Chapter 34
thirty-four
The drive is quiet. Maksim drives, his hands white knuckled against the steering wheel while Leon fiddles with his phone next to me.
I tell him he can sit up front. I know he often gets car sick sitting in the back, but he tells me it would look odd if we aren’t both getting out of the back seat when we arrive at the gala.
Like a couple.
Meanwhile, the man I am actually coupled with is sitting in the back seat next to Jessica Rabbit’s sister. Not that it matters. Soon there won’t be anything between us, and he’ll be nothing but a faraway memory fading into the distance.
Maksim pulls the car up to valet, handing the young pimply faced boy the keys, then he comes around to open the door for us. Leon slides out first, straightening his jacket before holding out his hand for me.
Gracefully, I slip from inside the car and stare in awe at the red-carpet entrance to the building.
Reporters line the roped off edges, snapping pictures, calling out names to get the attention of their latest victims. They all want a story, one that will get them front-page headlines of the latest tabloid or gossip magazine.
My gaze catches Matthias smiling, his arm wrapped tightly around Serena’s nipped in waist as they pose together for one of the reporters. She clings to his arm, staring up into his face with stars in her eyes. She catches me staring and shoots me a wink.
Bitch.
Matthias’s gaze catches mine, and his smile falters for a second, no doubt catching the sadness lingering in my eyes, before it’s gone.
“Come on,” Leon whispers in my ear. “Don’t pay attention to them. It’s just a show.”
“Some show,” I mutter as we join the line of wealthy patrons seeking entrance to the grand gala.
“Remember,” Leon keeps his voice low as he smiles at the crowd of onlookers, “look for anyone you recognize as having done deals with Elias. This is where the big money plays, and there’s a good chance one of the people here is funding Christian.”
I nod as we hand over our invitations, entering the fancy lobby of the swanky downtown hotel.
The ceiling is curved, dotted with recessed lights on either side of the large skylight windows that line it.
The room has a purple hue to it; the light casting a gentle glow off the purple painted walls and carpet woven with gold geometric octagons.
The ballroom is cast in darker tones—aged wood and walls painted in a deep mauve. A large strip of balcony overlooks the massive space from either side, and against the far wall, set in the center, is a recessed stage with a string quartet playing an elegant, haunting tune.
Waitstaff circle the room carrying silver trays of champaign and hors d’oeuvres of varying tastes. Leon grabs two glasses of the champagne: Armand de Brignac, a brut rosé. The seductive notes of soft spice, red currants, and sweet almonds sweep across my tongue, causing my palate to come alive.
Too bad I down it like a shot of tequila.
Such a waste.
Everything is too grand and over the top. Almost fake. Like a show or a play. I guess that’s what everyone is doing, putting on a show.
I let my gaze linger on Matthias as he flashes a smile to an elderly couple with Serena hanging on his arm; he knows exactly how to play to the audience.
The pain in my chest grows, my heart growing cold and bitter as I continue to watch the two of them flit around the room. That is never going to be us. Besides at Clover, he never once showed an interest in me while we were in public. Not before he called me a traitor and certainly not after.
He used me, and now he’s through with me.
If we didn’t need this mission to go well, I would have already walked out and left.
If it had just been about Matthias, I wouldn’t have looked back, but it isn’t.
It’s about Libby and Kenzi. It’s about my mother, because whoever this mystery benefactor is, he has something to do with her kidnapping.
“Ye know, if you watch them any harder, they might spontaneously combust,” Seamus chuckles on my right. I’ve been so caught up in my abject misery, I don’t hear him approach.
“Maybe that’s my plan.” I shrug a shoulder. “Where have you been? Liam said you’d be out of range for a few days.”
“Had a few things to clean up,” Seamus mutters. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”
“This have to do with Jimmy’s knife attack?”
“Something like that.” He empties his glass of champagne. “Fuck, this is why Kier and I opened a nightclub. This place is gawdier than Narcissus’s ass.”
I’m not sure what I find funnier. The fact that he sounds like a petulant child or that he’s properly referenced a mythological person’s ass. Whichever it is, I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of his statement. A few heads turn my way, brows crunched in distaste, but I pay them no mind.
“It wasn’t that funny,” Seamus scolds, but he’s smiling too.
“After the day I’ve had, it sure is.”
“Well, let’s see if we can make it better.” Liam comes to stand to one side of me, holding out a champagne glass. I take it with thanks as he takes my empty one and sets it on a passing tray. “Come with me.”
Taking Liam’s offered arm, he leads me around the room, my eyes sweeping over a sea of faces, most of whom I don’t recognize. We don’t stop to talk to anyone; he just keeps moving until we circle back to where we start.
“We’ll make another round in a moment and start up some easy conversation,” he tells me.
“And what are you going to introduce me as?” I ask curiously, a bitter note seeping through, unintended. It isn’t his fault that Matthias doesn’t want anyone to know I’m his wife, but now I wonder if Liam wants to introduce me as his daughter.
Maybe something is wrong with me.
“My daughter, of course.” The lines on his forehead crease as he looks down at me, puzzled. “What else would I introduce you as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure if you wanted people to know…” I let the statement hang, trying to act aloof, like I don’t care if he claims me or not.
