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Bridget nodded. “It makes more sense that way. The younger the child, the easier to manipulate and retrain.”
“But she was taken at ten,” I mused, scratching my bearded chin. I hadn’t had time to shave in the last few days, and Ava had shown 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 swiveled her chair around to face me. My brow creased as I stared down at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Were operating under the assumption that whoever took those children are the same people who are buying up women, right?” I nodded. “What if they’re a hydra?”
“What does a mythological creature have to do with this?”
Bridget snorted. “Not the creature itself,” she chuckled. “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?”
Woman had a point. A good one too, especially in this day and age. If Bridget’s theory was correct, it meant that there were far more working parts out there than we realized. We knew that Sheila and Remus worked for some type of secret society that spanned generations. Was it old enough to have been responsible for the missing children in the 1920s, or was the society simply another head?
“Did you find anything on Remus McDonough?” I asked while we were on the topic. Bridget nodded and turned 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 told 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 told me. “Luckily Ireland is very paranoid about domestic terrorism and the resurgence of the IRA, so they store footage for decades.”
She pulled up a picture of a man I recognized to be Seamus McDonough. But it wasn’t. The eyes were slightly off in the photo, colder than the ones Kavanaugh had shown me. His nose was crooked, most likely from being broken several times, and there were several symbolistic tattoos I didn’t recognize.
“His name is Remus O’Connor,” Bridget told 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 place 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 was what did whoever was 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 had 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 looked back, it didn’t make sense because we hadn’t broken her cover yet. What if she had been talking about Sheila and Marianne?
We knew that Remus was Katherine and Marianne’s biological father. We also knew 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 was getting more tangled by the second, and I wondered if there would ever be a time we would unravel it, or if our lives would continue to be caught up in a web we’d never escape from.
* * *
“How is she doing?” I stood in the hallway just outside Katherine’s medical suite, hands in my pockets, as I watched the woman gently stroke her daughter’s hair. At some point, Ava had fallen asleep in her chair, slumped over, her head resting on her arms at the edge of her mother’s bed. The woman had a content smile on her face as she gazed lovingly down at the daughter she had sacrificed so much for.
“I’m impressed with the progress she has made already,” Radick admitted 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 nodded. As I stared through the window, I wondered how much Katherine McDonough knew about her family. Had she known about Marianne prior to the night of her supposed murder? How long had she known Remus had been masquerading around as Seamus?
“I am slightly concerned about her mental well-being, however.”
My head turned toward the good doctor. “What do you mean?”
“Katherine has been through some significantly traumatizing experiences,” he elaborated and gestured 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.”
