by W. J. May
Rae waiting. Refusing to say another word that would only add to her ‘ranting portion of the afternoon’, according to Simon.
“And I called him Louis because I knew his father, Philip. He was Tristan’s and my handler when we were working as agents for the Privy Council.”
Wait…what?! Rae froze in place, blinking back at him in shock. He didn’t seem to be messing with her, and yet what he’d just said… It couldn’t possibly be true, could it? “Excuse me,” she said slowly, weighing each impossible word, “you said… when you were working as an agent for the Privy Council? You… you worked for the Privy Council? Or do you mean your time as a double agent? You never really worked for the Council, did you?”
“Yes, I did. And no, not always as a double agent.” Simon glanced up sharply, looking just as surprised. For a second, he just stared at her—like what she’d just asked was just as unlikely. Then, when she did nothing but wait, a look of dawning realization flashed across his face. He leaned forward in his chair. “No one ever told you?”
She shook her head.
“Not once?”
She shook it again.
“But surely you looked into me over the years,” he continued, trying his best to figure it all out. “There are records of these sorts of things. Mission reports. Case files. Employment history…”
But this was the Privy Council they were talking about. If they wanted to rewrite that history, make it seem like the man himself was never there to serve them… no one could do it better.
The thought obviously struck them both at the same time. They shook their heads of one accord. Both impressed by the masterful deception, and equally horrified by what had been done.
“I left you a letter once,” Simon said softly. “A letter in which I voiced my concerns about the corruption that lay at the heart of the Council. A letter that pointed you to investigate my parents’ murder. To find the truth just beyond. The letter was meant to be a warning.” He shook his head numbly, eyes on the floor. “I’m guessing you never found it.”
“I found it,” Rae interjected just as quietly. His eyes snapped up to hers. “Not that you made it very easy, by the way. A decrepit bench on a farm in Scotland that could have snapped my fingers off? Digging in the frozen roots of a shoreline tree that happened to have red leaves?” A faint smile ghosted across her face. “It’s probably for the best that you were taken out of my life so quickly. Never having the chance to be a dad. You would have sucked at it.”
For a second, all was quiet.
Then both she and Simon started to laugh.
Well, this is unexpected.
Once they started, it was hard to stop. Hard to control the volume, hard to muffle the sound from the others who were all waiting just a floor above.
Too much had happened. Too much had been uncovered. Had been seen.
And now this.
When they finally calmed themselves Rae pulled up a chair to sit across from him, tentatively taking a seat.
“What about Beth?” Simon asked quietly. “Did she tell you about me? That I worked for the Privy Council? Do you remember anything as a kid? About me?”
“I was six when you and Mom died in the fire. I remember I liked coloring.” She picked absently at a piece of invisible lint on her knee. “Before the fire, there isn’t a lot of stuff I remember. You told me once that the monsters under my bed were real.” She glanced up at him. “I guess I never realized how true that was until I got to Guilder.” She sighed. “I didn’t know anything about the tatù world until I was enrolled in Guilder. Uncle Argyle never told me.”
“He never… Really?”
She shook her head. “I think, after everything that happened, he was scared. He, uh, isn’t quite the confrontational kind of guy. Rather stay in the background if he can. Maybe it’s a good thing Mom got a tatù instead of him.”
“His heart was always in the right place. He was a good guy.”
Rae smiled. “He still is.”
Simon smiled this time, obviously grateful Argyle was still around. “I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing him…?”
“He and Aunt Linda live in America. New York now.” She didn’t want to say if Uncle Argyle would come. It was not her place to say.
“What about Beth, Rae? What did your mom tell you about me?”
A protective feeling came over Rae. She wasn’t quite sure how to explain it. Her father wasn’t asking for information on Beth. He wanted to know if Rae had grown up knowing about her father. It was a fair question. She swallowed. “Mom disappeared the same day you did. I thought you’d both died in the fire… While I sat in the tree house watching it burn. Argyle seldom talked about either of you. I got a letter from Mom when I turned sixteen. Uncle Argyle had kept it and mailed it out to me.” She blinked back the wetness in her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry for things that had never been. That weren’t meant to be. “When I found Mom last year, we didn’t really have a chance to talk about… you know.” They’d talked, but not much of the focus had been on Simon. “Jen was my mentor—”
“She helped train you?” Simon straightened in surprise.
“Before she tried to kill me. And Mom.”
“I’ll kill her.”
“Too late.”
He nodded, satisfied with her answer. Or, at least, with the implication.
“I always wondered if the Privy Council knew more than they let on. Once I knew about them, that is,” Rae moved on, eager to change the subject away from Jennifer. “I knew about the corruption in the Council. A lot of it was before my time. A lot of it stemmed from a man named Victor Mallins.”
Simon nodded with a frown. “I knew Victor. Horrible man. Terrible. Does he still hold a seat on the Council?”
“He became president,” Rae answered with a wry smile. “Right before he stabbed me in the stomach. Right before he tried to execute all of my friends.”
Simon’s face paled in a delayed kind of fury, but Rae held up her hands.
“Devon beat the crap out of him on the spot. Would have killed him, too, if Commander Fodder hadn’t pulled him off. Then we were able to get proof that he had been secretly conducting hybrid abuse of his own for years. Torture. Imprisonment. You name it. In the end, I led an army of Knights to the gates of Guilder just to take the horrible man down.”
Simon was listening with bated breath. Eyes as wide as saucers, like a child listening to a bedtime story that was almost too fantastical to believe. “And did you?”
Rae’s face clouded over as she remembered.
She and her friends had done a lot of things. United the two factions. Made it so that hybrids were able to live their lives out in the open, free of fear. Rid the world of an unspeakable evil intent on enslaving it. Fundamentally altered the course of the tatù community for good.
