no other way through that gate, and I couldn’t get what I’d come for without the resources locked away in the fortress of a house behind it.
“Do you have an appointment?” However, I could tell by his uncertain tone that the question felt as ridiculous to him as it sounded to me. I was a Tower, after all, if I were telling the truth. But protocol is protocol.
“I don’t need one. Just tell her Sera is here. Jake Tower’s love child has come home.”
* * *
The first-floor study they stuck me in could well have been called a library. Hardback books lined floor-to-ceiling shelves covering three walls. The center of the room held two couches and several small tables, but I sat on the window seat built into the fourth wall, so I could see the entire room.
A glance at my cell phone told me I’d been there for nearly forty minutes—8:00 p.m. had come and gone, without even the offer of a drink. No wonder my butt was going numb. But they’d stationed a guard outside the door and told me to stay put, and now that I’d already gotten Lia’s attention, creating another scene didn’t seem very likely to work in my favor.
Making me wait was a strategic move on Lia’s part. It had to be. To show me how unimportant I was. The internet was virtually void of information about the Towers’ personal lives, and my mother hadn’t been much more forthcoming, but I remembered every single thing she had told me over the years.
They are master manipulators.
Everything they do has a purpose—sometimes several purposes—whether you can see that or not.
Don’t think that being one of them makes you safe. They won’t hesitate to spill their own blood from your veins, if you become a threat.
With that in mind, I suddenly wondered if I was being watched. Studied. Or had I moved beyond simple caution and into paranoia? Either way, I couldn’t resist a couple of casual glances at the ceiling to look for cameras. But if they were there, they were hidden. Like I’d been for years.
On the first day of kindergarten I’d discovered that the dad I’d grown up with wasn’t actually my father, genetically speaking. My dad—he was Daddy, back then—was still waving goodbye to me through the classroom window when this little girl with curly pigtails asked me how come my dad was dark and I was light.
I’d never really thought about that before. I’d always assumed that I matched my mom for the same reason my little sister matched our dad. Just because. The same reason the ocean matched the sky, but the grass matched the trees. But before I could explain about how we each matched a different parent, a little boy with a smear of chocolate across one cheek poked his head into our conversation with an unsolicited bit of vicious commentary.
“That’s ’cause he’s not her real dad. She’s pro’ly adopted.”
I punched him in the nose, and then his cheek was smeared with chocolate and blood.
That was the very first punch I threw. It was followed, in rapid succession, by my first trip to the principal’s office, my first expulsion and my first visit with a child psychologist.
In retrospect, I can see that I overreacted. Pigtails and Bloody Nose were just naturally curious. They probably didn’t mean to throw my entire life into chaos and make me question my own existence at the tender age of five.
It took nearly an hour for the principal, guidance counselor, and my parents to calm me down enough to buckle me into my seat in the car. It then took another hour for my parents to explain that I wasn’t adopted. I was simply conceived out of wedlock, fathered by a man my mother knew before she ever met my dad.
That’s a lot for a kindergartner to absorb, but my parents seemed confident that I could handle it. My dad reassured me that he loved me more than I could possibly imagine, and that he would always be my dad. And that was that.
But my temper failed to improve.
When I was about fifteen, I overheard Mom tell Dad that I might have gotten my temper from my father, but my sharp tongue had come from Aunt Lia. Eight years later, as I stood waiting impatiently for an audience with her, nerves and anger buzzing just beneath the surface of my skin, that was still virtually all I knew about the aunt I’d never met.