Chapter 43 #2
“Right.” She nods. “I dug through years’ worth of newspaper articles, wedding and death announcements, funeral photos…
well, my program did. I just sorted through the possibilities once it made possible matches and found several of the missing children from before the 1980s.
Everyone between 1920 and the late 1940s is dead, but damn, they were some popular names. ”
“Anyone I would know?”
“One disappeared circumnavigating the globe.”
Blyad’.
“Every heard of the Glastonbury Mountain?” she asks.
I nod. “It was dubbed the Bennington Triangle, and from 1920 to 1950, more than twenty people disappeared there. All but two of the pictures of the missing people are a direct match for the missing kids. The two that didn’t match were anomalies.
A college student and an eight-year-old boy. ”
“Could have come across something they weren’t supposed to.”
“I mean, the list goes on and on all the way up to five days ago when tech billionaire John Rosentry died in a penthouse fire. His daughter went missing when she was ten.”
That is another anomaly.
“Don’t most of the children go missing when they’re toddlers?”
Bridget nods. “It makes more sense that way. The younger the child, the easier to manipulate and retrain.”
“But she was taken at ten,” I muse, scratching my bearded chin. I haven’t had time to shave in the last few days, and Ava showed her pleasure for it when I ate out her cunt this morning. “Kenzi was sold at seventeen. Crowe tried to sell Bailey at twenty-four. Why the change?”
“What if it wasn’t a change?” Bridget swivels her chair around to face me. My brow creases as I stare down at her.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re operating under the assumption that whoever took those children are the same people who are buying up women, right?” I nod. “What if they’re a hydra?”
“What does a mythological creature have to do with this?”
Bridget snorts. “Not the creature itself,” she chuckles.
“The hydra has one main body and several heads that can easily be regenerated. Some even say that when you cut one head off, two take its place. So, what if taking children is one head of the total body, acting on its own independence from the other heads?”
The woman has a point. A good one too, especially in this day and age.
If Bridget’s theory is correct, it means that there are far more working parts out there than we realized.
We know that Sheila and Remus work for some type of secret society that spans generations.
Is it old enough to have been responsible for the missing children in the 1920s, or is the society simply another head?
“Did you find anything on Remus McDonough?” I ask while we are on the topic. Bridget nods and turns back to her laptop.
“Once you told me that they were removing twins at birth, I traced the steps of Ava’s grandmother and found that she gave birth at Dublin Memorial,” she tells me. “The hospital recorded five live births that day, but only four birth certificates were issued.”
“Remus.”
“I tracked his progress and digital footprints through the years,” she tells me. “Luckily Ireland is very paranoid about domestic terrorism and the resurgence of the IRA, so they store footage for decades.”
She pulls up a picture of a man I recognize to be Seamus McDonough. But it isn’t. The eyes are slightly off in the photo, colder than the ones Kavanaugh showed me. His nose is crooked, most likely from being broken several times, and there are several symbolistic tattoos I don’t recognize.
“His name is Remus O’Connor,” Bridget tells me.
“Once I found a slightly modern photo of him, it became a lot easier to track his childhood. He was adopted by the O’Connor family when he was four years old.
Where he was before that? I have no idea, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was in a place like the Portland barn.
A sort of…waiting area for women and children to be trained or kept until they’re needed. ”
“The O’Connors weren’t good people, Matthias.
They were heavily involved in the IRA until they were killed in a bombing in 1997, two days before the cease-fire.
From what I can tell, it was a setup by this ghost organization.
Events like Bloody Sunday and the Belfast bombings, those were all setups by the O’Connors to keep the war going. To profit off it.”
“I’m assuming, then, that their deaths led to the cease-fire.”
“Bingo.”
The question is what did whoever is running the heads of the hydra have to gain from an Irish civil war? If they planted a four-year-old Remus within the family of the ranking IRA members, why did they wait to have them killed?
Unless Remus went rogue at some point. But when?
Bailey mentioned that Madam Therese made the comment that two of her assets had gone rogue. We assumed one of those assets had been Kenzi, but now that I look back, it doesn’t make sense because we hadn’t broken her cover yet. What if she had been talking about Sheila and Marianne?
