Page 124 of Never Quiet

Hayden stared at Amanda, barely blinking. “Why would you engage him, Amanda? Why the fuck would you put yourself through all of this?”

Noel told him, “Because of your mother, Hayden. It was her last wish that I avenge you and so many others hurt by Winters.”

“What do you…m-my mother?”

Inhaling deeply, Noel said, “Before Hope died, she wrote me a letter. Two years later, I received a package from her attorney. In her last weeks of life, your mother learned what happened to you from another of Winston’s victims who witnessed a small piece of it. A person preparing to commit suicide spoke to her first, to unburden the guilt of leaving a child to the mercy of a monster.”

“No, I-I didn’t want her to know.”

Walking to him, Noel knelt by his side. “For more than a decade, I’ve tracked down every living person he ever harmed, Hayden. I’ve taken every mission that allowed me to hit him back, to hurt him, to madden him. Had he not discovered Amanda was my niece, I doubt he would have been so fixated on her.”

“Why, Noel? Why?”

“Your beautiful mother, so like my own mother, asked me to protect you…the man who protected everyone else. She wouldn’t ask Elijah because she knew you loved him for saving you, for training you so you were never a victim again. Her heart ached that only he ever managed to protect you.”

She clasped their hands together. “When you insisted on helping Amanda personally, something you so rarely do, I knew you’d love her. I knew she could stop the bleeding. Something no one else ever accomplished. Not family, lovers, or friends.”

He whispered, “I can’t lose her, Noel.”

“There’s more to the story, sweetheart. More you have to know.” She lifted their hands and kissed the back of his. “Trust her mind and her love for you, Hayden. I think she might be smarter than you.”

Amanda wiped her face as her aunt stood. Her voice was hoarse with her tears. “Winston’s favorite game of all time involved Isabella. Hurting her, even if Hayden didn’t know, gave him the vengeance he wanted so badly. He went into excruciating detail about what he did to her.”

Clearing her throat, sipping some water Roark pressed on her, she continued. “She never asked for help over two decades. At one point, she was delirious from hunger and pain.” Brie released a gasping sob. “Hallucinating, she thought he was a demon sent by God to punish her for her sins.”

Amanda felt lightheaded. “After Harper’s wife died, then your mother, Winters demanded Isabella seduce Harper, who didn’t realize who she was until it was too late, and plant bugs in the house. If she refused, Brie would be taken, raped, and killed. Elijah let her go but she was banned from the estate. For her failure to get pregnant with a Delkin heir, her inability to plant devices, she was starved, raped, and beaten. Throughout her ordeal, she believed her sister was dead.”

Closing her eyes, Amanda held herself up on the bar. “Every piece of information I’m sharing with you has come from four sources. Winston, Hope, Noel, and Isabella herself. I hacked into her laptop and located a long-buried journal file she created at the suggestion of one of her therapists.”

Pressing her hand to her stomach, Amanda admitted, “I accessed Isabella’s medical files, had Noel steal her DNA, and essentially invaded every area of her life to solve a puzzle.” Opening her eyes, she turned to look at Hayden. “I had unlimited samples of your DNA to test.”

He stood slowly, frowning. “What…are you talking about?”

Tears slipped over her cheeks as she looked at Harper. “At first, I thought it was you but the timing was wrong.” Swallowing past the painful lump in her throat, she whispered, “I wanted to be certain, absolutely certain, because I wouldn’t give him up without knowing everything.” Hayden took a step toward her and she said softly, “Wait. I need you to wait.”

He stilled, his gaze intense.

“Isabella was young, terrified, from a devout Catholic family. The father of her baby was an addict who kept disappearing and wouldn’t let her love him. She hid the pregnancy. She b-bound her stomach tightly, in constant pain, because it would have been hard to hide with her build. She inadvertently d-damaged her unborn child’s left hip and stunted its’ growth as well as impeded proper lung development.”

Amanda held up her hands as people stood around the table.

“When her daughter was born, she wanted to save her but didn’t know what to do. She left her, wrapped carefully, lovingly, in a blanket inside a bassinet, a small note beside her, at a fire station in Seattle. She waited across the street, in severe physical pain from having her baby alone, to make sure the firefighters saw her. She wanted her to be safe.”

Gasping softly, she said, “Callileah. What a bizarre twist of fate that it was Morgan and his young lover who happened upon her smiling face, her dark blue eyes, and fell in love. The Hernandez women are a beacon for the Delkin m-men.”

To Morgan and Harrison, she said, “The organization that sends her gifts, money for her medical expenses, is a shell company within a shell company that Isabella set up to help with her daughter.”

Hayden was suddenly in front of her, his hands holding her arms. She could feel how hard his body vibrated.

“She loved you from the start. She told Winston to hurt her instead of you. She hates herself and if you don’t help her, if you don’t show her what I’ve shown you and save her, one day, she’ll stop trying to get up and go through her day like a whole person. She’ll die, Hayden.”

“Amanda…”

“I asked for a favor and you promised to grant it.” He nodded once as tears dripped from his jaw. “Don’t take Callileah from her fathers. It would break them all. Start over with her, heal the strangeness you’ve always felt around her – because Callie reminds you so much of her mother – but don’t take her.”

“You ask a favor for someone else?”

“I pried into the private lives of every person here, tested your bodily fluids, kept horrible secrets, and entertained a monster for six months to get information I had no right to possess. I’m ashamed of keeping it to myself this long but I hired my own people to follow Isabella, to keep her safe. It was the least I could do when I was taking what didn’t belong to me.”

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