Chapter 58
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Fiona
The pictures arrived just after breakfast.
I knew something had changed before Jasper said a word because he stopped halfway through rinsing his coffee cup and looked toward the burner phone laying on the counter.
It had buzzed once, nothing more, but the sound seemed unusually loud inside the cabin.
I stood near the little stove wiping crumbs from the counter and watched him dry one hand against his jeans before reaching for it.
His eyes moved over the screen, then lifted to mine, and my stomach tightened.
“King?” I asked.
Jasper nodded. “Yeah.”
I waited for him to tell me something had happened.
Another vehicle. Someone asking questions.
Sal finding a name. Anything that would pull us back into the uncertainty we had deliberately ignored for most of yesterday.
Instead, Jasper held the phone loosely in one hand and asked, “You still want the pictures?”
For one stupid second, I had forgotten I asked for them.
Then the names came back all at once.
Angel.
Banshee.
Kyllian.
I had spent most of yesterday trying not to think about what their faces might look like.
Every time I did, my mind created strangers—which was exactly what they were, except strangers weren’t supposed to share pieces of me.
Strangers weren’t supposed to remember the day I was born or spend years searching for someone with a name I no longer used.
My hand found Granny’s ring and turned it once around my finger.
“Yes,” I said, though my voice came out quieter than I intended. “I still want to see them.”
Jasper didn’t bring the phone to me immediately. He crossed the small kitchen instead, slid onto one of the chairs at the table, then held out his free hand. The gesture was so familiar now that I didn’t think about taking it. He pulled me onto his lap and wrapped his arms around me tightly.
Securely.
He was my rock, my foundation. Eleven months of getting to know each other through texts messages, random visits to Rosewood, and late-night phone calls and this man had become everything I needed.
“There are three,” he explained. “King had pictures of Angel and Banshee already. Nav provided the picture of Kyllian.”
“Why did Nav have a picture of her?”
Something crossed over his eyes—something that looked like he didn’t want to tell me.
“He didn’t. He got it from a man called Firestride. He’s Kyllian’s old man.”
I frowned. “How does Nav know him?”
Jasper hesitated before reaching for my hand. “That’s club business, Cher. There are gonna be times I know things I can’t tell you because they belong to the club or another brother. I won’t ever use that to hide somethin’ that affects you, but I can’t give you every secret I’m trusted with.”
I didn’t particularly like it, but I understood the difference. “So all I get is that Nav knew who to ask? Even though Kyllian is my sister?”
His mouth curved. “Pretty much. But if you decide to meet her, she can share more with you, and we can discuss with Firestride how much you can know.”
“Did Nav tell Firestride about me?”
Jasper took a deep breath and let it out slowly before he answered. “No. The picture is of Kyllian and Firestride together.”
That mattered enough that I looked at him before I looked at the screen. “Nobody knows?”
“Nobody knows Carly found you except the people we already talked about.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure why the secrecy still felt necessary when the people in those photographs were actively searching for me.
Maybe because once they knew, something would change that couldn’t be put back.
Right now, I was still allowed to think about them without their thoughts or expectations reaching me.
Jasper opened the first image. A man filled the screen.
For several seconds, I did nothing except stare.
I had expected some kind of recognition.
Not a memory, because that would have been ridiculous, but maybe the instant certainty people talked about when they discovered biological relatives after years apart.
The shape of his face would match mine. His eyes would make something click.
I would somehow look at this stranger and know him.
Instead, I saw a man. Older than Jasper.
Harder around the face. The kind of man I would have assumed belonged to one of the motorcycle clubs even without the cut visible in the photograph.
“This is Angel?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
My biological father.
The words didn’t fit the face any better than the name did.
I grabbed Jasper’s hand and pulled the phone closer anyway, studying details I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had seen the picture yesterday.
His eyes. His mouth. The lines around them.
I looked for myself so desperately that after a while I couldn’t tell whether anything I thought I recognized was real or something my mind created because I wanted proof.
Jasper stayed quiet beneath me. That helped.
If he had said, You have his eyes, or Look at your nose, I might have latched onto it because I needed something to make the connection easier. Instead, he let me decide what I saw.
