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“Is that what your mother told you?” he asked, looking a little taken aback. “I’ve never been an addict, and I wanted to stay in contact with you.”
“She never told me anything, actually,” I replied. “The most I ever heard about you was recently when she told me how you met and told me that she stole from you.”
“She stole? What?” he asked.
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “You didn’t realize it was missing?”
His face grew hard like stone and his eyes went flat black. “That was her? Shit.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I thought it was my assistant. I, uh, fired him,” he said, glancing over at Amara. She grimaced, and I realized his assistant was probably six feet under after that. My mom had inadvertently gotten somebody killed.
“Sorry, it was Mom,” I said. “Not that it did much good, we weren’t exactly rich while I was growing up. I think most of it went to her family.”
“I wonder why she didn’t keep any of it for you,” my father said, and then snapped out of it. “It doesn’t matter, really. All I knew was that she took you away and wouldn’t let me see you. With my involvement fighting the Organization, I thought it was the safest place for you to be.”
“But you found out how wrong you were, didn’t you?” Ryker interjected. “You shouldn’t have left her alone like that, the things they did to her.”
“I’ve heard, and for that I’m terribly sorry indeed,” my father said.
He was sincere about it, too. I could see the apology painted across his face and the pain of his guilt dragged him down, making his shoulders droop.
He was an attractive man, if I was evaluating him as somebody I passed on the street. His hair was dark brown, almost black, and he had silver streaks at the temples.
His eyes were dark brown like mine, but he had bright emerald flecks along the iris that were different than my amber.
His face was lean and masculine, and his body was tall and muscled, but not like my guys. Not like the Kings or Ryker. He’d be a soccer player, not one into American football and the physical blows of the sport that it entailed.
He moved with an animal elegance that I liked to think I had inherited and he had that weird, dark edge to him that I definitely had always wondered about in myself. Mom was sunny most of the time, so was Nat. I was the odd one out with that particular trait.
I was fascinated by him, but I was also angry that he’d given up on me that easily. That he’d freed me from the prison but made me wait before coming to see me.
“I know you’re sorry,” I said. “But I don’t know how much I want to forgive just yet. You let my mother take me away from you and you sent me away from the prison without telling me a damned thing about you. I’ve been waiting for this moment, so we could talk, but maybe it’s too late.”
“I understand,” he said and bowed his head. “But if I might plead my case with you, I believe you would understand why I’ve done the things I’ve done.”
He had a deep, soothing voice that had a powerful quality. It was hypnotic, and I wanted him to give me a reason to not hate him.
So I said, “I want to hear about it. I want you to convince me that you’re worth listening to.”
“Can we go somewhere to talk on our own?” he asked, glancing at my guys who were doing their best to not look like they were eavesdropping on every word.
“This is fine, anything we need to say can be said here,” I told him. “I’m sure you tell Amara everything, and these four will hear it all from me anyhow.”
“Okay,” he replied, a flicker of confusion that was gone as fast as it appeared. He was excellent at hiding his emotional reactions, another thing I like to think I inherited from him. “What would you like to know? I’ll tell you anything.”
I took a deep breath and cleared my head, tried to unravel the tangle of thoughts inside, and decided what I wanted to know first.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “Why did you leave us? Mom said you left her in New York and didn’t come back.”
“I was called away on family business,” he said. “I wanted to return to you two, but the family pressure I felt was intense.”
“We were your family, why didn’t we go with you?”
“It was too dangerous,” he said.
“Why?” I demanded, losing some control of my temper. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream in his face to tell me everything until his entire life story spilled out of him.
