Oh, yes, I remembered. This one… she definitely wasn’t normal. I could understand how she’d gotten so deep beneath Tessa’s skin.
“I wasn’t joking when I said I cut them off.” She lifted her left hand as she bent just the metal ones. “I didn’t stop there, though. I bruised my own ribs, dislocated my own shoulder, and even cut my face.” She traced a scar I could barely see on her light skin. “I did all of that because while I was kidnapped, my kidnapper never touched me. Do you know why I’d do all that to myself?”
No, but… I could put it together.Like she’d said, it was a story.
“So, Jason,” she purred out my name in an overly-sensual way, something she had no right to do, “when I tell you you’re going to need a bigger blade, I mean it.” A chuckle escaped her. “But if it makes you feel better, sure. You can keep it there.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You’re… strange.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She beamed up at me, like I just complimented her. “I’ll tell you everything, but let me ask you something, first: why didn’t you let me talk more when you kidnapped me?”
“Maybe I wanted to see what you were made of, if you were really as resourceful as I assumed you were.” My jaw ground. “Or maybe I wasn’t ready to hear the full truth from you yet.”
“It hasn’t been that long. Now, suddenly, you’re ready?”
“More like prepared. Tessa isn’t telling me everything, and that means she’s hiding something from me. You don’t hide things when you ask for help—not unless you have something to hide. There are only a few things she would dare hide from me, so I need to be sure.”
“And you trust me enough that you’ll believe every word I say?”
“Within reason.”
“One last question before I spill the beans.” Laina breathed in deeply, then sighed. She turned her eyes toward the pond. “Why do you care so much about Tessa and Kieran? When I mentioned your name to Kieran, he got spooked, and he hasn’t spoken to me since. He has to know you from before, so who the hell are you, really?”
So he didn’t tell her. Guess that honor fell to me, then.
“You can’t tell?” I asked her, causing her to whip her head in my direction and once again meet my gaze.
“Can’t tell,” she echoed. “Can’t tell what?”
“I know my hair isn’t the same color it used to be, but I thought, maybe, the eyes would give it away.” I paused before I added, “They both got my eyes, though Kieran’s match mine a little bit more. Tessa’s turned out a bit of a warmer brown than black.”
Finally, the girl got it. Her gaze widened, and she sucked in a hard breath. “Holy shit. You’re… you’re their dad?” I could see her head spinning; she truly did have no idea before now who I was. I bet it was a good thing she was sitting down, otherwise the shock might’ve made her knees give out.
“I am.”
“But you’re…” She studied me hard. “How old are you?”
“Forty-seven. Their mom and I had Tessa when I was only fifteen. Kieran came a few years later.”
“And their mom?”
“She left a long time ago. Up and abandoned all of us like we meant nothing. I did my best to do what I could for them, but in the beginning especially, I was still a kid myself. I worked a lot. They had to rely on each other—so now you know why I give a shit about the fact that Kieran betrayed his sister.”
She had the audacity to laugh at me. “Are you joking? Please. Kieran didn’t betray her. She gave him an order to get rid of me so she could worm her way into my dad’s life and apparently get the life she always wanted. As far as I was aware, she wasn’t specific in how to get rid of me. Your son had a thing for me, so instead of killing me, he kidnapped me and kept me for two years.”
Laina shook her head as she went on, “I didn’t know it was him at first. I only found that out five months ago. But during those two years he opened my eyes, and I saw just how easily Tessa inserted herself at my dad’s side. She might’ve been the one to call you and ask for help, but that’s only because we bested her at every turn.”
“Of course she was upset you returned. She asked her brother—”
“She asked Kieran to get rid of me, knowing he already had a thing for me back then. And then, when I got out, she tried to have Kieran killed on live TV. If you were keeping up with your kids, you probably saw the news. That bullet wasn’t meant for me, it was meant for Kieran the whole time.”
That… that couldn’t be right. But the way Laina said it with the full force of her chest behind it, with fire burning in those pink eyes, she wasn’t lying.
Tessa had tried to have her own brother killed. No wonder she was keeping things from me. She knew if I found out the whole story, I wouldn’t offer her a hand at all, so she worked her magic and turned me against Kieran, feeding me lie after lie so I wouldn’t reach out to him and ask for his side of things.
She made it look likehewas the one who betrayed family, not the other way around.
I didn’t think I’d ever felt so blindsided in my life, not even when Nora left.
