Sins of Our Ancestors Boxed Set

by Bridget E. Baker

“Thanks for dinner, really, but I don't need fancy meals, or stern talkings to. I need to get out of here and get back to the hundred thousand kids who are dying because of a mess you and dad, and Solomon, or his nefarious partner, or whoever else was involved, created.”

  She shakes her head. “We just want some time with you, and we need to make sure your blood cured your father, before we can even consider you leaving.”

  I groan. “How long before you’re convinced?”

  “Give us two weeks, okay? What difference will a few weeks make to those children?”

  “That’s at least two rounds of clinical trials,” I say. “Job’s been developing a plan, and I have no idea how much my absence will set them back.”

  “Clinical trials?” She shakes her head. “I’ve already missed seventeen years with you, and now you begrudge me two little weeks.”

  “Then come with me! Do you understand any part of what I'm saying? This isn't about you or Solomon, or making up for lost time, or teaching me lessons. This is about an entire group of people surviving or dying.” I almost choke on the word, thinking of Sam, but I shove that thought away. “If you can't see the urgency in this, in my speedy return, we'll never, ever have a chance of seeing eye to eye.”

  Josephine sighs. “Ah, youth. I miss the passion, the certainty about everything. I do understand that you want to help them, darling. I even get why you’re in such a rush. I'll talk to your father and see if I can help him remember what it was like to be young, to feel like if something didn’t happen right away, you’d explode. How about four or five days instead of fourteen? Would that be an acceptable compromise?”

  Because there's no way they'll release me until they can be reasonably sure Solomon's healed from my darts.

  Which is what this is really all about at the end of the day.

  My mom may care for me, and she may even love me in the way a little girl loves her favorite doll, or a beloved dog, but she doesn't love me like a daughter, because she has no idea what that even means. And Solomon isn't going to let me go until he knows he's healthy again.

  “Just answer one question for me, please?” I ask.

  She bobs her head.

  “Is Solomon going to kill the Marked kids, or not?”

  She frowns. “He gave you his word he wouldn't if you came.”

  “He promised me Sam could leave this island with me, too.”

  Before Josephine can answer, I hear a commotion outside, and the door to my cell bursts open.

  “I did promise that, didn't I?” Solomon's wearing jeans and a dark sweater instead of a suit. “You don’t forget a word do you? Even though I only included that promise to bring my daughter back to me, so I could fix the mess she created with her interference, her terrible temper and her insolence.” He glances at Wesley. “I hoped when you brought this one along, it meant you’d replaced the Roth boy. If you had, I hoped you might eventually let the past go, and be willing to give your mother and I a chance.”

  I glance at Wesley, and he shakes his head. He's come to the same conclusion as me. My mom's not about to change course, no matter what I do. And yet, I can't quite give up on her, knowing what Wesley told me about abused wives. She may not have known me long, and I may not have a lot of faith, but something deep inside me longs for her to love me more than this man, this awful, terrible man.

  I want to be enough.

  “You never know,” I say. “I do look just like her, maybe I take after my mother in other things, too.”

  Solomon's eyes snap toward me. “What does that mean?”

  I stand up. “She hadn't even divorced my dad yet when she decided to take up with you, right? Isn't that what landed us in this mess to begin with?”

  Solomon scowls. “You know nothing. About anything.”

  Josephine's face pales and her hands fist into balls on her lap. I change tactics. After all, Josephine's not the one I'm trying to upset.

  “Although, she seems certain you're my father. You're the one who doesn't know. I've heard that people who cheat are the most paranoid about others doing the same. Is that why you're so quick to judge her? How many women have you slept with since calling yourself a king? I bet your subjects adore your crown.”

  His slap surprises me, knocking my face to the side in a bright flash. My eyes momentarily can’t see and after I blink them several times and vision returns, my left cheek burns.

  Wesley jumps up, but I hold out a hand. He’s going to need to do far worse than slap me if we hope to make any progress. I glance at my mom. Her hand covers her face, but she's shocked, not upset.

  Not yet.

