Chapter 60
CHAPTER SIXTY
Angel
I’d stopped keeping track of motel rooms somewhere around the third state.
They all looked the same after enough time on the road.
Cheap curtains that never closed right, mattresses I wouldn’t have slept on if exhaustion hadn’t made the decision for me, and a table covered with scraps of information that had led absolutely fucking nowhere.
My daughter disappeared before I barely knew she existed. Eighteen years later, I was searching for a woman whose face I had never seen, who might not even know the name I was using to find her. Every lead ended the same way.
Nowhere.
Steele had spent years lying about Kay and the girls, and whatever happened to my daughter after she was taken had buried her deeper than I knew how to dig.
My phone started vibrating across the table, rattling against a stack of papers. I reached for it without much interest until I saw King’s name on the screen. He knew why I was out here. Unless he had something worth hearing, he usually left me the fuck alone.
“What?” I answered, dropping back into the chair.
King didn’t bother returning the greeting. “We found Kaitlyn.”
The room disappeared.
I stood so fast the chair crashed backward onto the floor, but I barely heard it hit. My fingers tightened around the phone while my heart hammered hard enough to hurt. “Where is she?”
“It’s not that simple, Angel.”
“The fuck it isn’t.” I started pacing the narrow space between the bed and the window because standing still suddenly felt impossible. “You just told me you found my daughter. Where the fuck is she?”
“She’s alive,” King said, his voice steady despite mine rising. “She’s safe.”
I stopped pacing. Those two words reached somewhere rage couldn’t.
Alive.
Safe.
I had tried not to imagine what finding Kaitlyn might actually mean.
Kyllian had remembered a baby girl but remembering her didn’t mean she had survived childhood.
Every time a lead went cold, the possibility that I was searching for a grave instead of a young woman had gotten harder to shove aside.
I sank onto the edge of the bed and rubbed my hand over my face. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“How?”
There was movement on his end of the call before another voice came faintly through the speaker. Grace. King must have had me on speakerphone. I didn’t care who the fuck heard me. I needed answers.
“Carly found her,” King explained. “She’s been going through the Society records Sienna left behind. She found a file on Kaitlyn Grace Ward.”
That name coming out of his mouth nearly stopped my heart again. Kyllian had been the first person to give it to me, standing in King’s clubhouse while I tried to understand that Kay had given birth to the baby I had spent years assuming was lost with her.
“What was in it?” I asked.
“Enough to trace what happened after she was taken.”
I closed my eyes. “Tell me everything.”
King was quiet for a second before he began.
“Knuckles contacted the Society because he wanted the baby to disappear. A man named Isaac Mitchell took the request, but he didn’t put Kaitlyn through the Society’s normal channels.
His brother and sister-in-law couldn’t have children, so Isaac arranged for them to adopt her. ”
My jaw clenched at Knuckles’ name, but I forced myself to stay quiet.
The bastard was dead.
“They adopted her?” I asked.
“As far as Carly can tell, yeah. Legal paperwork. New identity. They raised her as their daughter.”
I stared at the stained carpet beneath my boots as something painful twisted inside my chest. Another man had been her father.
He had watched her grow up, heard her first words, taught her things, probably threatened boys and bitched when she learned to drive.
Every moment that should have been mine belonged to a stranger.
Then another thought followed close behind it.
She had parents.
Whatever else I had lost, I knew someone had wanted my daughter enough to make her theirs.
“She hasn’t had an easy life, Angel.” King’s words cut through my thoughts.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Her parents died in a car accident.”
“Fuck.” The word came out under my breath.
“After that she went into foster care,” King continued. “That’s where the Society lost track of her. Carly found her. Once she had the original placement and the identity change, she kept following the paper trail.”
I stood again, unable to sit with the picture forming in my head. A little girl losing the only parents she knew, getting swallowed by a system while I existed somewhere in Arkansas without the first fucking clue she was alive. “What happened to her in foster care?”
King hesitated, and I immediately caught it. “Don’t fucking do that. You said Carly traced her. Tell me.”
“I’m telling you what I can.”
“That ain’t what I fucking asked.”
“No, it isn’t,” King snapped. “But before you forget who the fuck you’re talking to, she knows we found her. She knows who you are. She knows you and Banshee have been searching for her, and she told me exactly what I’m allowed to give you. I gave her my word.”
