Chapter 36 Daphne
36 Daphne
My head feels heavy as the slam of a door jolts me back to consciousness.
‘Oh good, you’re awake.’
My heart rate increases as my brain struggles to register the cold voice that just spoke. I try to lift my hand to rub my eyes but it’s being held down. I go to move it again but I can’t. Attempting to move my legs next, I struggle as I feel something holding me in place. With my eyes cast down, I open them fully only to see that my ankles are tied to chair legs and my arms are bound behind me.
I groan as I lift my head, sharp pain ricocheting around the back. The instant I lock eyes with my mother, it dulls.
My very-much-alive mother.
She looks impeccable in a black figure-hugging pencil dress and Louboutin pumps, with the world’s most perfect blowout. Her dark skin is pristine and glows with an almost ethereal radiance.
Death apparently suits her.
When I saw her standing there in the safe house, with four large men flanking her, I nearly threw up. It was like time stood still as I stared at her, unbelieving.
‘B-but you’re dead,’ I had said, frozen on the sofa with the film still playing in the background.
‘Dead to the world, but still very much alive.’
She looked exactly the same but completely different, strange and powerful. All of her warmth had gone, leaving a frightening lack of emotion.
‘Daphne, darling, where’s my old necklace?’
I stared at her.
‘The necklace,’ she bit out. ‘Where is it?’
I continued to gape at her.
My mother was alive.
My mother, who I thought had been dead for the last nine years, was alive.
Alive.
As in not dead.
‘I don’t understand. How are you alive?’
She smiled. Not a warm smile like I remember. A cold, unnerving smile. Kind of like the woman in my nightmare.
Oh my gosh.
The nightmare.
It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a memory.
My mother killed someone in our basement.
Bile rises in my mouth and I start gagging, all the while my mother stands there looking completely unphased as if she returns from the dead regularly and often gets this reaction.
To be fair, that’s probably spot on.
‘It’s something akin to sleight of hand, darling,’ she answered. ‘Now, I really would love to catch up but you have something of mine. Something that I’d like back.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The necklace, Daphne. I need the necklace.’
‘I don’t have it,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘Search the room,’ she instructed her lackeys. ‘You know, your father said the same thing when I asked him.’ She made her way over to the sofa, leaning down into my face. ‘Like father, like daughter, I guess.’
She nodded to someone behind me but before I could turn around I felt a dull thud against the back of my head and everything went black.
Now, taking in my surroundings, I notice we’re in a study very similar to Daddy’s, with dark mahogany furniture and a large bookcase taking up the side wall. I turn to take in more of the room but gasp when I see Daddy in a corner, slumped against a chair. His face is completely swollen to the point it’s started changing shape, and he’s bleeding. From where, I don’t know, but there’s a pool of blood by his feet so it’s more than likely his.
‘Don’t worry, he’s fine,’ sighs my mother, moving over to her desk, leaning against the front of it, her minions following her as she does so. ‘He’s been given a heavy sedative so there’s really no use in trying to wake him up.’
Tears prick at my eyes and I will them away.
If my mother can be cold, then so can I.
I think.
‘Why are you doing this? I don’t understand.’
‘Your father had something, and I wanted it. It’s really that simple.’
‘Are you talking about the formula?’
She cocks her head. ‘Yes. I am. What do you know about the toxin formula?’
‘I know that Daveeno wants it but they can’t find it.’
‘That, unfortunately, is correct.’
I shake my head, still confused by the mere fact my mother is alive, let alone the fact that she’s kidnapped me. ‘I don’t get it. Do you work for Daveeno?’
‘Daphne, I am Daveeno.’
My blood curdles and my heart drops.
‘What do you mean, you’re Daveeno?’ I bite out. I can feel the rage bubbling under my skin.
‘I mean, your great-grandfather founded the organization. And passed it down to me.’
My mind works overtime trying to connect the dots. ‘You were a double agent in MI6, weren’t you?’
She smirks. ‘Smart girl.’
‘You faked your own death,’ I continue slowly. ‘You faked your own death, so MI6 wouldn’t suspect you’re a double agent.’
‘Very clever.’ The fact that she looks genuinely impressed makes me want to jump off a cliff.
‘But why? Okay, so you were a double agent, but why bring Daddy into this? Why bring me in?’
‘Because my cover wouldn’t work otherwise. Before I inherited Daveeno, my grandfather explained to me the art of deception. In order to run the organization, I needed to prove myself; it wasn’t good enough that I was blood. So they sent me into MI6. My job was to retrieve as much information as possible, enlist as many people as I could into Daveeno and have them as sleepers in MI6. But in order to do that I had to appear unassuming. And that’s where George came in. We met my second year in, when there was a deadly toxin outbreak. George wasn’t an active member of MI6 but he was hired as an independent contractor to help work on the antidote. He did such a good job that they kept him on. Because George wasn’t a member of MI6 he had to go through a lie detector test every time he went into work, so as long as he didn’t know my true identity, every time he took a lie detector test he would be inadvertently maintaining my cover, so I married him. And to keep up appearances, I fell pregnant with you.’
