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“Make it happen?” Duke repeated, his large body, reminiscent of Dawg’s at the same age, tensing until his shoulders appeared broader and more imposing. “I’m no Marine and you’re not my fucking commander, Captain Mackay.”
Natches smiled. A slow, easy smile that lacked any humor whatsoever. “Think Memmie Mary will see it the same way?”
Memmie Mary was the iron will of the Mackay family on the other side of the mountain, just as Natches’s uncle, Rowdy’s father, Ray, was on their side of the mountain.
Duke’s eyes narrowed on him. “That’s low, even for you.”
“Not nearly as low as I’d go, Duke,” Natches promised him. “I won’t see Chaya destroyed any further than this is going to do already if Angel disappears. And I have a feeling, as much as Chaya and I both will hate it, you’re likely the only one with enough influence, where that stubborn-assed daughter of hers is concerned, to keep her here.”
As the final sentence left his mouth he saw the looks on Duke’s, Dawg’s, and Rowdy’s faces as their gazes jerked to the door behind him, and he knew with a sense of fatalistic regret that he no longer had to worry how to tell his wife.
He turned to her slowly, watched what little color she had in her face leech away as she stared back at him in horror.
“Duke. Find her. Now,” Natches ordered his cousin.
“We’ll go sit with Bliss.” Rowdy and Dawg moved to the door on the other side of the room that entered into the kitchen, with Duke following them.
Natches didn’t bother to watch them leave. He didn’t take his eyes off Chaya, nor did he try to hold her back as she glanced at his desk, saw the papers and files spread out over it, and began moving toward it slowly.
“You sent Duke to investigate her,” she said, her voice hollow as she neared the desk. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I actually sent him out five years ago,” he told her, staying close to her, knowing the blow this would deliver to the twenty-year-old wound in her soul. “He didn’t tell me what he’d found until tonight, though. . . .”
• • •
Natches’s words faded away when Chaya lifted a picture from the various papers and photographs on the desk.
She could feel herself screaming. Silent, agonized screams that she didn’t have the breath to actually push from her chest.
The little girl, her dark blond hair tangled and dirty, a little white bow barely hanging at the ends of the soft waves that ended at her shoulders. A matching white dress, torn, filthy, and stained with blood.
A single white sandal on her bloody, dirt-caked foot.
Red arrows pointed to her broken leg, her fractured arm.
She looked like a tiny, broken doll lying on the rough cot, unconscious, so pale she could have been dead.
Chaya heard the small, keening cry that left her lips. She knew that child. Knew her with every fiber of her heart and soul and knew the mistake she’d made when she faced the young woman that child had grown into.
Angel.
“What did I do?” The sound of her own voice was a shock to her, whispering from lips that trembled with the violent emotions surging through her. “What did I do to my baby . . . ?”
She was only barely aware of Natches’s arms going around her, holding her on her feet when she would have sunk to the floor.
There were other pictures. Pictures taken each year at about the same time, others taken with each new injury, each broken bone, and each gunshot or knife wound. And there
were many of them.
There was a notation made of a near rape, an abduction by one of the men holding another child who the family had been sent to rescue, and a detailed report of the collapse of a small hospital in Uzbekistan five years ago that resulted in hysteria and further injuries when Angel had been trapped in the basement.
Twenty years of training, near fatal wounds, and a life devoid of her mother’s love.
Included with the pictures was a birth certificate for another child. Jennifer Ellen Dane. Chaya read the parents’ names: her ex-husband and her sister. Her sister had had a child? With Craig? Beth’s half sister.
Chaya knew she was fighting to breathe, to throttle the screams echoing in her head, to find reality in the midst of the nightmare converging on her.
“My baby . . .” Strangled, filled with horror, the knowledge of what she had done to her daughter that afternoon sliced jagged, ever-deepening wounds into her soul. “Oh God . . . Oh God . . .”
