“That’s true.” Katherine smiles sadly. “But I don’t believe that Sheila was capable of loving me or Marianne. We were simply tools to be used and discarded when necessary. Even Marianne. Otherwise, she would have been with them instead of begging that Ward boy for a ticket to her freedom.
“I believe that she grew suspicious when I started asking questions, but at the time, I never would have thought the woman who raised me would betray me so deeply. There is no doubt in my mind that she was spewing lies to my father tocreate a gap between us so that he wouldn’t believe my evidence when the time came.”
“But he did,” Andrei smiles. “I remember him reaching out to me after you went off to college.” Katherine stares at him across the table in surprise.
“He did?”
Andrei nods. “He was proud of you,” he tells her. “Talked about how you were going to be the one to lead them into a new generation. A new tradition. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to tell me what he needed help with. When I called back a week later, as we discussed, he blew me off, stating he no longer needed or wanted my help.”
“Remus,” Ava snarls. Andrei nods.
“No doubt, little one.”
Ava beams at his nickname for her. The two have formed a bond since he helped rescue her, and it warms the cold, dead spaces of my heart. I never knew what I was missing before. Vas and my men will always be my family. My brothers. Tomas will always be the man who raised me and sheltered me and nurtured me into the man I am today. But having him here with her is something I never knew I needed.
“Tell us what happened, Kat,” Liam begs. Her mother takes a sharp intake of breath, but she doesn’t run like I expect her to. I can see her knuckles whitening on the chair arms beneath her, but she remains strong.
“Marianne and I had been rooming together in an apartment just off campus,” Katherine begins, her voice soft and her eyes drawing in a faraway look. She is dissociating. It is a common tactic among survivors. “Liam went out of town on an errand for my father, but it didn’t feel right. I warned him but…” She trails off. “I knew she had been hiding things, so I tore the apartment apart while she was supposed to be in one of her lectures. Inchby inch, I searched every nook, hole, and cranny until I found what I was looking for.”
“The cane?” Ava asks. Her mother shakes her head.
“Her birth certificate,” Katherine corrects her. “I’d only ever known her as Marianne McAllister. Liam and I had met her parents on a few occasions, but like our own parents, they traveled a lot for business. I remember wondering if they had adopted her because she looked nothing like them, but I never brought it up in case Marianne didn’t know.
“My mother came down a few weeks after I settled into the apartment. I took her out for lunch, and we ran into Marianne while she was out with a few friends from class.”
“You saw it.” Ava bites her lip nervously. “How similar they were to one another.”
Katherine nods. “They were so strikingly similar that it was almost scary, and when I pointed it out, they both became cold and frigid. Later, Marianne laughed it off that they were doppelgängers, but when I looked back at how many times I saw Marianne with my mother, it was only once. One time, when we were first introduced, and that was it. I was thirteen at the time, so I doubt I would have noticed the similarities then.”
“Then you went digging,” Liam states the obvious.
“Using my own funds, I traveled back to Boston to the hospital where I was born,” she admits. “The records were off.”
“More births recorded than birth certificates issued,” I say. Katherine smirks.
“Someone has been doing their homework,” she praises, and we all chuckle. “I managed to track down one of the nurses who had been in the delivery room with my mother. The woman told me everything she could. How my grandmother had taken the child from my mother’s arms and handed it off to another woman. One with a cane with a silver cross on it.”
“You’re telling me Leigh knew someone with that cane?” Liam growls.
“Everyone except my father,” Katherine confirms. “The nurse told me that after everyone left, the woman with the cane returned. The only reason she noticed was because the argument they got into was pretty heated, and the woman was escorted out of the facility.”
“That makes sense,” I tell her. “We believe that your mother was a plant inside the McDonough clan. Her job was to seduce your father, marry him, and, at a date of their choosing, assassinate him.”
“But then she got pregnant with you and Marianne,” Vas interjects. “That wasn’t part of the plan. What made it worse was the fact that you weren’t Seamus McDonough’s blood heirs, either.”
“Don’t remind me.” Katherine narrows her eyes.
“We believe that someone recognized Remus as Seamus’s twin back in Ireland,” I inform her. “There isn’t much of a paper trail, but we believe that at the same time Sheila was trying to infiltrate, so was he.”
“We’re not sure when she found out about it,” Vas explains. “But at some point, they began working together. I don’t even think whoever they were working for knew that Seamus had been switched with Remus. Not until we started digging ourselves.”
“We have one fucked up family,” Ava chuckles darkly.
“Indeed.” Katherine gives a small laugh.
“Tell us what happened the night you were taken.”
“Marianne caught me rifling through everything.” She sniffs, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I confronted her about it. I still didn’t know she was my twin sister. Not until she came to Portland. She spewed some lie about finding it in her parents’ attic before we left for college. That she hadn’t confronted themabout it. I believed her lies. Casting aside any doubts I had and the fact that she had looked exactly like my mother melted away as she cried in my arms about how they had hidden her entire childhood from her.