  “Watch your mouth. I won't allow anyone to talk like that about me, not even my daughter.”

  “I'm not your daughter.” I sneer. “I'm nothing like you.”

  He barks a laugh. “Thank you for that perfect segue. I came down to share the good news. My guard took a hair sample from you as I requested, and the lab results are already back.”

  That guard did yank a chunk of my hair out, apparently on Solomon's orders. My stomach turns. Solomon's crowing.

  No, no no.

  “My wife never lied to me. She's been faithful to me for all these years, just as I have to her. You're my daughter, clever mind, filthy mouth and all.”

  I shake my head vehemently. “I don't care what the DNA test shows. There's no part of me that has anything to do with you. I'm Donovan Behl's daughter through and through. If I could scrub any trace of you out of my body, I'd scratch my skin off to do it. If it left me permanently disfigured, well, I'd count it cheap.”

  This time he slaps one side of my face, and then the other in quick succession. When I bring my hands up to block him instinctively, he knees me in the stomach. I double over, and then slump slowly to the ground. I don't try to disguise my moans. I want my mom to suffer right along with me.

  “Daughter or not, speak to me that way again, and I won't be as forgiving.” Solomon spins on his heel.

  Josephine crosses the room and takes my face in her lap, stroking my hair gently. “Shhh now. I'm so sorry, darling, but you must be more careful not to anger him like that. He can't help himself when you're so disrespectful. You mustn’t talk to your father that way.”

  “Joey.”

  Josephine stiffens and pats my cheek one last time. She slides away from me and stands up, glancing back apologetically.

  “I'll bring you breakfast in the morning,” she whispers, and then she scurries after Solomon.

  So much for galvanizing Mom.

  Wesley rushes to my side and picks me up, laying me back down on my cot. “What can I do? Anything?”

  I'm still curled in a fetal ball, the pain radiating out from my stomach, but after a moment my stomach doesn't hurt nearly as bad, and I pull myself into a sitting position.

  I bring my knees up under my chin. “Well, the way Plan A played out genuinely sucked. Feel like working on Plan B?”

  14

  Wesley's laugh warms my heart. “I love you, you know that? You quite literally took those punches and kept on swinging.” He shakes his head. “Plan B, huh?”

  I love him, too. I don't feel the same way about him as I do about Sam. As I did about Sam. Or as I do.

  I'm a mess.

  But I do love him. Wesley's always been there for me, and he and I are the same in so many ways. He doesn't wallow, he's a pragmatist, and he keeps looking for ways to deal with things.

  Wesley's not the only one who's there for me, either. There's Rhonda, Job, Aunt Anne, Uncle Dan, and a whole host of friends back in Port Gibson. My heart aches for home, for my house, and my room. Why did I think I didn't have a place? Now that I've found my biological parents, all I want to do is flee as fast as possible and never look back.

  Does Josephine really think chocolate and trips to Mexico compensate for who Solomon is inside?

  “About that window,” I say.

  Wesley snorts. “I thought we ruled out the cot-stacking-window-smashing
plan?”

  “We did, but then my dad slapped me silly and my mom told me I needed to be more careful not to make him angry.”

  “True,” Wesley says. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  “The only thing we still have going for us, writ large, is that no one knows Solomon's Marked, right? And everyone knows I'm his kid. He finally has an heir, albeit a disappointing one who needs quite a bit of spit and polish.”

  Wesley nods. “I'm with you there.”

  “So maybe if we smash the window and incapacitate the guard, we can walk right out of town.”

  Wesley scrunches his nose. “I think Plan A has more promise, if I'm being honest.”

  “Plan A crashed and burned. We’re lucky we climbed out of the wreckage.”

  “I know.” He pulls me close. “I don't think I can stand around and do nothing while he hits you again anyway.”

  I roll my eyes. “Look, I know it's not a great idea to try walking out, but it's all I've got, and I can't just sit here, not anymore. If my mom offers me one more piece of chocolate as if that makes up for the way he treats her…”

  “Sneaking out the window isn’t going to work,” Wesley says. “And it's just gonna piss Solomon off even worse.”

