Chapter 59 My Mother’s Daughter #2
"Don't worry," he says with mock concern. "I don't ever make the same mistake twice. Losing them in Paris was…unfortunate. I thought I was back at square one, but then—" He chuckles incredulously. "I couldn't have planned it better myself."
Oh no…
"When Linette forwarded your submission to the Find Delilah form and I saw you—the girl in the ivory dress from La Tante Sophistiquée. The very same girl Julian's sons couldn't take their eyes off of…pretending to be my daughter."
He sighs audibly, gaze turning skyward as if that email was a gift from the Almighty himself.
"Pretending?" I repeat, my attention snagging on the implication. Please let it be true. "So, I'm not…"
His eyes widen, blink, and then he's rubbing at the back of his neck. "Well, not even I saw that part coming."
Ambrose crosses the room to me, dropping to a crouch, his dark eyes fixated on my throat and the necklace that rests against it.
I reel back when he reaches for it, but there's nowhere to go, and the man at my back holds me steady as Ambrose plucks the charm from my collar. "I questioned myself over this for days. It looked so like the one your mother had. It really wasn't until I saw it in person that I was sure."
The hope that'd been growing in my chest bursts.
So, I really am his daughter?
"What kind of man would hurt his own daughter?" The venom in my tone is acidic, and it has the intended effect of making him wither beneath it.
"My daughter?" he scoffs, and I realize I misunderstood the reason for the twist of his mouth. "Any child of mine would never have been so pathetic. Your father was the same—the cowardly snake."
My father?
A hollowness opens up inside my chest, expanding until it hurts.
He was…
"You killed him." It isn't a question.
"What else should I have done when I found him in my wife's bed? A man I hired and trusted? My own private security."
I wonder if he ever knew about me or if he was even still alive when I was born.
"Don't be sad," Ambrose tells me, a sharp tilt to his mouth. "You can still meet him if you like. I keep him in a special place. When I'm feeling particularly down, looking at his frozen, lifeless eyes always makes me feel…" He trails off with a shiver. "So much better."
Elijah was right. I couldn't have possibly understood before, but I do now.
Ambrose is no man. He's a fucking monster.
"Twisted fuck," I mutter, feeling like I've lost something, even though it isn't something I ever had.
Except I might've had it—a father. A real one who might've loved me and cared for me and never would've given me up.
But he took that.
"Lucky I kept him, too. Made it easier to double-check if you really were the product of his and my wife's infidelity."
The DNA tests. He never used his own; he used a dead man's and put his name on all the documents. But what's another stolen identity after taking the mantle of The White Rose?
"Not that I didn't already know. My wife stopped wanting any physical intimacy from me years before that.
She wanted a divorce. Can you imagine? From me, the man who provided her a comfortable home, everything she could ask for, and she wanted to leave—as if I'd ever let her.
I even offered to raise you as my own when the pregnancy test came back positive.
"I said we could be a family, how we were supposed to be. I'd been trying to get her pregnant for years before she started to refuse me. It never took. It felt like a good opportunity, maybe a new beginning for us. But she never could forgive me for killing her lover."
I know he isn't lying now. Not because I'm trusting the emotions I see on his face, I know now those can never be trusted, but because I can feel it. It's true. All of it. What reason does he have to lie to a dead girl?
Ambrose rubs the little charm of my necklace between his thumb and index finger, pinching it as if he can snuff it out of existence. There's a faraway look in his eyes as he continues, and every one of his words makes my heart grow heavier and heavier.
"All it took was one mistake. Just one, and she slipped through my fingers, taking you with her.
She'd been planning it for some time. She had to have been or she never would've succeeded.
She was smart, your mother. Much smarter than I ever gave her credit for.
A brilliant actress. Much better than you. But now…"
He blows out a musty breath all over my face and then rips the necklace from around my neck, holding it up so it catches the light streaming in from the window behind his desk. The tiny diamonds throwing larger rainbows over his tan cheek.
"Now I get to set that right, too."
Ambrose rises back to his full height, clasping the delicate necklace in his palm and squeezing it until his knuckles turn white.
