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Andrei turned his attention to Ava’s mother, who was 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 asked her. Katherine’s gaze shot over to him.
“Other than it was used to beat me nearly to death?” She let out a dry, humorless chuckle. “Not much. But it was the first thing I noticed was different about my father.”
“How so?” Ava asked softly next to her. Katherine looked over at her, eyes softening.
“I remember that one day he wasn’t carrying it and then suddenly he was,” she recalled. “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 questioned lightly. Katherine nodded.
“I tried,” she admitted. “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 did.
“After that, I kept a closer eye on him,” Katherine admitted. “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 asked. “Besides the fact that she turned out to be a psycho.”
Katherine smiled 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 muttered petulantly. “You were still her daughter.”
“That’s true.” Katherine smiled 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 of 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 smiled. “I remember him reaching out to me after you went off to college.” Katherine stared at him across the table in surprise.
“He did?”
Andrei nodded. “He was proud of you,” he told 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 snarled. Andrei nodded.
“No doubt, little one.”
Ava beamed at his nickname for her. The two had formed a bond since he’d helped rescue her, and it warmed the cold, dead spaces of my heart. I never knew what I was missing before. Vas and my men would always be my family. My brothers. Tomas would 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 was something I never knew I needed.
“Tell us what happened, Kat,” Liam begged. Her mother took a sharp intake of breath, but she didn’t run like I expected her to. I could see her knuckles whitening on the chair arms beneath her, but she remained strong.
“Marianne and I had been rooming together in an apartment just off campus,” Katherine began, her voice soft and her eyes drawing in a faraway look. She was dissociating. It was 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 trailed 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 asked. Her mother shook her head.
“Her birth certificate,” Katherine corrected 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 bit her lip nervously. “How similar they were to one another.”
Katherine nodded. “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 doppelgängers, but when I looked back at how many times I had seen 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 stated the obvious.
“Using my own funds, I traveled back to Boston to the hospital where I was born,” she admitted. “The records were off.”
