9. Five Days Until Bonding
Chapter nine
Five Days Until Bonding
Laurel
“Go on, Stanson,” Carr Ashford urges. “Tell her.”
I twist in my seat and find him standing beside his son, the two of them so similar it’s frightening. Like they belong in a dictionary under the words before and after.
“My dad’s name is Daniel,” I correct, but as the words leave my mouth, my stomach freefalls. Carr didn’t say Stanson like he was guessing. The name rolled off his tongue way too easily. Like he’d said it before.
Carr ignores me, all his focus on my dad. “How was Italy?” He smiles, but it’s fake pleasant. “Eat any good pizza?”
My dad pales. “Carrson.”
“Not Carrson anymore.” Carr places a firm hand on Carrson’s shoulder. From a distance, the gesture might look paternal. A father’s hand on his son.
Up close, it looks like ownership.
Carrson doesn’t move away, but every line of his body tenses under the touch.
“I have a son of my own,” Carr says.
“I see.” Dad’s gaze moves over Carrson’s face. “He looks just like you.” He clears his throat. “Or like you used to.”
“Wait, what?” I ask, struggling to catch up. “You know each other?”
All three men turn to look at me, two protective and one assessing.
Dad opens his mouth, but Carr answers first.
“Of course we know each other,” he says. “Stanson and I were boys together.”
My father doesn’t deny it. He only lowers his eyes, and the shame on his face tells me everything.
“Stanson Bellefleur. That’s his real name,” says Carr.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, the pieces of my life rearranging themselves.
Ashford University wasn’t bad luck. Ashfordville wasn’t a random town my father picked while drunk and grieving and desperate. The road that led me here wasn’t crooked by accident.
It was by design. My father coming home.
My last name isn’t even mine. Turner is a lie.
It’s Bellefleur.
Carrson sees the distress on my face. He moves a single step, or the beginning of one, but Carr’s hand tightens on his shoulder and stops him before he can reach me.
“Did Mom know?” The question scrapes out of my throat.
My father shakes his head once.
No.
The sting of that is sharper, that he lied to her, of all people. I always thought she knew him better than anyone. Now I picture him sitting across from her at dinner, laughing, touching her hand, building a marriage on top of a trapdoor she never knew was there.
Carr straightens. “That was a long time ago.”
“I remember it, though.” Dad’s voice is quiet, but a subtle stubbornness moves under it now. “How we used to play as children. You, me, and Lou. How is she? Louellen?”
At the sound of her name, Carr’s expression changes. A fleeting smile touches his mouth before sorrow chases it away.
“Three daughters,” he says. “All well.”
Dad reads between those lines. “But?” he prods.
The sharp corners of Carr’s shoulders round. “Tylerson. We lost him on a mission. Soviet Bloc. Lou, she…never really got over the loss.”
My father’s head falls forward, and the lines in his forehead deepen, giving me a glimpse of the man he’ll become in twenty, thirty years. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
The room thickens with sadness. Old names. Old losses. A history that existed before me and Carrson, before my father turned Stanson into Daniel.
“Becky?” Dad asks, continuing their conversation.
Carr pauses, weighing his answer.
“She goes by Rebecca now. She has one daughter, Samantha,” he says at last. “She’s risen to High Mother.”
Dad leans back in his chair, his fingers slipping from my knee. “You mean you chose her as a Mother? Let her g—”
“Well.” Carr snaps into action, curling his fingers at me in a get-up gesture. “As fun as this trip down memory lane has been, the children have to leave.”
The children.
Like Carrson isn’t standing there with his father’s hand on his shoulder. Like I’m not sitting right here, old enough to know that every adult in this room is a liar.
Carr sweeps his arm toward us, the gesture of a shepherd gathering an unruly flock. “They have preparations to make.” He looks right at my dad when he says it. “They’re to be bonded…and sealed.”
I hate Carr Ashford for that.
He could have left the sealing unnamed. He could have let my father believe the ceremony was only blood and vows. Instead, he makes sure Dad understands exactly what waits for me back at Ashford House.
All the color leaves my father’s face. His eyes fill, and when he takes my hand his grip is crushing. “I’m sorry, Laurel. I’m so sorry.”
