Their Kitten: Chapter 10

After waiting for forty-five minutes, I push off of the couch and creep over to her bedroom door. I crack it open, cringing when it squeaks on its creaky hinges, but she doesn’t stir. I quietly close the door and go back to the living room, standing in the middle of it. I look around the sparsely decorated place.

It’s far from feeling like home, only feeling like a temporary landing pad for her. There are no family photos on the wall or even generic dollar store artwork. Everything is so lifeless and miserable, showing just how little she has. The only thing she has is a single ratty brown couch, a flat screen TV with a visible crack sitting on top of an unstable TV stand, and a bookshelf with all kinds of things packed onto and on top of it.

I cross the living room and stop in front of the bookshelf. I browse the random books and notebooks she has tucked on the shelves; nothing looks interesting enough to move. A box is on top of the bookshelf, filling me with curiosity as I pull it down. I carry it over to the couch, glancing toward the hallway to make sure Kitten isn’t lurking in the dark somewhere. When the coast is clear, I take the lid off the box and shift through the contents.

The box is filled with pictures and small trinkets. I flip through a couple of the photos, but I don’t recognize anyone in them.

I keep looking and gasp when I find a photo at the bottom. My mouth goes dry as I clutch onto the old picture in shock. A picture of Triston and myself when we were kids.

Why the hell does she have this?

My heart speeds up as I dump the entire box onto the couch and quickly shift through the rest of the contents. Nothing has made sense since we met her. Her freaking out at my nickname, her refusing to tell us her name; her having an apartment in our dead mother’s name. She knows too much about our life, and we don’t know shit about her or can figure out who she is. It’s a good thing that Tristan isn’t here because there’d be nothing I could do to stop him if he wanted to hurt her again.

My breath catches in my throat when a see it—a photo of me, Tristan, and Cleo when we were kids. I pluck the photo out of the clutter with a shaky hand. My mind races with so many thoughts to try to explain why this woman would have photos of my brother and me. How did she know Cleo? How did she get these pictures?

I tighten my hand into a fist; the photo crumbling in my grasp. Anger heats my skin, and I rush to her bedroom, slamming her door open. Kitten awakes with a scream, her frantic gaze darting around the room before finally focusing on me.

“Why the fuck do you have this?!” I yell inches from her face, thrusting the picture into her line of vision.

Her mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out. Tears fill her eyes as she splits her attention between the picture and my face, her gaze communicating something her mouth refuses to.

“Please, Talon,” she says. “That doesn’t matter⁠—”

“Why do you have these?! Who the fuck are you?!” As shitty as this apartment building is, I can imagine the walls are as thin as paper and her neighbor can hear our conversation. But I don’t give a damn. This woman has been fucking around all day and now my patience has run out. She’s going to tell me who she is and what she has up her sleeve to justify all the fuckery she’s instigated today.

“Please don’t make me say it,” she pleads.

I stare at her long and hard and then look at the picture. I do this a few times before I stumble backward, away from her.

“Cleo?” I say, praying to God that I’m wrong.

The freaking out, her recognizing my nickname, and her refusing to tell us her name no matter what we did…it all makes sense. The woman we thought was gonna ruin us is none other than our old foster sister…one who is all grown up now.

One that we treated like a whore.

Guilt spirals in my chest. Everything we did to her in Heaven…all the torment we put her through in Hell. If she knew it was us, why the hell didn’t she just tell us before? Sure, it probably would’ve been weird as fuck at first, but so much pain could’ve been avoided. No sooner than the guilt settles, anger comes in hot right behind it.

“Why the hell didn’t you just tell us who you were?” I ask. “So much could’ve been avoided had you been honest!”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she replies, her voice almost pleading with me.

“You didn’t fucking give us a chance to!” I run a frustrated hand through my hair. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

I’d thought about her for years, but not because I missed her. I’d always been pissed at her because she left our family soon after my mother passed away. Tristan and I needed her, and she fucking bailed, off to the next family as if we were pieces of trash that she no longer had use for.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice is small as she curls her knees to her chest. It’s then that I notice some of her mannerisms from long ago haven’t changed. She still looks like the scared little girl that I used to see back then, but it’s hard for me to feel bad when the old betrayal I used to feel pushes its way to the forefront.

“Why didn’t you just tell us who you were, Cleo?” I ask with a sigh.

“I honestly didn’t know it was you and Tristan until he used your nickname.” She nervously licked her lips. “I swear I would’ve stopped it had I known beforehand.”

“But if you knew it after he said my nickname, you could’ve said something,” I stated, my tone flat. I don’t want to hear her excuses or whatever bullshit she wants to use to justify withholding this kind of information.

“I was too ashamed.” She drops her gaze to her lap and nibbles on her bottom lip. “I wanted you to remember me like I was before.”

“Ashamed?” I scoff and shake my head. “Tristan could have seriously hurt you! Are you so idiotic that you’re willing to risk your safety and your life over something stupid?!”

I can’t help but think what happened in her life to where she even considers doing something like selling her virginity in the first place. So many questions bounce around in my mind. Where did she go when she left our family? How did she get to her current point in life? Why did she never reach out? She left, and we never heard from her again, and after losing our mother, it was yet another hard loss to cope with. Now, here she is ruining shit all over again. I still don’t know what to make of all of this.

I fucked my former foster sister.

And I’m so fucking conflicted because I enjoyed doing it. What the hell is wrong with me?

I have to get the hell out of here. The longer I look at her, the more pissed off I become. I’d felt guilty all day, thinking that we may have been tormenting a stranger, but now her secrets have unraveled and revealed something that I never would’ve imagined. Who would’ve thought the virgin we paid to fuck was the girl that Tristan and I used to call our younger sister?

“I have to go,” I mumble.

She calls out after me when I turn to walk away, but I don’t stop moving. I mentally fight with myself on whether or not I need to tell Tristan the information that I’ve just found out. With his temperament today, it’s not the best idea to drop this bomb on him right now. When Cleo left, it affected him greatly. He’d spent years being angry with her—we both did. Now she’s back in our lives in a way we didn’t expect, and I don’t know what the hell to do moving forward.

I thankfully didn’t have to worry about her trying to run behind me with all the medicine she’s on. I don’t stop moving until I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. After sitting there for a few seconds, I punch my steering wheel a few times to release the pent up anger before a deep yell fills the space around me.

Why the fuck didn’t I put two and two together sooner? How didn’t I recognize her? She may have had a lot of makeup on earlier, but when we came to her apartment, she’d washed it all off. That should’ve been a dead giveaway then. I guess Tristan and I were so focused on getting information that we didn’t look at the obvious signs right in front of us.

Now I have to figure out how to keep this from Tristan until I think he’s ready to know the truth about who our Kitten is.