And then his damned old daddy might respect him the way he’d respected Gage.

  He hadn’t exactly lied to the dumb shit on the phone. This was a joke, in a roundabout way. It wasn’t Clay’s fault that things had turned deadly. He didn’t have a crystal ball and he wasn’t responsible for what other folks did. His plan was simple. There was just one last thing Clay had to do and then it would all be over as far as he was concerned. Would’ve been over already if that damned Wyatt hadn’t kept Addy stuck to him like freaking glue.

  But Clay had a plan for that, too.

  A smile cut across his face. “Bye, bye, princess.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Singing River Hospital, 9:05 a.m.

  They had moved her mother to a private room in anticipation of Adeline’s arrival. She appreciated not having to go to the morgue to do this.

  Adeline’s lips quivered.

  Her mother was dead.

  “You want me to go in there with you?”

  She peered up at the man standing next to her. The sadness in his eyes tore at her already broken heart. Wyatt had always loved her mother. Had checked on her often, Irene had told Adeline so. This was hard for him, too.

  Dragging in a breath for courage, Adeline shook her head. “I need to do this in private.”

  Wyatt pulled her into his arms, held her tight to his chest. “I understand.” The softly spoken words reverberated against her temple. “I’ll be right out here if you need me.”

  “Okay.” She pulled away from his strong arms and faced the door that stood between her and her mother’s body.

  Her mother had always been there for her. No matter what happened and no matter how far Adeline had run. She had been able to count on her mother when and if she needed her.

  How could she be gone?

  Adeline reached out and opened the door. Her hand shook. She wanted to back away. To deny this awful truth. No. She would not be a coward. Her mother deserved every ounce of courage Adeline could muster. The son of a bitch who’d done this had to be stopped. Adeline wanted his ass so bad it hurt. She would make him pay.

  Stepping into the room, she closed the door behind her and leaned against it. Before attempting to move toward the bed, she took a good long look.

  Her mother looked peaceful. The sheet was folded down at her shoulders, wasn’t covering her face. Somehow she found comfort in that insignificant detail.

  Potassium chloride. The bastard had killed her mother using the same technique he’d used in Laurel on the cop. Same one he’d tried to use to kill his wife, but his wife had been pulled back from the edge.

  They hadn’t been able to pull Irene back. Maybe because of the recent heart attack. Maybe because of her age. She hadn’t responded to the attempts to resuscitate her.

  Now she was gone.

  Adeline pushed away from the door and walked to the bed. Tears blurred her vision and she swiped them away with the back of her hand.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Adeline’s face crumpled with the agony flooding her. “I should have figured this out before now. I shouldn’t have been so stupid.”

  She reached beneath the sheet and took her mother’s cold hand in hers. An aching sob expanded in her throat. This wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.

  “Anyway.” Adeline cleared her throat. “He won’t get away with hurting you like this. I’ll stop him. I promise.”

  The idea that her mother might have survived this attack if she hadn’t had that heart attack—if Adeline hadn’t stressed her out—had more of those hot tears streaming down her cheeks.

  She’d always been a bad daughter. Her parents had deserved far better.

  Adeline shouldn’t have left nine years ago. She should have told Cyrus to go screw himself and stayed right here with her mother.

  Selfish. That was what Adeline had been. She’d been a selfish, indifferent daughter and now her mother was dead because of her.

  I will get you, you bastard. Wherever Daniel Jamison went, whatever he did, Adeline would find and stop him.

  Leaning down, she kissed her mother’s forehead. “I love you.” She bit back more of the tears, steadied her voice. “No one else could have been a better mother. I will always be your little girl. Yours and daddy’s.”

  She fingered the edge of the sheet, told herself to go ahead and cover her mother’s face. It was time. There was nothing more Adeline could do here. Nothing else to say.

  Getting the bastard who’d done this was all that mattered now.

  Raised voices outside the room drew Adeline’s attention to the door. Hope pushed aside some of the pain in her chest. Maybe they’d found that son of a bitch. She stormed across the room and jerked the door open.

  Wyatt stood between the door and Cyrus.

  Adeline looked past Wyatt, the agony inside her instantly morphing into white-hot fury. “What do you want?” Wyatt stepped fully aside, allowing Cyrus to feel the full brunt of her glare.

  Cyrus hiked up his chin and glared right back at her. “I want to see her.”

  “I told him to leave,” Wyatt explained. “I can call security.”

  Unable to shift her gaze from Cyrus’s, she could have sworn that for a single moment she’d seen misery in those beady brown eyes. Whatever she’d thought she saw, it cleared in one blink and was immediately replaced by the condescension she’d always associated with the man.

  “Addy,” Cyrus said sternly, though his voice trembled ever so slightly, “I have the right to see her. Call security if you’d like, but I will not leave without seeing her.”

  His man Everett hovered a few feet away. Adeline braced for war. No way was she letting this old bastard anywhere near her mother.

  She opened her mouth to say as much but swallowed back the words. Her mother wouldn’t approve of her acting this way. Cyrus Cooper, bastard though he was, was still family.

