“Guess she felt you might need someone like me in your corner if your father took a keener interest in you, which he did.” Leaning back, she smoothed her palms down her thighs. “I doubt she would have jumped the gun if he hadn’t taken you.I got the sense I was meant to be her ace in the hole. But once Ithas had you, she initiated contact and paid for a retrieval.”
“Vipaidyou to save me?”
“Look at this from my perspective.” She bristled. “I get summoned to meet with a client who I know has been sniffing around, which, fair enough. Folks get twitchy about paying fees as high as mine. They want guarantees I’m worth it, that I can do as advertised, and it’s common for them to ask around about me.”
Curiosity at her line of work tickled the back of my mind, but I crushed it flat, waiting for her to reach the part where Vi had to pay her to rescue her own daughter. The look on my face must have said it all.
“Look, I’ve never been pregnant. Learning I have a kid? One who had been kidnapped? Not on my bingo card.”
“Wait.” I must have misheard. “Never been pregnant?”
“If she hadn’t already signed a contract with my handler, I would have turned around and gone home after she ambushed me like that.” Rub her thighs any harder and she might cause a spark and start a fire in her lap. “I’m not one to make excuses, but you need to understand something about Ithas and me.”
As much as I would rather scream and run the other way than sit and listen, I had come this far. “Okay.”
Damn it.
Too late to back out now. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need more ghosts haunting my past. But maybe the reason Lucia, who required financial enticement to be sitting here, was babbling like a brook was because she did. Like a pressure valve left rattling too long, she might be the one who craved the release. As herleft on a doorstepdaughter, I don’t know why that should matter to me, but she had saved me. Her ultimate motivations didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be hanging around for long, so what could it hurt to hear her out?
Other than me?
Sigh.
“I met Ithas sixty or seventy years ago. He introduced himself as Morgan Fain, a potential client, and had already paid a deposit to my handler by the time he approached me in a coffee shop.” She indicated her current level of cleanliness. “I’m a mercenary. Guess I should have led with that.” She tapped her fingers on her kneecaps. “I open portals to places I shouldn’t be, steal things that aren’t mine, and kill anyone who gets in my way.” A frown cut across her forehead. “You’re old enough for me to tell you this stuff, right?”
“Plenty old enough.” Laughter bubbled up but got stuck in my throat. “I lived on the streets with Matty and Josie for…a long time. If running with a gang didn’t send me to therapy, then I don’t think your job description is going to scar me, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“Oh, good. Not about living on the streets or running with a gang. I’m sorry you went through that.” She puffed out her cheeks. “I just don’t want to pile on, and I don’t know anything about kids.”
“I’m not a…” I chose not to argue the point. “Anyway, Ithas posed as a client?”
“He had a job for me. Simple in and out. He wanted to tag along, which is normally not my thing, but he was willing to pay for the privilege. So, I charged him a hundred grand and brought him with me. He had given us bad intel, though. We stepped into a war zone. I had to fight our way out, and that meant ripping open a portal on the fly. Never a good idea. Emergency portals are as unstable as they come, and they drain magic three times as fast as stable ones. Oh. I had been shot too. Four times. That certainly didn’t help my stamina.”
“Yeah.” Reminded of Kierce’s current predicament, I winced. “I can imagine.”
“The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital across the country from where we began.” She had to clear her throat once, twice, three times. “The nurse standing over me told me the procedure had been a success. They had harvested eight of my eggs.” She swallowed hard. “The hospital? It was a fertility clinic.”
“Ithas stole youreggs?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder you didn’t know...” I clicked my teeth together before I could make her trauma about me. “I don’t know what to say. Sorry isn’t a big enough word. He violated you, and there’s no excusing it.”
I hadn’t expected to hand her aget out of jail freecard on the parenting front, but she had earned a whole deck of them.
“Ithas did what he did, and the blame belongs with him and him alone.”
An odd burst of relief that she didn’t hold his crimes against me blossomed in my chest.
“I’ll live another five hundred years. My mother, with her fae blood, lived eight. I always thought I had all the time in the world to decide about settling down with someone. I wasn’t sure about having kids. I had genetic mutations that caused me to be sick more often than not when I was young. Most quirks worked themselves out in puberty, but a few glitches in my magic linger. It’s one of the big reasons having a kid wasn’t on my radar until that happened. But the idea of having a baby while eight of mine could already be out there…” She couldn’t hold still. This woman was lightning in a bottle. “I couldn’t do that. Not until I got answers.” A flinch seized her shoulders tight. “Not that I wish you hadn’t been born. I’m sure you’re a great kid, and you’ve got people who love you, people who would do or pay anything to get you back.”
There was only one reason I could think of for Ithas wanting her eggs: genetics.
Lucia had a lot of supernatural factions branching out in her family tree. Ithas must have thought that for her to exhibit traits from all of them, no matter how small, her offspring would stand a better chance of survival than previous donors after fertilization. Thoughdonordidn’t cover the atrocity of the situation.
“I’ve been lucky,” I agreed, aware of how fortunate I had been in my chosen family. “I got lucky with you finding me too. How did you manage that?”
“A tracking spell.” She held up a scarred palm with a fresh scab. “I was able to trace you using my blood, which proved we were closely related. I have no other family, not since Mom passed, so a kid of my own would have been the only option.” A smile tugged at one side of her mouth. “For a second, I thought your blonde friend was going to attack me. She jumped me with a hug that cut off my oxygen. She wept with relief that I had located you.”
