Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) (10 page)

Although Elliott remained one of her favorite kin, and she’d indeed missed his company, s
he didn’t really want them tromping around inside her house. All three were armed, each wearing high-powered hunting rifles slung across their backs. Aaron was freaked out enough as it was, and she didn’t know what, if anything, he’d do if he felt threatened. But it would be rude for her not to invite them inside—and worse, it would make them suspicious.

Just stay upstairs,
she thought, keeping her mind shut tight lest Elliott or Ethan telepathically overhear any messages she’d intended for Aaron.
God, just sit tight and keep quiet.

“
Let me take your coats,” she offered as they walked ahead of her into the living room.

She nearly breathed an audible sigh of relief when Elliott said, “Thanks, but no. We’re out helping search the woods. Saw smoke coming from your chimney and wanted to make sure everything’s copasetic.”

“I thought you’d be out in the woods, too?” Kate remarked with a puzzled smile.

“Yeah—of all people,” Elliott agreed.

Naima went into the kitchen and pulled some mugs down from a cabinet by her sink. “I was out there most of the night,” she said, her voice steady and unflappable. As she filled each of the cups with steaming portions of tea, she added, “I’m exhausted. Thought I’d get in a couple of hours of sleep. Any word on how Michel’s doing?”

“Mason said he’s stable,” Elliott replied, looking grim and murmuring thanks as she offered him a mug. “The bullet missed his heart, but hit his lung, collapsed it. Mason got the slug out, but he said it will take some time before
he’s out of the woods. They’ve got him on chest drains right now, and he’s intubated. He hasn’t come to since the surgery. I think they’re keeping him sedated.”

Kate draped her hand lightly against his sleeve. “He’s going to be okay,” she said, but she cut Naima a worried sort of glance that indicated she didn’t share this optimism necessarily in her heart.

“Of course he is,” Elliott said. As a boy, he’d always harbored a sort of hero-worship adulation toward Michel. It was a fondness and admiration that had lasted into adulthood, even to that day. Naima had always supposed that if you’d asked Elliott, he’d have told you Michel could move mountains were he to take the notion.

Elliott
took a sip of tea, scalded his lip and winced. As he set the mug down, he said, “They found the son of a bitch’s car—did you know?”

“
No. Really? Where?” Naima asked, feigning surprise.

“Just outside the compound, hidden off the main road,” Kate said.

“Which means he’s still out there somewhere,” Elliott cut in. “He can’t have made it far, not on foot, not beat to shit like Mason said he was.”

“How many are out there searching?” Naima asked.

“Let’s see…” Elliott rubbed at his beard with his gloved fingertips, looking thoughtful. “Maybe forty now? I know all of my boys are here, right, Ethan?” He glanced at his grandson, who nodded. Then, with a slight frown, he added, “And all of Michel’s sons—except Phillip, of course. I guess he couldn’t be bothered.”

Centuries earlier, before the fires had driven the Morins into exile, Phillip Morin had been betrothed to Tristan’s mother
, Lisette. However, Phillip was not Tristan’s biological father; his now-deceased brother, Arnaud, had been, with Tristan resulting from an ill-advised tryst between Arnaud and Lisette. Even though Lisette had suffered from debilitating illness in the years since Tristan’s birth and had recently died, Phillip had remained pretty much denounced, and then remained incommunicado with, his entire family.

“Arrogant douchebag,” Elliott muttered, trying once again, and with more success this time, to sip his tea.

“The man who did this,” Kate said. “They found a wallet in his car and a driver’s license. It says his name is Brighton, I think.”

“
Broughman,” Elliott corrected. “And I don’t care what it says. He’s a Davenant, that’s for damn sure. The stink of his clan’s all over our woods.” With an exaggerated sniff, he added, “You can even smell it in here.”

Naima stiffened, glancing anxiously over her shoulder toward the loft.
“Are you staying long?” she asked, hoping both to change the subject, and that the note of polite cheer in her voice didn’t sound as forced to them as it did to her. “Until the bastard’s caught,” Elliott replied, his mouth turned down in a frown. “Speaking of which...thanks for the tea, Naima, but we’d better head back out.”

“
So soon?” Naima followed as they shouldered their rifles and headed for the doors.

“Lock
up behind us,” Elliott warned. “This guy is dangerous.”

“I can handle myself,” Naima
assured with a smile, returning her embrace.

“Save some for the rest of us if you find him first, then,” Elliott said, managing a laugh as he hooked an arm around her neck and hugged her again. “I’ll show you how we clean a buck in the backcountry.”

“You got it,” Naima said, watching as they tromped down from the front stoop and headed back toward the trees. Elliott unslung his rifle and carried it between his hands while Kate draped her hand affectionately against Ethan’s shoulder, walking alongside the boy.

Naima closed the door, then turned the deadbolt home. For a long moment, she stood
motionless, feeling a chilly draft creeping through the seams surrounding the door. When she peeked past the shade, her cousin and his wife had vanished from view, disappearing once more into the forest.

“What
do you want from me?”

She hadn’t heard Aaron come down the stairs, even though they normally creaked and groaned at even the lightest footsteps.
Damn, he’s quiet,
she thought, turning to find him standing behind her, leaning heavily against the bannister.
Even beat to hell—he’s so damn quiet!

“You…could have turned me
over to them,” he said, and his brows narrowed. Not with anger, she realized, but confusion. “You could have let them take me. Why didn’t you?”

At the genuine bewilderment in his face, Naima felt some
of her cool façade crumble. “You don’t remember,” she said at length. “Not about me, or the necklace. Not about anything.”

And I don’t understand how that’s possible,
she thought in dismay.
No matter how much time’s passed, or what your father has done—I can’t believe you’d forget me, Aaron. I could never forget you.