"I told her to get rid of this, and I thought she had. All the beautiful, expensive jewelry I bought her, but this piece of trash was always the most precious because he bought it for her."
I want to ask what he's going to do with it. It means more to me now than it ever did. But it's not like it matters.
"Are you done with your shitty villain monologue? Nobody cares, asshole."
"Oh, but you will," he sneers. "I haven't told you the best part."
Then something else he said registers in my mind, about setting things right with my mother.
He checks his watch again. "She should be here any minute."
Ambrose goes to the long shelves along the left side of the room, hunching to check his reflection in a small decorative mirror, and straightens his vest.
"What does that mean?" I demand, pulling where the man is still gripping my arms from behind. "Ambrose, what the hell does that mean?"
He finishes arranging the side of his hair into a neat line, peering at me with something like excitement glimmering in his eyes.
"I really should be thanking you," he says.
"I never anticipated she would give you up.
I always thought I'd find the pair of you together.
I was looking all these years for a mother and daughter, not just a woman alone.
Don't you see, Aurora? If it weren't for you so willingly throwing yourself at me, I might never have gotten close to her. "
A storm of emotion rages through me, splitting everything I thought I knew into unintelligible, unidentifiable rubble in its wake.
But one thing becomes clear. A moment brought forward into sharper clarity.
On that stage in front of all of those reporters after my identity was so conveniently 'leaked' to the press, I recall how Ambrose stopped before giving his announcement. He drew my necklace from the high neckline of my dress and set it so delicately atop the fine fabric.
You're perfect, he said.
The perfect bait.
I want to cry at how stupid I was.
How stupid we all were.
Playing right into his hands the whole fucking time.
Every time we thought we had a small win, it was only because he let us. Every time we thought we were one step ahead, it was only because he wanted us to think that.
"Sir," Coyote says from the opposite corner of the room. "She's arrived."
Oh my god.
"What are you going to do to her?" I demand, my voice hoarse and cracking, giving away the fear I'm incapable of hiding any longer. "What are you going to do?"
"What I should've done a long time ago," he snaps, lifting his chin as he turns to Coyote. "Anything from your team on the ground?"
Coyote frowns. "Nothing yet, sir."
"Keep checking."
"On it."
Please say they got away.
I can die at peace, knowing Ambrose failed again and that they might still find him and make him pay for everything he's done and is about to do if I can't stop him.
Coyote speaks quietly into his earpiece, repeatedly asking his men for a report that doesn't seem to be coming, and it gives me hope.
Until I hear her voice out in the hall.
"Get your hands off me," she shouts. "I came here on my own, didn't I?"
There's the sound of a slap. "Don't touch me! I can do it myself."
Ambrose grins with a sort of crazed malice in his eyes that I recognize, and smiles the kind of smile that can only belong to a narcissistic sociopath, and I see a man who clearly enjoys inflicting pain on people who are powerless to stop him.
A man who fancies himself a god.
Ignoring the swell of emotion in my chest at hearing her voice, I look for anything I can use.
I'm not sure, but I think if I throw myself forward with all my weight—do it fast and without warning—I might be able break out of this guy's grip. But then what? My eyes track to the shelves again. The mirror—I could break it and use the glass. Or the scissors on the desk?
If I'm really lucky, I could get my hands on a gun. Dropping my head like I'm resigned to whatever is about to happen, I look behind me, gaze darting over the tac vest and then snagging on the holstered weapon at his side.
If I can get free, I can try to make a grab for it.
Incrementally, I sag in his grip, making a little sobbing sound in my throat. The sound says I'm not fighting anymore. It promises that I've given up when I am more than ready to fight.
The doors open, and a woman is shoved into the room. Her teeth are white as she grimaces, spins on her heel, and shoves the man who brought her here right back with a curse on her lips.
She only stops when she sees me, going still.
There's no denying it. Diana De La Rosa looks older than she did in all the photographs—in the footage of her dropping me at that fire station—but all the things she passed to me are still there.
The oceanic blue eyes. Her bone structure. The long dark hair—now shot through with wide threads of gray.
The sharpness in her eyes dulls, growing softer as the same soul-deep recognition is mirrored in them.
"Hello, wife."