“Like?” I asked, unable to help myself.
“Like you,” he replied with a smile, meeting my gaze. “Of course, I’m only starting to remember you, but Leo tells me that we cared about each other very deeply. And it makes sense, considering how I remember feeling the first time I saw you.”
“Oh?” The sound was soft, barely pushed out from my throat—I was too afraid of letting my breath out for fear of disturbing his words. I didn’t want him to stop. I wanted to understand what was going on inside of him.
His brown eyes twinkled. “You dragged your baton along the ground to create a show of sparks. I remember thinking that you were so commanding and confident, even though you were clearly nervous. I saw how brave you were—so much braver than I was—and it took my breath away. I thought to myself, ‘That’s it. She’s the one.’”
I snorted at that, but his words had brought a bittersweet smile to my lips. I loved hearing his internal thoughts on our first meeting, but at the same time, I realized that all of this could change at the drop of a dime. He might be accepting now, but who knew how he would feel about it tomorrow?
“We really shouldn’t be talking about this now,” I told him softly, once again trying to extricate myself from the conversation. “We should wait until your memories are fully—”
“Give me a little credit, Liana. I know myself a little bit better than you do, and I know what I’m willing to accept and not accept. Maybe before I wouldn’t—couldn’t—tolerate the idea of you and someone else, but I realize now that was my problem, not yours. My fear of being abandoned again, turned away because something in me was faulty and broken. But Leo showed me how much you fought for me, how much you tried to resist your own feelings for him, and I realized that it wasn’t so black and white, so why should I be? Yes, you have feelings for another man. Does he make you happy? Do you still care about me? Can you?”
My confusion and shock at his questions caused my thoughts to completely fall apart. Why was he asking me if I cared about him and Leo both? Obviously, I did. But that couldn’t be what he was asking me, right?
“Why are you asking me that?” I asked carefully, uncertain of how to respond to his questions.
He stared at me, and then reached out and placed his hand over mine. “Because if Leo being in my body makes you happy, then I’m willing to share it—and you—with him.”
He could’ve knocked me over with a feather. “I…” was the only sound that could escape my clenched throat. Was that even possible? Could we… he… I…
I was overrun with confusion, my thoughts fragmented beyond belief. Of all the outcomes I ever thought possible, this was one I had never even considered, and it damn near broke me.
“I meant what I told you yesterday,” he said, catching my attention. “I would do anything to make the woman I love happy. To nurture her as she needs it. I just happened to fall for a girl who needed a man who could fight at her side while protecting her heart. I’ve got half of that covered. If Leo wants to help me handle the other part, I’m more than willing to let him. All I care about is that you’re happy.” The gleam in his eyes diminished some. “Leo told me about your mom. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I could tell it hit you hard.”
My heart broke at his words, and I started to cry. He was just too sweet and accepting, and I’d done nothing to earn it. He still cared about me, even though I had betrayed him in such a cruel way. “You deserve someone better than me,” I told him.
Grey patted the bed next to him, and before I knew it, I was curled up on my side, his front pressed to my back, one arm draped over my side. “Maybe,” he said in a light tone. “But that’s my decision to make.”
“How can you be so understanding about all of this?” I begged, needing to understand. “You don’t even remember us.”
“I will soon,” he promised. “And how can I not be? I’m lucky enough to be alive right now, and reliving my past is helping me realize a few things about myself. I came from a place where love was withheld because I didn’t conform to expectations. I don’t want to ever make anyone I care about feel that way. I’m willing to be open to all different forms of it, even those that defy convention. If this is what makes you happy, and lets me keep being a part of your life, then I don’t care.” He paused for a second, and then added, “The other reason is that Leo doesn’t have a corporeal self. Call me petty, but there’s something satisfying about the fact that even though I’m happy to share him with you, he still has to touch you using my hands, and kiss you using my lips. It’s a compromise that I’m okay making.”
I managed a chuckle at that. “You’ve become an oddly laid-back guy, you know?”
“I know, right? I can tell what you’re thinking. ‘Man, Grey is so cool now. I’m even more head over heels for that guy than I ever was before.’” I shoved my elbow into his stomach—not hard, but in a warning shot—and he chuckled, brushing his lips over my temple in a kiss. “You should probably be going,” he said, a yawn cracking his voice. “I know you guys have a lot of work to do, and I need some rest. And hey… I meant it—don’t be mad at Leo. I was also part of the problem. I kept him up, arguing with him about what a jackass he was being.”
“You did?” I asked, a smile breaking on my face.
“Of course I did. It’s obvious his feelings for you are his own. He’s just doubting them after what happened yesterday. And he lacks the emotional experience to know how to deal with it all.”
“They are?” I asked, looking up at him. “He does? How can you know that?”
“I told you this was pretty invasive, having both of us up here. And the reason I know his feelings for you are his own is because his thoughts toward you are way too polite. He just likes to kiss and hold you. Oh, he’s curious about the other parts as well, but he’s perfectly satisfied with the sensation of comfort.” He looked down at me, his eyes blazing. “My thoughts, however, are far filthier.”
