Page 69 of Wicked Deeds

I felt my smile turn lopsided. “So there’s been a development. I told you that Gwen had some matches on the DNA database.”

“I remember,” Damon said, his smile turning tight. Our conversation after Gwen and I had finally arrived home hadbeen short, but Damon hadn’t let me get to sleep until I’d filled him in on all the pertinent details.

“Well, this morning, I got a notification from the national DNA database that my medical history had been accessed. That’s the first time that’s ever happened.”

He made the link almost instantly. “Wait, you two are related?”

His head turned from me to Gwen. I wondered what he saw. She was short and blonde and beautiful. I was tall and mousy-haired and…well, he thought I was beautiful, but I wasn’t half-Fae gorgeous. I had my mom’s green eyes. Gwen’s were blue.

Pale blue, like Jack’s, I realized. His were the same ice-blue shade. Another nail in the coffin of coincidence. “Possibly half sisters.” Cousins was possible, but my gut said no.

“So you’d have the same dad? I mean, her mom is Fae, right?” Damon asked.

“Yep,” I agreed.

“And she got a match with her dad, too?” He was watching me intently. Probably trying to figure out if I thought this development was good or bad.

“Yep.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“You don’t get that information from the database,” I said. “Only the medical history. You can send a contact request, but Gwen hasn’t?—”

“You didn’t get a match with him, too?”

“I didn’t do a parental search recently. And my info is locked down. So, no. Whoever it is should only get a notification about his medical history being released, same as me.”

“Well, she should do that,” Damon said. “That would be amazing, if you knew who…” He trailed off and I knew he’d remembered the photo when he muttered something distinctly impolite under his breath. “That photo of your mom. You thinkit could be Jack.” He stared at Gwen intently. “She doesn’t look like him.”

“He has eyes like hers. Such a pale blue isn’t common.”

“Jack has blue eyes?” Gwen interjected.

“Yes, like yours,” I said.

“The color could be a Fae thing?” Damon suggested.

“It’s possible,” I said in a tone that was more ‘probably not’. If Gwen’s eyes were purple or some absolutely non-human color, I could chalk that up to her being tanai, but pale blue was still human.

Damon pressed his hand to the back of his neck, digging his fingers into the muscles as he locked eyes with me. “You could do the search for your dad.”

“I told you I’ve done it before and never had a hit. So, if it is Jack and his DNA is in the database now, it’s been a recent addition, or, at least, sometime since I turned eighteen.”

“He worked in medical holographs, you’d think he’d be into medical tech,” Damon muttered.

“You tech boys are always the ones paranoid about data safety,” I pointed out. If Jack was Gwen’s father, he knew he’d left a kid behind in England. He’d made arrangements for her. Left her money. But if he didn’t want her to find him, that was the perfect incentive not to add his DNA to a database. So why had he changed his mind? And when? Did he know Gwen’s was here in San Francisco? That she’d come out of the realm? Or that she’d gone in there in the first place? Had he kept tabs on her from a distance all this time?

Too many questions. I regretted my second breakfast, as my stomach flipped and churned.

“Right,” Damon said. “Dammit. He’ll have the notification that his history was accessed, too, won’t he?”

“He already knew about Gwen. So it wouldn’t be a surprise,” I said. “He walked away from her. Maybe he won’t care.”

“Do you think he knew about Sara getting pregnant?”

“I doubt it. She made it very clear my dad had no idea I existed. I threatened to run away once and she told me there was no one else who knew I’d even been born. I thought my grandparents were dead until the police located them after her accident. Jack had money. If Sara had wanted something from him, she would have figured out how to get it.”

Which suddenly made me wonder why she hadn’t extracted every penny she could from Jack. My mother never met a dollar she didn’t like. So, why hadn’t she worked Jack like all her other marks? Had she...?

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