Chapter 7 – Drake
DRAKE
The night before Tate was shipping out for Marine Corps bootcamp, we ate dinner as a family.
Steak and potatoes.
Tate’s favorite.
Like me, he was simple and easy to please. We finished the meal with German chocolate cake and coffee. Olivia cried throughout the entire meal, sobbing into a cloth napkin. She ate barely more than a few bites, distraught over being separated from Tate again.
I scooped Olivia into my arms and carried her to the elevator with her brother in tow. We rode the elevator to the second floor and headed into Olivia’s bedroom. I set her on the bed and ran down the hallway to the bathroom, grabbing a bottle of pills and filling a glass of water.
Olivia leaned back on a stack of pillows, cradled in her brother’s arms. “I’m going to miss you. This totally sucks. Three months is a long time.”
“I know this is hard,” Tate said in a soothing tone. “And it blows they won’t let me call you all the time to check-in. But you have Drake now. He’s a good guy. Let him take care of you.”
I entered the room and sat on the bed beside her. “Take these.”
She stared at the pills I dumped into her palm. “What are they?”
“My mom calls them happy pills. They’ll help you sleep.”
She took the glass from my hand and gulped down the pills. “Thank you. I’m sorry for acting like a crazy person. It’s just... You don’t understand. I searched for my brother for years. We promised never to be apart from each other again.”
He was the reason she left a decent foster home and lived on the streets.
Olivia would rather have been homeless than spend another second without Tate.
I didn’t know how that felt, not until I brought them into my home and made them part of my family.
The thought of losing either of them, even after only a few days together, filled me with dread.
I covered Olivia’s hand with mine and smiled. “It’s okay, Liv. I get it. There’s no need to apologize.”
“I promise not to cry the entire time Tate’s gone.” She sniffed back more tears. “Please don’t send me away.”
“Never,” I said without hesitation, shocked by her words. “You’re part of my family now.”
“Did you get the DNA results yet?”
I shook my head. “Still waiting on the lab. I should hear something by tomorrow.”
“What happens if…” She paused, biting her lip. “Will the results change anything for you?”
“Regardless of the results, you and Tate are Battles now. This is your home. Everything I own is yours now.”
At that, her face lit up with a grin that touched her pretty blue eyes. “Thanks, Drake. You’re my hero.”
My mouth fell open at her confession. Even Tate seemed surprised, his eyes widening at his younger sister. Then, he tipped up his eyebrow at me in question.
We sat in silence for a while, tension lingering in the air. I already knew Olivia would be my downfall. She wiggled her way into my heart and carved out a place for herself no one else had before. My carefully erected walls came crashing down, ready to let her inside.
Olivia’s eyelids fluttered as she fought sleep.
The pills worked quickly for my mother. She practically lived on them when my father was alive.
He flaunted his mistress in her face. A few times, he even answered the phone while he was with one of his professional whores. My mom put up with a lot of shit.
I was glad he was dead.
Good fucking riddance.
After Olivia passed out, Tate followed me downstairs to the Battle Cave. The room had dozens of monitors, most of which flashed with code. My programs ran twenty-four hours a day, optimizing with the help of Lovelace.
Oversized monitors hung from the ceiling. To my right, there was a massive flat-screen television and a leather sectional couch, more than twice the size of the standard ones. Closed doors lined the far wall, where I kept private servers containing some of Lovelace’s code.
I also had a bedroom, though most nights I fell asleep holding my laptop on the couch. My sanctuary spanned the length of the house. Down here, I had everything I needed.
At the long oak bar, I grabbed the decanter and poured two glasses of scotch. Tate raised his drink and took a small sip. Unlike me. I gulped down the amber liquid, enjoying the burn as it slid down my throat. Licking my lips, I savored the taste.
“Liv will be okay,” I said to assure Tate. “Don’t worry about her while you’re gone. I’ll take care of her.”
“I know.” He patted my shoulder. “I just worry about her mental state. She seemed fine after I joined. This is what we talked about for months but—”
“She needs time to adjust. It’s a lot for her to handle all at once.”
Tate tipped the glass to his mouth and nodded.
Lovelace chimed with a new notification, the sound coming through the speakers.
“I’ll never get used to that,” Tate said, laughing, eyes pointed up at the ceiling. “What does she want?”
“I programmed her to alert me about important events, calls, or emails.”
I checked my cell phone and clicked on the email containing the DNA test results.
The wait was finally over.
I leaned away from Tate, turning my phone to the side to keep it from his view. Studying every line of the report, I committed the information to memory in awe. So my father had an affair with Tate’s mother. However, the report showed more than the genetic markers confirming our familial link.
The last bit of information stopped me dead in my tracks. I had asked the lab to compare our DNA but never expected this outcome. The data did not lie.
Tate deserved to know, so I blurted out, “We’re half-brothers.”
“What?” Tate snapped his head to me, speaking through a mouth full of popcorn. “Did you hear from the lab?”
I nodded, gripping the phone for support. “The results are conclusive. We share twenty-five percent of our DNA. That means we’re half-siblings.”
A slow grin spread across his face. Overcome with relief and joy, he threw his arms around me. He let out what sounded like a sob as we hugged, and then quickly pulled away.
“What about Liv?”
I shook my head. “She’s not my sister.”
Tate narrowed his eyes at me as if reading the lie on my face. “What are you not telling me, Battle?”
I closed the Mail app on my phone and sighed. “It’s nothing.”
“Bullshit,” Tate snapped and grabbed the phone from my hand. “You promised not to hide anything from me.”
Nerves coursed through my veins, making my hands tremble and sweat. We hadn’t known each other long, but Tate just understood me. He sniffed out my deception like a human lie detector and saw right through my act.
As he read the email, I waited for him to catch on to what I saw so clearly. But Tate didn’t understand the data. He scanned it twice before he glanced at me and shrugged.
“I don’t get it. What am I looking at?”
“Boring scientific data,” I said to move on from this conversation, hoping he would give up.
Of course, Tate being a giant pain in my ass, kept probing me. “Tell me. I can handle it.”
“Scroll down to the bottom of the email.”
He did as I requested, but still looked confused. So, I pointed at the section showing the DNA comparison to Olivia and Tate.
“You and Liv don’t share any DNA,” I said, and as the weight lifted off my shoulders, Tate’s chest deflated, and his shoulder sank.
“No,” he muttered, staring at the floor. “It’s not possible. Our mom said—”
“She lied,” I interjected. “Maybe she thought it was better this way. Or it’s possible my dad forced her to keep the secret.
When my PI looked into the past, he found no record of my father paying off your mother.
He didn’t leave a paper trail. But that wasn’t much of a surprise. I never expected to find one.”
“The man from my childhood… The one in the suit.” Tate scrubbed a hand across his jaw and groaned. “He was your father. I mean, our father. All this time, I wondered why, of all the people who came to the apartment, I remembered him. He stopped by on weekends. Sometimes, he spent the night.”
None of this surprised me. Dear old dad spent more time at the office and with his whores than with my mom and me. He acted as if he were only home to fulfill his duty. Maybe once a week, he would grace us with his presence.
Tate offered his hand to me. “Promise never to tell Liv.”
I shook his hand. “It’s our secret.”
“I’m serious, Battle.”
His facial expression switched from dark to scary in an instant. Tate had a way of flipping a switch on the fly, his moods shifting from one moment to the next.
“Regardless of what the results prove, Liv is still my sister. Nothing will ever change that.”
“Family isn’t measured just by blood,” I said, thinking about The Devil’s Knights, my brothers in arms.