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Amerie
“Yes, Amerie. It’s me.” Zara smiled thinly and cocked her head to the side. “Well, us, actually.”
As she spoke, two cloaked figures emerged from the hollow. Ali and a redheaded woman. With a start, I realized that it was Dr. Carmichael—Zara’s friend who owned the private practice where I had my checkup a couple of months ago.
“I don’t understand,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “All of you are in the Rosmerta Society? And you came here to give me information for my article?”
Somehow, I found that hard to believe. Something else was happening here. Something sinister.
Zara smiled. “It’s a bit of dramatic irony, really. You’ve been digging into the Rosmerta Society without realizing that the Rosmerta Society is the thing that brought you here in the first place.”
I had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
“How did you know I was looking into the society?” I asked, taking a slow, measured step backward.
“Piper told me,” Ali said.
Of course. Jensen had suggested the very same thing. Admittedly, it was my own fault for telling Piper about my article idea in the first place. She thought the Rosmerta Society was a silly urban legend, so she probably mentioned the project to Ali in an off-the-cuff comment. She had no way of knowing it was all real, or that her own father was a member.
I frowned. “Hold on… what do you mean about the society bringing me here? Do you mean this specific cave?” I asked, gesticulating around us. “Or Vanderwild Bay in general?”
“Vanderwild Bay, honey.” Zara smiled, showing all her teeth. Her eyes didn’t match the friendly expression, making her look like a shark.
“But you brought me here.”
“Sure we did,” she said breezily. “Just not under the circumstances we claimed.”
I took another step back. “I don’t understand.”
Ali reached into his cloak and stepped forward. With horror, I realized he was holding a small black gun. He lifted it and aimed it right at my heart.
“Don’t worry, Amerie,” he said. “I have absolutely no intention of hurting you. This is just to make sure you don’t try anything stupid. Like running.”
Zara pointed to the smooth stone seats in the center of the cave. “Sit down,” she said, voice imperious and chin raised high. “We’re going to be here for a while. We have a lot to discuss.”
I looked at Ali again. He waved the gun and dipped his chin in the direction of the seats, letting me know I didn’t have a choice.
I turned and trudged across the cave, mind whirling with fear and confusion. None of this made sense. Why was my own mother allowing my stepfather to threaten me with a gun? Why did they bring me to town if not to bring me into their family? And what the hell was Dr. Carmichael doing here?
I perched on the edge of the closest stone bench, stomach roiling as I stared at the flaming torch in the center of the circle. Zara and Ali sat next to each other on the bench next to me, and Dr. Carmichael took the one opposite.
“You know, you actually almost caught us with all your silly digging,” Ali said, grinning and shaking his head. “That night you found the contract. All my fault. I was supposed to move it into one of the secret rooms, just in case you ever went snooping, but I completely forgot. Stupid mistake. But I’m only human, after all.”
Zara nodded. “There was also that ridiculous home DNA kit the school paper got you to try out. My god… you were so close,” she said, pinching her thumb and forefinger together. “Luckily for us, we’ve become rather adept at acting, and you’re so desperate to have a real family that you were willing to buy anything we said as long as it involved us crying and talking about how much we loved and wanted you.”
My head was spinning and spinning. It felt like I was in a fever dream. “I have no idea what’s happening here,” I said. “Are you saying the Origins database was actually correct?”
“Yes.”
“So that woman in Michigan is my bio mom? Not you?” I asked.
Ali threw his hands up. “Finally, she gets it.”
It was all starting to make a horrible kind of sense now. When I first met Zara, I wondered why she looked so different from the photo my father showed me when I was a kid. She claimed that she’d had a lot of work done, which seemed to make sense for a rich housewife, so I didn’t question it.
I’d also wondered why she looked so much older than thirty-nine, despite the Botox and fillers. At the time, I put it down to all the years of hard living and drug use. But now I realized the truth—she was actually many years older than my real mother. No amount of Botox could make a woman in her late forties or early fifties look like a woman in her late thirties.
Zara shushed Ali. “Stop, honey. It’s a very big shock. You can’t expect her to understand right away.