My face went white hot with surprise and embarrassment, followed by a shot of lust that hit me from head to toe.
“How can you just talk about it like that?” I asked, my embarrassment outweighing my attraction. “How can you just—”
“It’s my body, remember?” he said, cutting me off by lightly stroking his fingers over my cheek. His eyes dropped to my mouth, and he smiled. “I don’t remember our first kiss yet, and while I’m sure it was amazing, I sort of want to reinvent it right here and now.”
“Are you asking me?” I whispered, my heart beginning to flutter wildly in my chest.
He smiled. “Normally, I would say yes,” he declared, his voice low and smoky. I twisted toward him in response, wanting to face him more fully. “But you’ll have to forgive me if I pass out now instead.” As if to emphasize the point, he yawned widely, and then dropped his head back onto the pillow, his eyelids closing.
I smiled, reaching out to cup his cheek. I didn’t know what to make of any of this, but I had learned something important: I still had feelings for Grey.
If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be this disappointed that he was asleep again, even if he needed it.
“Goodnight,” I said, giving him a peck on the cheek before gently untangling myself. I still had to think about what he had said about Leo, but there were other things that took priority at the moment.
Besides, I needed to talk to Leo before I made any judgments or decisions. If what Grey was saying was true, then maybe Leo’s overreaction was due to his inexperience with complicated emotions like these. I wasn’t sure, but I had to talk to him about it before I started condemning his actions.
29
I emerged from Grey’s room, intent on heading back to the war room to continue going through the files, but I stopped when I saw Zoe leaning against a wall, waiting for me.
“Hey,” she said as the door closed behind me. “How is he?”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure how to tell her about the conversation that Grey and I had just had, as I had no idea how
to even process it for myself. Grey was willing to share his body with Leo and was okay with me having some sort of relationship with both of them. The idea that he could be so accepting of this, of us, had opened up a strange possibility in my mind, and I really wanted time and space to think about it.
On the one hand… God, Grey loved me. So much so that he was entertaining the idea of sharing his body with an AI forever, just to make me happy. On the other… it was weird.
So I put it away, and applied a little effort to forming a small smile for my friend. “He’s going to be okay, I think. What’s up?”
“Oh, Dylan called Maddox to request a meeting with you both. Maddox had her come up here, and they’re waiting for you in the front room. She asked me to tell you, so…” She pushed off the wall and spread her arms. “Mission accomplished. You’re welcome.”
A surprised laugh escaped me, and I shook my head at her. “Thanks. Did they say what it was about?”
I had a suspicion, though I asked the question anyway. Dylan Chase had also been in the Tourney, and had technically won the fourth and final challenge, but ultimately lost when the Knights voted me in as Champion instead of her, breaking with tradition. I hadn’t been sure what to make of her during the Tourney—she was highly competitive and outspoken—but had suspected her and two others of being legacies.
But Dylan had surprised me, first by coming to my aid when Baldy attacked Leo and me, then by insisting that she look into the situation personally. I had paired her with Tian, knowing that the youngest member of our group could keep a careful eye on her, as well as help her root out the legacies who were living as undocs. I was still unclear about her true loyalty.
It seemed today would reveal another part of the puzzle, as she undoubtedly had new evidence to share. If it was in line with what we were seeing from Sadie’s computer, and she was telling me the truth, then I had to start entertaining the possibility that her intentions were honorable. There was a chance she was feeding us good information to try to gain our trust, to set us up in some way, but I didn’t see that as being her style.
And I really wanted to trust her. I couldn’t explain exactly why, but I liked the woman. Yes, she was obnoxiously blunt, and asked for what she wanted in a way that made it seem like a demand, but she cared about the department and the people inside of it. Her views on the Tower were interesting, in that she saw it as more of a mission, an experiment, the integrity of which needed to be protected. If it was an act, it was convincing.
“She’s got the DNA results from the house we found in the Attic,” Zoe replied. “As well as the blood taken from the catwalk. Maddox said she seemed pretty excited, so maybe it’ll be something that’ll blow the lid off this thing.”
I laughed. “We should be so lucky. But unless she’s got detailed information about a hideout for the legacies, I’m not sure the results will yield very much.”
“You never know,” Zoe replied with a little shrug. “Anyway, I’m getting back to the files in a moment. Just going to check on Eric.”
“Okay.” I watched her go for a second, my heart a few ounces lighter for all of her bright happiness. It was such a dramatic difference from this morning, and I was glad that Eric’s prognosis was looking good. We’d come too close to it going the other way, and I hated to think of what Zoe would’ve been like had she lost him. I couldn’t bear to let anyone know that pain, especially not her.
I turned away from Zoe and started toward the kitchen, quickly following the spiraling hallway past the bedroom and bathroom doors and into the kitchen, where I stopped long enough to grab a glass of water. I drank it quickly, placed the cup in the sink, and then resumed my trek, following the hall to where it would eventually spill into the largest room of my quarters.
