“There’s no one to back her up.”
Maizie asked, “Does she need it?”
“I don’t love the situation.” She tapped her foot in the air in a rhythm, her feet stacked on a small drinks cooler they usually kept in the car. “Part of me wants to call around. See who can come here and help us out. We need more coverage.”
“Like Amara and Bruce?”
Kenna nodded. “Maybe even Stairns.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.” Maizie shot her a look.
“Zeyla needs backup. So does Jax. Who knows what Preston is up to right now.” Not to mention the two of them were the only ones in the RV. Just a pregnant woman and a young adult with limited skills in protecting herself. “I’m getting my gun.”
Kenna set the laptop on the other front seat and slid off her headphones. She wandered to the bedroom closet and pulled outthe small lockbox where she kept a loaded 9mm. She checked it but put the safety on before she wandered back to her seat.
“Are you serious?” Maizie said into her headphones.
Kenna passed her, glancing at her face so she could get a read on what was being said from her expression. It didn’t provide much insight. She grabbed the laptop, slid the headphones on, and tucked the gun by her leg on the seat. “What’s going on?”
Maizie reacted. Not quite a flinch, but it was close.
“Zeyla?”
“Fine,” the other woman said over the comms channel. “I’m in the stairwell now, by the way. I just mentioned Mom since you brought her up.”
“Last time I talked to her she was going to tell me something important. We never got to finish our conversation.” Kenna had called her back a couple of times since but had gotten no answer. “Do you know what she was going to tell me?”
“It’s not that Mom thinks you’ll hate her for it. It’s just that it’s bad. Maybe she regrets what she did, but I think she did the world a favor.”
“We have to find a family. Do I need to know this in order to do that?” Kenna figured she’d get what was being said. They had priorities and, right now, those leaned more toward finding thisDominatusasset and figuring out what she’d been up to.
“Maybe it’s connected, and maybe it isn’t. How do we know?”
“It’s definitely connected,” Maizie said.
Kenna glanced over at her, frowning.
“I’m sending it to you,” Maizie said to Kenna. “Zeyla, tell her what you told me.”
Silence on the line echoed while Kenna opened the message Maizie had just sent. The attached document, a PDF, was an article…about Kenna.
Expert PI Unable to Locate Missing Child
“She wrote an article about how I’m failing to find Ellayna? And she hasn’t posted it yet?” If the reporter wanted to rub it in her face, she was running out of time to do that. As soon as they located Sylvia Caughton, they would find Ellayna. “Maybe it’s still part of the cover. Just for fun. Or it’s a code.”
“It’s significant,” Zeyla said. “Because you’re the onlyDominatusoffspring in this generation who is able to have a child.”
She had only found that out becauseDominatuswanted her to know why they thought she was special. Kenna didn’t care. The life she and Jax had created was theirs and didn’t belong to this dark group.
“Any information is information they’ll use as leverage. They don’t know how to do anything other than manipulate everyone around them.”
“So tell me how it was done?” Kenna wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but she had to ask.
“She’s the one who did it,” Zeyla said. “She introduced an anomaly in the gene sequence that sterilized every child conceived in our generation. Except her sister’s child.”
“Why didn’t she skip you, too?” Kenna swallowed against the lump in her throat.
“Part of the reason why it worked was because she allowed them to give her child the anomaly,” Zeyla said. “If she was going to do this to the children, she wasn’t going to save herself. She was going to hold herself and her child to the same standard.”
