Page 348 of Romeo

Jasper looked up at me. “That botherin’ you?”

“I don’t know.”

Which was becoming my answer to nearly everything. I stared at Banshee’s face and tried to imagine him getting a phone call that told him the search was over. Did people cry when they heard something like that? Did bikers? Would he want to get on a motorcycle and ride straight to Louisiana? Would King have to physically stop him? The thought made my stomach tighten.

“I’m not ready for him to come here.”

“Nobody’s comin’ here.”

“I know.” I looked at Jasper. “But if he knows, what if he wants to?”

“Wantin’ ain’t the same as gettin’.”

The certainty in Jasper’s voice eased something inside me. He wasn’t threatening Banshee. He was reminding me that my biological family didn’t automatically get access to me simply because we had finally found one another.

I handed the phone back. “Kyllian.”

Jasper’s gaze held mine for half a second longer before he changed the image. My sister’s face appeared. Everything inside me went quiet. I reached for the phone again without thinking, bringing it closer.

Kyllian. Alive. That one word suddenly mattered more than anything else.

I studied her more carefully than I had the men. Her hair, her eyes, the shape of her smile. Again, I searched for myself and again I wasn’t sure what I found. Were there similarities? Or was I looking for any connection to the woman in the picture I could find?

Photographs could lie in strange ways, especially when you stared at them hoping they would tell you something they couldn’t. But Kyllian was not just biology. Kyllian remembered. That changed everything.

“She saw me.”

Jasper didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quiet. “Yeah.”

I swallowed. “She knew me before I was Fiona.”

The thought had followed me since yesterday but saying it made the enormity of it settle deeper. Kyllian had known a version of me I couldn’t remember. She had heard Kaylah call me Kaitlyn Grace. She had been there at the beginning, before Isaac, before my parents, before Fiona Mitchell existed. There were things about me that only she might know. Tiny things. Useless things. Things I suddenly wanted more than I could explain.

“Do you think she remembers what I was like?”

Jasper frowned slightly. “As a baby?”

I nodded. “Did I cry all the time? Was I quiet? Did Kaylah hold me a certain way because it was the only thing that made me stop? Stupid stuff.”

“Ain’t stupid.”

“It kind of is.”

“No.” Jasper reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s your beginnin’. You’re allowed to want it.”

My eyes burned. I looked down at Kyllian again. “She might know.”

“She might.”

That possibility frightened me almost as much as it comforted me. Because getting those answers meant speaking to her. And speaking to her meant she would become more than a photograph.

I set the phone down. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

Jasper didn’t ask what this meant. Instead, he pushed the phone farther away and held me closer. “Then don’t.”

I stared at him. “That simple?”

“Yep.”