Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series)

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.”