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Bailey raised a suspicious brow at my sister. She wasn’t buying any of it, but once Ava told her story, she might be more open to the idea that her father wasn’t who he said he was.
“Where to start…” Ava pondered for a moment. “Your father and Elias Ward have been friends since before college. They were part of the same fraternity.”
“I don’t understand.” Bailey looked around the table, confused. “What does Elias Ward have to do with any of this?”
Ava pondered what to say next. Hers was a long and complicated story that brought up wounds that still hadn’t healed. They were too fresh. But my sister was strong. She took a deep breath and launched into her story, her hand tight on Matthias’s as she recounted her life with Elias Ward.
Bailey listened with rapt fascination as my sister recounted growing up within the Ward household. She was eleven when her mother was murdered in a botched home invasion. The assailant hadn’t known she’d been hiding in a small space her mother had designated for emergencies. When the police arrived sometime later, they had found her, and social services shipped her off to live with who she’d been led to believe was her biological father.
Elias Ward.
Ava divulged her past openly, unshed tears crowding her eyes as she recounted how she had been treated growing up in that godforsaken household. The mental and physical abuse. Her obsessive, perverted brother. Father’s hands were clamped so tightly around his cutlery, I thought they might bend beneath his hands.
There were a few things we knew about her time with Elias, but most of what we’d been told had been watered down or skipped altogether. We’d all been waiting patiently for a time when Ava would tell us on her own.
Part of me wished she hadn’t.
If I ever saw Christian Ward again, I’d kill him with my bare hands, only to bring him back and do it again.
Fuck that.
I’d bring him to the brink of death, only to heal him and do it over again. Time after time. Slice after slice. He’d spend years being tortured by me and my family the exact same way he had tortured my sister.
“Wait.” Bailey smiled behind her coffee cup. She set down the envelope in favor of the new mug of steaming coffee she’d been brought. Her plate of food had been set aside, uneaten. I’d have to make sure she ate before we left the table. “You ran away and the only thing you changed was your last name, which had been your last name prior to it being changed to Ward, and no one found you for an entire year?”
Ava smirked mischievously. “Yep.”
“You had Elias and your husband searching for you, and none of them found you?” Both Bailey and Ava were cracking up laughing. Even my father was chuckling silently from his seat, the anger that had been rolling off him earlier dissipating slowly. He was looking at Ava with so much love and affection it was stifling.
Not that he didn’t show his love for us, but there was a twinkle in his eye when he thought of Ava and a softness to him when he dealt with her. He wasn’t much different with our sister Saoirse before she’d left for Ireland.
In a fit of rage.
But that was a story for another day.
“Let’s be fair here.” The Russian rolled his eyes, less amused than the rest of us. “No one thought you would make it out of the state. Let alone nearly halfway across the country.”
“But I did.”
“I can’t believe no one found you when all you did was shorten your first name.” Bailey was still cracking up over that tidbit of information. “Why didn’t you come up with something different? Like Vivica Storm or something?”
Ava scrunched her nose in distaste. “Vivica Storm?” She snickered. “That sounds like a stripper name or someone who writes dirty erotica.”
“I think all erotica can be considered dirty,” Bailey pointed out.
“Not the point.”
Bailey just shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t care one way or the other. “Just saying.”
“She’s got a point, Ava,” Seamus piped up. “It was kind of like you weren’t even trying.”
Our sister’s mouth fell open in a dramatic gasp. “Well, excuse me, Mr. High and Mighty, but I didn’t exactly know any better. It wasn’t like I could watch television or anything, and the only books I was allowed to read had to be either from the school or smuggled in by Libby and Kenzi.”
“Anyway,” she added. “James Bond doesn’t change his name everywhere he goes.”
Seamus and I groaned. We should never have introduced her to those films.
“That’s fiction,” I reminded her, a small smile flitting at the edges of my mouth.
