Page 61 of The Shade of Things
I tipped my neck to the side. “If you want to go for the jugular, it’s right here. I meant Tatiana and Juliette. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have learned anything. You didn’t even want to share the fact that you had a brother.”
Isla exited the car, a crumpled-up shirt and an empty water bottle in her hands. “Laurent doesn’t have a brother.”
My eyebrows shot into my hairline. Juliette was another honorary family member like Tatiana? Why let me think that her dad, Gabriel, was his actual sibling?
I wasn’t about to fight with Laurent in front of Isla, but oh boy, were we coming back to this.
“Did you send Rahm down to the garage to scout cars?” I asked Isla.
“He offered to do it,” she said.
“You were always too trusting,” Laurent said.
She glanced away before looking back with a wistful smile. “I was, wasn’t I?”
Was that a dig about him betraying his pack and walking away? Laurent dropped his gaze and a surge of protectiveness welled up inside me.
Confiding in me wasn’t simply about trusting me with his secrets, there was comfort and healing in sharing your sorrow, rather than keeping it bottled up. I knew that all too well.
“Let the past go.” Isla patted his cheek in a motherly gesture. “We leave in ten,” she said and went to wake the others.
I clamped my lips shut tight against all my questions and crossed my arms.
“Can we finish this discussion once we’re out of the game?” Laurent said.
“Depends. Are you actually going to tell me something?”
“I’m not used to sharing,” he said.
“So you keep saying, but I don’t see you trying to change that. Not when it comes to yourself,” I amended. “Yeah, we can table this, but Laurent? I won’t wait long.”
I should have strutted off in a cloud of self-righteousness, but how could I when I was doing the same thing to him that he was to me? Or was he? My moral high ground was shaky. I was keeping a terrible secret about what my family had done to his family. It wasn’t right for me to continue a friendship, never mind be intimate with him, under the false pretense that this history didn’t exist.
I sat down against a wall. Did his secret keeping constitute a betrayal? If nothing in his past impacted me or my family in any way, how much right did I have to know about his life before he met me? I wasn’t in danger from him; we weren’t even dating. Was he simply on a much slower timeline of processing and healing and that’s why he couldn’t talk about his past?
I’d kept my magic a secret from everyone for almost thirty years instead of allowing them in and letting their love for me help heal the scars of the past. My cousin Goldie, who’d raised me, still didn’t know, since I wasn’t having this conversation with her long-distance over the phone while she was in Florida, but that needed to be rectified.
Secret keeping and what constituted betrayal was no longer such a black-and-white issue.
Rahm returned, smoking a cigarette. “Found a passenger van. It’ll be tight, but we’ll fit.”
His knuckles were tattooed with Hebrew letters and he wore a thick gold chain. A Jewish bad boy. I bet he was very popular back home with girls wanting to shock their mothers.
He blew out a smoke ring. “The way they’re going at the gate, it won’t hold long. The garage must not be out of bounds.”
Okeyo unearthed a gun from a side holster under his soccer jersey. “No problem.”
Everyone except Rahm, Isla, Eli, and Laurent jumped, flinched, yelped, or gasped.
Eli nodded at him. “Finger off the trigger. Pointed away from anything you could unintentionally shoot. You’re trained. That your licensed firearm?”
“Yes.” The Black man’s English had a musical lilt. “I’m a politician with a permit to carry. I was at my gun club in Nairobi when I was taken.” His eyes dropped to Eli’s own weapon. “Hobbyist or professional?”
“Police officer,” Eli said. The two men exchanged a mutual respect bro look.
“Where’s the van in relation to the elevator down there?” I said.
“Back left corner. Maybe a hundred feet,” Rahm said.