I laugh.
A dry, humourless laugh.
‘So that was all fake? All of those memories I have of us as a family, of me and you, you were just faking?’
‘No.’ She shrugs. ‘Even though I didn’t want to, I loved you, Daphne. I even grew relatively fond of your father. You made me feel human. You made me feel love.’ Her eyes soften, and it’s like she turns into a completely different person. The warmth I remember comes rushing back into her face; even her posture relaxes.
She looks familiar. She looks like my mother again.
‘I was almost immobilized by guilt when I thought about how my decision to fake my death would impact you. But I didn’t have a choice. I kept tabs on you over the years, watched you from afar at your competitions, and I even went to Switzerland for your graduation. And before I “drowned” –’ she makes air quotes – ‘I left you my necklace. I didn’t realize at the time how much of a pain that would be later down the line, but I just wanted you to have something of mine.’
That does explain a lot. My mother never used to take her necklace off. Not in the pool, not in the shower, not even when it didn’t match her outfit. She wore it every single day, so I was fully convinced she’d drowned in it too.
‘If you’re looking for empathy, Mother, you’re not going to get it from me. As far as I am concerned, my mother drowned when I was nine years old and that’s the end of that.’
She has the audacity to look hurt.
Ha.
Hurt.
How ironic.
‘I mourned you,’ I spit. ‘I mourned you at nine years old and continued to do so for the next nine years, and all the while you were flouncing around living the life you actually wanted to. And you’re wrong. You didn’t have to fake your own death. You always have a choice.’
‘That’s the thing, though. I didn’t. It was either fake my own death or participate in my real one. Nine years ago, MI6 had a huge problem with double agents so they were trying to catch them out. Security checks were more frequent and rules were harsher. As a result of that, some of the Daveeno sleepers started getting nervous. Most were fine after a little pep talk but one was more difficult than the rest. He worked with your father and had got a little cagey with his findings. I didn’t have time to keep tabs on him so I invited him around for dinner as my men searched his house. They found a lot of incriminating evidence that could take Daveeno down for good and I couldn’t have that, so I killed him and framed him for my death, planting his DNA everywhere around the lake, suggesting he killed me. Which, in the eyes of MI6, placed him in Daveeno while I was just an innocent, loving mother and wife, who was tortured for information I simply didn’t possess.’
The nightmare.
The basement.
The faceless woman.
‘Malcolm.’
Her eyes narrow.
‘His name was Malcolm. Wasn’t it? I saw you that night. You killed Malcolm, didn’t you?’
Her eyes light up. ‘I knew you were there! I couldn’t be sure but I had a feeling a small pair of eyes were on me.’
‘You killed a man, just so you could live?’
‘Yes.’ She looks at me like I just asked her if grass is green. ‘Malcolm was about to ruin everything, not just for me but for you and your father too. If Malcolm came out with his findings, you and your father would’ve been blacklisted from society. I did you a favour.’
I completely ignore her twisted logic and fire off the next question. ‘How did you even come to know about the formula that you’re now so desperate for?’
‘Malcolm’s journals.’ She shrugs, like the answer is obvious. ‘He kept extensive notes about what he was working on, and because he worked with George the majority of the time, his findings were the most present. He hinted at George making a toxin that was potent, lethal and undetectable but he didn’t explain any more. We tried to look around for any evidence suggesting this but found nothing. And with the whole his-wife-just-died thing, George had a lot of eyes on him so we couldn’t keep digging. We knew he had something but after my death, he left MI6 for good and kept to himself, so we had no reason to intervene.’
‘But why now? It’s been nine years?’
She lets out a sigh. ‘Love.’
‘What?’
‘You wanted to smell like me.’ She smiles a little, and her face fills with the warmth that I remember. ‘You wanted to be close to me so much that you used up all of my perfume. So a few months ago your father started working on recreating that perfume for you, for your birthday. The reason it couldn’t be replicated was that your father had mixed his basic antidote starter mix to my perfume to give it more projection, which actually ended up altering the smell. So if he was going to recreate the perfume, he was going to need to remake the antidote starter.’ She laughs to herself, glancing over to Daddy in the corner.
‘Love is the most potent emotion, Daphne. He knew it was stupid to get the very specific ingredients to make the antidote starter, but he did it anyway. For you. I mean, that man has some serious flaws and he doesn’t show his love very well, but when it comes to you and putting a smile on your face, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.’
