The Phoenix

Both her parents were still alive in the spring of 2003.

By the fall of that year, her mother had gone missing.

Gabriel had lied to her.

Athena Petridis had not killed her mother.

She, Ella, had been tricked into murder.

Retying the letters with the ribbon, she slipped them into her bag along with the wedding photographs and baby bracelet and tooth box that had seemed so meaningful and important a few hours ago, but now felt like trivial postscripts to a nightmare that was only just beginning to unfold. Carefully replacing the lid on the fourth box, she noticed what felt like a tiny indentation beneath her fingertips. Pressing down, she was astonished to feel a sliding sensation. A hidden panel, no more than two inches long, moved to one side like the lid of an old-fashioned wooden pencil case. In the cavity beneath was yet another letter – this one without an envelope or dates and torn at the edges. It was also signed by Ella’s father, but unlike the others it had been typed.

Take care of Ella, it read. I’ve found Rachel. She’s in North Africa, and she’s with M. I know how you feel about her, Mother. But she isn’t well. She’s besotted with M, but she has no conception of how dangerous he is. I have to get her away from him and out of this group we’re involved with. I have to get us both out, for good. And I will, I promise. As soon as it’s safe and I have Rachel, we’ll come back for E.

Wish me luck, Mother. I love you. Will.

Ella held her breath. Tears welled up in her eyes.

So her parents had intended to come back for her! They had. But something – or someone – had stopped them. William’s letter clearly implied that that ‘something’ was The Group. And was that ‘someone’ the mysterious ‘M’, who had brainwashed and spirited away Ella’s mother?

My father wasn’t loyal to The Group, Ella realized. He was trying to escape them!

She thought back to the footage she’d watched, on the USB stick that Gabriel had given her after they’d first met, with William waxing lyrical about The Group and how it was Ella’s ‘destiny’ to join them. Had that been made before he lost his faith? Or had he been pressured into saying it?

What if the video wasn’t real at all, but had been doctored, digitally altered in some way, as a sick piece of propaganda, designed to draw her in? If it was, it had worked.

But now Ella’s eyes had been opened. Her father had wanted to escape The Group. Which meant that the very last thing he would have wanted was for The Group to get their talons into her as well.

Could it really be true that these people who had transformed Ella’s life – who had turned her into a vigilante, a killer, a human weapon – were not the good

guys at all, but were in fact responsible for destroying Ella’s family?

Who was ‘M’? Ella mused. And why was he so dangerous?

She had to find out what had happened to her parents after her father wrote that letter. Because William and Rachel never did come back for her. And they would have done if they could, Ella felt sure of it.

Driving back to the city, with the bag of letters and trinkets on the passenger seat beside her, Ella felt oddly alert, despite her physical exhaustion and the lack of food in her stomach. She knew more now than she had ever known in her life about the family she had lost. And yet, in a way, she also knew less. About her parents. About The Group. About herself. About Gabriel. And about Athena Petridis, and what the whole past year of her life had really been about.

The dreadful, inescapable fact was that Ella had become a killer. An assassin. She hadn’t avenged her mother’s death at all. Instead she had murdered the ‘wrong’ person, based on a lie. And yet there had been a connection between her and Athena. Some sort of recognition, some link with her parents and her past that Ella had felt so strongly, she couldn’t relinquish it now, even in the face of all today’s evidence.

Waves of fatigue washed over Ella. But she knew how much work she still had to do. And that was what was keeping her going, giving her this strange sense of energy that prevented her from falling asleep at the wheel.

She had come so far.

But her journey wasn’t over, nor her mission even close to complete.

Father Michael Murphy blinked blearily at the young woman standing in the parsonage doorway. It was the middle of the night – two in the morning, to be precise – and her ashen face looked as eerily white as the moon.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I need to confess.’

‘OK.’ Father Michael pulled the belt on his dressing gown tighter against the cold and ran a hand through what was left of his hair, trying to shake off the sleep that still clung to him. ‘And it can’t wait till morning?’

The woman shook her head.

‘I see.’ Father Michael put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Well, no sin is beyond God’s forgiveness.’

‘Even murder?’