by BETH KERY
“Yes,” I said.
Why did I lie? I suppose it was the same, obvious answer. I loved him, no matter what. I couldn’t bear seeing his pain.
“I didn’t understand,” he said thickly. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to mine. He cradled my face in his hands, rocking me gently. “God, I’m sorry, Anna. I knew you were horrified and traumatized, but I thought it was because you were worried it was Noah—”
“All I could think of… ” All I can think of. “Was what if it was true? What if I’d slept with my own father. Fallen in love with him?”
“Do you see?” Evan entreated desperately, his stare willing me to believe him. “Do you see why I warned you? Noah lies. He lies to control. He lies to hurt. Please don’t let him in, Anna. Please.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
That night, I finally fell into a dreamless sleep in Evan’s arms.
In the morning, I awoke feeling blessedly numb. I told Evan I was feeling claustrophobic, and that I needed to get out of the hotel room. I saw the whites of his eyes showing as he looked around at my declaration. I could tell that he was still worried about me to the point that he was having difficulty focusing on anything else.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No. I’m going alone. I’ll be back in an hour. I’m fine. I feel much better today. Talking last night helped. I just need some fresh air and a little exercise.”
I saw him considering, searching for reasons why I shouldn’t go. Obviously, he couldn’t come up with anything. I wasn’t an invalid or a prisoner.
“Take your cell phone, in case you need me for anything,” he said, handing me a card key for the hotel room. I put it in my purse. I’d already secreted his car keys in there, while he’d been in the shower earlier. I wasn’t sure if I would use them to make an escape or not.
I just wanted those keys, like a safety line. In case the sheer panic hit me again.
Even though I’d stolen the keys, part of me knew I wouldn’t go. Not until I’d heard the truth about the genetic testing, anyway. I left the suite, determined to ignore the worry I sensed pouring off of Evan. There was nothing I could do to comfort him besides tell the lie again that I was fine.
That I believed him.
The sun and cool air revived me a little. I distracted myself by browsing through some of the luxury shops on the bottom floor of the hotel and walking along the beachfront. I temporarily forgot the car keys in my purse. For a few blessed minutes, I didn’t think about escape, or Evan, or Noah, or the fact that I wasn’t my parents’ biological child… Or the horror of Elizabeth leaping out of my dreams and from inside of my head into the concrete reality of the hotel room last night.
Thankfully, that insulated cocoon that made me into the equivalent of a walking, talking zombie stayed with me when I returned to the hotel room forty-five minutes later.
I needed that protection for what was to come.
I heard distant male voices as I quietly entered the suite. I paused a moment just inside the door.
“… a bloody mess,” I heard Evan say. “She’s so fragile, after everything that’s happened.”
“Don’t you think she deserves to know the truth?”
I realized it was Wes Ryder on the balcony with Evan. I could make out their tall figures through the billowing, partially translucent curtains.
“No one deserves to know something that awful,” Evan said loudly. “Jesus, what if—”
“What?” Wes asked when Evan abruptly cut himself off.
“What if she couldn’t take it? What if she harms herself when she hears the news? It’d be my fault. For bringing her to this Godforsaken place. All of it. Do you have any idea what she’s gone though, these past few days? Christ, what a nightmare. I love her, and yet I’ve done this to her. I have wronged her in ways I never imagined,” I heard him say, even though his voice was muffled.
A tendril of pain wormed its way through the insulation of my denial. It burrowed into my chest at the desperation I heard in Evan’s voice.
“It’s not as if any of this is her fault. Anna is innocent. She doesn’t deserve to suffer,” Wes said heavily.
Silently, I backed out of the hotel room and closed the door.
I walked down the hallway to an exit door and stood on the staircase landing. I quickly texted Evan that I’d decided to have breakfast, and that I’d be back in a half hour or so.
Then I waited, with the exit door slightly cracked open.
Ten minutes later, I heard a door open down the hallway. The elevator dinged, and I dared to peek out. I saw Wes Ryder stepping onto the elevator.
We were only on the third floor. I rushed down the stairs. I caught up to him as he walked down the sidewalk next to the parking lot.
“Wes!”
He turned around, looking surprised, and then acutely discomfited to see me running after him.
“Anna.”
“Hi,” I said, coming to a stop and running my fingers through my mussed hair. I smiled. He blinked and glanced away skittishly. “I thought that was you. Did you come to visit us?”
“I did, yes,” he said, his gaze jumping to my face and off it, once again. I understood better now why he was always so uncomfortable around me, why his glances were both hungry and haunted at once. Maybe he hadn’t just been in love with Elizabeth once.
Perhaps he still was.
“How are you?” I asked him, recalling that I’d felt angry with him for keeping my resemblance to Elizabeth to himself, upon Evan’s request. I needed to make it clear I’d forgiven him, if I were to convince him to give me his news. He waved his hand, as if to say the question had been inconsequential. He seemed embarrassed.
“This has all been one hell of a mess, hasn’t it?” I asked softly. “No one would believe it if I tried to tell them the story.”
He shook his head and shoved his hands into his pockets. I thought I saw his lips move in a silent curse.
