Page 51 of The Inquirer

I wasn’t going to do that. My first instinct when it came to her was to protect, but I couldn’t decide how or why or what she did to deal with her baggage. Even if we’d been in a real, committed relationship, it wouldn’t have been my place. Advice if she asked, but otherwise, I needed to keep my mouth shut and support her.

And do my job.

Back to my research.

Two hours later, I’d gone through everything in the folder, and my mind was spinning. I’d definitely found what I’d been looking for, and it was worse than I’d imagined. In fact, I was now fairly certain that I’d discovered what Nyx was down here investigating.

And why my sister had those boxes in her library.

They knew. At the very least, my dad knew and had given Ashley the boxes to hide, probably giving her more than the one so he’d be able to claim that they were random boxes.

I wouldn’t put anything past him.

The real question was, did Ashley know?

I had a lot of problems with my sister, but I wanted to believe that she would do the right thing. If she knew the truth, though, and hadn’t done anything about it, then she was no better than our father. And if Mom knew, she was guilty too.

I rubbed my forehead. This was crazy.

But I couldn’t deny it. I had too much evidence, and the story was too compelling. Even now, it was running through my head like a film, like my film.

Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Matthew and Ruth Calvert were shown in a local paper as being the owners of a rather large piece of property. The property where my family’s home had sat for generations. That wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was the article just underneath it. An article about the arrest of a slave named Zachariah Adams for assaulting his owner’s son, fifteen-year-old Matthew Francis Calvert. Adams claimed that the teenager was harassing the slave’s daughter, Deborah.

The next article was from a couple days later, stating that Adams had been hung for the assault.

Next came a record of slaves born on the Calvert plantation roughly eight months later. A list that included a child named Rachel, whose mother was listed as Deborah Adams. No father was recorded. Two of the other babies had fathers listed, and I had a sinking suspicion that I knew why Rachel’s father wasn’t.

I didn’t have a direct link from Rachel to Joshua, but if Rachel was the daughter of Francis Calvert, it would explain why Joshua’s skin was so light and why he shared features with Obadiah Calvert. I remembered now that Matthew Francis Calvert had been my ancestor’s older brother. When Francis died, the next oldest, David, had inherited everything. That I remembered from family dinners.

Three letters and a journal held the worst of it all. It boiled down to three main points.

Matthew Calvert had stolen everything from the Adams family. Their home and their freedom.

Deborah Adams had married a man named Solomon Huxley whose descendants still lived here.

And I knew those things because my family knew them too.

My father had always known.

Twenty-Two

Nyx

The thermometer on the porch of my cabin said that it was close to seventy despite the late hour, but the humidity had to put it to almost eighty. After this case, I’d never complain about New York summers again. The city got hot, but this was like walking in soup. I’d pulled my hair up, but strands of it still stuck to the back of my neck.

Why had I thought it was a good idea to do this?

My stomach twisted, and the sweat on my palms had little to do with the heat. Running to Bradyn when I needed someone to push the dark away made sense. Sex with him was amazing, and for reasons I didn’t want to analyze, I felt safe with him.

But this wasn’t me running to him. I’d had that flashback, but I’d worked through it on my own. Sure, I was a little worried that if I tried to sleep, it’d come back, but that wasn’t why I was only a few feet from Bradyn’s front steps. I wasn’t bored, either. Or horny. All my usual reasons for seeking sex weren’t there.

Well, not exactly anyway.

I wanted sex, but I only wanted it with him.

It was a new sensation and one that scared the shit out of me. There were times back home when I’d gone to Club Privé looking specifically for one sub or another because I knew which one would give me what I needed at that particular time. There, it’d been about who would be the best at doing what I needed done. With Bradyn, it was about him. I wanted him.

Fuck my life.

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