Page 46 of His Toy

CHAPTER 12

Zaid

In the operations room, Kiley sat across from me. “That was harder than I thought it would be,” she said.

“But you found answers?”

“Of course I did,” she said. She rolled her eyes. She handed me a manilla folder. “That’s everything.” It was an inch thick, full of various sizes of papers. “I have the digital copies too.”

“The cause of death?”

Kiley raised an eyebrow. “Overdosed. Both of them.” I flipped through the files: birth and death certificates, a few newspaper articles, other documents. Kiley was staring, but I ignored her gaze.

“You really care about her, don’t you?”

I kept my eyes on the files in front of me. “Your point?”

“I’ve never seen you get like this for anyone.” She shuffled her feet, her mouth open, as if waiting for the right moment to say something. Kiley and I had a relationship similar to mine with Grant: familial, but unrelated. I had given her a job and a temporary home when she had nothing. Any time another person, man or woman, was let into the house, she was wary, like a protective sister. Finally, Kiley said, “There’s something you should know about their deaths.” The usual feistiness in her voice was gone. I looked up. “Two young children, both under three, were found in a nearby park. They could hardly make sense of it to the police.”

Heather had been left alone, that young?

“When did this happen?”

“Around the same time their parents died.”

I flipped through the files again. “And you’re sure it’s them?”

“Everything fits.”

The thought of the two sisters being abandoned in a park together made me sick. But I understood Heather now. She grew up knowing her sister, nothing else. Hazel was all she had.

And shestillhad Hazel. I needed to make sure that they were both protected.

“There was a festival in that park the day before. Maybe the parents went to leave them at the fair with a free daycare or something, and when the festival wasn’t there, they left them anyway. Or maybe they forgot. Who knows,” Kiley said.

My mother had indulged in certain substances, courtesy of Eric. But my mother always stayed by my side. She never left me.

Who would abandon their children to get high?

“Look,” Kiley said, crossing her arms. “I don’t want to tell her. This might be something that’s better left unsaid.”

I agreed to some extent. Heather was fairly optimistic, and news like this could change her entire outlook. She had been searching for these answers for her whole life. It might break her.

But she needed to know the truth. She deserved it. I understood herneedto know. After the journey she had been through, she needed to know that she might have had the worst odds, but she had survived. Not only survived, but she was doing well. Thriving.

But we had to be ready for what was coming. I needed her to be ready. To stay the woman that I knew could handle Eric.

The information would wait for now.

“This is the only hard copy?” I asked. Kiley nodded. “Destroy the other records.”

Kiley showed hesitation and tried to argue, and I listened, but ultimately denied her. I could use this information to manipulate Heather, or I could keep it safe from her. It wasn’t in me to do the first option anymore. I flipped through the file once more and saw the gravesite. I knew exactly where their tombs were. Perhaps we would take a trip to Primm. I could tell Heather then.

But for now, we had a party to attend.

***

Heather met me in the fireplace room. Lace covered her arms, her chest, opening to a wide neckline, and the lace ending at her wrists and knees. A sweetheart-cut dress was beneath it. In ankle boots, she was a few inches taller, but still shorter than me, and she looked elegant, sophisticated, promising. Sultry. But I knew who she was underneath. The woman who wore workout clothes and dripped with sweat while I punished her, who used her mouth to please me, all while on her knees.