“I don’t know what to say, Anna, except I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything, except keep the fact that I’m Elizabeth and I are doubles. Evan asked you to keep quiet about it, and you have a much longer history of friendship with him than you do me,” I reasoned.
He looked unconvinced and uncomfortable. Very uncomfortable. He was sweating again, and he looked pale.
“Did you tell Evan the results? Of the genetic test?”
He swallowed thickly and looked back at the hotel. I had the impression of a trapped animal. Somehow, I knew that he was about to say that he’d prefer that Evan give me the news.
“I’m stronger than Evan thinks I am,” I said before he could utter a syllable. “It was my cells that were tested. Noah took them from me against my will. He drugged me to do it. I could make a big deal about the fact that Noah, Evan, and you decided to have the testing done without my consent. But I want to know the results, too. So I’m not going to complain. I deserve those results, above anyone else. Surely you know that, Wes,” I said more gently, persuasion thick in my tone.
“Yes,” he replied thickly. Abruptly, his reluctance annoyed me.
“Come on, Wes. If I can accept the truth, surely you can,” I said, unable to keep the impatience out of my tone. “I am whatever I am, no matter who my biological parents are. You don’t have to act like I’m a monster.”
He started, meeting my gaze for the first time. He looked stunned.
“I don’t think that, Anna. I’m just… this is difficult to say.”
“It’ll be more difficult to hear,” I countered grimly. “But I’m ready, Wes.”
He frowned, and then sighed. “I’m not sure how much Evan told you,” he said hoarsely. “But we decided to have both your paternity and maternity determined.”
“Wouldn’t you have to have my father’s genetic material to do that
?”
“Yes,” he said, his gaze flickering around.
“Wes?” I demanded. “Trust me, whatever you say isn’t going to come as a surprise to me. I found out from my parents yesterday that I was adopted. I’ve already suspected and agonized over the possible truths. I’ve braced myself to hear it.”
He met my stare uneasily. “Anna… I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the genetic testing has proven with an extremely high level of certainty that your biological mother was Elizabeth Madaster.”
I just nodded, ignoring the roaring that started up in my ears.
“And my father?”
Someone else said those words, someone that sounded calm and strong.
Wes grimaced. He looked sick.
“The genetic testing shows that your father is Evan. God, I’m sorry, Anna.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I never returned to the hotel suite.
My mind was blank for the next forty minutes or so. I functioned, because I successfully maneuvered on the lakeside road to reach Les Jumeaux. But I was a machine, performing all the necessary motor movements, while I—Anna—was blessedly absent.
Who was Anna Solas, anyway? Anna Halifax? Anna Madaster? She was nothing. I was no one, just the organic robot that drove the steep, twisting road with much more expertise than the previous, self-conscious Anna would have done. Did I believe Wes? Or Noah? Or Evan?
I don’t know what or whom I believed. I existed in a fixed state of doubt, right on the edge of complete and utter despair.
The first time I experienced any sense of emotion was when I pulled up to the shadowed, stone gatehouse to Les Jumeaux. I remembered vividly first arriving there, how I’d felt like I’d entered a dream—a fairy tale—as I stared up at the towering pine forest while sitting next to my handsome, perfect husband. I remembered Evan’s small, special smile when I’d handed him back the card key, and how the gate had swung open.
(The gate opened for you because Les Jumeaux is yours. It’s your birthright. Your heritage.)
“No,” I said out loud emphatically.
Yes, I was now talking to her out loud now. The ghost. The ancestor. Elizabeth.
My mother.
“This place is no fairy tale. It’s a nightmare. It’s hell,” I grated out, gripping the steering wheel tightly.
A silent pause.
(Let’s finish the nightmare, then.)
I lowered my window and pressed the card key to the pad. The wrought iron gate to Les Jumeaux slowly swung open.
I used the garage entrance to access the house. In the kitchen, I came to a halt. Sunlight streamed through the terrace windows. Outside, the cerulean blue lake flashed and winked at me. The aspens were beginning to turn in the cooler weather. A breeze gusted through the trees. The leaves rustled and glinted like thousands of fluttering gold coins against the backdrop of the blue lake and dark green pines.
Inside the house, that soft, watchful silence cloaked everything.
(Les Jumeaux isn’t a hell. It’s your home, Anna. We carry the hell inside us.)
I walked farther into the room. In the sink, I saw Evan’s and my coffee cups. It was like finding artifacts that had survived a catastrophe… like the perfectly preserved loaf of bread I’d seen once at a museum exhibition of excavated objects that had survived the volcanic disaster of Pompeii.
It hit me then. The grief. I braced my hands on the sink and wept.
But I’d set some kind of internal limit on my pain. I had a lifetime to cry.
And only hours to exact revenge.
The truth had come to me gradually, in snippets. It hadn’t really coalesced entirely in my head until I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in Evan’s and my old bedroom, gripping a pair of sharp scissors in my hand.
Maybe the truth had formed incompletely at first because of my denial of it: my refusal to face the ugly truth, my determined rejection of Elizabeth’s nightmare message or her voice in my head.
Somehow, I knew that I would never be able to be rid of her, nor would I ever accept her, if I didn’t do this thing.