I wanted to put my fist through the wall.
Unfortunately, King’s word was one of the few things in our world I knew wouldn’t bend just because I threatened him.
That was the reason most of the Arkansas Chapter backed him when he finally made his move to take Steele’s place.
King didn’t fold because somebody got loud, and he didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep.
In our world, that counted far more than charm ever fucking did.
I forced myself to breathe through my nose. “What can you tell me?”
“Carly followed her through foster care. She eventually found a stable home again.” He paused again and I heard him exhale before he said, “She got pregnant at fifteen and had a baby.”
My head snapped up even though there was nobody in the room to look at. “She has a kid?”
“A son.”
I lowered myself back onto the bed, stunned by another piece of a life I hadn’t known existed. “I have a grandson.”
“The boy was adopted. He’s safe and being raised by people she chose.”
I didn’t know what the fuck to do with that information. I had spent all this time trying to find my daughter and had somehow found out I was a grandfather in the same damn phone call.
King continued before I could get lost in it. “Afterward, she was adopted again. She has a family. People who love her. Carly was able to follow all of that and confirm she’s Kaitlyn.”
“Then give me her fucking name.”
“No.”
My free hand curled into a fist. I hated him for being right almost as much as I hated that there was nothing I could do about it.
“Angel,” Grace said suddenly, her voice cutting through the speaker. “Her name is Fiona DuBois.”
Everything inside me went still.
King swore under his breath. “Grace.”
But I barely heard him.
“He deserves to know, King.”
“DuBois?” I repeated, staring at nothing as the name settled into place. “As in Romeo fucking DuBois?”
“Yes,” Grace answered.
Memory hit hard and fast. Jasper DuBois had been a cocky Cajun bastard when he came into the Arkansas Chapter, smiling at anything with tits and acting personally offended if a woman didn’t smile back. I’d been the one who gave him the road name Romeo.
Now Fiona DuBois—his wife— was my daughter.
“She married Romeo?”
“Yes,” King said.
I dragged a hand over my face, trying to fit the man I knew together with the daughter I had never met. Then the only question that mattered pushed everything else aside.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit, King.”
“I honestly don’t know,” King replied. “When Carly identified her, I told Romeo to take Fiona and hide her until he heard from me. He did exactly that. He hasn’t told me where they went, and I haven’t asked.”
I stared at the papers scattered across the motel table. Ten minutes ago, they had been everything I possessed that might lead me to my daughter.
Now I knew her name.
And I knew her fucking husband.
And if Romeo wanted to disappear, I knew exactly which motherfucker would know where he went.
“I know where to get that fucking information.”
“Angel, don’t you fucking—”
I hung up on my president before he could finish.
I had a motherfucking Cajun to find.
The Bourbon Bar looked almost exactly the way I remembered it when I pulled my bike to the curb.
New Orleans had changed around it because New Orleans was always fucking changing, but Gator’s place still sat there like it owned the street.
I killed the engine, swung off the bike, and stared at the doors for a moment while the heat from the ride crawled beneath my cut.
I had spent the entire trip telling myself I only needed information.
That had been a fucking lie.
I needed to see her.
Maybe not talk to her. Maybe not touch her. I knew she had asked for time, and I understood what that meant. I just wasn’t sure understanding it was going to be enough to put my ass back on a motorcycle and ride away when my daughter was finally somewhere within reach.
The door opened before I reached it, and Juju stepped outside. His eyes moved from my face to my cut then back again before recognition came instantly.
“Well, shit.”
“Gator here?”
Juju glanced over his shoulder. “Boss.”
I walked past him before he could decide whether he planned to stop me.
The place was closed to the public, chairs still sitting upside down on a few tables while all six Bourbon Kings occupied different parts of the room.
Donut sat at the bar with a plate in front of him.
Worm had a laptop open two stools away. Braveheart leaned against the far wall, and Thore was doing something behind the bar.
Gator stood near the end of the counter.
The second he saw me, his expression changed.
Not surprise.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
That was all the confirmation I needed.
He slowly set down the glass in his hand. “Aw, hell. Whatever brought your ugly ass through my door, turn around and take it back outside.”