Page 76 of Mimic
“I’m sorry, Gunner.”
“How old are you, Indie?”
“Twenty.”
“Son of a bitch!” Gunner cursed, and Haizley was quick to scold him. “Not the time, Gunner.”
“What if,” Jingles continued, ignoring Gunner’s outburst, “his plan all along was to go back for her when she was eighteen?”
“That son of a bitch let her be raped as a child so that she could become a weapon for him later.”
I stopped listening as the men argued all around me. I knew they were enraged for my benefit, but it didn’t change what I was feeling deep inside my soul. In the span of mere minutes, I’d learned that not only had my father most likely orchestrated my being taken away from my mother. But he’d willingly given me to a man he knew would use me, a child, as a sex toy. All so I could be trained to be a killing machine. I’d been stolen away from the one person who loved me with everything she had.
“Nav?”
A hush settled around the table as I called out the brother who could finally get me the answers that I needed.
“Yeah, Indie?”
I looked up at him. His hair was a golden honey brown. His eyes were blue sapphires, and his shoulders were wide. He didn’t look like someone you would typically think of as a nerd, a computer whiz out of Silicon Valley. He was every bit the biker he portrayed. But he had knowledge. Knowledge I had put off seeking out. Knowledge that I desperately needed right this second before I could make any further decisions.
“Can you tell me what happened to my mother?”
A sad smile slid over his face as he nodded and looked down at his computer. I waited anxiously as his fingers danced across the keys. My eyes were glued to his as he fixated on the screen in front of him, and I knew the moment his fingers froze.
The information I had been too afraid to look for because I knew. I knew when I was there, locked in that room every night as I begged for my mother to save me, that nothing short of death would stop her from coming for me.
I knew when we were rescued, and Magyk insisted we couldn’t go home because that was the first place they would look. That we would be putting our families’ lives at risk by letting them know where we were.
And we all agreed.
Our first night of freedom, huddled together in a hotel room, we all agreed we didn’t want our families to suffer. It had been ten years. That was a long time to hold out hope. A long time to still be searching.
We all knew the truth.
We didn’t need anyone to tell us.
We knew.
Our mothers didn’t come for us because they couldn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mimic
“I’m so sorry, Indie.” Nav’s words hit us all.
It was yet another thing Indie and I had in common. Our mothers had been killed by sadistic sons of bitches whose only motives were power and sex.
Death and destruction followed us everywhere we went.
I leaned over and pulled her against me, whispering in her ear, “I’m so fucking sorry.”
She nodded, but she didn’t cry. Her face was blank in expression. I hated the look on her face. Hated the pain she was feeling.
I’d always known my mother was gone. Dakota made sure of it. He taunted me every day about how she’d told him where to find me. How to find me. He’d convinced me that she didn’t want me. Saying that shit over and over to a child wasn’t just traumatic, it was pure evil.
As children, we believed adults told us the truth. We believed they would never lie. It was the innocence of childhood that made us trust the grownups in our lives.
