Chapter Sixty-Five
Haze
I stared at Drake. I had no way of getting the better of him. I was outmatched. I had no weapon, and my precious daughter was in his potential firing line.
“I know where the keyring is.” I took a step toward him. “If you let my daughter go, we can go get it.”
Drake shook his head.
He knew Bibi was the best leverage he could get.
“I know what you’re planning. You take the keyring, and then…” I sliced my finger across my neck.
Drake smiled. “I don’t want you dead.”
“The Corporation want us dead. You work for The Corporation.”
Drake’s eyes kept flicking between the shop’s two doors.
How far away was Fox now? And was he even going to be up to saving us?
“The Corporation were convinced you were working for a rival gang. Killing you in Ivrea was going to send a message that no one should get involved in their business.”
“But you failed.”
Is this why he’d been so interested in us? Failing to kill us had hurt his ego? His professional reputation?
Drake shook his head. “I saw the kill order go out, and I told them I’d do it. I took control of the operation. You were never meant to die.”
“What do you mean?”
“The men who took you were under strict instructions to not touch you. But then you escaped through the window anyway.”
“I was meant to live—but Fox was meant to die?”
I tried to understand it. If we’d attracted attention for our killing work, then wanting Fox dead but me alive didn’t make sense. We came as a pair—unless they were sexist enough to think I wouldn’t be a threat without my man? God, it was exhausting always being underestimated.
“Why would The Corporation want him dead and me alive?”
Bibi snorted. “Jumping jellyfish!” We both turned to look at her. She was still transfixed to the screen.
Drake leaned closer to me. “They wanted both of you dead. I wanted you to live.”
I huffed. “You have some morality clause about women? God, how noble.”
He was looking at me funny.
“What? They didn’t pay you enough to take us both out?”
“Blood is thicker than gold.” He paused. “I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt you.”
What was he saying?
“I’ve been trying to help you,” he went on. “I thought you’d see that.”
What the fuck was he saying?
I kept my voice calm. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what.”
“No.”
I stared at him. He stared back.
A jolt—a snap of recognition. Something in the curve of his nose.
He took a step toward me. “I’ve tried to teach you patience. I’ve tried to make you see threats everywhere, to question everything. I’ve tried to make you better at what you do.”
My head started spinning.
Our early texts.
Your parents never taught you patience?
They never taught me anything.
“Twelve years ago, an alert came up that a DNA sample taken at a murder scene had enough alleles in common with mine to be my offspring.”
He was saying he was my father.
My actual father.
The Chameleon was my father.
Not Mike Martin.
Alain Drake.
“Until then, I never knew you existed. And it didn’t take me long to realize what you were up to.” He smiled. “You clearly took after me more than you did your mother.”
Twelve years ago. One of my very early kills. Pre-Fox days. A bad man who’d hit me—before I hit him back. With a skillet pan. He did draw blood. I just hadn’t had the sense to make sure it was all cleared up.
“Last year when I got an alert that your DNA had been registered at Find My Heritage, I thought you were trying to find your father. It was a good opportunity to make contact.”
This wasn’t making sense.
“Why did you create Mike? What was the point?”
“I wanted to get to know you, although it soon became clear it was Fox pretending to be you. And I wanted to see if you were interested in getting to know me.”
“So you created a perfect grandfather with a twee, wholesome life?!”
“It didn’t matter who I was pretending to be. You turned up that day. Before you realized that Mike didn’t exist, you were going to meet him. You wanted to meet your father.”
Everything I’d felt when Fox first told me he’d found my father was still there. I wanted to know more about my history. About where I came from. Now, I was just trying to work out how I felt knowing that he was a violent gun-for-hire working for a shadowy criminal organization.
I kept looking at him, trying to determine if I could see any of myself in him. Was this even true? Could he just be some bullshit artist who got off on lying?
The Chameleon.
How often had I thought of myself as the same thing? Playing up whichever side of my heritage I figured was going to help me fit in more. Mine was an identity that could be changed whenever I needed it to.
I could see it now. I did look like him. He was a little darker than me, but I could see it.
The Chameleon. He could adapt to whatever surroundings he was in. Interpol agent. Assassin. And his hard-to-identify heritage. He’d used it all to his advantage. No one could ever quite work out what I was, and he’d been afforded the same privilege.
I thought of “Mike’s” messages with Fox. The way he wrote, the things he said. It was all so believable. Nothing gave away that English wasn’t his first language. The multilingual Chameleon. It was all part of being able to be whoever he wanted to be.
