Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 103918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103918 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
"Did he?" I somehow managed to choke out. The mere thought of Lex being at the hands of someone who would hurt him like that made me violently ill.
King shook his head. "His two broken arms made it kind of tough," the man said easily.
I should've been horrified at the prospect that King or his brother had broken some kid's arms, but I wasn't. I didn't care what that said about me.
"So you protected him?" I offered.
King shrugged. "There were a few kinks in the system here and there that we had to work through, but we figured it out."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, with Pitts for example, Con and I each took an arm. But only one of us could take the blame or we both would've been moved out of the house and Lex would've been stuck there by himself. We were able to cover Lex most of the time. Even if we couldn't get ourselves into the same foster home as him, we were able to keep track of where he was and then it was just a matter of sitting on the house whenever we could. Most times, we just made sure to keep Lex with us during the day. That made things a lot easier. After a while, the social workers figured out that we were more trouble apart than together, so they didn't move us around so much. It meant that we spent more time in group homes because there weren't a lot of foster families that were willing to take in three boys all at once and also deal with a kid who had so many health problems, but that was fine by us. In the group homes, you knew what you were getting. You knew which guards liked roughing you up versus which ones went the other way."
Something about the way he said the last words had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. But I didn't ask him what he meant.
"He said he has four brothers. Who are the other two?"
"Luca and Vaughn. They’re actual brothers."
"Were they also foster kids?"
King shook his head. "No, but they probably would've been better off if they had been," was all he said.
I sighed because even though he’d shared a good deal of information with me, he really hadn't told me anything. I still didn't have a clue why Lex had reacted so strongly when I’d told him I loved him. But that wasn't something that King could've answered anyway.
"So that tells me who you are, but it doesn't tell me why you're here," I said.
"He hasn't told our brothers the truth," King said. "About his sight," he added. "He only told me because he knew I'd be able to keep our brothers, especially Con, from losing his shit about it. He and Con are particularly close."
I found it difficult to believe Lex might be closer to Con considering that King had spent time in jail after protecting Lex from his ex, but it was further proof of how little I knew about Lex’s past.
"None of us have seen Lex in over a year. I had no idea it had gotten so bad so fast."
"He's dealing with it," I said. "He's learning to move around his environment, and he's taking steps to keep managing his diabetes on his own."
King pinned me with his gaze. "Like I said, he's a certain kind of strong. But when he went off the grid so we couldn’t track him, I started to wonder if maybe keeping his secret hadn't done him any good."
I looked down at Lex and found myself reaching out to stroke his cheek. His skin felt warm, but no longer sweaty and some of the color had returned. "So you tracked him here," I said to King even as I kept my eyes on Lex. "How?" I remembered Lex never left his phone turned on for any length of time, but I'd always assumed it was because he hadn’t wanted to get any calls from his work.
"I've been having his financials monitored. He's been paying for everything with cash, but then to my surprise, a few days ago I get a call from one of my men who tells me that an escrow account was initiated by Lex's real estate attorney. From there, it didn't take much to figure out the rest."
"What rest?" I asked.
"That he was buying a large chunk of property in the middle of nowhere. Property that included three cabins that aren’t much bigger than his walk-in closet back in LA."
King's words caught me completely off guard. "He… he bought the cabins from Harvey Parnell? Why would he do that? Why would he buy himself a group of cabins he didn't need?"
"Well," King said as he leaned forward in the chair again. "That's where things get interesting. He didn't buy the cabins for himself. He bought them for you."