  “How much angrier can he really get? Besides, if we make him truly furious, we're back to Plan A, right?” I grin.

  “Fair point.”

  I climb off the cot and cross the room to the bathroom.

  “Good thinking,” Wesley calls after me. “We should pee now, before we try to race across town.”

  “Oh shaddup, smart aleck. I can't remember if there's a mirror or something shiny in here. I'd like to know how bad my face looks before I try and convince people we run into that I'm Princess Ruby and they should let me do whatever I want to do instead of trying to stop me.”

  No mirror. Of course not. A mirror could be smashed and used as a weapon. I curse.

  Wesley grins at me. “Don't worry. You don’t look so bad.”

  “Okay, if you had to pick one, does my face look like I'm too old to be climbing trees, or like I was shuttlecocked in the eye in a round of badminton?”

  He laughs. “Shuttlecocked? I have no idea what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. To answer your question, Rafe looks bad after our fight, but you look fine. Your cheeks look pink, but so far, no bruising.”

  That's good. “I guess my dad would be an expert at inflicting pain without leaving substantial marks.”

  “Next question,” Wesley asks. “How do you plan to break the window, and once we do, how do we incapacitate the armed and presumably annoyed, if not outright angry, guard?”

  Sam would never ask me any of these questions. He'd leap to the ceiling, kick the window out, and then use a bunch of weeds as a garrote to strangle the guard before he had a chance to breathe, much less cry out. Tears spring to my eyes, but I shake them off. I can't think about Sam. He's not here.

  Wesley and I have to figure this out without ninja skills or super human strength. I rifle through the basket full of leftovers my mom left in her rush to abandon me when Solomon whistled.

  “That soup tureen looks heavy.”

  Wesley sighs. “I doubt it'll break that window, though.”

  I shake my head. “Not for the window, but it should knock that guard out.”

  “Good call. Now about the window.” He kneels down by one of the cots, arms braced to try and pull it apart.

  “Wait, if we disassemble the cots to break the glass, how will we reach the window?”

  He sits back on his heels and swears. “I guess you could stand on my shoulders?”

  I imagine us wobbling back and forth, and ultimately falling to the tile floor in a crash. “I dunno, that seems. . . unreliable. Besides, how will you get up after I do?”

  Wesley sighs. “Have you ever tried stacking cots? I doubt that will work any better.”

  “Let's say I do stand on your shoulders, smash the window, and then crawl over the shards to the other side.”

  “Okay.”

  “How,” I ask, “do you think you're gonna get out?”

  Wesley exhales. “If you take out the guard inside, too—”

  “As opposed to bashing just the one in the head and sneaking off?”

  Wesley throws his hands up in the air. “This isn't really my strong suit, escapes and whatnot. I'm more of a managing people and troubleshooting political minefields kinda guy.”

  I collapse on my wobbly cot. This is so not my thing, either. I refuse to think about Sam, though, because a meltdown hovers on the other side of that cliff, and it won’t help us.

  “I guess we can wait, and hope that once he's cured, God-loving Solomon will let us go? Maybe Mom can even convince him to do it in just five days.”

  That sounds stupidly optimistic, even to me. I don't think he'll kill me, at least not right away, but I doubt he's sending me back to donate blood for Marked kids either. Besides, if his Mark comes back, all bets are off. I wouldn't put it past him to keep me in this room forever for regular blood transfusions to hold his Mark at bay.

  “What about the pipes for the sink?” Wesley asks. “Aren't they metal?”

  “Pipes? What are you talking about?”

  “For smashing the window. I know a lot about problems that crop up in town,” he says. “Once I followed Mr. Edwards around all day.”

  Mr. Edwards is one of Port Gibson’s two plumbers, the better one, in my opinion. I know them both from my time in Sanitation. “Why'd you follow him?”

  “I think he wanted Dad to appoint him as head plumber. He spent all day complaining about Phil Nyugen's work. But the point is, I know what a P trap is. Do you?”

  I shake my head. “I never studied plumbing. I was only in sanitation for a few months, but I actively avoided anything to do with pee.”

