always an exception.
One of Gideon Malick’s ancestors had eventually decided that enough was enough.
Perhaps he had simply been unusually brave.
Or perhaps someone important to him had been chosen and sacrificed. A family member. A friend. A lover.
Whatever the reason, something finally pushed him past his breaking point.
He decided to cheat.
During the selection ceremonies, he manipulated the lottery so that he would always avoid being chosen.
That little trick was quietly passed down through the Malick family.
Many years ago, the current head of the family, Gideon Malick, learned of it along with his brother.
At the time, the two brothers had been young, idealistic, and spectacularly convinced they understood honor.
When they discovered that their beloved father, and perhaps even their grandfather and great-grandfather, had been cheating during the selection ceremonies, their first reaction wasn’t relief.
It wasn’t gratitude that their ancestors had cheated and survived, allowing the brothers to exist in the first place.
No.
They were furious.
And ashamed.
The two young men decided that cheating was a betrayal of both their family’s sacred mission and the other Hydra families who had sworn to uphold it.
Whatever their ancestors had done before them, it ended there.
The brothers swore that they would follow the mission honestly.
They would be true to their family.
They would never cheat.
Unfortunately, brothers are still individuals.
Gideon Malick eventually came to a different conclusion.
After thinking it over, he decided to follow his instincts and continue cheating.
And during the very first selection ceremony they experienced after making their oath, Gideon’s brother was chosen.
It remained Gideon’s deepest secret.
He had never told anyone.
But now he couldn’t stop wondering whether the Hive knew.
His brother had known the truth.
He had been sent through the portal.
Had he encountered the Hive?
Had he confessed everything?
Gideon had no idea.
And that uncertainty gnawed at him.
Still, the situation had already reached this point. All he could do was reassure himself.
Perhaps his brother had kept silent out of loyalty to him.
Perhaps he’d kept quiet for the sake of the family.
Or perhaps the Hive already knew everything and simply chose to overlook it because Gideon was now responsible for bringing him back to Earth.
There was no way to know.
"Father."
Stephanie’s voice cut through his thoughts.
"I found something. You should take a look."
Gideon forced his scattered thoughts back into place and walked over.
He bent down beside Stephanie and glanced at the file.
Then he froze.
His eyes locked onto the page.
"Peggy Carter?"
His brow furrowed.
"That old woman became an Avenger because of him?"
Evenson’s circumstances had changed.
He was no longer merely someone Gideon had once intended to manipulate.
He was now arguably Gideon’s most important partner.
That meant Gideon needed to reevaluate everything he knew about Evenson’s past.
Not merely repeat the old investigation.
He needed to look at it from an entirely different angle.
And Stephanie had just uncovered a piece of information they’d previously overlooked.
Peggy Carter.
A founding figure of S.H.I.E.L.D.
A lifelong enemy of Hydra.
A woman who should have been well past her fighting days.
Yet somehow, she had returned to active duty and eventually become one of the Avengers, earning a reputation as a formidable figure known as the Mother of the Black Heart.
And according to the records in front of them, the chain of events that had made all of that possible could be traced directly back to Evenson.
Stephanie and Gideon were just beginning to examine the information more closely when the room suddenly flooded with green light.
Space warped.
Reality twisted.
And Evenson abruptly appeared in the middle of the room.
But that wasn’t what caught their attention most.
Evenson was holding someone by the arm.
Someone who had clearly come back with him.