Page 33 of Dragon Stepbrother's Secret Baby

She led the way out of the dining room, but I couldn’t help casting backward glances at the teenagers. They worked happily and they all smiled and laughed like they were really enjoying themselves.

I’d never seen happier teenagers anywhere. They coordinated their efforts, and right before I walked out, one of the tallest boys yelled through the door to two girls who were wheeling a cart away. “Be careful loading those into the dishwasher this time! Karim charged our whole team to replace the ones you broke last week.”

“You’re the one who crashed an entire cart into Kingston on our last KP shift,” one of the girls shot back. “You’re the reason we got assigned an extra KP rotation, Darian.”

“None of us is ever letting you near another dirty dish,” a different boy added from the other side of the room and the others all burst out laughing.

Lacy touched my elbow. “Come on. They could be in here messing around for hours.”

“Are they all like this?” I murmured.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Happy. Are all the kids so…..so happy?”

“They have no reason not to be. They work hard for their Clan and they all know they have a place in the Clan when they grow up. None of them has to worry about where they belong. They’ve all been working for years to take their places and contribute when they get old enough.”

“Don’t they ever get out? Don’t they ever go into town and blow off steam like normal teenagers? How can they be happy when they’re stuck in here all the time.”

“Oh, they go into town often enough. Trust me.” She snorted with laughter. “They take field trips to New York or Paris when they want to. They take the Clan’s private jet and a few adults go with them to make sure everyone gets home in one piece. The kids have a good time and then they come back ready to knuckle down and build the futures they really want. They could leave the Clan and go live among the outsiders if they wanted to, but no one ever does.”

I turned to eye her. “No one except Layton Heller, you mean. He left and he took his son with him. Why would he do that if everything here is so perfect?”

She winced. “No one knows why Layton left, but he must have had a good reason—a reason directly related to the Clan’s interests. Layton never did anything against the Clan’s interests.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute. She obviously knew Layton as well as I did. She was right about him. Layton would never leave his family unless he absolutely had to. He wouldn’t have taken his son away unless he had a damn good reason—a reason that was as important to Kingston as it was to the rest of the Clan.

“What happens if any of those kids gets into trouble or falls behind on their studies?” I asked.

“They get the help they need,” she replied. “Someone usually tutors them or coaches them to get their life together. Kingston tutored Darian for about a year when Darian started having trouble. He lost his father in one of the Danes’ attacks and Darian went off the rails for a while. Kingston got him back on track.”

I stopped on the spot to stare at her. “He did?”

Lacey nodded. “Darian needed an older man who also lost his father to the Danes. They could relate to each other and Kingston showed Darian how to channel his anger against the Danes into building up the Clan. Darian is really good at strategy and reconnaissance. Kingston got Darian to use his skills to track down the Danes who killed his father. Then Kingston assigned Darian to organize the hit to take out the Danes that did it. It gave Darian a way to focus his feelings to help the Clan.”

I blinked at her and then faced front trying to understand everything she just told me. So this was what Kingston had been doing after he left me and my mom. He’d been helping his Clan.

He told me that’s what he’d been doing, but it all became so much more real, now that I actually saw these people in the flesh.

That boy scraping dirty dishes in the dining room right now—he could laugh and joke and enjoy his time with his cousins because of Kingston. Kingston gave Darian his life back.

Kingston had been just like that boy—lost and angry and confused after his father’s death. He must have channeled his grief and anger into helping his Clan against the Danes. That was what he’d been doing during the five years when I didn’t know where he was.

Raising Connor alone didn’t seem like such a sacrifice now. I bought Kingston the time he needed to heal and grow up. Now he was strong, successful, and connected to a community as strong and successful as he was. He made it that way because he was strong and successful. He was their leader and showed them how to be strong and successful.

I couldn’t stop staring at everyone and everything around me. Was this what Connor could look forward to—this interconnected network of support and success—for the rest of his life?

If he ever had any trouble growing up—if he had behavior problems or school problems or suffered any tragedy—the Clan would step in to help him. Some older man would guide him and coach him and show him how to fix his life.

I couldn’t give him that, but Kingston could. I couldn’t imagine any father giving their child a greater gift—except for maybe Layton. He would do something like that, but he never got a chance because he was dead.

I lost track of where Lacey was taking me until she turned off into a separate room. I didn’t notice this place before. Dozens of other rooms, halls, and spaces had been carved out of the mountain itself.

This one shone with bright white walls, a white tile floor, and blazing white fluorescent lights glaring down from above. Dozens of computers stood on different workstations around the room.

An even bigger towering bank of shelves in the corner flashed and flickered with high-tech computer components. The stacks out in the main hall paled in comparison to this.

“What would you like to do first?” Lacey asked.

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