Page 22 of Judgment Day

Sadie stiffened, looked around. I fucking hated this. Hated that faraway look in her eyes. Hated the distance between us.

I brushed her cheek, and she flinched. “I’ll fix this.” The ground seemed as though it were swallowing me up.

For several seconds, she didn’t move. It didn’t even look as though she was breathing. Her lips parted but nothing came out. Then finally, “You can’t.” She shook her head, then scoffed, a faint smile tugging at her lips. “There are things you don’t know…” Her voice faded off into her thoughts. Torment flickered in her eyes as she searched my face, looking for something—understanding… hope…forgiveness for the things that haunted her mind. I couldn’t tell.

“Caspian told me about your son.” I narrowed my eyes on hers, holding her still, letting her know I meant what I said. “I’ll help him, too.” I shoved my hands into my pockets to break the urge to touch her. “How did I not know about him before now?”

Her eyes snapped shut as if I’d slapped her. Her breath hitched, then she cleared her throat to cover it up as she opened her eyes again. “Winston told everyone he belonged to a servant, that she was ill during pregnancy and I’d gone to help take care of her. I looked like the compassionate queen, and he got his alibi.” There was a careful cadence to her words, like she wasn’t quite sure how to say them because she’d never said them before.

I’d been out of prison for almost seven years. The child would have to be at least that old. I would’ve known if she’d suddenly disappeared for nine months.

“What happened to this servant?”

“She died during childbirth.” Her gaze fell to the ground, and her voice grew soft, the way someone spoke when remembering a loved one. “At least that’s the story we told.”

We lived by secrets, and we died by them. And so did anyone who was a threat.

“Where is he now?”

“A country house somewhere. I’m always blindfolded when we go. I know there’s water nearby because we travel by boat, and it’s not in Ayelswick because we also travel by plane. I’ve tried counting seconds in my mind, but it’s too far. There’s a woman who takes care of him. She thinks we visit out of some noble obligation to his dead mother.”

It was another fucked-up blow the Brotherhood had dealt her—being a mother unable to freely raise her own child and having no idea where he was.

“And his father? Does she think he’s dead, too?”

Surely, she didn’t believe the child belonged to Winston.

“We told her he was in pr—” Her words broke. She cleared her throat and lifted her chin, as if recognizing a mistake she’d almost made.

All the air left my body. “You told her what, Sadie? You told her his father was what?”

In prison?The same way I would have been in prison if she’d been pregnant with my child.

No.

There was no way.

“Or maybe I’ll go bareback. Fill you up and make you feel me dripping down your thigh the rest of the night.”

She looked torn between answering me and running away. She was struggling. It was in her eyes, in every calculated breath, all over her face.

“How old is he?” I asked, though in my gut I knew the answer. How could I have been so blind?

Because it was one time and she was on birth control. Because I trusted our love to be stronger than a secret. Because I never, in a lifetime of heartache, believed Sadie would have kept something like this from me. Because keeping this from me felt like a betrayal.

A weight hung between us, darkening the sunny sky, crushing my chest and making my knees almost buckle.

“How. Old?”

“Twelve,” she finally answered, meeting my gaze.

Twelve.

“He’s got your eyes. Your skin. Your smile.”

The air around us changed. Disappeared. My chest tightened. I tried to breathe, dragging in a lungful of nothing but anguish. It pierced and seared and shredded every fiber of my being.

I had a son.

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