“Pauline was not my mother,” David said. His voice was strong but quiet. His voice was the kind of voice that has been used to staying in the shadows for a long time.

“Then who was?” Julian asked him.

David’s eyes turned to Michael. “Marta was my mother.”

No one spoke for several long minutes.

“Oh yes,” my father said after a while, as if he had just remembered something important. “I guess that makes him your brother,” he said to Michael. “More importantly, your half-brother.”

Michael stared across the table at David, completely stupefied. Then he looked back at Jack.

“Did you tell him that you just murdered his mother?” Michael said aggressively.

“Yes,” my father answered. “And I also told him that he was the reason I killed her.”

My skin started to crawl, and I felt as though my nerves were going to explode if I didn’t get out of this room. Michael looked like he was going to jump across the table at my father at any moment. Everyone else looked like they were completely frozen in shock.

“You see, I just found out about David myself. It seems that they kept him a bit of a secret,” he glared at Michael. “Your mother took it upon herself to hide my son from me for all of these years. I had a son--an heir to my fortune--and she kept him hidden. When she came back after her little erroneous visit to you the other night, I had men follow her. She led me straight to him. He looks a lot like me, too, can’t you see the resemblance?”

“You knew my mother came to see me?” Michael said.

He was getting ready to lose control; I could see it.

Jack nodded. “Yes.”

“And you killed her.”

He shrugged, as if this were commonplace for him. “Like I said, I killed her because she hid my son from me. I couldn’t have cared less what else she did.”

David sat across the table from us, unmoving and silent. Michael looked at him in disgust.

“You know that your father just killed our mother, and yet you just sit there as if you don’t care?” Michael said to him with rage in his eyes.

“Marta may have been my biological mother, but I have never considered her my mother,” David answered.

“Then who was?” Michael spat his words at David as if they were daggers.

“Pauline.”

All of a sudden, it all made sense to me. Marta had come to my mother for help when she discovered she was pregnant from an extramarital affair with my father. My mother didn’t care about my father’s indiscretions; she had always hated him. My mother, instead of shunning Marta, helped hide her child when it was born. She must have known what an awful fate the son of Jack White would face, and she took pity on them both.

Then this man sitting in front of me, boasting about his ‘heir apparent’, killed them both.

And I’m going to kill him.

31

We left immediately following my father’s announcement. I wasn’t sure what his game strategy was to bring us there and parade David in front of us like some sort of token. Maybe Adam was right; maybe my father did it to show us that he had a legacy now and that there was nothing he couldn’t and wouldn’t do.

If seeing David was supposed to scare us though, it didn’t work.

I felt bad for the guy more than anything else. And I felt mad for Marta and my mother. They had spent all the years of David’s whole life trying to keep my father from discovering him, and suddenly now, he ends up right where they tried to keep him from falling in my father’s clutches.

The four of us walked back to Goldshire quickly. There was a lot to talk about, and everyone was baffled by what had just happened.

“Hey,” David called from behind us as we neared the big tree. “Can I come with you guys?”

The guys looked at him and then scanned the perimeter. I knew what they were thinking. They thought that my father was using David as a pawn to get to us.

“Why would you want to come with us?” Adam asked.

“Well, a day ago, I was minding my own business and going to school, and then suddenly now I’m picked up by a father I never knew who just happens to have also killed a mother that I never knew. So yeah, I’m a bit puzzled right now, and you guys seem a lot cooler than he is, so I thought maybe I could come talk to you about what’s going on.”

“I don’t trust him,” Adam whispered to Michael.

“Neither do I,” he replied.

“Hey, I remember you,” David said as he tilted his head toward Julian. “I thought you looked familiar back at dinner, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Now I remember you, though. You were that kid I used to play tag with in Pauline’s backyard.”

Tag.

“We should bring him,” I said. “It’s not his fault he’s in this mess. I think we need to help him.”

I could tell that neither Adam nor Michael thought that was a good idea. But Julian seemed to be on my side about it.

“I remember you, too,” Julian said to him, smiling. “You played a mean game of tag.”

David laughed and walked toward us.

“Fine,” Michael said flatly. “You can come for a while. But if you do anything stupid, I’ll send you back to your father in pieces.”

David looked slightly intimidated by him.

“You’ll get used to him,” Julian joked.

When we got back to the apartment, the guys grilled David. I honestly felt a little bad for the poor guy. It started to get late, and they seemed to feel at least okay enough about him to let him stay the night without having to go back to Lineage. David took a spot on the couch, and when everyone else had gone back to their bedrooms, I stepped out to peek in on him. He laid there on the couch, looking nervous and slightly miserable.

“You okay?” I asked as I walked out. He sat up and pushed the blanket Julian had given him to the side of the couch to make room for me to sit down.

David sighed. “Yeah, it’s just been a lot to take in, you know?”

I did know, though. In fact, I probably knew better than anyone.

“So, you’ve been at Lineage this whole time and never knew he was your father?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nope.”