43. Claire
Chapter forty-three
Claire
“What the hell?” Remy snaps, taking an angry step toward the senator. “What did you do?”
“She’s alive.” Victor assures him, his knuckles white around the blade wrapped tightly in his hand. “I just… I had to do it at least once.”
“She doesn’t look alive.” I say, glancing up at him and then back to the body of the woman who helped me find my freedom once.
“I knocked her out. She wouldn’t stop screaming. I…”
“Well, yeah,” Remy says, “You stabbed her. What did you expect?”
“I don’t know. I just… I got so mad. I—”
“What is going on?” I ask.
Some part of me is telling me that I should have never walked into this situation, that something is wrong. And yet I can’t make myself feel worried— If not for the numbness, because it doesn’t make sense that they would hurt me. The senator pulled me out of the fire, and Remy… he hasn’t spent the last six months paying Moose a small fortune to keep me alive so that he could kill me himself.
Remy appraises me, and I don’t know what he’s looking for, but he must find it because he nods. “Wake her up.”
Victor drops down to rouse his wife, but Remy wraps an arm around me, turning me in the opposite direction. That’s when I see the table set up, all the instruments placed atop it. It unlocks a memory somewhere …
The first time Remy brought me to his basement, when he had Eric Giante tied to his chair.
When I glance at him, he’s looking down at me, thoughtful. “The day I had you on my boat for the first time, you mentioned your social worker… how she was the only constant you ever knew… how she handled your admission to Darrington.”
“Yes,” I say, because he almost seems to be looking for confirmation.
“That was by design. Addison, over there?” He nods his head behind me, where I hear Addie moan as the senator hauls her up. “She’s the one who put you into the system.”
I stare at him, not sure where he’s going with this, or why I’m here. “Of course she did.” I say, glancing out of the corner of my eye to see the senator dragging her to her feet by a handful of her scarlet hair. “That’s her job.”
“No, it’s actually not. Addison Massarini? She’s the wife of Senator Victor Massarini… your father.”
I’m not sure what sort of reaction he expects at that information, but I have nothing to give him. No shock, no confusion, no amusement. I just stare at him. “No…” I take them in—Victor with his large hand clamped over Addie’s mouth… the wedding band noticeably absent.
Her eyes are wide, but she doesn’t have the power to fight against him, particularly since she’s tied up with enough rope to hang the whole town. She looks like the hero from a cheesy silent film when the victim ties them to the train tracks.
“He is. He suspected as much the first time he met you. He stole your toothbrush to run a DNA test, but the results weren’t a match.”
Victor is watching me, his lip between his teeth. He looks completely different from the first time I met him at Remy’s house in Costa Rica, and different from when he sat next to me on the plane. Then, he’d been composed, perfectly polished and put together just the way you’d expect a man who works for the government. Last time, I hadn’t exactly focused on what he looked like, but in hindsight, I realize it was more like this than not.
Anxious.
“But that didn’t sit right with either of us,” Remy explains, “so we tested again. This time, we did it without telling his wife. And wouldn’t you know?” He hands his phone out to me in his large palm. I hesitate just a moment before accepting it to look down at whatever he’s showing me.
There are a bunch of words that look like a foreign language for all the sense they make, but one thing stands out among the rest.
Probability of paternity: 99.9998%
It takes my brain a long moment to work out what exactly that’s saying… too long. When I look back up at Remy, he nods. “Claire, meet your father.”
There are too many questions I can’t even begin to entertain, so I push them out of my head, staring at the man who is my alleged father… or rather, the man who fucked my mother. I don’t see any similarities—he’s tall with naturally tanned skin and a straight nose that’s clearly never felt the impact of a pissed off woman.
“Claire.” Victor smiles, though I see that his lips twitch on the way. The man looks like he’s about to faint at any second.
I turn to Addie, whose wide eyes are pleading for me to help her. She’s a severe woman—beautiful in all the right ways, but she never radiated warmth. She wasn’t ever there for me; she was just there .
“I think we should let Addison explain.” Remy says, nodding at Victor who removes his hand from his wife’s face, letting her gasp ring through the stale room.
“Help me!” She pleads. “They’re crazy! They’re making this shit up! Let me go!”
I’m not sure what it says about me that I was more willing to believe a sadist who chained me up in his basement was my father than I am to believe Senator Massarini is, but I guess that was the wrong question the whole time .
I shattered when Evan Ludlow had told me in the same breath that he could be my father, and that that wouldn’t stop him from doing whatever he wanted with me. It’s a depravity I’ve never let myself think of; a horror unlike anything I could fathom. I’ve long ago accepted that some people will do whatever they have to for the sake of power and pleasure, taking it wherever they find it. But his willingness to take things that far had been too much.
Hearing that Victor could be my father—that he is —should be a relief. Instead, it just leaves me with more pain. Does that make Addison my mother? Did she get rid of me twenty-one years ago and then keep an eye on me from afar because she didn’t want a child?
I remember some mention of the senator’s wife and children. I wasn’t listening entirely, but wasn’t she pregnant at the wake?
“Explain.” I tell her, because it’s all I can manage. My throat doesn’t ache as bad anymore, but my chest does, and it’s taking up too much presence to force more air into my lungs.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about!” She cries, jerking in an attempt to get away from where the senator is holding her still against him. Blood seeps out onto the rope that’s wound around her black pantsuit, and while it looks like a fair amount, I gather the wound isn’t terribly serious.
“You know exactly what we’re talking about. Tell Claire all about how you cut her from her mother’s womb and left her to die. Tell Victor how you helped orchestrate his girlfriend’s kidnapping, her murder, and the sale of their children.”
Victor’s lips are trembling, and I can’t tell if he’s holding back a sob or a snarl. He looks feral in the worst way, and I’m glad he dropped the knife, because I recognize the look of a man with nothing to lose.
But my brain, fragmented as it is, grazes over the horrific crimes Remy just claimed her to be responsible for, latching onto one word.
Children .
Part of me thinks maybe Addie is right, that the two of them are sharing a state of psychosis right now. Folie a deux is a real phenomenon, after all.
But then I remember that I’m probably the most fucked up person in the room…
That is, until they walk in.