From Broke Technician to Luna novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Roth's Side

I got in.

The door shut behind me with a soft, expensive sound, and the car pulled away from the curb before I had my seat belt on.

Ansel Roth sat on the far side of the back seat in a black coat, with his long white hands folded on his knee.

In the dark his eyes were brown and tired, not red at all.

"You've been crying," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You are holding that folder hard enough to bend it."

I looked down. He was right, and I didn't loosen my grip.

"Was it you?" I said. "Did you send the cards to keep me quiet, or to keep me alive?"

"Both would be a lie."

"Then tell me which part is true."

He turned to the tinted window.

"I knew your mother," he said. "Marian let me live on the edge of Ashworth land for a year. I was a vampire with no clan, and she gave me a room over the barn and an invitation to cross her door."

"She invited you in."

"She said any friend of the pack was a friend of the house. She was the only person in a century who said that to me."

He was quiet.

"You were two when I came. You used to sit on my boots while I fed the horses."

I tried to picture it and got nothing, which hurt more than a picture would have.

"Sonja Kincaid came the autumn you turned three," he said. "Not to the house. To me. Two of her men took me in the orchard at noon, when I could not stand, and they locked me in a cellar with the shutters open an inch."

"Why you?"

"Because I knew where the house was hidden. Your mother moved the pack every few years. She trusted me with the new address."

My mouth had gone dry.

"Sonja said I could give her the address or I could burn slowly," he said. "I told her no for two days."

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