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
His thumb moved over my hip. “Know what?”
“If I look like him.” I frowned at the photograph, annoyed by the disappointment that followed. “I thought I would know.”
“Why?”
I glanced at him. “Because he’s my father.”
“Biologically.”
The distinction landed softly instead of defensively. I looked back at Angel’s face. “I know.”
The man who had been my father was dead.
That hadn’t changed yesterday when Jasper gave me another man’s name.
Dad was still the man whose coffee I remembered smelling in the mornings, the man whose shoulders had once seemed high enough to touch the ceiling when he carried me. Angel was something else.
I didn’t know what yet.
“He searched for my mother for two years,” I said, mostly because that was the only thing I knew about him that felt personal.
“Yeah. He loved her.”
“And then when he found out she had the baby, he started looking for me.”
Jasper nodded. “Immediately. He was given the president’s patch when Steele died.
He turned it down and asked to go nomad so he could search for you.
He had nothin’, Ma Belle. Nothin’ but the word of a girl he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years who told him you were born and gave him a name. He’s still searchin’, Cher.”
I stared at Angel a little longer. That mattered more than whether we shared a nose.
“Next one.”
Jasper swiped the screen. Banshee appeared.
My uncle. Even thinking the word made me uncomfortable.
Not bad exactly. Just premature, like wearing shoes that hadn’t been broken in yet.
Uncle belonged to someone who showed up at birthdays or annoyed you at Thanksgiving.
It didn’t belong to a biker in Nebraska who didn’t know the niece he was searching for had spent time in the same world as him without either of them realizing it.
“This is Banshee?”
“Yeah.”
I took the phone from Jasper this time. There was something different about looking at Banshee. With Angel, I had immediately searched for resemblance because biology was the only connection between us that I understood. With Banshee, I kept thinking about Kaylah. His little sister.
My mother.
“He looked for her for years.”
Jasper pressed his chin onto my shoulder. “Yeah. He only stopped this year.”
“When he found out she died,” I whispered to myself. Jasper’s arms tightened around me.
I wondered how many times Banshee had imagined finding Kaylah.
Whether he had pictured some reunion where she yelled at him for taking so long or hugged him until neither of them could breathe.
I wondered what it had done to him to eventually find answers instead of the sister he wanted.
Then I thought about what Jasper told me yesterday.
Banshee was still looking for Kaylah’s daughter.
Me.
Guilt pressed uncomfortably into my chest.
“He doesn’t know,” I whispered.
Jasper knew exactly what I meant. “No.”
“He’s still looking.”
“Yeah.”
I rubbed my thumb along the edge of the phone. “And I’m sitting here looking at his picture while he has no idea I’ve already been found.”
Jasper looked up at me. “That botherin’ you?”
“I don’t know.”
Which was becoming my answer to nearly everything.
I stared at Banshee’s face and tried to imagine him getting a phone call that told him the search was over.
Did people cry when they heard something like that?
Did bikers? Would he want to get on a motorcycle and ride straight to Louisiana?
Would King have to physically stop him? The thought made my stomach tighten.
“I’m not ready for him to come here.”
“Nobody’s comin’ here.”
“I know.” I looked at Jasper. “But if he knows, what if he wants to?”
“Wantin’ ain’t the same as gettin’.”
The certainty in Jasper’s voice eased something inside me. He wasn’t threatening Banshee. He was reminding me that my biological family didn’t automatically get access to me simply because we had finally found one another.
I handed the phone back. “Kyllian.”
Jasper’s gaze held mine for half a second longer before he changed the image. My sister’s face appeared. Everything inside me went quiet. I reached for the phone again without thinking, bringing it closer.
Kyllian. Alive. That one word suddenly mattered more than anything else.
I studied her more carefully than I had the men. Her hair, her eyes, the shape of her smile. Again, I searched for myself and again I wasn’t sure what I found. Were there similarities? Or was I looking for any connection to the woman in the picture I could find?
Photographs could lie in strange ways, especially when you stared at them hoping they would tell you something they couldn’t. But Kyllian was not just biology. Kyllian remembered. That changed everything.
“She saw me.”
Jasper didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quiet. “Yeah.”