“Brady?”
“Yeah,” he muttered while continuing to rummage through one of the boxes they’d pulled out of the attic. He wanted to be sure he had all the journals his mother wrote and thought she might have left some behind when she’d escaped the house years ago.
Kat waited for him to look up. It took a few minutes but she wanted to have his full attention when she told him what she’d just read.
He pulled out a string of tangled lights and sighed. “Why would they keep these? They’re obviously useless.” He tossed them aside to join the growing pile of trash and dug back into the box.
“Brady.” She slapped her hand on the timber floor.
“What?” He glanced up, a scowl on his face.
Something in her expression must have given him a clue because he pushed the box away and moved on his knees across the floor to where she sat, one of his mother’s journals in her hand, the rest spread around her in date order.
“What? What is it?” he asked, his eyes on hers.
“Have you ever read any of your mother’s journals?”
He shook his head but his eyes never left hers. “No.”
“Not even when you were little and found one?”
“No. She hid them. At least that’s what she told me. I didn’t even know she kept them until she got sick.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, I can see why she’d hide these,” she muttered, glancing down at the open page.
“Why? What’s in them?”
God. How did she tell him? Should she tell him or make him read the words in his mother’s hand? “Um…”
“Kathren, please. Just tell me what has put that look on your face.”
Taking a deep breath, she thought about the best way to upend his life. And it would upend it. What was written in these journals would change everything he knew about his mother and father. About the brother whose body he’d come home to claim.
“Ren?” Brady grabbed her forearm, his fingers curling around and squeezing. “Whatever it is can’t be worse than your father trying to destroy a whole town.”
She smiled. “Not the whole town. Only the non-bloods and half-bloods.”
“See? What could possibly be worse?”
Fuck. It was worse. So much worse. “I think you should read this part.” She turned the journal she’d been reading and held it out, open to the page that would probably be the hardest to read. At least it was what she thought was the most shocking of what she’d read so far. Her eyes scanned the rest of the journals.
God. What else was in them?
“You can’t tell me?” he asked as he took the leather-bound book.
Remaining quiet, she kept her gaze on his face, waited for him to look down and read the words that had been like a punch to her gut and they weren’t even about her.
“Fine. I’ll read it.” But he didn’t. His eyes stayed locked with hers for a long time before he took a deep breath and blew it out in a rush. “You could just tell me…”
Kat rolled her lips between her teeth and tried to keep her emotions at bay. It was hard though. This would hurt Brady. Hurt him in a way she wasn’t sure he could recover from.
He hadn’t given her the full details of the night his mother had taken him away or how it had affected him, but she’d got the impression it had scarred him deeply. This would open up those old wounds and deliver more.
Brady’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“He brought the first child home the year I lost the fifth baby.
I didn’t ask any questions. I should have asked questions.
The little boy was around two, barely talking or walking.
He cried. Cried for a mother I knew nothing of.
Malcolm told me to keep him quiet. To keep him out of sight.
I wasn’t sure what had happened or why this little boy was here.
Matthew told me to be grateful. To mother the child as my own.
And as much as it shames me to admit, I didn’t argue. I accepted.
That boy became mine.
Became Marcus.”
Brady’s gaze snapped to hers. “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know.” The confusion in his eyes matched her own. “I haven’t read past that page. I didn’t think I should…”
“You should. Jesus, I’ve got nothing to hide from you.” He glanced down at the book in his hand. “But it appears as though my mother had something to hide.”
“It sounds like your father and whoever Matthew is had a lot more to hide.”
He took a deep breath and began to read again.
“In the first few years I kept to myself, to the house in the mountains.
No one came to visit in all that time. And I never ventured into town.
Not that Malcolm would have let me. He and Matthew brought supplies.
I was more a servant than wife and I was never the latter legally.
But that’s a story for another time.”
“Fuck.” Brady dropped the book to the floor and dragged his fingers through his hair.
She gave him time. Let him get his thoughts together before asking the question burning on her tongue.
“Did you know Marcus wasn’t your blood brother?”
He shook his head. “No.” His gaze met hers. “And now I have to wonder if I’m blood related to my parents. Marcus clearly wasn’t.”
Kat could understand why he’d think that. She wanted to know the answer herself. But she wanted so much more than that, and Michelle’s journals held the answers.
“I think someone needs to read everything your mother wrote. I think…” she licked her lips, swallowed. “I think we might find out why your father wanted to destroy this town and why Marcus helped him.”
“Why? It’s not like they can be punished for what they did or understanding their motives will make anything better.”
“No, they can’t be punished. Death did that. As for making things better… Brady, there are secrets here that could answer a lot of questions people have, could help the town recover from the years of terror your father and his supporters subjected us to.”
“He’s gone now. He can’t hurt anyone from the grave.”
“But he can. His actions have left a taint on this town. It’s dark and insidious and will continue to eat at us until we put it to rest.”
Brady laughed but there was no humor in the sound. “Sure. Why not blacken the Connelly name more?”
