fifty
We sleep most of the day away. It is dinnertime before we find ourselves downstairs, still utterly exhausted.
I may have woken her up a few times with my head between her thighs.
“What do you mean you can’t find them?” I growl at Mark and Bridget. We are sitting at the family dining room table going over everything we have learned and collected. My father has managed to find some documents at the McDonough mansion that help to piece together some of the puzzle, but it also opens up a lot more questions.
“I mean, one minute we had a location on them, and the next, they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Yeah.” He stares at me like I am an idiot speaking Chinese. “You know, gone? Poof? Adios? Not to be found?”
“Your body won’t be found if you don’t quit,” I growl.
Mark blows out his lips. “I thought sex was supposed to give you endorphins and make you happy.”
Everyone but Liam and I roar with laughter. Not even my glare silences them. Fuckers.
“As you were saying, Mark,” Liam drawls. The hacker snickers before clicking something on his tablet. The portable projector he brought comes to life, emitting a soft light over the blank cream wall just ahead of me.
“We sent Dima to the airstrip because that was where chatter said they were going to be,” Mark explains. “It was supposed to be a foolproof plan.”
“Except,” Dima butts in. “The only people there were their guards.”
“No Remus or Sheila.” Mark taps his screen again to show video footage of Sheila and Remus getting into the exact car that Dima had ambushed at the hangar.
“Was it a decoy?” Andrei wonders. “Maybe they knew you would be monitoring them.”
I shrug. “That is a possibility.”
Andrei turns his attention to Ava’s mother, who is sitting silently next to her daughter, her green eyes fixed sadly on the grainy image of her mother.
“What do you know about that cane you found?” my father asks her. Katherine’s gaze shoots over to him.
“Other than it was used to beat me nearly to death?” She lets out a dry, humorless chuckle. “Not much. But it was the first thing I noticed was different about my father.”
“How so?” Ava asks softly next to her. Katherine looks over at her, eyes softening.
“I remember that one day he wasn’t carrying it and then suddenly he was,” she recalls. “It was my sophomore year of high school. I asked him about it, and he said that he had twisted his knee coming off a step wrong.
“There was nothing suspicious about it at first, and I shrugged it off easily. Then a week later, it was gone again. Ijoked and said how I was surprised such an old man was healing so fast, and he stared down at me and asked me what I was talking about. ‘You hurt your knee,’ I had reminded him. ‘I saw you walking with a cane, remember?’ My father had shaken his head and said he hadn’t injured his knee at all. In fact, he hadn’t even been home all week. He had been in Aspen with his CFO.”
“Did you say anything to him about it?” Andrei questions lightly. Katherine nods.
“I tried,” she admits. “But he said I must have either dreamed it or mistaken one of the staff members for him.”
“That seems a bit… convenient.”
And it does.
“After that, I kept a closer eye on him,” Katherine admits. “By the time graduation came around, I had compiled a laundry list of moments that seemed inaccurate. The day Liam and I left for college, I emailed him everything I had over a secure server. Our relationship toward the end had become strained and rocky. I have a feeling my mother was the cause of that.”
“Why do you say that?” Ava asks. “Besides the fact that she turned out to be a psycho.”
Katherine smiles at her daughter. “It is true that your grandmother never held any love for me, and now I know why.”
“Still doesn’t make it right,” Ava mutters petulantly. “You were still her daughter.”