“Bastian?”

“Yeah?”

“He’s amazing.” The way her eyes lit up told me everything. She loved him already, and loved him deeply.

I didn’t ask for any more information but took a few steps to the bedroom door. Inside were a twin-sized bed and a small dresser in dark wood. There was a mismatched nightstand with a small light in the shape of a turtle. A bookshelf lined with Doctor Seuss and Captain Underpants books stood in the corner near the closet. There were a dozen or so books on the floor in front of the bookshelf with a few Star Wars action figures poised on top of them.

In the center of the chaotic room, a tow-headed boy sat at a small plastic table. The table was cluttered with crayons, markers, and colored pencils, and the boy was bent over a piece of paper scribbling madly. He didn’t look up. He was completely focused on his task.

For a few minutes, I just watched him as he worked, observing everything I could about him. He was right handed, and even with the way he was bent over, I could tell that his eyes matched mine exactly. There was something about how he leaned into his work and the intense expression on his face that was also very familiar.

I didn’t have any pictures of myself from when I was a child. Apparently none of my foster parents ever took any, or if they did, they didn’t give them to me. I never really considered what I had looked like back then, but now I knew. I could see myself as a six-year-old, sitting there at that table in a room just like this one.

I couldn’t quite see the drawing Alex was making, and when I took a little step forward to get a better angle, he looked up at me. For a moment, we stared at each other without speaking. He tilted his head to one side to study me, and I realized I was making the same motion as I watched him. He dropped his gaze down to my feet and then raised it back up to my face.

“You’re tall,” he said.

I grinned. I started to open my mouth, but I realized the sentence that had formed in my head included an F-bomb, which probably wouldn’t be a good idea. I quickly thought of something else.

“Maybe you’re short,” I suggested.

Alex looked up at me and let out a long, exaggerated sigh as he tossed his hands in the air.

“I’m only six,” he replied. “Someday I’ll be bigger.”

“I bet you’ll be as big as me when you’re older.”

He tilted his head to one side and looked at me intently.

“Maybe,” he said. He turned back to his drawing.

“What are you making?” I asked as I took a second step into the room.

“A picture.”

“Of what?”

“You.”

My heart skipped and my diaphragm constricted. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

“Me?” I finally choked out.

He nodded and went back to coloring.

I stepped the rest of the way into the room to get a better look. The drawing was definitely of a person, but I wasn’t too sure anyone would think it was me. The figure’s head was just as big as his body, and Alex had colored in red shorts over stick legs. The arms were large balloon shapes, and the hands were little round balls with five tiny sticks coming out of them.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.

“Right here,” Alex said as he pointed to the blue dots on the oversized head. “Your eyes are the same color as mine. Raine said so.”

“She did, huh?”

“Uh huh.”

I wondered what else she had told him.

I pulled out the extra chair from the other side of the table and dragged it around to sit next to Alex. My ass barely fit in the seat, and I was a little worried it was going to break under my weight. I shifted a little, deciding the chair would at least hold me for a while, and looked down at the simple piece of printer paper covered in crayon marks.

“What are these?” I asked, pointing to a couple of objects near the feet of the figure.

“Dumbbells,” he said. He looked up, and his eyes traveled over my arms. “You work out a lot. That’s why your muscles are so big.”

He pointed at the balloon arms.

“Well, that makes sense,” I said.

We sat in silence as Alex continued to draw. I knew I ought to say something else, but I didn’t know what it should be. I hadn’t spent any time around kids since I was one myself, and I had no idea how to interact with them. He obviously knew something about me, but how far that knowledge reached was a mystery. Did he only know about me through Raine, or had Jillian divulged information as well? If she had, what would she have said?

I was totally lost, so I decided sticking to something simple would be best.

“It’s a good drawing,” I finally said.

He stopped drawing and looked at me with a creased forehead and slightly narrowed eyes.

“Are you going to be my dad now?” he asked bluntly.

Whatever he had been told, it was enough for him to understand some of what was happening. I wanted to ask him what he knew about me and the death of his mother, but I couldn’t bring myself to change the tone of the setting quite so much. It was the first time we had ever laid eyes on each other, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.

“I’d like to be,” I said.

“Okay.” He turned back to the drawing and started to make a second figure in the picture. This person was smaller than the image of me, with no balloon arms but the same blue dots for eyes.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Me,” Alex said as he shrugged his shoulder. “If you’re going to be my dad, I have to be in the picture, too.”

Apparently, that was all there was to it.

“I guess that makes sense,” I replied with a nod. “Will anyone else be in the picture?”

He placed the end of the crayon up against his lip, creating a little depression there. He stared down at the picture in contemplation.

“I think maybe Raine, too,” he said. “She’s not my mom, though. She’s your mom.”

“Raine’s my mom?” I had to laugh at the idea.

“She’s not?” His brow furrowed.

“She’s my girlfriend,” I corrected.

“Oh.”

The news didn’t seem to faze him at all. He studied the picture for a moment before switching to a purple crayon and adding a shirt to the picture of himself. He made his pants yellow and his shoes blue.