“No,” he said simply, softly.
He met her gaze, his blue eyes round and intensely fierce, and she wished she could peer beyond the veil of his telepathic shields to sense what was going on inside his mind, what he was thinking. “But
you
do, don’t you? You remember it all.”

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Someone meant for me to find this woman,
Aaron thought.
Whoever left that necklace outside my door—they wanted me to remember. Maybe they even knew I’d find her somehow, that she could tell me about my past.

As for who might have done Aaron this seeming favor, he had no idea. Although his list of associates was pretty extensive—he did a lot of work on behalf of both his father and Lamar’s business interests throughout the world—he could count on one hand the number of people who knew about his amnesia. And even then, he’d have fingers to spare when he was finished.

It couldn’t have been his father. On the one occasion Aaron had ever dared to ask Lamar about his past, his father had erupted in violent, furious response. “What difference does it make?” he’d snapped. And then, because he was far too frail to lift his hand against Aaron, never mind his lash, he’d ordered Aaron to punish himself—to use a mallet to smash each of the fingers of his right hand—his dominant hand—in turn, shattering each.

Julien?
Aaron wondered—his first guess, in fact, even though it made no sense. Julien knew about Aaron’s past. He’d told him about it, bits and pieces anyway, over the years. Yet he’d also tried diligently to deflect Aaron’s most persistent attempts to pry more information out of him.

“
Why do you want to bother with that?” he’d asked. “I keep telling you. There’s nothing for it. And besides, your lost memories make up…what? One-tenth of your life so far? Even less? It’s a drop in the bucket, Az—not even
worth
remembering. Think of everything that’s happened—all you’ve accomplished—that you
can
recall.”

Julien might have recognized
the Saint Christopher’s medal as having belonged to their mother, but that would have been it; even if what Naima said was true, Julien couldn’t have known.

“The necklace,” he said
to Naima. “Tell me what you know about it.”

“I told you—you gave it to me.”

He nodded, frowning. “Yes, I know. Tell me more.”

“I haven’t seen it since
the night you gave it to me—the night of the fires,” Naima said, drawing his gaze. “I dropped it by accident. I thought it was lost forever.”

“Fires?”

“Your father set them. He and your brothers, some of the other men from different clans. They burned down my grandfather’s great house. They were trying to kill my family.”

Something about this made his skin suddenly crawl. “
When did you say this happened?”

“In
1815,” she said. “On October twelfth.”

Again, an icy shiver stole through him.
That had been the date of his accident, when he’d fractured his skull. It had also had been his mother’s birthday. He thought of the memory he’d rediscovered upon receiving the Saint Christopher’s medal—the birthday party, her face flushed with delight as she’d handed him the necklace.

The clasp doesn’t work…
Be a dear and put it in your fob, won’t you?

Had it been the same
October twelfth that Naima was talking about? He remembered something his mother had told him when she’d come upon him in the crowd of partygoers:
Here’s one of you at least! Your father and brothers have all seemed to vanish into the woodwork!

“Did I go somewhere on horseback?” he asked. “That night—October twelfth
, 1815. I fell off my horse, hit my head. I can’t remember anything before that night. Do you remember what happened? How I fell?”

She looked at him, her brows lifted with pity he damn sure neither wanted nor needed. “No,” she said. “I don’t know anything about that.
”

She stepped toward him. He tried to shy away, but wound up stumbling and sitting down hard on one of the stair risers. When she touched his face, he flinched; she spread her fingers gently through his hair, her skin warm against his.

“Is that what happened? You have amnesia…?” she whispered, her voice sounding pained. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s nothing
,” he said with a frown, brushing her hand away.

“
Nothing?” She looked momentarily wounded.

“Yeah. Nothing. Twenty something years
lost. A…drop in the bucket,” he said, remembering what Julien had told him. “I’ve lived almost two centuries since then.”

“Thirty years,” she said, drawing his gaze. Her eyes had hardened, a crimp forming between her brows, and her voice sounded brittle, like a thin crust of frost had settled over her.
“Your father kept me prisoner from 1793 to 1815. I was seven when he took me. You were eight. So this drop in the bucket of your life, as you called it, was thirty years.”

“Prisoner?” Aaron asked, caught off-guard.
He had no difficulty whatsoever in believing his father capable of something so heinous. God knew he’d seen Lamar’s cruel capabilities first-hand on more occasions than he cared to recount. But until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that Naima might have also been victimized by Lamar, as he had been—or for so long.

“Yes.” Naima nodded once. “Your father abducted me when I was a child. He kept me locked away beneath the floor in his library.
  And because your bedroom was next to the library, you could talk to me through the floorboards. You were company to me when I had no one else.” She started to walk away, balling her hands into fists at her sides. “You were my friend.”

“Why did he take you?” Aaron asked, drawing her to a halt.

“Because I’m a half-breed,” Naima replied evenly, sparing him a glance off her shoulder that could have sliced through steel. “Half-human, half-Brethren. And worse—half
Morin.
He used me to try and humiliate my grandfather, to hurt him. He dragged me before the entire council of Brethren males and called me an abomination, a disgrace to my Brethren ancestry. The council voted to banish me to Indian tunnels that ran beneath our farms—to seal me in what we called the Beneath, and leave me there to die.”

He watched as tension slowly knotted through her entire body, her spine growing ram-rod stiff, her shoulders thrust back, her chin and jawline set like iron. “Lamar had other plans
,” she said. “I wasn’t down there a day before he had me taken out again, with no one else aware—least of all my grandfather. That was when he locked me beneath the floor in his library, made me his prisoner…his slave…his pet for the next twenty-two years.” With a cold glare, she added, “I hope you can appreciate, then, why that doesn’t constitute
nothing
to me.”