The hair on the back of my neck rose at his tone. I sent a thank you up that it wasn’t personally being directed at me.
“He was my brother, but that didn’t miraculously make him any different from the rest. He’s the one who left me on the side of the road.” I shrugged, glancing away. I’d never hidden what was done to me but it was still hard to talk about.
I had to tell the man I belonged with that half my colony had had a turn between my legs. There was no way to dress up the truth and make it sound pretty. It was what it was.
“So we need a plan, then. Do you know why David wants me back?” I smoothly redirected the conversation.
I could tell he wanted to push me on what I’d just confessed, but fortunately, he dropped it.
“David’s been looking for you for a long time, Pixie. You’ve just been left in the dark for way too fucking long.”
“Why has he been looking for me?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t expect him to know the answer, but I should have.
“You’re the spitting image of your mother, and he’s still hung up on her.”
I opened my mouth to respond, and then closed it, running a hand over my face. What the hell? “How do you know…you knew my mom?”
I didn’t know how that was possible. Maybe he was aware of who she was; I mean there, were only five years between us. He couldn’t have known her too well.
From what I’d been told, I was removed from my mother’s stomach without her having a choice in the matter.
The second I was cut out of her womb, she was left for dead on someone’s dining room table. It wasn’t a huge secret in The Order; it was a tale I’d heard numerous times. I was a black sheep born to be a whore. That’s what I was taught, and I was treated as such.
“Tell me how you two know each other. You and David.” I said after a beat when he didn’t answer me.
He cocked his head and tsked. “I thought you would have figured that out by now. Where do you think I came from, Cali?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I blanched and my stomach dropped. “What? No. No fucking way.” I vigorously shook my head back and forth, looking him over from head to toe.
He was covered in tattoos and built like a Greek god. He was the leader of the Savages, king of a cult. Men in The Order didn’t look like him and they sure as hell didn’t get to branch off like he did.
“You never wondered how Grimm knew exactly where the church by the lake was? The one where Azel held his meets?”
I stared at him long and hard and suddenly felt like I should have figured this out long ago.
It semi-explained the inverted cross tattooed under his eye that served as the official symbol for the Savages, why he had his own vendetta against David, and how they knew one another.
But even as the pieces clicked together, I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“H How did you get out? How did three of you get out at once? The Order never lets anyone go. Those who don’t follow David’s bullshit doctrine are immediately executed.”
“My father was told to get out, an
d he took me and Grimm with him. Cobra wasn’t part of it. That’s not where we met.”
His. Father.
I pulled in a quiet breath and softly let it out. I knew he wasn’t lying because that wasn’t his style. He just liked to spew facts in a not easily decipherable way.
There was a sleuth of missing details in what he was telling me, like how the hell they got to leave alive and why they were told to go in the first place.
I wasn’t going to push him about it, not when he didn’t push me about the Noah thing. Eventually though, he would be telling me all about it. He never spoke about his past or his parents, but he logically had to have come from somewhere. I knew he had a closet full of bones.
And now, with answers came so many more questions. And fucking shame.
I knew his reaction when I told him things was genuine, but knowing he was part of that world meant he was a little more keyed in to the inner workings than I thought.