I heard their voices long before I entered the room. They were speaking in low tones, and the acoustics of the room didn’t help give the sounds any form. I emerged from the hall and went down the handful of steps into the wide conference room, angling for where the two women were standing in front of the large wall screen, opposite the theater-style seating. I had designed this room specifically for conferences with my Knight Commanders, so that when I finally got around to having them, it would make the large-scale debriefings easier.
Of course, right now I was only going to be meeting with one Knight Commander. But it was important.
“There she is,” Maddox said, nodding her head in my direction.
Dylan turned around, an excited smile growing on her lips that served to make her look even prettier. “Oh good,” she exclaimed. “You are never going to believe what I found.”
I raised an eyebrow and looked over the blond woman’s shoulder to Maddox, meeting her green eyes with a questioning glance of my own.
“She wouldn’t tell me until you were here,” Maddox replied with a shrug. “Now that you are…”
“I just didn’t want to have to explain it twice,” Dylan said wryly, giving me a look. “Don’t you hate when you have to do that?”
I nodded. I really did. “Go ahead,” I told her. “What did you uncover?”
“Only that the DNA from the bridge and collected from the blankets and plates at the scene of that weird structure thing you found in the Attic shows that these people are all biologically related. Siblings, in fact.”
“Siblings?” I repeated dumbly. “How is that possible?” Residents in the Tower were only permitted two children per couple. There had been at least thirty people in the house we discovered. Someone had over thirty children?
Dylan pulled a data stick out of her pocket and plugged it in to the port at the base of the screen. A second later the screen came on, revealing several different files. “Well, ‘siblings’ isn’t exactly right. Some of them are siblings, sharing both mother and father, but others are half-siblings, sharing only the father. In fact, sharing only the father is common; the mothers look like they’ve had a minimum of three children each, but I have evidence to support that one had seven children with the same man.”
“So one man is the father of… thirty people or so?” Maddox asked, beating me to the much-needed clarification question. I was shocked. How could one man have so many children without the Tower knowing about it? Both genders had birth control shots that kept us from procreating without the Medica’s involvement. Accidents happened, but for the most part, it should’ve been impossible for someone to have that many children after a birth-control shot. Not without the Medica’s intervention, anyway. Or waiting for the five years it took for the shot to expire.
“Yes,” Dylan said grimly. “Not only that, but I was able to use parts of the DNA to track back to the mothers, and…” She pressed on one of the files, and pictures and information for at least a dozen different women filled the screen. Everything about them was different, from their hair color to their department, but there were two things they had in common: half of them were dead, while the other half were labeled ‘missing.’ “The DNA matches all of these women. They’ve all been reported missing at some point within the last fifty years, but now I think they were kidnapped. It seems I’m the only one who put that together, however. The ones who are labeled dead were discovered years after their disappearances, in various states of decomposition, and all the autopsy reports read the same thing: died in childbirth. The Knight reports that accompany the autopsies say that the girls were probably dissidents who became undocs and then died having an illegal child, which was never recovered. Nobody ever looked any deeper than that. Nobody ever saw the pattern.”
I felt sick. Someone—a man—had evidently been taking women, forcing them to have his children, and then discarding them when their bodies gave out because they didn’t receive the medical treatment they had needed to survive. And no one had put it together as anything more than a girl being dissatisfied with Tower life, making an attempt at being an undoc, and dying for her folly.
“That’s disgusting,” Maddox whispered, echoing my thoughts in a much more direct
fashion.
“I know,” Dylan replied, an undercurrent of anger in her voice. “And it gets weirder. I did a search to see if any known DNA records matched the DNA of the father, hoping to find the sicko. No luck, obviously, or else I would’ve marched his ass up here to talk to you directly. But something odd did come up. Apparently, Frederick Hamilton shares a distant relationship with these people. Cousins, at most, but the relationship is there.”
I sucked in a breath. I knew from the files Jasper had uncovered that Salvatore had been Sadie’s candidate in the Tourney—and the one she’d unleashed the sentinel for—but Hamilton had been another suspect, because of his relationship to Ezekial Pine. Lacey had assured me that her family had wiped Pine’s out, and that Frederick’s survival had been an oversight on her part… but had it been? Or was Frederick a child of two legacy families? Had his branch of the family managed to escape because of his other family, who kept him hidden when the slaughter began?
Was that the legacy family we were dealing with today? Was Dreyfuss or Sage one of them?
Or worse, had Lacey’s family missed someone else? Was the father somehow one of Ezekial Pine’s descendants, too? If so, who was the male in the equation? Presumably another person Lacey’s family had missed, but who?
My gut told me it was Dreyfuss, but there was a chance it could be Sage, or even, on a very off chance, Plancett. All three men had been around twenty-five years ago, and were the only ones still alive who were old enough and connected to this in any way. And while Sage was a possibility, I found it hard to believe the man would have anything remotely resembling a libido (or maybe I just hoped he didn’t). He was 115, for crying out loud, and far too busy to be fathering child after child. Unless he was having those women artificially inseminated.
God, I really hoped he wasn’t. The thought made me want to throw up.