Chapter 50
fifty
We sleep most of the day away. It is dinnertime before we find ourselves downstairs, still utterly exhausted.
I may have woken her up a few times with my head between her thighs.
“What do you mean you can’t find them?” I growl at Mark and Bridget.
We are sitting at the family dining room table going over everything we have learned and collected.
My father has managed to find some documents at the McDonough mansion that help to piece together some of the puzzle, but it also opens up a lot more questions.
“I mean, one minute we had a location on them, and the next, they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah.” He stares at me like I am an idiot speaking Chinese. “You know, gone? Poof? Adios? Not to be found?”
“Your body won’t be found if you don’t quit,” I growl.
Mark blows out his lips. “I thought sex was supposed to give you endorphins and make you happy.”
Everyone but Liam and I roar with laughter. Not even my glare silences them. Fuckers.
“As you were saying, Mark,” Liam drawls. The hacker snickers before clicking something on his tablet. The portable projector he brought comes to life, emitting a soft light over the blank cream wall just ahead of me.
“We sent Dima to the airstrip because that was where chatter said they were going to be,” Mark explains. “It was supposed to be a foolproof plan.”
“Except,” Dima butts in. “The only people there were their guards.”
“No Remus or Sheila.” Mark taps his screen again to show video footage of Sheila and Remus getting into the exact car that Dima had ambushed at the hangar.
“Was it a decoy?” Andrei wonders. “Maybe they knew you would be monitoring them.”
I shrug. “That is a possibility.”
Andrei turns his attention to Ava’s mother, who is sitting silently next to her daughter, her green eyes fixed sadly on the grainy image of her mother.
“What do you know about that cane you found?” my father asks her. Katherine’s gaze shoots over to him.
“Other than it was used to beat me nearly to death?” She lets out a dry, humorless chuckle. “Not much. But it was the first thing I noticed was different about my father.”
“How so?” Ava asks softly next to her. Katherine looks over at her, eyes softening.
“I remember that one day he wasn’t carrying it and then suddenly he was,” she recalls. “It was my sophomore year of high school. I asked him about it, and he said that he had twisted his knee coming off a step wrong.
“There was nothing suspicious about it at first, and I shrugged it off easily. Then a week later, it was gone again. I joked and said how I was surprised such an old man was healing so fast, and he stared down at me and asked me what I was talking about. ‘You hurt your knee,’ I had reminded him. ‘I saw you walking with a cane, remember?’ My father had shaken his head and said he hadn’t injured his knee at all.
In fact, he hadn’t even been home all week. He had been in Aspen with his CFO.”
“Did you say anything to him about it?” Andrei questions lightly. Katherine nods.
“I tried,” she admits. “But he said I must have either dreamed it or mistaken one of the staff members for him.”
“That seems a bit… convenient.”
And it does.
“After that, I kept a closer eye on him,” Katherine admits.
“By the time graduation came around, I had compiled a laundry list of moments that seemed inaccurate. The day Liam and I left for college, I emailed him everything I had over a secure server. Our relationship toward the end had become strained and rocky. I have a feeling my mother was the cause of that.”
“Why do you say that?” Ava asks. “Besides the fact that she turned out to be a psycho.”
Katherine smiles at her daughter. “It is true that your grandmother never held any love for me, and now I know why.”
“Still doesn’t make it right,” Ava mutters petulantly. “You were still her daughter.”
“That’s true.” Katherine smiles sadly. “But I don’t believe that Sheila was capable of loving me or Marianne. We were simply tools to be used and discarded when necessary. Even Marianne. Otherwise, she would have been with them instead of begging that Ward boy for a ticket to her freedom.
“I believe that she grew suspicious when I started asking questions, but at the time, I never would have thought the woman who raised me would betray me so deeply. There is no doubt in my mind that she was spewing lies to my father to create a gap between us so that he wouldn’t believe my evidence when the time came. ”
“But he did,” Andrei smiles. “I remember him reaching out to me after you went off to college.” Katherine stares at him across the table in surprise.
“He did?”
Andrei nods. “He was proud of you,” he tells her.
“Talked about how you were going to be the one to lead them into a new generation. A new tradition. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to tell me what he needed help with. When I called back a week later, as we discussed, he blew me off, stating he no longer needed or wanted my help.”