I couldn’t help it—there were some things I just had to know.

“How do you know I’m your dad?” I asked. “We haven’t met before.”

“Raine told me what you looked like.”

It wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but this was all new territory for me. I was having a hard enough time keeping my language clean. I knew what I couldn’t say, just not what I should say.

“I meant, how did you know…or did you know…”

I bit my tongue to stop the natural curse that formed there. It hadn’t been very long since Jillian had been killed, and the last thing I wanted to do was upset the kid at our first meeting. Still, I needed some answers.

“Did you know that your mom’s…your mom’s husband…did you know he wasn’t your dad?”

“Yeah,” Alex said without looking up.

“How did you know that?”

“Mom and Ian yelled at each other a lot,” Alex explained. “When she was mad at him, she’d say he wasn’t my real dad. I didn’t know who my real dad was until Raine told me about you.”

The idea that Jillian had picked fights with her husband didn’t surprise me in the least—that woman could be a hellcat. I was a little pissed she had obviously fought in front of Alex but not necessarily shocked by it.

“What did Raine tell you?” I asked.

“She said you were strong,” Alex said. “She said you had big muscles to always keep us safe. She said even though you weren’t here yet, that’s what you were doing. That’s why we had to stay here, so you could make us safe again.”

I looked Alex over carefully, trying to determine any signs of distress, but I couldn’t see any. His words were matter-of-fact, like he’d practiced saying them or at least had been thinking about them frequently. I couldn’t figure out if he was scared or not, and that bothered me. I wanted him to know that he would be okay.

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said definitively. “Just like Raine said—I’m going to make sure both of you are safe, and then maybe we’ll find a house we can all live in together. What do you think of that?”

“That would be okay,” Alex said. “Raine said we were going to find a house on the internet, but there isn’t a computer here.”

“Well, when we find a house for all of us,” I said, “I’ll make sure you have the best computer out there. You can play games and do your homework on it.”

“Ugh!” Alex cried out, startling me. He arched his back halfway over the chair and splayed out his arms. A couple crayons fell to the floor. “I hate homework!”

I grinned as I looked around the room at the books, action figures, and stuffed animals all over the floor.

“I bet you don’t like cleaning up your toys either, do you?”

He rolled his head to the side, keeping himself bent backwards over the chair.

“Of course not!”

I laughed at his display.

“I bet Raine makes you clean them up though, doesn’t she?”

He took in a big breath and let it out in a huff.

“Yeah.”

I grinned.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” I said as I leaned closer to him.

“What?” he asked, his interest piqued.

“She makes me clean up my stuff, too.”

I was rewarded with a smile.

“I’m going to go talk to Raine,” I said to Alex. “Will you show me the picture when it’s done?”

“Sure.” Alex righted himself in the chair and went back to his work.

When I came back into the main living area, Raine was in the kitchen with bread and peanut butter on the counter in front of her. She stopped and looked at me as I came out.

“You were right,” I said. I couldn’t stop the smile on my face. “He’s awesome.”

“He really is.” Raine’s expression mirrored my own. “I see more and more of you in him every day.”

“What does he know?” I asked. “I mean, he said a little, and you must have told him I was his father…”

“I didn’t tell him; Landon did,” Raine informed me. “When he brought me here, and Alex came out of his room, Landon told him I was going to take care of him until his dad got here.”

“Fuck,” I muttered. “How did he react?”

“I think he already knew Jillian’s husband wasn’t his father,” Raine said. “He didn’t seem surprised, just took it all in stride. I tried to talk to him about his mother a little, but he doesn’t say much. He knows they’re both dead, but I can’t get much of a reaction out of him. I kind of think he’s in shock about it all.”

“Why don’t you know who your parents are?”

“I don’t remember them.”

“How can you not remember your own parents?”

“I just don’t, okay?”

“Everyone remembers their parents. Are yours dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know that?”

“Just shut the fuck up!”

I tried to shake the memory from my head, but it lingered a while. If anything, it solidified my resolve to win this tournament and give Raine and Alex some kind of normal life—the kind of life I never had. There was no way I’d let Alex be bombarded with the kinds of questions I always had to deal with as a child.

No fucking way was that going to happen to my kid.

“Bastian? You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just thinking. I don’t want him to grow up like I did.”

Raine lowered the knife full of peanut butter and walked over to me. She coiled her arms around my back and held me against her. I brought my arms up and returned the embrace.

“He’s so smart,” Raine said quietly. “You won’t believe how smart he is. I think as long as he knows we’re going to take care of him, he’ll be just fine.”

I wasn’t sure if it was going to be that simple or not, but I was willing to believe it. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to know he was going to be all right when all this was over.

Assuming any of us were all right.

I heard the sound of the lock at the door and turned to find Landon motioning me outside. I told Raine I’d be right back and went out into the bitter wind to speak with him.

“It’s set,” Landon said. “The tournament will begin the day after tomorrow.”

“What’s the plan?”

“Stay here tonight,” he said. “In the morning, we’ll get on the plane and head up there. The usual pre-tournament party for the elite is tomorrow night, and then it’s on.”