Made By Design (Blood Bound Series Book 2) by J.L. Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

The documents were Dorian’s and my birth certificates. Each listed our birthplace as Anchorage and our mom’s maiden name, the name she still went by, Lamayli Lamont. Next to the details for the mother of the child was space for the father’s information. Name. Address. Phone number. The address and phone number fields were blank, but the block next to ‘Full Name of Father’ wasn’t. It was filled in with typed letters, rather than the handwritten ones that had clearly been our mom’s handwriting.
    “No father listed?” My throat felt dry, and I swallowed, looking from Dorian to Kendrick. “Why wouldn’t she write his name?”
    Dorian laid a cold hand over my forearm. “Well, she did tell us his name under my sparkling ability to compel her. Maybe she never intended for us to know his name.”
    “Or,” Kendrick said pushing the chair back to stand, “maybe John Athobry isn’t your father’s name.”
    I leaned against the edge of the desk. “But how could it not be?”
    “She was compelled to believe that other stuff,” Dorian said. He went to the cupboards and began straightening the contents. “Caius could have compelled her to believe his name was John.”
    As I shifted my weight, the glass lamp cast a glow over the framed photo below it. I picked it up. The photo was so old, the colors faded even though they rarely saw sunlight in this curtain-shielded room. Mom barely looked a day older than the day this photo had been taken. It couldn’t have been more than weeks after our birth, judging by the two babies she held in her arms. I was on the left, white blond hair and pale as a ghost. Dorian was on the right, equally as pale but with a thick halo of chocolate-brown hair.
    “Where was that photo taken?” Kendrick asked, seeing through my eyes. Although he didn’t need to, he took the frame from my hands and studied it. The internal stone walls resembled the Armaya’s castle decor. “Looks like you’ve visited the Armaya a few times before…well, you know.”
    “Before Caius made a meal out of me?” Flashes of that night struck my mind like electric probes. I slid a hand down my face, wishing Kendrick could compel the memories away permanently. But forgetting wasn’t an option. I blinked hard and pushed off the desk. “But that’s not at the Armaya. Mom’s never been there.”
    “So where was this photo taken?” Kendrick shoved the frame back into my hands.
    Dorian abandoned the cupboard and moved to stand beside me. In the photo our mom sat in her green armchair. It was the very same one she’d kept for all these years, which now stood out of place in the opulently decorated living room beyond the wall of this office. Behind her was a wall that was made up of a mixture of stone and horizontal set logs. There was an ice-crusted, glossy window, reflecting the pitch black of a night-darkened forest.
    “That’s at the cabin,” Dorian said, face lifting as he shrugged. “Why?”
    Kendrick arched his brows at me. “Do you still have that picture of Caius with you and Marcus as infants?”
    I nodded, unable to sort through the clatter swirling through his mind. “It’s in the jewelry box in my room.”
    In a blurred rush Kendrick disappeared from the office. A few seconds later he reappeared through the doorway. The black and white photo he held out to me was difficult to look at. Caius appeared much the same as he did now, except his hair was less salt and pepper and more pale than it was these days. His face was a proud beam, the smile of a man who had taken this photo as a kind of trophy of the experiments he had succeeded in. Kind of like a serial killer keeping a lock of hair. It was a memento, a keepsake.
    “Do you remember how I said this photo was taken at the Armaya?” Kendrick asked.
    Fingers prodded over my brain. Somehow I understood that the sensation was the insertion of information rather than the retrieval of it. My eyes widened, darting up from the photo to my best