“Where did you meet my mother?”
“In a bar. She was very beautiful, but troubled.” A polite way of describing a messy fucking drunk. “We only spent a few nights together. The last time, she told me she was pregnant. But how was I to know she wasn’t lying? How was I to know it was even mine?”
“And you realized she’d been telling the truth when you discovered someone you shared DNA with was out there committing murder?” If I’d been more careful when I’d killed that first bad man, Drake would never have found out about me.
Drake nodded. “It was easy to find you. I read all the childhood records on you, and then followed police reports with certain details. A male victim, usually with a history of assault against women. A violent yet poorly thought-out attack. A kitchen knife or other household object used as a murder weapon. It wasn’t hard figuring out which were yours. ”
My father. Reading up on me.
“You never thought to introduce yourself? Like a normal person?”
Drake threw his hands in the air and raised his voice.
“I was doing the best parenting I could from afar. Cleaning up your mess! Making sure you kept your freedom.” He took a step toward me.
“I’m not a good person. I don’t care about others.
What could I ever offer you? I stayed away for your sake. ”
I didn’t excuse him, but I understood him. “You’ve been watching me all this time?”
“You made mistakes in the early days. The skillet pan kill; I had to encourage a neighbor to forget seeing you. The bar kill; I had to make sure the hairs you left behind got misplaced.”
I thought I’d been out there on my own, that killing men and getting away with it was a sign that I was an avenging angel with good luck behind me, that it showed I was doing good work. But I’d just had my dad hovering over me, clearing up my mistakes?
“Fox was a good influence at first. He was careful. Maybe not as good as me, but he was methodical. I respected that. But even before The Corporation’s kill order came in, it had become clear that Fox was going to be your downfall.
He was the one pushing for the big names, the ones that were going to get you caught or killed. He needed to be stopped.”
“You were happy to let Fox die?”
“Once I’d found you, I did a good job of protecting you. I made sure you got away with all your crimes. I’d trusted Fox to do the same. And then he let you down. Unforgivable.”
I shook my head. “When Ivrea failed, how did you convince them to not try again?”
“I said you’d been given a big enough scare that you’d rethink your choices.
I said I would monitor you and step in if necessary.
” He looked at me as if he expected praise for this.
“When I realized what the keyring was, and that Bibi had it, I put you under surveillance. I had to be sure you hadn’t managed to cash it out.
That you weren’t part of a bigger infrastructure, a bigger gang. ”
I started pacing. “We’re a family! We just have an unusual little sideline. That’s all we’ve ever been!”
Drake shrugged. “I couldn’t understand why you’d take all that risk—for what?
This na?ve attempt to make the world a better place?
But with every surveillance report I received, it became clearer and clearer it was just the two of you and your little detective friend.
I was about to call it all off, but then you took Clark Dixon. ”
“We thought he was just a random wife-beater! We had no idea he—”
“He was working with The Corporation. They were going to buy Boltons.”
Bibi laughed hysterically at my phone. “Silly Peso!”
I dropped my voice further. “You thought us killing him was a sign we were working for one of your competitors?”
“Losing him killed The Corporation’s carefully engineered takeover plan—and then they saw how much Fox made from shorting on the Boltons stock.”
Drake was The Chameleon. Drake was my father. Drake had been trying to save us from The Corporation. Drake wanted cash. Drake wanted Dolly Dodo.
What the actual fuck was going on?
Something else hit me. “Danny, Kristoff, Barry—they all died because of you?”
“Danny needed to die because he knew too much. I was meant to be meeting him there, but Fox beat me to it.”
Danny had been standing there waiting for Drake, not Fox. He would’ve ended up dead either way—just at my father’s hand, not my husband’s.
“I never even knew Danny was a criminal.”
Drake snorted. “He was very small-time. A little drug-dealing here and there. I enlisted him to help because of your history with him. But he was an idiot who got ideas above his station. Started strutting around, thinking he was a big deal.”
That did sound like Danny.
“Kristoff was a threat to your career. The reputation you had built. He was an entitled idiot. And Barry was too nosy for his own good. I saw him taking photos of me when I was in my car. I couldn’t risk him handing anything in to the authorities.
I wasn’t going to let some nobody be the one to unmask me. ”
“But why did you kill him at our house?”
“To confirm Jenny was working with you. Watching how she helped make his death look like an accident was very interesting.”
I tried to take in everything he was saying.
My father had been watching me for twelve years. Twelve years!
He’d been trying to help me.
He wanted me alive.
But he wasn’t so bothered about Fox.