Page 28 of Sins of the Fathers

The door swung open. Archie straightened, ready to intervene if he had to. Jasper stormed out of the place, making what had happened inside clear. Leroy didn’t follow. Archie didn’t see him at all. Of course, that could be because all his attention was on Jasper, but he didn’t wait to see what would happen. He pushed away from the car, ready to welcome Jasper into his arms. He knew Jasper wouldn’t have the patience for that, but Archie hadn’t been lying when he’d said that he’d be here, no matter what Jasper wanted.

“You should probably drive home,” Jasper said, loud enough that Leroy could probably hear him. “I don’t think I can focus on the road well enough not to crash the car.”

He moved to walk around the car, but Archie caught his arm and pulled him closer. Jasper didn’t struggle. He didn’t push Archie away. Instead, he sank against him, his entire body relaxing.

Archie pressed his face against Jasper’s head, breathing in his scent and squeezing him. There was nothing else he could do. He doubted that suggesting he go into that house to beat up Leroy would help, even though he was pretty sure they would both be tempted.

“It didn’t go well?” Archie asked even though he knew the answer to that question.

“He didn’t tell me anything. He barely looked at me,” Jasper muttered from where his face was pressed against Archie’s chest.

Archie looked up at the house just in time to notice Leroy peeking out the open door. Their gazes met, and Archie raised his chin. He wasn’t ashamed of being seen with Jasper. In fact, it was the opposite. He was proud that Jasper had chosen him of all people. He loved Jasper, and he felt sorry that Leroy had never seen the kind of man he’d managed to raise, even though he’d barely tried. It would no doubt be best for Jasper to put more distance between him and his adoptive parents, but Archie understood why he couldn’t yet. He wanted answers, and Leroy was right at the center of the mess.

Leroy and Archie stared at each other for a moment. Leroy was the first one to look away. He stepped back inside the house and closed the door, leaving Archie staring at smooth wood. There was nothing left here for Archie or Jasper, so Archie gently guided his boyfriend toward the passenger door of the car. “Let’s go home. We can think about something else for the rest of the day, and tomorrow, we’ll regroup and find a way to solve this mess. Leroy might have all the answers, but he can’t be the only one, and we still haven’t looked through all the documents I found at the sanctuary. I’m sure there’s more and that we’ll find our answers there.”

Jasper didn’t look convinced, but he allowed Archie to move him around the car. He slid into the passenger seat, and by the time Archie was in the driver’s seat, Jasper was staring back at the house. Archie could only imagine how he was feeling. He had to know that he would never come back, and it couldn’t be easy. No matter how close or not close he was to his adoptive parents, they’d still raised him, and this place had still been home for a long time.

But Jasper didn’t need this home anymore. He had a new one, with Archie and his friends. Hopefully, once he found out about his biological parents and what had happened to them, Jasper could settle. He could let go of the past and work through what had happened to him.

But even if he couldn’t, Archie wasn’t going anywhere. Jasper was his future, and Archie would do what he had to in order to make sure that both of them were happy.

“I should’ve known he never actually loved me,” Jasper murmured as Archie drove them away.

“Why would you have? You thought he was your father. Hell, even though he’s not related to you, he was your father. He raised you. He should’ve loved you.” That made Archie wonder about Leroy’s wife. Had Jasper seen her? What did she think of all of this?

Archie couldn’t bring himself to care much, though. If she loved her son, she would’ve intervened a long time ago. She would’ve been there for Jasper. Instead, she stood behind Leroy, and she still did.

“I think I’m glad he didn’t,” Jasper said. “Because I know that he had something to do with the sanctuary and with my parents’ deaths. How much harder would it have been if he’d loved me?”

Archie couldn’t argue with that. As much as Jasper hated Leroy, he’d always known the kind of man Leroy was. He knew what Leroy was capable of. And he knew there was a good chance that Leroy had orchestrated all of this and was responsible for the death of his biological parents.

* * * *

JASPER KNEW THAT ARCHIE would give him whatever he needed right now. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what he needed. Did he want to stop thinking about Leroy? Obviously. He’d already known it would end the way it had, but it still hurt. Part of him had believed that Leroy actually cared about him.

He’d been proven wrong. If Leroy did care, he would’ve told Jasper what he needed to know. Instead, he’d pushed Jasper away, which left Jasper right where he and Archie had started. Jasper knew that he wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about this mess until he found out what was going on and what had happened to his biological parents, which meant he needed to get to work.

That was why he made a beeline for the metal box on Archie’s coffee table as soon as he stepped into the apartment. He heard Archie sigh behind him, but his boyfriend didn’t ask him what he was doing. Instead, he disappeared into the kitchen as Jasper opened the box and grabbed a handful of documents from it. They’d kept what they’d already gone through to the side, so everything left in the box was new information.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” Archie asked as he placed a glass of water on the coffee table and sat next to Jasper.

“Leroy is hiding something, and I can’t ignore that.”

“I’m not asking you to ignore it. You don’t have to solve all of this mess right now, though.”

“When, then?” Jasper shook his head. “I can feel how close we are. We have all this information,” he said, gesturing to the box. “I know that the name of the killer is in here.”

“What if the killer doesn’t have answers for you?”

Jasper dropped the documents he’d been reading through. “Does that make me a bad person? I don’t want to find the killer to stop them. I want to find them to get answers. If I’m honest, I don’t really care about what happened to Daniel Marsh and the other two. They were there the night the sanctuary was destroyed, and my parents were killed. They were all responsible for that, and they got what they deserved, even though it came more than twenty years later.”

“You’re not a bad person,” Archie said, squeezing Jasper’s thigh. “I just wish I could make things easier for you.”

“No one can do that. Even I can’t do it. I just know that the answers are here, and I need to find them.”

“I want you to have that, but having answers won’t bring your parents back,” Archie murmured.

Jasper closed his eyes. “I know.” He wasn’t even sure he wanted his parents back. They’d created him, and he was sure they’d loved him and had raised him like good parents until they’d been killed, but he couldn’t remember them. That didn’t mean he didn’t want justice for them, or that he didn’t want to know what had happened and who was responsible for their deaths.