I wore a dive suit without the hood, my long, blonde hair spilling around the black neoprene. My face looked pale, but calm in the mirror as I grabbed a handful of hair. I lopped it off at my shoulder.
When the last long strands fell to the floor and I’d donned a dive hood, I examined myself closely in the mirror.
I looked at the result of centuries of interbreeding. No wonder Elizabeth and I looked so much alike. For a split second, my smooth, flesh and blood face disappeared, only to be replaced by a skull in a dive hood. I started in shock, and my own face resolved over the bones and bleached white teeth.
Somehow, I knew I’d seen an exact replica of her skull. Not only that, I’d seen through my own flesh, like an X-ray. It would be how I appeared one day, when my body lay moldering in the ground. I’d seen her skeleton, the very foundation of the living, breathing, vibrant, flesh and blood woman she’d once been.
(Light from my darkness.
Swim deep, darling.)
Tears filled my eyes. She’d been so alone in that cold, wet world for so long.
“It’ll be over soon, Elizabeth,” I whispered.
It had all settled in my head now.
I had realized, at some point in my dazed consciousness in the past few days, that Madaster had said something revealing in that tortured, bewildering conversation we’d held in his tower retreat. He’d asked me if Evan knew about the tunnel between the Twins.
Tunnel. Not hallway. Not corridor, as Evan had called it.
He’d seemed smug when I said that Evan had mentioned sealing the corridor between the two mansions. He’d been satisfied to hear that Evan didn’t know about the other passageway that joined the Twins.
Because now I understood, there had been not one, but two passages between the houses.
I was very careful to remain hidden on my trek across the beach to the boathouse. I didn’t want Noah to spy me from his tower, so I stayed behind the giant granite boulders along the beach until I reached the dock.
Noah might have spotted me as I hurried down the dock a moment later, hauling my dive equipment. But I was exposed for only half a minute. And I couldn’t be anxious about that now. Not when I’d decided what needed to be done.
Besides, given his condition, Noah no longer could visit the scene of his worst crimes. I realized how it must have been a festering thorn in his side for the past few years, the knowledge of that deep, secret place beneath Les Jumeaux, and his inability to access it.
Excellent job, Lorraine.
Grandmother. Cousin. Ancestor.
It’s dangerous to dive alone, especially for someone of my limited expertise. But it’s crazy to cavern dive alone. Some people might have said I was acting suicidal. I was positive I wasn’t, though. I knew, because I’d thought about ending it all in the past few days, when I’d looked into Evan’s eyes, and wondered what I would do if I found out I’d married my own biological father.
Slept with him.
But this wasn’t that.
I remembered Evan saying that he’d become bent on serving Madaster justice. Now, I’d become the bent and twisted one. I thought of only one thing as I stowed my equipment on the speedboat and started up the motor: Revenge. The word pulsed in my veins.
It was my true birthright.
I anchored a little farther to the south of where Manny had secured the cruiser that day when Valeria and I dived. There was an outcropping of stone here that I believed would obscure Madaster’s view of the boat from the tower.
I back flopped into the cold water alone. I recognized the whitish-gray, bleached sand below me, and the skeletal stone outcroppings. When I reached the drastic drop-off of the Great Wall, I turned on my dive light. I swam along the cliff’s ledge toward the n
orth, trying to approximate where Valeria and I had dropped over the wall. I feared that I wouldn’t find the wide, deep cavern we’d previously entered.
Thinking I’d swum far enough, I kicked over the cliff. More than a thousand feet of water yawned below. Coldness and that dreadful thrill passed through me. I descended over the massive stone wall.
I was insignificant and alone, and I couldn’t trust myself.
Terror seized me. Large clouds of bubbles burst from my regulator. I couldn’t catch my breath.
(You’re not alone, darling.)
(Follow your instinct.)
Stay with me, Elizabeth.
It was the first time I’d ever addressed her by name in my head. Whether it was crazy of me or not, I don’t know. I acted purely on survival now. Maybe being a little mad would keep me alive.
Just when I was thinking of surfacing and reorienting myself, I spotted the large hole in the wall below me. I entered the wide cavern, my dive light reflecting off the pale walls. A reassuring feeling of familiarity went through me.
You dived here often, didn’t you, Elizabeth?
(Yes. Both into the cave and out of it. The spring has been there since the tunnel was first built. They built around it. You’ll see. Follow the light in the darkness, darling.)
A jolt of adrenaline went through me. Like that first time with Valeria, I swam with a confidence I shouldn’t have felt. I realized now I’d been—and was now— experiencing Elizabeth’s certainty. These were her waters.
I got to the place where the tunnel of gray boulders and smooth rock faces narrowed. I looked up, but saw only a stone ceiling. Had I gone too far? Where was that tiny, flickering light that had made no sense to me?
No sooner had I started to worry when I glided out of the horizontal tunnel into a vertical one. The stone floor and roof disappeared. I shined my light upward. I looked up a stone tube. It was like a natural well, approximately ten feet in circumference. I tilted the flashlight down, and realized I was suspended in deep water. My light couldn’t find the bottom, it went down so far.