What’s he apologizing for? Bringing me to The Order’s doorstep? Lying to me? To Mom? Or for whatever happened to him before he became the father I knew?
He looks up at Carr. “You have to protect her. Please. If you ever cared about me when we were young, then do this for me.”
Carr scowls. “You already spent that coin, Stanson. When you ran away and I didn’t come after you, even though everyone was calling for your punishment.”
My father’s shame gives way to anger. “Didn’t punish me?” His voice carries, drawing a few looks from the other patients. “You think I walked away with no consequences?”
Carr’s face smooths again. “You were allowed to live.”
Dad stands, the movement shaky enough that I reach for his elbow, but he waves me off. He’s fragile in ways that make me want to pull him back down, but there’s another man under the frailness now, one I don’t know. A stranger who stands with a straight back, his meekness vanished.
“What about my money?” he demands. “Millions of dollars my family earned. All taken when I left.”
Carr appears offended by the emotion in front of him. “You were removed from the path,” he says primly. “The Order took what was owed.”
“What was owed?” Dad laughs once, the sound harsh. “You took my inheritance. My future. Now you want my daughter too?” His lower lip quivers. “I don’t owe you her.”
Carr’s lips thin as if my father said blasphemy. “That’s exactly what you owe. The duty you’re trying to shirk.”
“No,” Dad protests. “Not her.”
“She’s Order-born,” Carr snaps. “Whether you had the courage to raise her that way or not, she belongs with us.”
For a wild, breathless moment, I think about escape. The kind Carrson and I talked about an hour ago, except this time we take my father with us. Just grab his hand and run.
But that’s a plan born out of panic and stupid hope, because the reality is that taking Dad might backfire and destroy all the progress he’s made.
The realization hurts, but recovery has rules.
It needs time to build, a fragile scaffolding that can’t survive being ripped apart just because I’m scared.
Even after everything Dad’s hidden from me, after all the lies, I still love him too much to ask him to run before he’s strong enough to stand.
A nurse hovers near the doorway, drawn by our raised voices. Her eyes move from my father’s pale face to my hand in his, then to Carr.
“Mr. Ashford. Good to see you. Hope Mr. Wainwright is well,” she says, and my attention snags on those names because no one introduced him and what does she mean Wainwright? That’s Thomson’s last name.
Carr gives her a courteous nod. “I’m afraid Mr. Turner is overwhelmed,” he says unruffled. “We’ll leave him in your care.”
“Laurel.” My father clings to my hand, and I look down at his fingers, struggling to reconcile that these are the ones that held mine and taught me to walk, the ones that gripped the dashboard in terror when I was learning to drive, also turned the doorknobs of Ashford House.
My voice cracks, so I swallow and try again. “It’s going to be okay, Dad.”
Carrson shakes his father’s hand off his shoulder and comes to me. His eyes stay on my face, asking all the questions he can’t say out loud with his father watching.
Can you leave him?
Can you survive this?
Carr comes over then. He faces my dad. “Stanson, there were…rumors about why you left, but I could never confirm. Were they…”
Dad’s shoulders hunch, all the progress I’ve seen in him dissolving in an instant. He nods once, then turns toward the window, staring through it with vacant eyes.
“Dad?” I whisper.
His breath shakes on the way in. He looks past my shoulder to Carrson.
“Take care of her,” he tells him.
“I will, sir.” Carrson’s mouth tugs up slightly. “Though she rarely needs my help.”
Dad sighs. “She’s always been that way.”
I go to him, wrapping my arms around him before I can think too hard about everything I need to ask.
His arms close around me, and I shut my eyes, breathing him in.
For once, there’s no alcohol clinging to his clothes.
He smells like coffee and laundry detergent and the father who used to drive me to school with a travel mug balanced between his knees.
“I love you,” I whisper.
“I love you too, Laurel.”
The nurse steps closer, giving us the kind of patient space that tells me she’s watched families say harder good-byes than this one. Dad releases me first.
Carrson’s hand finds the small of my back as we turn toward the door. I let him guide me out, even though every question Carr left hanging follows close behind us.
What did Dad run from? What did Carr hear? What other parts of my father’s life existed before he became mine?
At the doorway, I look back.
Dad’s standing by the window with the nurse beside him, his shoulders bent.
One last wave.
I leave him there.