Fine, but none of this explains what happened.
Almost like she can read my mind, she continues.
‘The ingredients that you need for an antidote starter like the one your father created are very hard to come by unless you work somewhere like MI6 or Daveeno, but because your father cut ties it wasn’t readily available to him so he had to find another way. He reached out to one of his old friends in MI6 asking him to get the stuff for him. What he didn’t know is that we’d been monitoring of phones recently and unfortunately the man your father reached out to had one of them. We had a few clues about what was in your father’s serums because of an old diary Malcolm kept so we knew he was up to something, we just didn’t know what. That’s when we sent in Stefan to go and look around his work office. When he found one of George’s journals, he brought it back. We went through it and found out that your father did indeed make a toxin but Malcolm told him to get rid of all the evidence because he didn’t want Daveeno finding it. George wrote down a riddle to find it in case he ever needed it and that’s what we sent Teddy in with.’
‘Why do you even want the formula?’
‘I like money. And a lot of people will happily pay a handsome fee to get their hands on such a powerful serum.’
That makes sense.
‘How did you even know the formulas were in the necklace?’
‘Torture, darling. Torture.’ She points to Daddy. ‘He explained that when I was sleeping he stuck it in the back of the photos, but that’s about it. We weren’t able to get the location of the necklace out of him. But that’s where you come in. Just like me, he has only one weakness. You.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I laugh, and this laugh is filled with humour. ‘I’m a weakness to you? That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve ever heard. One of your men attacked me in my own home, then two of your people chased me around a mall, trying to kidnap me, then Teddy attacked me and shot me, and then another man attacked me in the cottage you claimed was your favorite place on earth. Don’t patronize me and say I’m your weakness, because the evidence shows that’s just not true.’
She looks embarrassed.
‘Well, I never said my methods were sound.’
‘Your methods didn’t even work!’ My voice rises in annoyance. ‘Why did you bring me here? To use me to threaten Daddy?’
She nods.
‘So what’s your plan? Threaten Daddy, get the formula, then what? Set us free? Or are you going to kill everyone? The staff that you’ve locked away as hostages included? Staff that, mind you, you used to know. You loved Josh and Bethany, but now, all because of greed, you have innocent people scared out of their minds. They didn’t do anything wrong, yet they’re the ones paying the price.’
Before my mother has a chance to answer, the lights turn off.
‘What was that?’ Mother asks, rounding her desk quickly, opening her laptop.
One of the men pulls out his radio. ‘Cole, what happened to the lights?’ He releases the button he was pressing but all he can hear is static. ‘Cole, can you hear me?’ he tries again, but gets the same result.
‘Madam, I think the radios have been scrambled.’
‘The CCTV isn’t working either,’ my mother replies, frowning at her laptop screen before looking back to one of the men behind her. ‘Well, go and check it out.’
He shifts, looking uncomfortable for a moment before heading for the door.
‘You.’ Mother turns around, pointing at another one of the men. ‘Stay here and call for an extraction team. You two, haul him and follow me.’
She opens her drawer and pulls out a gun, loading it calmly with deft precision before picking up the knife that was lying on her desk. She makes her way towards me, flicking the knife open, bending down and cutting me free of the cable ties.
‘Get up. Let’s go.’
I don’t move. I don’t do anything. Maybe if I stall for long enough whoever’s here can find me. My mother moves to do something, but before she can the guy who was on the phone calling for the extraction team speaks up.
‘The car will meet you on the other side of the woods, madam,’ he says as he pockets his phone.
‘Good,’ she tells the guy, before turning her attention back to me. ‘Now get up.’
When I don’t, she cocks her gun in my face, smiling that cold smile. ‘Daphne, if you seriously think I won’t shoot you, you’re sadly mistaken. I have no problem shooting you, or anyone for that matter.’ Before I can blink, she moves her gun and shoots the guy who just called the extraction team.
I don’t so much as flinch.
Did she kill him?
Will she kill me?
She points the gun at me. ‘Get. Up.’
I get up.
The two men who went to haul up my father are now standing with him slumped against them.
Still pointing the gun to my head, my mother looks over to them. ‘You ready?’ After a curt nod she pushes the barrel of the gun into the back of my head. ‘Move.’
With the two guys in front of us we walk towards the bookcase. One of the men presses down on a book and the shelves move. He pushes on them and they open up to reveal a dimly lit hall.
A secret door.
Of course my mother has a secret door.
The men walk through, with me and my mother closely behind. We descend a set of stairs until we get to a metal door. I can feel the cool evening air rush in as one of the men pushes it open. We walk out into a wooded area.
A very familiar wooded area.
We are in the woods behind my house.