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Dawg blew out a hard, deep breath, drawing Natches’s attention to the regret that creased his face.
“Christa’s said all along that Angel was too much like Chaya, and that was why Chaya was having problems with her.” He propped his hands on his hips for a moment, hanging his head before lifting it again and giving Natches a regret-filled look. “I’d never believe she was your kid, but yeah.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “I believe she’s Chaya’s. It was in those eyes, contacts and all, she was beggin’ Chaya to see her. To accept her.”
Natches wanted it to be a lie. He fully admitted that. To know her daughter had lived the horrendously dangerous life they knew Angel had lived would kill Chaya. It would kill him if he was facing Bliss twenty years later, knowing he’d lived a life that included love and laughter while she’d suffered. Chaya would feel the same, and it would break both of them.
“Bliss is brokenhearted.” Rowdy’s words had Natches’s heart tightening. “She told Annie she didn’t think she would ever forgive her mother if anything happened to Angel now. Told her she felt like Angel was as close to her as a sister.”
Pain struck at his heart and tore to his soul. God help him. God help Chaya.
And if he called Bliss from her bedroom to question her about it, Chaya would follow. She wouldn’t let Bliss out of her sight. She was presently curled in the large, oversize chair in Bliss’s bedroom. The two hadn’t spoken since they’d left the marina. Which was odd for Bliss. She usually went into a Mackay meltdown when she was angry. But she was eerily silent now, refusing to discuss Angel or the attempted kidnapping. And Chaya refused to leave her alone.
“Timothy’s going crazy,” Dawg said then, worried for the former DHS special agent who had been with Chaya in Iraq when Beth had supposedly died. “One of my contacts from DHS said he arrived about two hours ago and demanded all of Army Intelligence’s records as well as DHS’s from that operation. He’s in meltdown.”
Timothy’s lab had run the DNA and verified the child’s body as Beth’s.
“We’re all in meltdown,” Natches said heavily as the silent alarm on the watch he wore vibrated, indicating a vehicle had passed over the motion detector set in the driveway leading to the house. “And I have a feeling it’s about to get worse.”
Because he knew the man arriving.
Duke Mackay had been investigating Angel Calloway for about five years. When Natches noticed the young woman showing up at the lake or at events that Bliss attended, he’d become curious about her. Tracker and Chance hadn’t even blipped on his radar until eighteen months ago.
Just out of Army Intelligence, Duke and his brother, Ethan, had taken the job of tracking Angel down and learning why she’d taken such an interest in the preteen. At first, Duke had reported that Angel’s presence in Somerset must be a coincidence, that a young mercenary, a sister to the commander she followed, couldn’t have any true interest in Bliss.
But Duke had decided to stay with the team for a while, and Natches had let the information and the young woman slip to the back of his mind. Until Tracker, Angel, and Chance had shown up a year and a half ago, out of the blue, to protect Dawg’s sister, Lyrica, while Duke had been involved in another job Natches had sent him to.
He didn’t believe in coincidence, he thought as he opened the door leading into the kitchen for his younger cousin and stared into the mossy green eyes of the man who had spent all of his adult life away from his home. A man he knew had his own demons and haunted past.
“Office?” Duke nodded his head toward the opened doorway across the kitchen. “I’d like to talk to you and the cousins alone first.”
First.
Duke’s features, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, were sharply hewn, brooding, and touched with the same sun-bronzed stroke of Native American ancestry. Raised by distant relatives in Montana from the time he was fifteen until he joined the Army at eighteen, he wasn’t a man many were comfortable around.
He was a man Natches could understand and respect, though. And the fact that Duke wanted privacy first had the tension already radiating through him building instantly.
“Come on,” he breathed out roughly, turning and heading for the office. “Let’s get it over with.”
• • •
Natches had known grief in his life. More than anyone could imagine, but as he stood silently next to his desk with Rowdy, Dawg, and their younger Mackay cousin, Duke, he knew this was the nightmare he never could have imagined before today.
He’d thought the past and its monsters had been vanquished when his father, Dayle Mackay, died in prison. Now, he realized, the nightmares he’d known as a boy were never going to be forgotten.
And as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t vanquish the monsters that were going to rise up to torment the wife he loved more than he loved anything else in his life. And now Chaya’s nightmares were only going to be added to as well. Nightmares of the life her daughter Beth had lived for the past twenty years.
Duke showed him a photograph of Beth and another little girl almost identical to her but younger, with Chaya’s first husband, Craig Dane. He explained that the other girl was Jenny Dane, the child Chaya’s sister had had with Chaya’s husband. The Canadian birth certificate verified the parents. Jo-Ellen was murdered when the girls were taken from her, and she had never told anyone about her baby.
Jo-Ellen hadn’t possessed many friends, worked from home in Canada, and hadn’t told those she did know that Jenny belonged to her. She’d hidden the pregnancy and the birth, presumably to keep Chaya from knowing how she and Craig had betrayed her. Then, somehow, Craig got both girls to Iraq and they were all in the hotel when it was bombed.
A mercenary named J. T. Calloway found a little blond-haired girl wandering the streets of Baghdad and had assumed she’d been beaten. There was no report of a missing American child, so he’d kept her, given her his family name to hide her, just in case she was in danger, and raised her as his own.
He’d raised her amid the blood and death he, his wife, and two sons lived within. A child taught from the age of three that survival meant kill or be killed. Homeschooling lessons included hand-to-hand combat training and how to use a knife, a gun, or fingernails to disable an enemy.
She’d nearly been raped at age six by an enemy combatant, forced to kill at age fifteen, and taken her first bullet at age sixteen. And her eyes weren’t a shattered blue, intense violet, or brilliant green as listed in differing reports on her, but a soft gray ringed by a darker blue.
And when she smiled, she looked like her mother.
She looked like Chaya.
