Chapter 9
Krys waited two hours for a hot shower. It took a while to get the grit out of his hair, and he scrubbed until it was squeaky clean. Afterward, he dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt. It was too rainy to go anywhere or do outside chores.
Thunder rumbled, and from the second floor, he enjoyed the sound of the rain hammering against the roof.
The river wasn’t far. Even though their house wasn’t in a flood zone, they often talked about safety in the event of a fire, tornado, or flood.
Those were the things you could prepare for, but in a pack, it was the unexpected threats that kept him awake at night.
It was so damn quiet he wondered if everyone had gone to sleep.
Maybe they were hanging out downstairs. The pack often shifted together so their animals could bond, all except Cecilia.
She once shifted inside by accident, and their attempt to lead her horse out the door was the funniest shit Krys had ever seen.
Krys’s wolf got along fine with the animals in the pack. It was people that made him edgy and violent. He’d grown to accept his packmates over the years, but they kept their distance from him. Tak was the only one who trusted his wolf, and that was all that mattered.
After putting on deodorant, he headed to Cleo’s room. She was in the second hall on the right after his. Good thing she wasn’t any closer for all the paint fumes filling the hallway.
He glanced at the horseshoe hanging above her door. Virgil had hung it there when it used to be Mercy’s room, and nobody had bothered taking it down.
Before opening Cleo’s door, he gave a light knock.
Remnants of Mercy still remained. The butterfly lamp by the bed, the round papasan chair in the far left corner, the cloudscape painted on the wall behind the bed.
There was very little of Cleo’s fingerprint in here other than clothes and the giant TV.
Krys peered behind the door at Cleo sitting on the stepstool, a paintbrush in hand and a faraway look in her eyes. Small paint cans in varying colors were lined up on the plastic tarp beneath her, each with dollops of another color where she had put the brush in without cleaning it enough.
Her mural was like a five-year-old’s drawing with shapes of people and animals.
Krys pulled a chair out from her desk and sat down. “Who are they?”
“I’m trying to paint the pictures in my head, but it looks stupid.” She took a small brush and painted a brown streak across her drawing. “This was a dumb idea. I’m not good at it.”
“As long as you’re having fun, who cares? This is your room, kid. You can splatter the paint everywhere or make a rainbow. Hell, draw a giant circle if you want to.” He glanced at the TV. “Or you could paint that whole wall black and make stars.”
“I don’t want to paint that wall. The TV blocks it, and if I hate it, I’ll have to stare at it every night.”
“Good point.” He swiveled his chair back and forth. “You don’t need to be Michelangelo. If it sucks, you can always paint over it.”
She carefully placed the lids on each paint can.
Krys hated seeing her so discouraged over a trivial thing, so he got up and flipped off the overhead light, which left the butterfly lamp on the bedside table casting cool shadows on the walls.
After locating the remote control, he sat on the bed, fluffed a pillow behind him, and turned on the TV.
“Open the door all the way. Let’s watch a movie while the fumes air out.
Didn’t Mercy tell you to keep the door open? Jesus.”
“Nobody told me anything.”
“When you start up again, put a fan in the doorway so it’s blowing the air out. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Since Cleo was a night owl, he sometimes dropped in and watched TV to keep her company. Occasionally Melody or Cecilia wandered in and joined her. Being together strengthened bonds.
Krys passed her the remote after she sat on his right and drew up her knees. “Hope you don’t have paint on your clothes.”
“Too late now,” she murmured.
After she picked a movie about Roman soldiers wielding swords on a battlefield, Krys pondered whether he should have this conversation. Tak might get pissed, but it didn’t seem right keeping secrets from her about her own life.
“Do you ever wonder about your real family?” he asked, gently broaching the topic.
“I don’t know.”
“I never had a grandfather. Always thought it would be cool to have one, but he died a long time ago. The other one—well, nobody really knew who he was. I had one grandmother, but she wasn’t a nice lady.”
