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Gracie’s eyes widen, furrowing her brow. “Sounds sadistic to me.”
Sadistic? “She killed the guy to save my ass.” Not that I needed her help at that point.Shh… Keeping that to myself. “Besides, who else could she depend on? How many times have we seen raids go down at these places and the slavers go free and the women end up punished? How many times have we seen the women who have been trafficked put in jail? What were her choices? And even you can’t deny she’s got real potential.”
Gracie’s perfectly manicured eyebrows crash together. “To be adopted as a sister?” She shakes her head. “No. She’s rejected. She’s way too old.”
“She’s fifteen.”
“Possibly sixteen. We don’t adopt that late. Besides, the unit she’d be adopted into is already at capacity.”
“Fuck that. She saved my life.”
“Yes. You should be grateful and more careful. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to go through the trouble of giving her a psych eval, making sure no family is out there, and then washing her to make her look like a legit adoptee. No. She has too much history. Besides, I don’t need a psych eval to tell she’s messed up.”
That pisses me off. Cee is my save. She’s my hope. “Not all of us can be adopted from the cradle, Gracie. Some of us are used, abused, angry, and messed the fuck up.”
Crossing her arms, exposing cleavage and a lacy red bra totally at odds with her bland, black silk, button-down, she barks, “Don’t belittle me simply because I was adopted as an infant, Justice. You know what I’ve lost because of The Guild.”
I know. I also know that she has to stop using the past as an angry excuse to justify everything she does. Not that I’d know anything about that. “This isn’t about Cee’s qualifications. It’s about the fact that she’s the same age as Tyler.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t bring him up. Ever.”
I exhale frustration so hot I’m surprised I don’t see fire. How is it we can push each other’s buttons minutes after sitting down? I do it like it’s my job. But it’s not. She can deal with her own stuff, because, yeah, I got my own shit to deal with, too. “Look, Gracie, she asked. You know how rare that is. They never ask. And she’s determined. I saw it in her face. She’s not going to forget about us. It’s safer for The Guild to have her brought in.”
“Not if I M-erase her.”
I know, even as the rage overtakes me, that Gracie is beyond pressing my buttons; the suggestion is mean. I can’t even bring myself to believe Momma would allow erasing the memory of a fifteen-year-old. Still, I take the bait. Using the one word, I know will hurt her most. “You bit—”
Bam!Gracie slams her hands on the desk. “Don’t, Justice. I won’t put up with that word being uttered in my office.”
Caught in the middle of a sister squabble that includes a culture he can’t hope to understand and things he should know nothing about, Sandesh looks over and mouths,M-erase?
Clenching the seat’s arms, I do my best to control my voice. “Tell me what you have against her. Tell me why she can’t be brought in.”
Is it because you’re a traitor and secretly hate the family and the sister who loves you?
Grabbing a watermelon Jolly Rancher from the bowl on her desk, Gracie unwraps it quietly, expertly. The grandfather clocktick,tick,ticks the seconds away. She puts the candy in her mouth. “I’ve never encountered a rage like hers before. Not since…”
Her eyes shift away from me. Her face reddens.
She doesn’t want Cee here because she’s like me? Okay. That fucking hurts.
I press harder, trying to get at any hateful feelings she has toward me. “Yeah. I’m angry. I’ve always been. I punched you in the face the first time we met.”
A sad smile flits across her face. “Because I called you my sister. You told me your sister was dead then punched me.” She licks a red tongue across her lips. “That was different.”
“How? How is my childhood anger different from hers?”
As if pondering the question, she clicks the candy between her teeth, turns it over, sucks it back in. “Don’t you have enough, Justice? Isn’t getting first Tony and now Sandesh into The Guild enough? Now you want the kid indoctrinated, too?”
Indoctrinated? I drop my foot to the floor with a thud and sit forward, close enough to see how fast Gracie is breathing. “This isn’t about Cee. This is about Momma, our home, The Guild. You think you know better. You think Cee can do better than us.”
“Yeah. Fine.” She throws up her hands. “It’s about the way we were raised, and the way I was raised before my mom came. Being a Parish, having all that money, having your values and knowledge filtered through The Guild and the trauma of our sisters messes you up, but it’s different for me. I was freed, so I see things differently.”
I bite my lip. If I have to hear one more time about Gracie’s miraculous transformation into worldly woman and how the rest of us were sheltered for too long, I’m going to lose it. We needed that time being cocooned in the family to heal. She was adopted as a baby, not as an injured child or teen. She doesn’t understand.
I don’t say that, but I do hit back. “You can’t use your injury to injure others, Gracie. I’m sorry about John. I’m devastated about Tyler. I wish things had been different. But he left, he chose to get out, so stop blaming us.”
Working the candy in her mouth, Gracie glares like only a redhead with green eyes can—all spit and fire. “God, Justice, you really are the baby of our unit. Grow up. John would never have done that.”
