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Reese blinked and silence descended the room.
At least until Sig exploded. “Nine? For fuck’s sake, had to have heard that wrong.” He turned to Autumn. “She say nine? Is my hearin’ fucked up?”
Autumn had covered her gaping mouth when Syn had said Maya’s age and at Sig’s question, she dropped it to answer, “Yes, that’s what I heard. Oh my God.”
“You don’t look… How old are you?” Reese asked, completely ignoring the men’s reaction.
Syn also did her best to ignore the wildfire burning around them and focus on what was important. “Twenty-three.”
“That’s…” Reese shook her head, clearly at a loss for words. Her reaction was one of many reasons she never told anyone she had a daughter. “That’s…”
“Fucked up, is what the fuck that is,” Deacon growled.
“Holy fuck,” Dodge muttered. “Holy motherfuckin’ fuck. You had to be… What? Fourteen when you had her?”
Syn nodded but concentrated on the attorney. Someone who might actually be able to help her.
“You were fourteen when you got pregnant?” Reese asked quickly as if she knew the room was on the verge of combusting.
Syn braced. “Thirteen.”
A pin dropping could have been heard.
Reese soldiered on as if she wore a flak jacket. “And the boy’s family?”
“Boy?” Syn asked. Fuck. She was hoping to avoid the inevitable.
“The boy… The baby’s father. I’m assuming it was someone about your age?” Reese closed her eyes and whispered, “Please say it was. That you were two kids… who didn’t know what you were doing and only made a mistake…”
Syn wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t want to focus on that. She wanted to focus on getting Maya back. Nothing more. The past couldn’t be changed but the future could. They needed to focus on the future.
Nothing could be done about the past. Besides get past it.
Talking about the details wasn’t doing that, it was making her relive it.
She didn’t want to do that. She didn’t.
She couldn’t.
“Does it matter who the father is?” Of course it did, but she wished to hell it didn’t.
“Well, yes, it matters. Will he fight for custody? Or fight keeping you from getting it?”
“Can he?” Syn asked Reese, not expecting that worry to be added to the rest of the pile. “I was only thirteen when I got pregnant. Isn’t that a crime?”
Dodge went so solid beside her, she thought he turned into a concrete statue. His fingertips dug into her neck. She winced and jerked her head enough for him to realize how hard he was pressing and he loosened his fingers. But what he didn’t do was remove them.
Reese’s face paled. “It depends, I guess. It would depend on his age and on the age of consent in whatever state it was where you got…” Air hissed out of her.
“What fuckin’ state allows thirteen-year-olds to get knocked up by a man?” Sig raged.
“None that I know of, Sig,” Reese assured him, “but this is not something I specialize in. I would have to check…”
“Was this in West Virginia?” Autumn asked gently.
Syn nodded.
Dodge released her neck and pulled the cell phone out of his back pocket and began to type quickly. His face was dark and stormy. As bad as Sig’s. He stared at his phone for a second, his eyes shifting across the screen and when he lifted his head, he gave Sig a look. “Sixteen.”
“Well, fortunately—and I hate to use that word in this case—that might help us,” Reese said.
“No,” Syn said.
All eyes landed on her.
“Why not?”
“I was told not to say a word to anyone about how I got pregnant. If I did, they threatened to give Maya away to another family and swore I’d never see her again. I don’t know if that was true or not since they lied about so many other things, but at the time I believed it. I knew if Sig could give me to some random family, they could do the same with Maya. It’s a risk I didn’t want to take and still don’t. I don’t want to lose track of her.” She glanced at Sig. “Like us. Look how long it took for us to find each other again.”
Her brother rubbed a tattooed hand over his mouth but said nothing.
“How did you get pregnant?” Dodge asked, his voice a dangerous rumble. “This guy wasn’t a teenager, was he? He was a goddamn adult?”
Syn pressed her hands over her eyes. She didn’t want to go down this fucking road. “It doesn’t matter,” she whispered.
“It fuckin’ does!” Sig roared. “It’s one thing for two teenagers to fuck up, it’s another when a fuckin’ adult man fucks a thirteen-year-old.”
“Rape,” Reese corrected him. “Not fucks. Rapes.”
Syn took a strained breath. This had been a mistake. She dropped her hands from her face and glanced up at Dodge. “I can’t…” The words got caught in her throat and she cleared it, shook her head, met his eyes and said, “I can’t. I have to go.”
