I slit my eyes. “Your real father came for you, didn’t he?”
At that moment, the door to the interior opens, flooding the garden with music and chatter. We’re hidden among the honeysuckle, but once glance over tells me Sal is outside smoking and on his phone.
“I’ll tell you everything but not here,” Dante says, releasing me from his grip enough to herd me deeper into the garden by my wrist. His grip is iron, and his pace is quick. But I keep up in my dress and heels. The rain has fallen recently, so the scent of the honeysuckle is heavy in the air as he steers me to a covered wooden seating area.
It’s where we used to sit as kids and throw stones into the duck pond, making the fish dart every which way. There are no fish now.
Maybe they all died?
“Sit,” he orders, but I just stand there, glaring at him as the rain starts to fall again. He sighs after a solid minute of me not sitting. Only then does he release his hold on me. He doesn’t sit either. He stands in front of the wooden seating area where he’s brought me, blocking my escape. If I don’t mind swimming, only the duck pond has a clear exit.
“No more lies or games,” I say, staring up at him. “Who are you?”
The light rain falls on him, coating him with a fine mist. It makes his blue eyes all the more clear and emotionless. “I couldn’t tell you before,” he says.
“But you can now?”
He shrugs. “Savino isn’t open to sharing his private life with others.”
“When did you find out that he was your birth father?”
He gives me a blank look. “The first time you ran away.”
I nod at him. My mother and I first escaped when I was ten.
“I was already working for the agency then. I thought it was just another job for your father. When I got back after seeing him, you were gone.”
And we would have stayed gone had Rebecca not broken down. She couldn’t handle being on her own. Adrien had groomed her from the second they met to be dependent on him. She couldn’t look after herself. She couldn’t look after me. After she was committed, that was when Adrien found us.
“But you stayed,” I say.
“I stayed for you. I knew Adrien was hunting you. You were supposed to have gotten out. I had to make sure you were able to survive.”
I shrug. “Is that why you did eventually leave? Because you were sure?” Dante left pretty much as soon as he turned fifteen. Adrien didn’t go after him. He just let him go. Now, I wonder if Savino had something to do with it.
“I had to. But came back for you, didn’t I?”
He did…when I turned the same age, fifteen. My father was the one who broke me, but Dante was the one who molded me. And then, he was the one who helped Rebecca escape the right way the second time. If it weren’t for him, I would never have become what I am today.
But it wasn’t me he did that for.
“Does Adrien know about Savino?”
Dante nods. “He’s always known.”
I nod at him as though all makes sense. Adrien’s obsession with gathering power, using what pawns he finds. He sees Dante as just another pawn, like me. But he didn’t train me for Adrien like he wanted me to think. No. Jude figured it out.
He did it for the mother he always wanted but never had….
“And your mother,” I say, taking the necklace out from under the collar of my dress and playing with the locket like it’s something I do every day. I don’t. I just put it on this morning. But now I’m here waiting with bated breath, testing my theory to see if he knows who his mother is…
His blue orbs flare to life, tracking the necklace in my hand.
So he does recognize the locket. Interesting. And here I thought it was the picture of us as kids together looking like a family that he coveted the first time he took it from my hands. A sick, twisted family, but there you go.
And then… “I have no mother.” He shrugs, eyes dead and empty again. “She’s dead. She died in a suspicious house fire. You know this; you’re the one who found the file.”
Liar.