  “All right.” Adeline backed into the room, opened the door wider to facilitate the wheelchair’s entrance. When Wyatt sent her a questioning look she just shook her head. This was something she couldn’t exactly explain.

  Adeline closed the door and moved to the side of the bed opposite Cyrus’s position. He stared at Irene for a long moment then redirected his attention to Adeline. “Are they any closer to finding the animal who did this?”

  A moment was required for her to set aside the years of animosity she’d felt for this man. She was doing this for her mother. “Yes,” she finally said. “We know who he is now. We’ll get him.” Her attention settled on her mother once more. “Soon. I won’t stop until I find him.”

  “When you find him,” Cyrus said, drawing her contemplation back to him, “I want you to kill him.”

  There was something in his eyes. An agony that nearly matched Adeline’s. He was dead serious. “I’m...” She swallowed with difficulty, her emotions vacillating between disgust and empathy. “I’m a cop, old man. Not an assassin.” She resisted the urge to reassure him about her objective. She had every intention of killing the bastard. In the line of duty, of course.

  “Not just one shot,” Cyrus cautioned, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Keep shooting until there’s no question that he’s dead.”

  Bewildered by the strange tension vibrating between them, Adeline dragged her focus away from Cyrus and back to her mother. She smoothed her hand over her hair. She wasn’t giving the old bastard the satisfaction of seeing in her eyes that she would like nothing better than the opportunity to carry out his suggestion. That was wrong. It wasn’t a suggestion, it was an order. The kind he’d been giving his whole life. The same kind that people around here had been jumping through hoops to follow.

  “She loved you more than anything in this world,” he said quietly.

  Adeline didn’t need him to tell her that. “But she stayed here when I begged her to join me in Huntsville.” She knew damned well her mother had loved her despite the frustrating decision. Mainly Adeline just wanted to defy anything he said.

  Cyrus didn’t speak again for a while, just stared at Irene as if by sheer force of will he could change this reality. Even Cooper law couldn’t resurrect the dead.

  “That was my doing.”

  More of the disgust she always felt in his presence settled in Adeline’s stomach. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a long story,” Cyrus said, his voice weak, distant. “And complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

  What the hell? Adeline had tolerated about as many secrets and lies as any one person could be expected to stomach. It was past time for the whole truth. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Cyrus met her glare with an uncharacteristic softness. “Your mother and father dated for two years before they married.”

  “I knew that.” Adeline had no idea what he was getting at. She was tired. The pain had settled into a dull ache. She had no patience for listening to a pointless story. Particularly from this man. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Your father and I...” The old bastard sighed. “We sort of competed for Irene’s affections. We both loved her.”

  Oh, yeah, right. “My mother would never love you,” she countered, allowing him to feel every ounce of disdain his claim elicited. No way was she going to listen to this kind of crap. She shouldn’t have let him in here. The ache in her chest protested with another harsh wave of pain. She’d done this for her mother...arguing with him was wrong under the circumstances. Just hear him out. She gave him her attention once more. “Why would you say that?”

  Incredibly, Cyrus nodded as if he agreed with her assertion. “I longed for her to, but she loved your father. And I wasn’t about to try and take that from him. He’d suffered so much his entire life. I just wanted him to be happy.”

  The polio. Adeline blinked, remembering. Her father had suffered with polio as a child. He’d been a fine, strong man when Adeline was growing up but his childhood and teen years had been very different. She remembered hearing her mother say that Cyrus had always looked out for his little brother, especially while they were growing up. Adeline had never known that side of her uncle. Didn’t really believe it existed even now.

  “I accepted your mother’s decision, but I...” Cyrus’s gaze rested on Irene then. “I never stopped loving her.”

  Shock rolled through Adeline. Jesus Christ. She’d had no idea. Something else her mother had never told her. Adeline couldn’t imagine the old bastard really loving anyone, except his own evil spawn. But now that she thought about it, she’d never seen Cyrus look at his own wife the way he had Irene.

  “My God,” Adeline muttered. How could she have missed so much? Had she been that self-centered? Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to see.

  “Shortly after your father and mother married, Irene discovered she was expecting their first child.”

  The news rocked Adeline back on her heels all over again. She needed body armor here; the bullets just kept coming. “I thought—”

  “Irene lost that child.” Cyrus’s tone had turned dull and listless. “She was about four months along and your father was away on business. She had an appointment with the obstetrician and I offered to take her. I was driving too fast the way I always did and there was an accident. Your mother wasn’t visibly injured. She seemed fine.”

  Her mother had told Adeline that Cyrus had been in an accident and that was the reason he’d ended up on crutches and then in a wheelchair. Only Irene had left out the part about being in the car with him.

  “You said,” Adeline prodded, “that Mother wasn’t visibly injured. What happened to the baby?” She hadn’t heard anything about a miscarriage, either. As far as Adeline had known, she’d been the one and only child. The one and only pregnancy. Of course that had proven wrong.

  Just another indication of how little she knew about her parents.

  “You know they didn’t have the tests back then that they have now,” Cyrus explained. “At least not around here. There was damage they didn’t catch. Later that night she had to be rushed to the hospital, right here in Singing River. By then the internal hemorrhaging was so severe, it’s a miracle she survived at all. She was airlifted to Hattiesburg for emergency surgery. The only way to save her life at that point was a total hysterectomy.”

