Page 346 of Romeo

For one stupid second, I had forgotten I asked for them.

Then the names came back all at once.

Angel.

Banshee.

Kyllian.

I had spent most of yesterday trying not to think about what their faces might look like. Every time I did, my mind created strangers—which was exactly what they were, except strangers weren’t supposed to share pieces of me. Strangers weren’t supposed to remember the day I was born or spend years searching for someone with a name I no longer used. My hand found Granny’s ring and turned it once around my finger.

“Yes,” I said, though my voice came out quieter than I intended. “I still want to see them.”

Jasper didn’t bring the phone to me immediately. He crossed the small kitchen instead, slid onto one of the chairs at the table, then held out his free hand. The gesture was so familiar now that I didn’t think about taking it. He pulled me onto his lap and wrapped his arms around me tightly.

Securely.

He was my rock, my foundation. Eleven months of getting to know each other through texts messages, random visits to Rosewood, and late-night phone calls and this man had become everything I needed.

“There are three,” he explained. “King had pictures of Angel and Banshee already. Nav provided the picture of Kyllian.”

“Why did Nav have a picture of her?”

Something crossed over his eyes—something that looked like he didn’t want to tell me.

“He didn’t. He got it from a man called Firestride. He’s Kyllian’s old man.”

I frowned. “How does Nav know him?”

Jasper hesitated before reaching for my hand. “That’s club business, Cher. There are gonna be times I know things I can’t tell you because they belong to the club or another brother. I won’t ever use that to hide somethin’ that affects you, but I can’t give you every secret I’m trusted with.”

I didn’t particularly like it, but I understood the difference. “So all I get is that Nav knew who to ask? Even though Kyllian is my sister?”

His mouth curved. “Pretty much. But if you decide to meet her, she can share more with you, and we can discuss with Firestride how much you can know.”

“Did Nav tell Firestride about me?”

Jasper took a deep breath and let it out slowly before he answered. “No. The picture is of Kyllian and Firestride together.”

That mattered enough that I looked at him before I looked at the screen. “Nobody knows?”

“Nobody knows Carly found you except the people we already talked about.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure why the secrecy still felt necessary when the people in those photographs were actively searching for me. Maybe because once they knew, something would change that couldn’t be put back. Right now, I was still allowed to think about them without their thoughts or expectations reaching me.

Jasper opened the first image. A man filled the screen. For several seconds, I did nothing except stare. I had expected some kind of recognition. Not a memory, because that would have been ridiculous, but maybe the instant certainty people talked about when they discovered biological relatives after years apart.

The shape of his face would match mine. His eyes would make something click. I would somehow look at this stranger and know him. Instead, I saw a man. Older than Jasper. Harder around the face. The kind of man I would have assumed belonged to one of the motorcycle clubs even without the cut visible in the photograph.

“This is Angel?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

My biological father.

The words didn’t fit the face any better than the name did. I grabbed Jasper’s hand and pulled the phone closer anyway, studying details I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had seen the picture yesterday. His eyes. His mouth. The lines around them. I looked for myself so desperately that after a while I couldn’t tell whether anything I thought I recognized was real or something my mind created because I wanted proof. Jasper stayed quiet beneath me. That helped. If he had said, You have his eyes, or Look at your nose, I might have latched onto it because I needed something to make the connection easier. Instead, he let me decide what I saw.

“I don’t know,” I murmured.