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CHAPTER15
Standing there in shocked silence,Cygny watched the blood drip down the painted canvas.
The first sound to break through was laughter.
Turning her head she saw Helena, her hands clasped together under her chin. She was beside herself with a manic look of joy.
“Why?” The question tore from Cygny’s throat.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing in front of her. Maybe she should have expected this kind of depraved indifference from him, but until that moment, everything he had done was in an almost passive way.
Using an electronic trail to frame Leo, he hadn’t hurt anyone physically in an attack like that.
A part of her died when she saw the way he so easily ended the other man’s life.
“He wasn’t necessary for what I’m here to do.”
Cygny turned and gestured toward Mister Samuels. “Then let them go.”
Before Nicholas answered, Helena hissed her opinion. “They’ve all seen too much. Kill them all.”
“This isn’t about what you want, Helena.”
“Of course not,” she argued back. “This is all about Mary’s girl. So tell her what we came to tell her and then let’s go.”
“If you think she’s going to go with you after she finds out that you had me kill her lover, you truly don’t understand women.”
“Leo? What did you do to Leo?”
The words tore free from her lips. There was no need to hide behind names given to them to protect their cover. Nicholas knew who they were and he’d summoned them here.
Helena turned toward Cygny and snarled her answer. “I left him out in the snow, he’s probably frozen stiff by now.”
Cygny’s heart stopped in her chest. “No.”
Removing a small contraption from her pocket, Helena gave her a sly wink. “All it took was just a little poke and he was down in the snow.” She shrugged and tossed it behind her onto the floor. “He couldn’t move, he could barely talk, but really, it was kind of a waste. I wanted to keep him.”
“Damn it, Helena! Will you shut up!”
Folding her arms across her chest, Helena turned her attention back to her father. “Why do you care so much? She got to have him!”
“Helena-” Nicholas’ voice lowered to a threatening rumble of sound.
“It’s because she’s your favorite, right? It’s because of Mary!”
Cygny’s head ached along with her heart but the sound of her mother’s name turned her attention back to the two. “Mary?”
Her mind skipped back to Helena’s earlier rant about Mary’s girl.
“What does my mother have to do with this?”
They both turned to look at her, but it was Helena who spoke first. “She’s the one that got away. He loved her-”
“Helena-”
She ignored his warning and continued on. “I don’t think he’s ever loved anyone but her.”
One heartbeat later and Helena was sliding down the wall she’d been thrown against. Cygny mirrored the look of shock on her face.
Nicholas took a step toward Cygny but she backed away. “You knew my mother?”
He dropped his chin in something akin to a nod.
“She was the most talented forger I’d ever seen. She had a way of matching the energy of the painter, making each work sing with her talent. I’d never seen anything like it.”
Cygny fought off the anger and anguish that welled up inside of her. “She never mentioned you.” She shook her head. “Not ever.”
His hands fisted at his sides as he took another step closer. “She didn’t want me, not in the same way. She didn’t understand that I could give her a way to settle down. A place to call home. She didn’t have to move around like some kind of hippie in a ratty old wagon. I would have given her everything, all she had to do was... all she had to do was love me.”
He almost sounded like it hurt him.
And maybe it did, but the blood still dripped from the painting onto the man who lay beneath it, prone and still.
He’d ended his life and thrown his daughter against the wall for this secret.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Cygny pinned him with a look. “This is all about you!”
Nicholas had aged before her, his eyes rimmed with red.
“You,” she shook her head, “you breached the FBI records. You made an entire department close down and reorganize, because... Did you tell them about my mother? My exposure to all of her fakes and her friends? Did you really make this whole thing happen to draw me out into the open?”
“You made it impossible to find you otherwise.” His words were snarled and hissed through his teeth. “I always thought you’d have your mother’s talent for art. I never dreamed, until you joined Homeland, that you’d inherited my skill with a computer.”
Cygny felt like she’d been sucker punched in the stomach. “I don’t have anything of yours! You’re not my father!”
“Oh, I am,” he insisted. “We worked together for several year and I had your DNA matched against mine at a private lab. You are my flesh and blood.”
She turned to look at the dead man on the floor. “I don’t like your kind of blood.”
