Chapter 101: I LET HER SEE EXACTLY WHAT I WAS CAPABLE OF

Chapter 102

Ren

I looked down at the photograph in my hand, and for a moment I genuinely didn’t understand why she’d handed it to me at all.

It was old. Creased soft at every fold, the colors gone slightly warm and faded the way photographs do after enough years sitting in a drawer somewhere.

Four people stood in it, caught mid-laugh at some gathering I had no context for.

A woman and man, I didn’t recognize any of them.

And beside them, a second couple...a woman with Lumi’s exact jaw, and a man with his arm draped loosely around her shoulder.

"I don’t understand," I said. "Why are you showing me this."

"That’s my mum," Priya said quietly, pointing to the first woman. "And my dad." Her finger moved to the man beside her, the driver, the one Darren had told me about not twenty minutes earlier.

"Okay," I said slowly. "And the other two?"

"Lumi’s parents."

"I gathered that much." I looked back down at the photograph, at four strangers frozen at some party decades before any of us existed to them. "I still don’t understand what you’re trying to show me, Priya."

"Neither did I," she said. "Not at first. I stood in my living room with this exact photograph in my hands, and I stared at it the same way you’re staring at it right now, and I felt nothing. It was just four people. Two couples. I didn’t understand what he wanted me to see."

"So what happened."

"He told me to look closer."

I frowned down at the image again, forcing myself to actually study it instead of just glancing past it the way I had the first time.

The angle of the shot. The way everyone stood. And then, slowly, something in the arrangement of it started to shift the longer I looked.

Lumi’s father’s arm wasn’t just resting around his own wife’s shoulder.

It was around Priya’s mother’s waist.

The kind of hold a man doesn’t offer a woman he only knows in passing, the kind of hold that carries a history behind it, easy and practiced in a way that made my stomach turn even before I’d fully worked out what I was looking at.

I lifted my eyes back to Priya’s face, and she was already watching me, already waiting for me to arrive at the thing she’d clearly been carrying alone for weeks.

"They had an affair," I said, my voice barely holding together around the words.

She nodded once, slow, tears sliding fresh down her face.

"Yes," she said. "That’s how I was born, Ren. Lumi’s father is my father too. I’m her sister."

For a long moment I couldn’t say anything at all.

I stood there with the photograph still hanging loose in my hand, looking at a woman I’d known for the better part of a year, trying to reconcile the person sitting on this bench with the sister of the man who’d nearly killed my mate.

"You’re her sister," I said finally, still not entirely believing them even as they left my own mouth.

"Half," Priya said quietly. "Same father. Different everything else." She pulled her knees up slightly, wrapping her arms around them the way a child does when they’re bracing for something.

"I didn’t grow up in that house, Ren. I grew up in the back seat of a car, waiting for my dad’s shift to end. I only found out what I actually was to that family the day he visited. He told me like it was a gift he was finally allowed to give me."

"And you never told her. Any of it."

"How was I supposed to?" Her voice cracked, sharp and raw. "Hi, I know we’ve not been friends for years, but actually I’m your father’s other daughter, the one he never claimed, the one born to the woman he used and discarded the same way he tried to use and discard your mother?

There was never going to be a good moment for that conversation, Ren. I told myself it didn’t matter. That it wasn’t relevant to anything, that it was just an old, ugly piece of history that had nothing to do with the friendship we were actually about to build."

"But it mattered to him."

"Apparently more than I ever understood." She wiped at her face again, and something in her posture folded further inward, smaller by the second.

"When he showed up outside my building that night, when he told me I was his daughter too, I think some sick, starving part of me actually wanted to believe it meant something. That maybe he’d come back because he finally wanted to know me. I know how pathetic that sounds."

"It doesn’t sound pathetic," I said, and meant it, even through the fury still coiled tight behind my ribs.

I knew exactly what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for a parent who never came, having watched Lumi carry that same wound for years.

"It sounds like a man who knows exactly which wounds to press."

"I said no to him," she said again, more firmly this time, like she needed to hear herself say it as much as she needed me to.

"I told him I wasn’t going to spy on Lumi for him. I meant that, Ren. Whatever I am to that family by blood, I never once wanted to hurt Lumi. I got close to her because I liked her. Because Theo needed someone steady in his life and I could be that for him. None of that was ever a lie."

"Then explain the print." She flinched slightly at the shift in my voice, but she didn’t look away.

"The night she dropped Theo with me," Priya said, "I had no idea where she was going. I swear to you on my father’s grave, if I’d known she was headed anywhere near that house, I would have stopped her myself. I would have called you the second she pulled out of the driveway."

"Then how did your print end up in that room."

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice had gone smaller, more careful, like she was picking her way through a version of the story she hadn’t planned on telling anyone.

"After I found out she was rescued at the apartment," she started.

"I panicked. I thought... I don’t know what I thought. I told myself I needed to know if it was really him. If he was really back. If he was the one who’d hurt her."

"So you went there yourself."

"I went there myself," she said. "Alone, at night, like an idiot, because I couldn’t sit still not knowing. And he was there. I found him in that same front room, and yes, Ren, I met him."

"And?"

"And he wasn’t the one who did it." She said it plainly, without hesitation, the kind of certainty that only comes from having actually seen something with your own eyes.

"I confronted him and he swore he was innocent. He didn’t do it, Ren. He wouldn’t lie to me "

I felt something cold slide down my spine. What lies did he tell her to make her believe him.

"Then who." I asked, wanted to see and know what was said to her.

I knew I needed to be careful and patient with her. Lumi had really changed me.

"I don’t know," she said. "He didn’t tell me. He barely acknowledged I was standing there at all, honestly. He looked...distracted. Agitated. Like a man watching a clock he couldn’t stop." She shook her head slowly.

"I left before he could say anything else to me. I’ve spent every day since wishing I hadn’t gone there at all, because now I’m sitting here with a piece of the truth in my hands and no idea what to do with it, and a print on a windowsill that makes me look exactly like the thing I swore to myself I’d never become."

I sat back against the bench, my mind working through it, turning the pieces over the way Darren would have, looking for the seam where it all fit together.

"Do you know where he is now," I asked. "Your father."

Something shifted in Priya’s face, a flicker of fear that had nothing to do with me.

"Ren..."

"Do you know where he is. We just need to hear his side of the story." I need to make her believe that I’m not aware of the truth.

She hesitated a long moment, long enough that I felt the wolf under my skin start to stir again, patient no longer.

"I think so," she said finally, quietly. "He mentioned somewhere he’d be staying. I didn’t think much of it at the time, I was too busy trying to get out of that house without falling apart."

"If you truly care about Lumi," I said, "if any part of what you’ve told me here today is real, then you help me find him. You help me end this properly."

"I want to," she said, and I believed that she meant it, even shaking as badly as she was. "I do, Ren. I just..."

I needed her to tell me exactly what she knows. But then she needs to also know I’m choosing to be this gentle with her.

I turned to look at her fully, and I let her see, just for a moment, exactly what I was capable of.

"I need you to understand something," I said, cutting her off gently but firmly, keeping my voice level even as every part of me wanted to let something sharper into it.