Page 357 of Romeo

I stopped pacing. Those two words reached somewhere rage couldn’t.

Alive.

Safe.

I had tried not to imagine what finding Kaitlyn might actually mean. Kyllian had remembered a baby girl but remembering her didn’t mean she had survived childhood. Every time a lead went cold, the possibility that I was searching for a grave instead of a young woman had gotten harder to shove aside.

I sank onto the edge of the bed and rubbed my hand over my face. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“How?”

There was movement on his end of the call before another voice came faintly through the speaker. Grace. King must have had me on speakerphone. I didn’t care who the fuck heard me. I needed answers.

“Carly found her,” King explained. “She’s been going through the Society records Sienna left behind. She found a file on Kaitlyn Grace Ward.”

That name coming out of his mouth nearly stopped my heart again. Kyllian had been the first person to give it to me, standing in King’s clubhouse while I tried to understand that Kay had given birth to the baby I had spent years assuming was lost with her.

“What was in it?” I asked.

“Enough to trace what happened after she was taken.”

I closed my eyes. “Tell me everything.”

King was quiet for a second before he began. “Knuckles contacted the Society because he wanted the baby to disappear. A man named Isaac Mitchell took the request, but he didn’t put Kaitlyn through the Society’s normal channels. His brother and sister-in-law couldn’t have children, so Isaac arranged for them to adopt her.”

My jaw clenched at Knuckles’ name, but I forced myself to stay quiet.

The bastard was dead.

“They adopted her?” I asked.

“As far as Carly can tell, yeah. Legal paperwork. New identity. They raised her as their daughter.”

I stared at the stained carpet beneath my boots as something painful twisted inside my chest. Another man had been her father. He had watched her grow up, heard her first words, taught her things, probably threatened boys and bitched when she learned to drive. Every moment that should have been mine belonged to a stranger.

Then another thought followed close behind it.

She had parents.

Whatever else I had lost, I knew someone had wanted my daughter enough to make her theirs.

“She hasn’t had an easy life, Angel.” King’s words cut through my thoughts.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Her parents died in a car accident.”

“Fuck.” The word came out under my breath.

“After that she went into foster care,” King continued. “That’s where the Society lost track of her. Carly found her. Once she had the original placement and the identity change, she kept following the paper trail.”

I stood again, unable to sit with the picture forming in my head. A little girl losing the only parents she knew, getting swallowed by a system while I existed somewhere in Arkansas without the first fucking clue she was alive. “What happened to her in foster care?”

King hesitated, and I immediately caught it. “Don’t fucking do that. You said Carly traced her. Tell me.”

“I’m telling you what I can.”