“Remus,” Ava snarls. Andrei nods.
“No doubt, little one.”
Ava beams at his nickname for her. The two have formed a bond since he helped rescue her, and it warms the cold, dead spaces of my heart.
I never knew what I was missing before. Vas and my men will always be my family.
My brothers. Tomas will always be the man who raised me and sheltered me and nurtured me into the man I am today.
But having him here with her is something I never knew I needed.
“Tell us what happened, Kat,” Liam begs. Her mother takes a sharp intake of breath, but she doesn’t run like I expect her to. I can see her knuckles whitening on the chair arms beneath her, but she remains strong.
“Marianne and I had been rooming together in an apartment just off campus,” Katherine begins, her voice soft and her eyes drawing in a faraway look.
She is dissociating. It is a common tactic among survivors.
“Liam went out of town on an errand for my father, but it didn’t feel right.
I warned him but…” She trails off. “I knew she had been hiding things, so I tore the apartment apart while she was supposed to be in one of her lectures. Inch by inch, I searched every nook, hole, and cranny until I found what I was looking for.”
“The cane?” Ava asks. Her mother shakes her head.
“Her birth certificate,” Katherine corrects her.
“I’d only ever known her as Marianne McAllister.
Liam and I had met her parents on a few occasions, but like our own parents, they traveled a lot for business.
I remember wondering if they had adopted her because she looked nothing like them, but I never brought it up in case Marianne didn’t know.
“My mother came down a few weeks after I settled into the apartment. I took her out for lunch, and we ran into Marianne while she was out with a few friends from class.”
“You saw it.” Ava bites her lip nervously. “How similar they were to one another.”
Katherine nods. “They were so strikingly similar that it was almost scary, and when I pointed it out, they both became cold and frigid. Later, Marianne laughed it off that they were doppelg?ngers, but when I looked back at how many times I saw Marianne with my mother, it was only once. One time, when we were first introduced, and that was it. I was thirteen at the time, so I doubt I would have noticed the similarities then.”
“Then you went digging,” Liam states the obvious.
“Using my own funds, I traveled back to Boston to the hospital where I was born,” she admits. “The records were off.”
“More births recorded than birth certificates issued,” I say. Katherine smirks.
“Someone has been doing their homework,” she praises, and we all chuckle.
“I managed to track down one of the nurses who had been in the delivery room with my mother. The woman told me everything she could. How my grandmother had taken the child from my mother’s arms and handed it off to another woman.
One with a cane with a silver cross on it. ”
“You’re telling me Leigh knew someone with that cane?” Liam growls.
“Everyone except my father,” Katherine confirms. “The nurse told me that after everyone left, the woman with the cane returned. The only reason she noticed was because the argument they got into was pretty heated, and the woman was escorted out of the facility.”
“That makes sense,” I tell her. “We believe that your mother was a plant inside the McDonough clan. Her job was to seduce your father, marry him, and, at a date of their choosing, assassinate him.”
“But then she got pregnant with you and Marianne,” Vas interjects. “That wasn’t part of the plan. What made it worse was the fact that you weren’t Seamus McDonough’s blood heirs, either.”
“Don’t remind me.” Katherine narrows her eyes.
“We believe that someone recognized Remus as Seamus’s twin back in Ireland,” I inform her. “There isn’t much of a paper trail, but we believe that at the same time Sheila was trying to infiltrate, so was he.”
“We’re not sure when she found out about it,” Vas explains. “But at some point, they began working together. I don’t even think whoever they were working for knew that Seamus had been switched with Remus. Not until we started digging ourselves.”
“We have one fucked up family,” Ava chuckles darkly.
“Indeed.” Katherine gives a small laugh.
“Tell us what happened the night you were taken.”
“Marianne caught me rifling through everything.” She sniffs, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
“I confronted her about it. I still didn’t know she was my twin sister.
Not until she came to Portland. She spewed some lie about finding it in her parents’ attic before we left for college.
That she hadn’t confronted them about it.
I believed her lies. Casting aside any doubts I had and the fact that she had looked exactly like my mother melted away as she cried in my arms about how they had hidden her entire childhood from her.