Thirty Days of Hate by Ginger Talbot

Author:Ginger Talbot [Talbot, Ginger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-12-29T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

A wave of shock rolls over me.

My mouth opens and closes as I struggle to speak.

“Are you saying th-th-that I was adopted?” My voice cracks, and I have to push the words out.

He nods, a pained look stretching across his handsome features. “Something like that. Not legally. More like purchased.”

His words are a bombshell hurled into my reality, exploding, shattering it. “That’s crazy.” I sit up, shaking my head in denial, my brown locks sliding into my face. Sergei reaches out to brush them back behind my ear, and this time I let him. “I mean…no. I look just like my mother. Everyone always said so.”

“Yes. That’s true. Your father chose you because you looked like your mother.”

My father chose me. Vasily Toporov chose me.

I feel as if I’m slowly sinking into quicksand, but I force my mouth to move, to say things.

“Go on.”

His gaze slides away from mine. “Your mother wanted a baby. When it didn’t happen, they did tests. It turned out your father was sterile. So you were adopted.”

I struggle to reconcile that information. “If…if that’s true…why didn’t you just tell me sooner? I mean, plenty of people are adopted. I wish my mother had told me – but I understand why she might not have wanted to say anything. And it’s not the end of the world.”

He grimaces, looking really uncomfortable now. I’ve never seen this look on his face before. He’s still not meeting my eyes.

There’s more that he’s not telling me, I can see. “What were the circumstances of my adoption?”

“That’s the part I’d prefer not to discuss.”

“Sergei!” I scream at him. “Damn it to hell, stop messing with me!”

His gaze snaps back to meet mine. “I’m not trying to!” he shouts back. “All right. Your birth mother was a prostitute.”

I wince at that. “Okay. And my real father?”

“Unknown.”

“All right.” I feel light-headed. I’m turning this new version of my life over in my mind. “My mother wasn’t my mother.”

“But she loved you,” Sergei rushes in. “I know that about her, because I spied on your family for almost a decade. There’s very little about your family that I don’t know, Willow. From everything I’ve heard, Tatiana loved you with her whole heart.”

My heart hurts at the thought. My mother did love me. Well, the woman I called mother, anyway. She lived her life for me. She lived her life to make sure that I was the perfect little girl, to keep me safe from the wrath that burned just underneath my father’s skin. We were going to go on the run together right after I graduated from college. We’d been planning it for years.

She would have risked my father’s fury to save me from his terrible plans. She would have died for me.

“I don’t judge my birth mother for being a prostitute,” I say, struggling for breath. The thought of a woman so desperate that she had to sell her own child fills me with sorrow.

I can’t sit still. I sit up straight, scattering the pillows, and swing my legs over the side of the bed.

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