He Used My Blood Then Chose Me novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: What Dad Never Said

I left them at the shrine and took the horse back up the ridge road alone.

Ren said nothing when I went. Min-jun started to follow and I told him to stay.

He stayed.

It took me most of the afternoon to get home.

The mill came up through the trees the way it always did, gray and low, with the wheel stopped because the stream was low in summer.

Dad was out front splitting a log.

He saw me coming and put the axe down.

He didn't ask where I'd been. He never did.

I got off the horse and stood in front of him.

I had the blanket in my hand.

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he sat down on the chopping block and put his face in his hands.

"Where'd you find it," he said.

"At the shrine. The burned one, down the valley."

He nodded into his palms.

"That's where it was," he said.

"Dad."

"I know."

He looked up. His eyes were red at the rims, and he wasn't crying, but he was close.

"Your mother and I found you in the Amber Forest," he said. "Twenty-five years ago. Late summer, same as now."

"How old was I?"

"Six months. Maybe seven. You were wrapped in that blanket and laid under an oak tree at the edge of the forest, and you were screaming loud enough that I heard you from the road."

"Who left me?"

"I don't know. There was nobody. Just you and the blanket."

"Was there anything else?"

"One thing." He rubbed his hands together. "You had a mark on your left wrist. A little circle with a dot in it. I thought it was a birthmark."

"It's not."

"No. I know that now."

I held out my wrist and turned it over.

The mark was there, faint and brown, the same as it had always been.

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