We know that Remus is Katherine and Marianne’s biological father.
We also know that sometime between Katherine’s graduation and her kidnapping, Seamus was murdered and replaced by Remus.
Had it been so well organized that even the people who controlled their assets hadn’t known about the replacement?
Fuck, this mystery is getting more tangled by the second, and I wonder if there will ever be a time we unravel it, or if our lives will continue to be caught up in a web we’ll never escape from.
“How is she doing?” I stand in the hallway just outside Katherine’s medical suite, hands in my pockets, as I watch the woman gently stroke her daughter’s hair.
At some point, Ava fell asleep in her chair, slumped over, her head resting on her arms at the edge of her mother’s bed.
The woman has a content smile on her face as she gazes lovingly down at the daughter she sacrificed so much for.
“I’m impressed with the progress she has made already,” Radick admits proudly. “Then again, she has gone through this several times in the past, so it’s not too surprising. She still doesn’t have much vocal capability, but she’s been practicing by saying Ava’s name all day.”
“Good.” I nod. As I stare through the window, I wonder how much Katherine McDonough knows about her family. Did she know about Marianne prior to the night of her supposed murder? How long did she know Remus had been masquerading around as Seamus?
“I am slightly concerned about her mental well-being, however.”
My head turns toward the good doctor. “What do you mean?”
“Katherine has been through some significantly traumatizing experiences,” he elaborates and gestures to her chart. “The doctor who had been taking care of her left extensive medical notes documenting every time Elias came to visit her.”
“While she was awake, of course.”
Radick visibly swallows.
“No.” His jaw clenches angrily. “I wish I could say that any doctor wouldn’t allow for such an abhorrent breach of medical conduct, but I’m afraid that isn’t the case here.”
There is not much that can turn my stomach, but what the doctor is implying churns my insides, bilious and sour.
“How many times?” Fuck, I don’t want to know the answer, but I ask it anyway.
“Once or twice a month for years, and that isn’t counting whatever he did to her while she was awake.”
My teeth grind together, jaw aching as I struggle to keep from being sick. There are times when such things are appropriate under consensual role playing, but this is not one of them. As soon as I am done here, that doctor is going to find out what it means to feel real pain.
“Any lasting damage?”
“She won’t be able to have any more children.” Radick huffs out a breath. “It looks like her ovaries were damaged during the original incident, but as far as I can see, there is no lasting physical damage from the extra involuntary proclivities.” He spits the last few words out angrily.
Blyad’.
“I suggest a therapist,” Radick continues. “Once or twice a week to start, and the schedule can adjust from there. Maybe some antidepressants.”
I nod my head to let him know I hear him, but I won’t agree to medicating Katherine without her permission. She has already been violated without her consent. I won’t allow that to happen again, even on something like this.
“Thank you, doctor,” I tell him sincerely before striding into Katherine’s room. “Hello, Katherine.” I speak softly so I don’t disturb my slumbering wife. Walking over to her, I bend down to pick her up in my arms when a hand slaps against my wrist.
Startled, I look up into the cold, lush emerald eyes of her mother, which narrow at me.
There is a storm on her face as she looks at me in silent warning.
Radick hadn’t been exaggerating about her improvements.
Her grip, although still weak, holds more weight than it did last night when she’d barely been able to move it.
“It is all right,” I whisper to her calmly. “I am only going to move her to the bed. She will have a neck cramp and a backache tomorrow if she stays like this.”
Katherine eyes me suspiciously for a moment, and I realize that Ava must have told her mother everything about us.
Sure as hell isn’t going to earn me any brownie points.
She glares at me a few more seconds before releasing my hand and looking mildly ashamed when I lay Ava down on the large bed beside her.
Straightening up, I look Katherine straight in the eye.
“No one will ever tear you two apart again. I promise you that.”
She closes her eyes, a tear escaping down her pale face. When she opens them again, they are clearer and full of gratitude I don’t deserve.
“Thank...” She pauses to take a slow breath. “…you.”
“You don’t need to thank me, Katherine,” I tell her softly. “I always protect my family.”