“I presume you’re here to ask for forgiveness and beg to stay?” he says, and it is not a question.
My mother hardly reacts.
“Understand that I would not be here if I had any other option,” she says, her voice quiet but steady.
Gabriel tilts his head slightly, considering. “I see,” he says, taking a seat on a nearby couch. “Do you have a reason for thinking that I would want to help you?”
“You need me,” my mother says simply.
A flicker of amusement crosses his face. “Do I?”
“You need mycompliance. You want the whole world to know where you’ve been sending your kids? Why, quite suddenly, the orphanage was shut down afterwards?”
Something in Gabriel’s expression shifts, just barely. It’s the smallest crack in a wall so thick it might as well be concrete.
He stands.
And then, with a voice that carries through the vast room, he calls out, “Kai. Wren. Elliot.”
The doors at the far end of the room push open, and three children step inside.
They are Steele children, through and through.
The girl is a copy of Gabriel. Same dark hair, same grey eyes, though her face is softer. The youngest boy, around six, I notice resembles their mother more, and somehow, appears the gentlest of the three.
Kai, though, with his odd, gold-ringed eyes and light-brown hair that’s so close to his skin tone that it almost blends in under the dim lighting, didn’t resemble Gabriel much. Or even his mother, Irina. But no one in this room could mistake him for anything other than their son.
In fact, I’ve heard he’s my age. Though I never would have guessed that myself. Because there’s something profoundly wrong in the way he carries himself, and despite looking my age, there’s nothing youthful about him.
There’s something empty in his gaze, something so hollow it feels like he isn’thereat all. Like his body is, but the rest of him got lost somewhere along the way.
It frustrates me that I don’t understand. That I don’t understand him at all, when I usually understand everything.
Because here is a kid, barely old enough to have seen much of the world, yet there’s a depth about him… a maturity carved entirelynotfrom age.
I don’t know what it is about this boy that makes me feel almost sad for him.
Beside him, his sister stands still, barely breathing. Wren. She is younger, smaller, her face delicate and doll-like.
There are no bruises. No marks. No outward proof of what is troubling them. No indication of what has happened to make them this way. Nothing but the haunted look in their eyes, and the sorrow radiating off of them like an aura.
My mother inhales sharply, and when I look at her, I see it.
Recognition.
“Wren?” Her voice trembles.
The little girl’s lips part slightly, as if she wants to say something, but she hesitates. Then, my mother’s eyes snap back to Gabriel, her expression shifting from shock to fury.
“What did youdoto them?”
“I didn’t do anything,” he says evenly, and my mother’s breath shudders.
“You sent them there!”
I don’t know whatthereis, but I know it must have been hell, because my mother looks like she wants to strangle him.
I barely hear them anymore.