“Of course I want people to know, Avaleigh.”
I cringe at the use of my full name. Liam purses his lips, turning me to face him, my free hand clutched tightly in his.
“Do you know why your mother named you Avaleigh?”
I shake my head, my gaze on the floor as redness crawls up my neck in embarrassment for letting the simple use of my name affect me so much.
“I know your name has been used to belittle you over the years,” he explains, his finger coming up beneath my chin, forcing my head up.
The green of his eyes don’t show the pity I’d been expecting, merely fatherly concern.
“But I want you to understand why I choose to use it. I can’t believe your mother never told you. ”
“My mother didn’t tell me anything about her past,” I huff. “My whole life was a lie that she created, and even though I know it was to protect me, I feel that if she’d confided in me, I would have been better prepared.”
“You were just a child,” Liam says softly. “No parent wants to lay such a heavy burden on their child so young.”
I shrug a shoulder. “No child wants to lose a parent so early, but that’s the way of the world sometimes.”
Liam nods thoughtfully.
“Well, let me give you a little something she couldn’t,” he tells me with a warm smile.
“Your name is made up of two different names of the people we loved the most. Your great-grandmothers. Ava was your mother’s grandmother, and Leigha was mine.
The two of them were inseparable growing up in Ireland, and even when they were married, they were still joined at the hip.
“Their families traveled to America together to start anew,” Liam continues. “A fresh start. Your mother and I were practically raised by them.”
“Really?” Nan seems so maternal and caring. She doesn’t seem like the type of mother who would leave her children for someone else to raise.
“Don’t get me wrong.” He sighs. “Our parents loved us and were by no means neglectful. But they were building a shipping empire alongside our grandfathers. It often kept them out of town or out late at night. They kept us out of the public eye. Boston at that time was a no-man’s-land.
Gangs were fighting for territory, and drug trafficking was slowly spreading across the east coast. Everyone wanted a piece of it.
“It nearly killed your mother when they died,” Liam speaks softly. “The two of them were more like mother and daughter. After their funeral, we made a promise to each other that our first daughter would bear their names. The same way our first sons would bear our late great-grandfathers’ names.”
Seamus and Kiernan.
“But you named your daughter Saoirse,” I point out.
Liam chuckles. “It didn’t seem right naming her Avaleigh,” he admits. “Marianne never had that connection with them. They died a few years before we met her.”
Something about that makes me warm inside.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s all right, lass.” He smiles bleakly. “I wish you could have met them.”
“Me too.”
“Now, enough of this.” He straightens himself and draws me to his side. “Let’s go manipulate the fuck out of these rich, snobby bastards.”
“Language, old man.” I laugh at him, and he snorts in amusement.
“You are definitely my daughter.”
“Did you recognize anyone?” Liam asks on our second round. More people have begun to filter in throughout the night, and the quiet conversations from before have picked up.
“A few of them.” I confirm. Subtly, I motion with my champagne glass toward a portly man who laughs egregiously at something one of his men says.
I see him drinking his weight in whiskey throughout the beginning of the night, and now he’s red faced, his toupee slightly shifted.
The young girl on his arm looks more alarmed by the second as one of his hands roams her backside.
“His name is Acastus Chloros,” I sneer. “He was one of Elias’s biggest purchasers of underage girls.”
Liam growls.
“Like the one on his arm?”
I snort derisively. “I doubt she’s underage if he brought her here, but she probably was when he bought her.”
Liam curses under his breath.
“But he’s not connected or wealthy enough to pull any strings.” I rub at my eyes tiredly with one hand.
For the next hour, I point out the people I recognize one by one, detailing their sins to my father.
None of them can pull off a cash grab like the one we intercepted, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own personal sins to atone for.
Liam is determined to bring down the sex trade in Seattle.
We just pass a small craps table that’s been set up for entertainment when a delicate laugh sounds in my ears. My entire body tenses at the familiar lilting sound, my feet frozen to the wooden floor as I search for its origin.
I find it.
The laugh belongs to a woman in an elegant pink chiffon dress. Her back is turned, but there’s no mistaking the wild curls of strawberry blonde hair that hang loosely down her back. The woman laughs again. Gentle and musical.
“Ava,” Liam whispers urgently, trying to grab my attention, but it’s too late.
“Mom?” I call, loud enough the woman hears me, but not enough to grab the attention of everyone surrounding her.
The redheaded woman turns; her brows crease. Any hope I have in my chest deflates the minute I see the woman’s face.
She isn’t my mother.
Of course she isn’t, I chide myself. Mother is dead.
She looks exactly like her though. The same lithe frame and curly hair. The same delicate laugh that I would remember anywhere.
I don’t call out my mother’s name, but the woman still turned when I called out Mom. Why?
When her gaze falls on me, her eyebrows shoot up, eyes widening, mouth slightly parted as she takes me in.
“Katherine?”
My mother’s name is a choked sob on her lips, her face paling. The man next to her jerks around at her exclamation. I recognize them.
“Oh my god.”
This is my mother’s mother.
Sheila McDonough, and next to her stands the man with the silver cross cane.