  “Not pee, but the letter P. They make the pipes in a certain way to trap sewer gas, and. . . Actually, you don't need to know all of that. It's gross. The point is, it’s designed so that a normal person can take this part of the pipe off to check for hair and junk. I might be able to get it off, even without any tools.”

  I point at the bathroom. “Less talking, more plumbing.”

  Wesley ducks inside and closes the door to muffle the noise. Even so, I hear a clang and glance at the main doorway. If the guard hears us and comes to check, we're screwed. I bang on the door myself to cover the noise.

  A moment later, a deep male voice asks. “Yes, Your Majesty? What can I do for you?”

  Uh. What do I say now?

  “Are you the jerk who yanked out my hair?”

  He makes a choking sound. “No Your Majesty, that was Edward.”

  Another clang from the bathroom. I try to cover it up by banging on the wall again.

  “Your Majesty, I’m right here. There's no need to bang on the wall.”

  “Uh, I'm upset. I want to talk to Edward. My scalp still hurts where he ripped out my . . . er, royal hair.”

  “Your royal hair?”

  I laugh before I realize I shouldn’t. I turn it into a cough.

  “I’m sorry about your royal hair, Your Majesty, but Edward's stationed outside and must maintain his post.”

  Wesley pokes his head out, large pipe in hand and throws me a cheesy thumbs up with his other hand.

  “Okay well, I have some select words I’d like to say to him.”

  Wesley points at the door and mouths the words, “What are you doing?”

  I sigh. “That will be all, umm, non-assaulting guard whose name I don’t know.”

  “My name is Adam, Majesty.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You sound a little familiar, Adam.”

  “I showed you around your first trip here,” he says.

  I close my eyes. He was pretty nice. His steps recede slowly, and I hope I don’t need to bash him over the head.

  “Why would you call him over?” Wesley whispers. “I thought we decided we weren’t going to win any of the
m over.”

  “I didn't call him over. You made so much noise in there that I had to cover for you. All I could think to do on such short notice was bang on the wall.”

  He slaps his forehead. “Nice cover, Your Majesty.”

  I slug him in the arm. “I’m sure you’d have come up with something far better in this room, where we have nothing.”

  “Yes, your Highness. Whatever you say your Royal Fanciness.”

  I snatch the pipe from his hand. “Oh, and bad news. There’s definitely a guard stationed outside, in addition to the one in here.” The good news is that I won't even feel guilty when I bash Edward’s stupid, hair snatching skull in.

  Wesley grabs my cot and carries it over next to his. “So much for sneaking away. Do you want me to try and get out first so I can do the smashing?”

  I shake my head. “I think he'll be less likely to shoot me, what with all my majesty and pomp. Besides, I have a score to settle with Edward. He yanked out a fistful of my hair.”

  “You ready to do this, then?” he asks.

  I nod.

  We stack the cots on top of each other. It's harder than I expect. The top cot keeps sliding, and at one point, the bottom cot collapses entirely.

  “Everything okay in there?” Adam’s deep voice makes me jump.

  “Uh, yes,” I say. “Just playing a game.”

  The guard clears his throat. “Well, keep it appropriate, or I'll have to come check on you. King Solomon wants me to put anything odd into my report.”

  “I'm sorry,” I say. “I promise we'll be less . . . rowdy.”

  Wesley smirks, and I thump his shoulder again. He falls back on top of the cots with a crash, and I swear. There's no way Adam’s walking away now.

  Wesley shoves my cot back to the floor, and kicks the pipe underneath his. He sits down on his, tucking his feet underneath him to cover up the pipe. I hop onto his lap, and not a second too soon. Adam opens the door and stares from Wesley to me and back again.

  He’s tall with blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. Even with his broad shoulders and dark tan, he’s not as beautiful as Sam, but he’s awfully close.

  “No funny business,” Adam says. “Your dad specifically ordered that. Your mom wants your friend here only for moral support. I'm authorized to move him one cell over if I think anything improper is underway.” He narrows his eyes at Wesley pointedly.