Kat bit her tongue except it wasn’t enough to stop her from voicing the words swirling in her head. “You might not even be a Connelly. Marcus wasn’t.”
“Fuck.” He dragged both hands through his hair again, tugged the ends. “How do we do this? Shit, we need to tell the sheriff. The sovereign and regal, the council.”
“Not yet.” She put a hand on his arm in the hope of grounding him. His need to run was written all over his face and while she could see the appeal, the weather didn’t allow for it. “I think we should read as much of these as we can before we do anything, say anything.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll see what other shit the Connellys did.” He snatched up the journal and flipped the pages to the beginning. “I’ll read this one. You grab another one.”
“I’ve read part of that one so let me keep going. Do you have a pen and paper? I’d like to make notes.”
“We should try and put them in time order.”
“I’ve done that already. Can you get a pen and paper?” He needed something to focus on besides the thoughts spiraling in his head.
She let go of his arm except before he could get up, she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him close. Neither of them spoke. They sat on the floor for long minutes while Brady calmed and Kat comforted.
“Thank you for doing this with me.”
“It’s what mates do, right? Support each other.”
“You still want to be my mate after what we just read?” he asked, his lips brushing against her neck where he’d burrowed in. “I wouldn’t hold it against you if you didn’t.”
“You know me better than that, Brady.”
He sighed into her neck. “Yeah, I do.”
“I’ll be here no matter what.”
“God, I hope so because I don’t think that’s the only rotten skeleton we’re going to find.”
Kat didn’t agree with him verbally; she didn’t have to. They both knew if Malcolm Connelly was capable of taking a child and passing it off as his own, he was capable of so much more. What, remained to be discover.
She only hoped it didn’t break Brady.
Kat made notes about the last two pages she’d read. It had taken a couple of hours but she was pretty sure she now understood what Malcolm and Matthew had been doing. She also understood that Brady’s mother had been brought to Whispering Springs against her will. Turned against her will. The woman had been trapped in a situation she had no clue how to get out of or where to go for help.
Michelle Watson had been taken off a street in Omaha, Nebraska, when she was barely eighteen. She’d been subjected to beatings and rape—because no one would argue otherwise—for years. All at the hands of a man who claimed to be her husband—her mate.
Kat still wasn’t sure who Matthew was; Michelle hadn’t mentioned a last name so far but she had mentioned him every time she wrote about the beatings. Up until this point he hadn’t been involved in the rapes except the man had to have known what Malcolm was doing to his mate. Kat had no idea if Matthew was alive or not, but if he was she had every intention of hunting him down and putting him down.
No man deserved to live after what he’d done and allowed to be done to others.
It was the children that concerned Kat the most. They were under the age of three according to Michelle. So far Kat had a list of four names—names the men who’d kidnapped them had given them—and none of them were called Jacob.
Michelle knew nothing of where they’d come from before Malcolm arrived at the house with them. One thing Kat hadn’t discovered, and what Michelle didn’t seem to know up to this point in her journals, was where the children went after they spent a week locked in the shed out back.
The thought of going out to that shed had Kat’s stomach clenching. Except she knew they would have to. Eventually. Maybe they would wait until they told the sheriff about what they’d uncovered.
Not that Brady had found much. He’d read half a journal before he dropped it to the floor and left the room. A few seconds later Kat heard banging from the back of the house. Wanting to be sure he was okay, she’d gone to check and found him taking out his anger on the wall dividing the back bedrooms.
She’d left him there. She knew someone who needed to be alone when she saw them.
That had been hours ago now.
Stretching her arms over her head, she dropped her chin to her chest then tipped it toward the ceiling, pulling on the kinks in her neck. It was time for a break. She’d make them lunch then decide what to do about the information she’d collected.
“Hey.”
Turning her head, Kat found Brady in the doorway covered in dust and timber splinters. Smiling, she said, “You need to get cleaned up.”
“Want some lunch? I’ll wash up and make sandwiches.”
“You wash up and I’ll make something better than sandwiches.” She’d brought a chicken pie with her yesterday that wouldn’t take long to reheat.
“How’d it go?” Brady asked with a tip of his chin at the journals.
“Ah, I’ve gone through four so far. Do you know who Matthew is?”
“No. Should I?” His expression told her he didn’t really want to know the answer to that.
“I don’t know. He seems to be in every entry up to where I’ve read. You don’t remember another man living here?”
He shook his head. “Was only ever Mom, Dad, Marcus, and me.”
“Hmm…” Kat pushed to her feet. “Well, he’s someone important in the early years of your mother’s life here. I think he lived here too.”
“Maybe you’ll find why in a later journal.” He eyed the leather-bound books warily. “I’ll go wash up.”
Kat watched him go with a heavy heart. Each thing she was discovering about Michelle Watson’s past meant another scar for Brady. Not the physical kind, but the kind that were hidden, the kind that marked the heart and bled the soul. If what she was thinking was true, he’d be finding out he and Marcus had one thing in common.
Neither of them had been born with Connelly blood.