Page 339 of Romeo

“Who named me Kaitlyn Grace?” I asked.

Jasper went still for a moment before answering. “Your biological mother. Her name was Kaylah Russell.”

I repeated the name silently. Kaylah. Nothing moved inside me. No memory. No inexplicable recognition. She was a stranger who had suddenly been placed at the beginning of my life.

“Where is she?”

“I’m sorry, Cher. She died years ago.”

The loss hurt anyway. Not the way losing my mother hurt, because I didn’t have Kaylah’s face or voice to miss. What hurt was learning there had been another woman I might have asked questions and, in the same breath, learning I never could. Jasper started to explain that there were painful parts of Kaylah’s history, but I stopped him. I didn’t need them today.

I needed to understand the people.

Jasper nodded and told me Kaylah had been married to a man named Remington Ward, whose road name was Steele. When I looked at him blankly, he explained that Steele had once been president of the Silver Shadows Mother Chapter in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Silver Shadows I knew through Jasper were the Nebraska Chapter, built later after the old club fractured. I had never heard Steele’s name because none of that history had meant anything to me before today.

“Did you know him?”

“Yeah, baby, I did. He was my president.”

“So that’s where Ward came from,” I said.

“Legally, yeah. But he wasn’t your biological father.”

I rubbed my forehead. “There’s more?”

That finally brought the faintest smile to Jasper’s face. “Steele was still married to your mom when you were born. That’s why his name was listed.”

“Who was my father?”

“Marcus Ryker. His road name is Angel. He was a Silver Shadow too, back in Little Rock. Steele’s enforcer. He rides nomad now.”

I stared at him. “My biological father is another biker?”

“Yeah.”

“In your club?”

“Yeah.”

A shaky laugh slipped out. “Of course he is. Apparently, I could have been raised on another continent and still found my way into your clubhouse.”

Jasper’s smile lasted only a second before I asked if Angel was alive. When he said yes, something inside me reacted before I had time to decide how I felt about it. Alive meant there was a man somewhere who shared part of me. A man who might have my eyes or some expression I had never known came from anyone else.

“Did he know about me?”

“He knew Kaylah was pregnant. Then she disappeared from his life before you were born.”

Anger came hard and fast. “So he knew there might be a baby and never bothered to find out?”

Jasper didn’t defend him. He simply explained that Angel had searched for Kaylah and her two daughters for two years. He found nothing and never learned whether Kaylah had given birth. The anger inside me stumbled over that.

“He looked for two years?”

“Yeah. He never knew you were out there.”

I looked down at our joined hands and thought about all the times a social worker had asked whether I had relatives. Grandparents? No. Aunts? No. Uncles? No. There had been a man somewhere who might have wanted to know me. He just hadn’t known Fiona Mitchell existed.

Then another part of Jasper’s sentence reached me. “Kaylah had daughters?”