What the fuck am I rambling about? he thought.
Nothing would stoke fear about a family reunion like illustrating his dysfunctional relationships.
“You remember that old guy who used to live here?” she asked.
“Afram? Eden’s father?”
“He was kinda like a grandpa.” She picked at a speck of dried paint on her knee. “Sometimes when you guys went swimming, we used to talk. He didn’t bug me with a lot of questions. We played checkers. He was really nice.”
Cleo had never admitted that before. He remembered how she was locked away in her room at that time. Afram died, and nobody thought to have a conversation with Cleo, since they didn’t realize they knew each other that well.
“I guess it hurt like hell when he died,” he said, offering sympathy.
Her bottom lip quivered. “It’s not fair. He was really nice.”
“Yeah. Life ain’t fair.” That seemed like the perfect segue. Krys chose his words carefully so as not to turn her against anyone. “You know we’ve never given up looking for your family. It would be selfish if we did.”
She quietly stared at the TV screen with those big, inquisitive eyes. Cleo never ignored people. She was always listening, always processing.
“There’s a potential lead. I don’t have details, but Montana’s looking into it. We’ll know more soon.”
Her countenance hardened.
“Hey, this is something you have to face. Even if this doesn’t pan out, we might get lucky and find them someday. You need to be ready for that.”
“Lucky?”
“Yeah, lucky. How do you think Hope and Tak would feel if someone stole Jasper? Even if he found a new home, don’t you think they’d always be his parents?”
That was the best way he knew how to put it, one that also helped him grapple with this difficult reality.
She shrugged. “I guess.”
He mussed her hair a little. “It won’t do any good to worry about something that hasn’t happened, but finding your family isn’t a bad thing, kid. You’ll always be ours, even if you belong to someone else.”
Cleo curled up and rested her head and arms over his thighs. For the first time in longer than he could remember, tears stung his eyes, and he looked away so she wouldn’t see. He knew in that moment he’d go to the ends of the earth for her.
“I guess it’s not so terrible that everyone wants me,” she finally said. “Better than before.”
His eyebrows gathered in the middle. “Before?”
“When I was in that room.”
He stared at her ear, her sloped nose, her long lashes as she watched the television. Cleo never talked about the lab with anyone.
“They treated me like nothing. I was just ‘that girl’—a lab rat for their experiments.”
“Do you know what they did?”
She shrugged. “They wanted my eggs. They probably took ’em all, like what we do with the chickens.”
That explained the scar on her lower belly.
They had quietly speculated why she had it.
Salem said her organs were intact, so they must have gone in the barbaric way to get to her eggs.
Thinking back to how disorganized that medical lab was, they probably had no clue how to collect them.
Either that or they didn’t care and thought cutting open a little girl was an acceptable means.
It made him wish he could jump in a time machine and make those men suffer a little longer.
“I hated them,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
“I tried to escape before you came along. They got mad and chopped off my hair with a knife. They said next time I acted up, it would be a finger.”
“They got what they had coming. They’re dead.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
Krys sighed at the weight of feeling helpless.
“Can I still visit?” she asked, her voice as small as how he felt in that moment.
“Yeah, kid. If we get lucky and find your real parents, I’m sure Tak will work it out. We’ll keep this room empty. How’s that? When you’re old enough, you can come hang out in the summer if you want. We’re still your pack, and this is your home. Got it?”
She nodded and scooted down to his knees.
He reclined his head against the headboard and reflected on how she had no memory of childhood.
No memory of her parents scooping her up in their arms and making her feel safe.
Now she was faced with an uncertain future and torn between the two places where she belonged.
While he wanted this to be another dead end, that would mean she’d never go back home to her real family—to people who loved her. She deserved that more than anyone.
Krys wanted to stroke his hand over her head the way her mother probably did when she was little, but affection didn’t come naturally, so he watched the war movie, his thoughts as distant as hers must have been.