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“I wanted to be sure.”
“Three more babies were born since Paz did your family tree. Two boys, one girl.”
“Hm.”
“Anyway, we might have two candidates. One is Sofia, a very distant cousin of your mother’s, on her father’s side, though. Sofia is forty, married to her second husband, and has two boys. She doesn’t live in Bulgaria anymore. After her divorce, she took her boys and moved to the UK, where she met a doctor and got married.”
“Too old.”
“Seriously? Because I saw her, and she doesn’t look forty. The women in your family have impeccable genes.”
“She’s got two sons and a husband. Her hands are full.” I didn’t feel like telling Corri the real reason why I was rejecting her. I didn’t need a mature woman who’d already gone through life and seen plenty. I needed someone more flexible. Someone I could… Okay, fine! Manipulate. “Who’s the other candidate?” I hoped she’d say the name that was on my mind, that had been on my mind for a while.
“Yolanda Aleksiev. Your cousin. Actually, second cousin.”
After an exhausting day, I finally felt a bit more relaxed. “Tell me about her.”
“She’s eleven, living in an orphanage.”
I blinked. Well, that was unexpected. “What happened to her parents?” I remembered Paz saying that he couldn’t discover the name of her father, but the last time he’d checked, her mother, Anelia, was alive and well.
“Bus accident. Many people died, and Yolanda’s mother was one of them. Since there was no one left to take care of the child, she ended up in the system.”
No one, indeed. Her grandparents dead, her great-grandparents just as dead, and her mother’s first cousin, Katerina Angelov, lost in a parallel universe.
“Didn’t she have an uncle? What happened to him?”
“Poof!” Corri spread her tiny arms wide. “Vanished. Some say he ran from home when he was twenty and never came back.”
“Hm.”
“You know, Mistress… your family is very sad. Not on your father’s and grandfather’s side, though. They had brothers and sisters, each with their families… They’re spread far and wide.”
“But they don’t suffer of schizophrenia.”
The pixie sighed. “Sofia does take a lot of pills.”
“What about Yolanda?”
“She’s just a kid…”
“So?”
“They don’t care about kids there. I haven’t noticed anything particularly worrisome about her, and I’m glad, really, because she wouldn’t have access to treatment if she were to need it. She seems like a normal kid. She’s introverted, spends most of her time reading, stays out of trouble…”
“Why is she a candidate if she’s so normal?”
“She sleeps a lot.”
Gotcha!
CHAPTER NINE
My plan was taking shape, but the more I worked on it, the more I built it in my head, the less appealing it was. I couldn’t tell my guys about it. They would have put an end to it before I’d get to explain it to them properly and come up with believable excuses. My guys… They were better than me. Days passed, weeks… and I sometimes slept with all of them, sometimes only with GC and Paz, sometimes I sneaked into Francis’s bed, sometimes Sariel came to spend the night in the North Tower. And the more time I spent with them, the more I started to believ
e that I didn’t deserve them at all. I had to keep silent. Corri was my pixie, so I knew I could trust her not to tell a soul. She’d carried out her mission brilliantly, and now I wanted her by my side, because she was the only one I could bounce ideas off of. She didn’t like my plan, either.
I need someone who has the guts to see this for what it is and tell me it’s right. The end justifies the means. I need someone who’s stronger than me. Except in this case, strong didn’t actually mean strong. It meant amoral. Lorna.