  “Oh my God.” The revelations just kept coming. Adeline stared at the sweet face that hid so much pain. Why hadn’t her mother ever told Adeline any of this?

  I didn’t want you to know that you weren’t my little girl.

  More of that misery twisted Adeline’s insides.

  The door opened and Wyatt stuck his head into the room. “Everything okay in here?”

  Adeline wanted to run into his arms. To feel his heart beating against her breast. But right now she had to do the right thing...she had to hear her mother’s story. “Give us a minute more.”

  Wyatt held her gaze a moment then drew back, pulling the door closed once more.

  When she settled her attention on Cyrus once more, he continued. “Both your mother and father were devastated.” That same monotone that sounded nothing at all like the old bastard she knew echoed softly in the room. “I took full responsibility.” His shoulders sagged wearily. “It was my fault. Your mother couldn’t deal with any of it. She wouldn’t even talk about it. She left the hospital with your great-aunt Joan. Went straight to Cincinnati. Your father couldn’t talk her into coming home. He’d lost his child and, from every appearance, was about to lose his wife. He tried not to hold it against me, but I saw it in his eyes. He wanted to hate me...but he couldn’t.”

  Adeline could only stare at the man she’d thought she knew. But like everything else about her past, she hadn’t known half the story. “My father didn’t possess the capacity to hate.” That Adeline knew for a certainty.

  Cyrus moved his head in agreement. “I didn’t deserve his compassion. I hated myself enough for the both of us. Your father was worried sick about your mother. Months passed. Joan told him that she stayed in bed all the time. Wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even Joan. We were losing her.”

  We? Adeline couldn’t deny that Cyrus’s feelings for her mother were real. Jesus. Adeline swiped at her eyes, ordered herself not to cry again. She’d had no idea about his feelings or about how her mother had suffered as a young woman. None at all. How could she have not recognized how complicated her mother’s life had been? Not paying attention, that was how. Adeline had only been worried about herself and her career.

  “I realized I had to do something,” Cyrus said. “I went to the church and spoke to the priest.” He shook his head. “I hadn’t set foot inside those doors in years. But your mother and father were faithful members. I explained the dire situation.” He drew in a deep breath. “Two weeks later I received a call.”

  Tremors worked their way along Adeline’s limbs. “From the church?”

  Cyrus gave a nod of confirmation. “Your father and I met with a priest named Grayson. That same night we drove all the way to Cincinnati. It was three or four o’clock in the morning when we arrived at Joan’s.” Cyrus’s expression reflected his unwillingness to apologize for his actions, then or now. “We brought you to her and suddenly she was alive again. The light returned to her eyes.” A sad smile haunted his lips. “She came back to us. We brought the two of you home that very day. Everyone thought your mother had gone to Cincinnati and had the baby. No one ever knew any differently. You were such a tiny thing, by the time your parents started to show you off, no one seemed to notice you were older than a couple of months.”

  Why hadn’t Grayson told Adeline that? Emotions she couldn’t label churned inside her. The idea that she had in fact been whisked away in the middle of the night shook her. Another realization hit hard on the heels of that one. No matter how sweetly Cyrus painted this story, the bottom line would be the same. “How much did I cost you?” The roiling emotions coalesced into one—anger.

  “That information is between me and the church.” Cyrus met her angry gaze with lead in his own.

  Try as she might, Adeline couldn’t hold on to the anger. She felt dazed. This was...difficult to take in. Like everything else she’d learned the past few days. “Wait.” Another question jarred her. “Where did the baby pictures of me come from?” If she was six months old when her biological parents were murdered...how had her mom and dad gotten those photos?

  “The priest gave them to us. He’d gone through the Solomon photo albums, since there was no family to pass them onto, and collected the photos of each child—alone—and sent those to the new parents.”

  “This is…” Adeline couldn’t find the words to adequately quantify or encapsulate these incredible facts. She put her hands palms up in front of her. “Unbelievable.”

  At least now she knew how Prescott’s family had photos of Cherry as a baby despite the fact that she’d been four when she came to them. Adeline imagined that if Prescott survived this, she—like them all—would need some serious therapy. Evidently, she’d totally repressed any recall of her own early childhood until her daughter had turned four. Now that Adeline thought about it, this was the reason Prescott’s family had moved to Hattiesburg when she was four. And Arnold’s had moved to Wiggins when she was two. That was part of the deal, they had to extract themselves from their former lives to some degree to limit the questions. But what about extended family?

  Adeline pushed aside the mounting questions. All those issues could be sorted out another time. Not that they really mattered. What mattered was finding those women—her sisters—alive.

  And stopping the man who had done this. She stared down at her mother. She was gone. Nothing Adeline did or thought or said would bring her back. The agony swelled in her chest once more.

  “I did what I had to do to save my family,” Cyrus said, that commanding tone he generally used back in full force. “I make no apologies for that.”

  Adeline arrowed him an incredulous look. “What do you want me to do, old man?” she demanded. “Give you a medal?”