Page 74 of The Vipers and Their Vendetta

“Very well. I’m looking for something—a family heirloom which your mother stole from me.”

I’m immediately defensive at him calling my mother a thief. “She didn’t steal from you! You were the one who stole something from her. Or perhaps I should saysomeone.”

“If by someone you mean Reagan, you should know that your mother was in no state to be a parent. Drinking, drugs, whoring around. She neglected Reagan. I saved my daughter’s life by no longer giving her access to that woman, but your mother was the person who left us first.”

My mouth drops. The woman he’s describing is not my mother. She wasn’t like that at all, was she? I barely even saw her pick up an alcoholic drink. But he’s planted that seed of doubt. What if she had been, and I simply never saw it? Maybe she’d changed over the years. Or perhaps, when she fell pregnant with me, she hadn’t wanted history to repeat itself and had cleaned up her act.

After all, she went from one man who was a criminal to the leader of an MC. Is that really the kind of man an upstanding citizen is attracted to? It wouldn’t be a stretch to think of her as being a party girl back in the day.

The only person I can really ask about this, and trust that he’ll tell me the truth, is my dad. Problem is, if I ask him if Mom had issues with addiction before she had me, he’ll want to know how I found out. The whole story will come out then, and my dad will want to punish Jarl Olsen for how he treated Mom.

I can’t imagine Jarl would take a threat from an MC lying down. Then I’d have started a war, and if I lose my father, too, I’ll have no one.

“You’re lying!”

He remains calm in the force of my anger. “I don’t know what she told you, Ivani, but I’m telling you the truth. Now I simply want to find the heirloom she took with her when she deserted us. I assumed she would have sold it for drink or drugs almost as soon as she’d left, but finding out that you’re here gives me a final opportunity to find it. It’s a gold cross on a chain, almost an inch in size. It was passed down from generation to generation in the Olsen family, and she took it from us when she had no right to.” He pushes his phone over to me so I can see a picture of the necklace. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to find out if you’d seen it.”

I recognize it instantly because it’s been around my dad’s neck for as long as I can remember. Fuck.

I wonder if he has any idea where it came from.

Why the hell would my mother give that necklace to my dad? Didn’t it have bad connotations? It doesn’t make any sense. Why give my dad something that belonged to the bastard who stole her child? If her story is true, she hated Jarl Olsen. Wouldn’t it have reminded her of him and what he did to her every time she looked at it?

Unless it was someone else she wanted to remember—the daughter who was no longer with her.Reagan.

Did she give the necklace to my dad to remind her of the baby daughter she’d abandoned?

Or was it a sort of trophy and it gave her a kick to see a powerful, untouchable man wearing it? A giant ‘fuck you’ to Jarl? I have so many questions and no way to get the answers.

My stomach knots at the thought that my mother could have been lying to me, even on her deathbed. It makes me feel hot and cold and prickly all at the same time. But there’s still no way I’m getting that necklace back from my dad for Jarl Olsen.

I pray Jarl doesn’t see the truth in my face.

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen it. If what you’re saying about my mom is true, then she most likely did sell it. Why would she want to keep something that reminded her of you all these years? She hated you.”

I take satisfaction from those final words, but he seems unaffected, his pale blue eyes like glaciers.

He presses his lips into a thin line. “I see. That’s most unfortunate. Normally, if someone takes something of mine, and I’m unable to retrieve it, I’ll take something else in return.”

“Well, she’s dead,” I say with bitterness. “You’re too late.”

“Yes, so it seems.” His gaze drifts away as though he’s lost in thought, perhaps thinking about their time together.

I can’t help myself; I’m curious. “Why didn’t you find Mom back then and take it back yourself? Why did you just let her go?”

“I had no idea where she was. I didn’t even know if she was alive or dead. I certainly didn’t know she’d gone on to marry into an MC, but I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.”

“My mom wasn’t a bad person,” I say. “This woman you’ve described—drinking and taking drugs—that wasn’t the mother I knew.”

“Well, I’m glad she cleaned up her act. It was a shame she never managed to do that for Reagan. The poor girl had to grow up without a mother.”

Guilt twists inside me. Maybe my upbringing hadn’t been perfect, but I’d had a mom and a dad, and I’d never gone wanting. I’d believed Reagan had been raised by a monster, but perhaps my mom had been the monster all along.

Then I remember this man took a payoff from the college to not press for any further investigation into his daughter’s death. Who does that? Not the kind of man who loves his daughter and wants to fight for justice.

But these aren’t normal men, are they? They don’t go to the cops when there’s a problem; they sort it themselves. It makes me wonder if that’s what Jarl is doing here now.

“I kept my part of the deal,” I say. “Now, can I see the photos of Reagan?”

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