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I’d been stupid to think it could be anything else.
17
REBEL
Kara hadn’t left Fang’s room since I’d tucked her into his bed the first night she’d arrived here. She’d gotten up to use the bathroom but hadn’t showered. She’d flat-out refused to go out into the common rooms, cowering whenever one of the guys got too loud or too close to her door.
I had spent hours watching over her, whenever I wasn’t out searching for the other women and the baby. I’d brought her food and drinks, and if I wasn’t there, I’d had Queenie take my place because she was the next best thing to a mother.
But the food all sat untouched on the bedside table, and Queenie had been forced to take it away again.
“You have to eat, Kara,” I warned her again, wondering if this was how Vaughn and Kian and Fang had felt when I’d been so low I’d stopped eating too. If it was, I should apologize, because it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Worry gnawed away at my insides, making me not want to eat either.
Trying to set a good example, I picked up half the chicken sandwich Queenie had brought her for dinner.
“It’s nice,” I told the back of Kara’s head, since she refused to roll over and face me. “Queenie makes the best chicken. Her Southern fried stuff is my favorite. But she makes all sorts of food. Ice cooks too, but his meals are more like steak and burgers.”
She didn’t acknowledge that I’d spoken. I sighed. Clearly, the way through to her wasn’t with mindless food chatter. I chewed the sandwich and decided to just play my ace card. Beating around the bush had never got me anywhere. “Tell me about your daughter.”
Kara tensed up. “Why would you ask me that? It’s cruel.”
Maybe it was, but she was scaring me. I was truly beginning to think she was just going to lie in bed until she died. The worst part was, I knew how that felt. I’d never been anyone’s big sister. I didn’t know what that role was supposed to be, but if it had been Bliss lying in that bed, this was what I would have done for her. So it was what I did for Kara.
“What does she look like? She’s my niece. I want to know.”
Kara flipped over to glare at me.
I gave her a small smile. Just her facing me was better than her lying there, staring at the wall. “Please? I’ve never had a niece before.”
Kara bit her lip, tears filling her brown eyes. But she slowly sat up, leaning back against the headboard with a pillow shoved behind her. Her bottom lip trembled. “She’s so beautiful. She has these big eyes that just stared into mine all the time. They’re kind of a murky color at the moment, not blue or green but not really brown either. My mama used to say my eyes were like that until I was a few months old, and then they went brown. I hope hers are the same as mine. Not like…his.”
“Caleb’s?”
She nodded.
I reached out for her hand and squeezed it. “Even if they aren’t the same shade as yours, those eyes are hers. Not his. Does she have hair?”
Kara stroked her fingers absently over the quilt, rubbing it like it was her daughter’s head. “A little bit. It’s blond.” She glanced at me curiously. “My hair was blond when I was a baby, and then it went dark as I got older. Was yours the same?”
My heart squeezed. She was searching for a connection between us. “Yes. My mom loved it because hers was bottle blond and she used to say we were twins. Mine got dark by the time I was about ten, though. I dyed it blond once in my twenties, assuming I could pull it off because I had as a kid…yeah, not so much.”
Kara smiled at that. “I was never allowed to dye my hair.”
I cocked my head to one side. “So you never put green streaks through your hair during your emo phase?”
Kara screwed up her face. “My what?”
I chuckled. “You never had an emo phase? My God, you’re such a baby. Maybe your emo phase is still yet to come. Don’t worry, little sister. I can guide you through it. You can borrow all my black, ripped-up band T-shirts, and I have new eyeliner sent to my house monthly. I’m never in short supply.”
She cast a glance down at my early 2000s Fall Out Boy concert tee. “I’ve never heard of that band.”
I gaped at her. “What about Paramore? All Time Low? Good Charlotte?”
“Are they all singers too?”
“Oh my God. What music do you like then?”
Kara lifted a shoulder. “There’s some church hymns we sing, but other than that, I never really listened to music when I was back at the farm. I’ve been listening to the radio since I left, but I don’t know any of the singers yet.”
