Still Waters (Greenstone Security 1)

Especially since the moonlight illuminated the sculpted body I was lying atop.

We had been silent a while, my mind working over everything we’d said so far that didn’t seem like a lot, but at the same time was too much.

One thought stuck with me, tangled with my own memories.

“Your dad, how did he die?” I asked.

The question was blunt, for sure, but in my experience, bluntness was the best way to deal with death. Death was the starkest, most unadorned fact of life and trying to dance around it did little help to anyone, especially the one touched by it. Beaten by it.

Keltan’s arms flexed around me, but his eyes didn’t harden; if anything, they glowed with something akin to approval, swimming around the grief. He didn’t hesitate in his answer.

“Heart attack. Forty-one years old. Never smoked a day in his life. Had a couple of beers on the weekend but wasn’t a big drinker. Lived clean. Cleaner than most. Took him while he was fencing. My sister was there when it happened. Nothing she could do. And by the time she sprinted back to the house to get us and the paramedics, who were twenty minutes’ drive away, there was nothing anyone could do.” He shrugged, and my body moved with the motion. “If your name is on the bullet there’s nothing you can do, I guess.”

I glanced up at him. “You believe in that kind of stuff?” I asked, slightly surprised that a manly, now ex-soldier believed in something that sounded a lot like fate. The wording of it was distinctly male, but the crux of it seemed the same.

He didn’t break eye contact with me. “Yeah, babe. Gotta have some belief as to why this world throws us copious amounts of shit. Gotta have at least a bit of faith that the universe is doing it for a reason. ‘Cause to get through the shit, there’s something at the other side. Something worth it.” Those eyes burned into my soul with the weight of what he was alluding to.

Me. He meant me. I was worth it.

But are you really?

It was a small, shaking, scared voice that asked that. The eight-year-old me who asked if I was worth it, then why did my father leave without a flinch? Why did he do that to mom without an ounce of… anything?

“Kismet,” I whispered.

He traced my jaw. “Exactly.”

I sucked in a breath at the meaning behind his words and searched for escape. I found it in truth, in the demons of my past, the only time they’d helped me out.

“Yeah I believe in that too. That’s how my mom met my dad. Kismet.”

Keltan tilted his head. “Meant to be, to create what I’m holding?” he said lightly, eyes clearing of some of his own demons.

I shook my head. “No, they met after this was created.” I waved my hand down my naked body.

Keltan frowned. “Not entirely sure that’s possible. And”—he glanced down at my bare belly—“you’ve got a belly button, so you’re not some kind of alien. Need more of an explanation.”

I smiled despite myself, then sobered. “My sperm donor, the one who made me, he’s not my dad. Not the one I have movie night with once a month, who introduced me to Audrey and Tarantino. Not the one who tied my hair up for me until I was old enough to do it myself, and who loved doing it.” I gazed into his eyes. “My biological father left us in our trailer when I was eight years old, and Polly was two.” I paused, swallowing against the roughness of the memory closing up my throat. “That was, of course, after beating my mother within an inch of her life,” I added in a flat voice.

Keltan’s eyes were no longer liquid, but glinting bronze. His hand had stopped idly stroking my jaw; instead it cupped it roughly, frozen.

“Kismet was Pete,” I continued on a whisper. “When I figured out how to get Mom to the hospital, in a taxi—the driver is hopefully burning in Hell for not helping me with my barely conscious mom and two-year-old baby sister because I was short two bucks—he was there. He treated her. He treated us. Saved us.

“And what my father did, as horrible as that was—and it was—without it, my mom wouldn’t have Pete. I wouldn’t. Polly wouldn’t have the only dad she’ll ever know. The only one she needs to know.”

The following silence wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but it was definitely full. The entire time Keltan’s eyes never left mine, and with them he said the things I didn’t want him to say, but also did.

Luckily, he believed in simplicity around the ugly truths too.

“I’m sorry your dad was the most colossal fuckwit on Planet Earth, babe,” he said. “We’ll just hope a semi ran over his broke ass the moment he left you.”