But Victor Mallins? They hadn’t done that one.
He’d done it himself.
“He died, but it wasn’t at our hands. It was at his own.”
Rae could still hear the gunshot. Still hear the screams like it had just happened that second.
“He might have been a terrible man, done terrible things…but he redeemed himself in the end,” she continued softly. “Sacrificed himself to save a lot of lives. Mine included.” There was a heavy pause as she thought about that day. “In the end… I guess that’s all that counts.”
Simon met her eyes for a split second. A split second that contained entire worlds. Lifetimes of questions. Lifetimes of grief. “I guess it is.”
Chapter 13
The anklet stayed on. The door stayed locked. But the ropes were removed.
Simon Kerrigan could roam about the basement with relative freedom, while his daughter wandered back upstairs to the rest of the house, feeling more lost and confused than ever. She returned to her bedroom to discover that, at least in this, she was not alone.
Devon was standing in the middle of the floor, his back to the window, eyes on the door. “I heard every word,�
�� he said without preamble. “Every single word.”
He was Tristan’s and my handler when we were working as agents for the Privy Council.
Tristan, as in Tristan Ward, Devon’s own father! The realization clicked into place as she stared at him. Her heart broke when she saw the expression on his face. It was absolutely devastated. The look of someone who expected the betrayal, but couldn’t help but be stung.
“Your dad never told you?” she ventured tentatively. “You knew he was an agent, before he became dean of the school…”
Devon stared off into space. Half with Rae, half lost in the horror of what he’d just heard. “You know my dad; he never told me anything. Certainly not about anything to do with his time working for the PC.” His face tightened painfully before he shook his head. “When I signed on as an agent I went through his files, of course. But most of them were redacted, and he seemed to have worked alone. But this?” His eyes leveled with hers. “I mean… your dad?”
All at once, several things clicked into place.
The way that Tristan Wardell had always seemed to hate her, even before he had personal cause to do so. The way he’d moved heaven and earth to keep her and Devon apart. The way he’d threatened to disown his own son—all so that Devon would stop seeing her.
Maybe it hadn’t been about her at all. Maybe it had always been about her father.
“Partners,” Devon continued quietly, still lost in thought, “like me and Jules. I hadn’t understood what he meant when he said that before. And not just partners; they were roommates in London. They lived together. Went to school together. Best friends in the world… he said.”
Again, Rae watched helplessly as he struggled under the crushing cognitive dissonance.
No doubt he was replaying every moment that he and Julian had ever had. Discovering their powers. Sparring in the Oratory. All those missions. Sharing bottles of whiskey. Sharing a house. Sharing who knew what else. Stories, hopes, dreams.
No doubt he was applying that same brotherly bond to his father and Simon.
Trying to understand in what kind of world a thing like that would make sense. In what kind of world would he never have been told.
“He told me once that you would be the death of me.”
Rae’s head jerked up and she stared at Devon in dismay. He’d never told her that before. “He did?” She always knew Dean Wardell hated her, but this was a whole other level. “He actually said that? I’d be the death of you?”
Devon nodded numbly. “It was the night we came back after meeting with Kraigan—when we were pointing him in the direction of Jennifer Jones. You and Molly had been sent up to the dorms. Julian had been taken away to the infirmary. And it was just me and my dad.” He spoke in that same soft monotone that Gabriel had used under the sedative just a day before—seeing things that Rae couldn’t. Tensing as the images flashed before his eyes. “I’d broken a few ribs when Kraigan took my power. Got pretty banged up along the way. He made me…” He shook his head, unwilling to continue. “Every hurt he found, every bruise and break…they made him hate you all the more. Like the pain and bruises were all your fault somehow. Not Kraigan’s. Not mine. That was the first night he told me I was never to see you again.” A belated shudder ran through his shoulders. “He absolutely forbade it.”
For the first time in her life Rae felt a stab of pity for Devon’s absentee father. How horribly familiar for him it must have felt. To see his own son clamber out of the car with his former partner’s daughter. Always coming back a little more broken than before. To see that same son fall in love…with a Kerrigan. The daughter of the man who’d destroyed his life.
In a strange way, he had to have felt as though he was protecting Devon.
Every harsh word. Every threat. Even Devon’s eventual Guilder eviction… it was all done to keep him safe. To spare him from the same pain that Tristan had felt at Simon’s own hand.
“Have you talked to him?” Rae asked softly. “Since everything that’s happened?”
As dean of the school, Devon’s father had been stationed at Guilder in the days leading up to the battle. Safeguarding the younger students, and those who were too young to have yet gotten their tatùs. It was an important job, but one that left him conveniently apart from his son. A son to whom he hadn’t spoken since giving Rae his eventual blessing for their love.
Devon shook his head. “He texted me once on my birthday. Again when we made it out of the factory. That’s it.”
Rae nodded quickly, not knowing what to say. To be frank, the news that Simon and Tristan had been partner agents was not quite as shocking to her as the news that Simon hadn’t always been a double agent. But in a lot of ways it made sense.
Information had always been rather lacking when it came to the dean’s past. The only bit of concrete information she’d ever been able to get, save for a vast number of rumors, was that he hadn’t wanted to take the job. He’d wanted to fade out of tatù life entirely. But as his own son was about to start attending, he was eventually convinced.
Aside from that, it was nothing but conjecture. Strange bits of innuendo, or random words in passing that never really made sense.
Whenever Devon did something especially impressive, and when he was coming up through the ranks at Guilder, and those moments were rather frequent, he would be compared to his father.
“A record to make his father proud.”
“Worthy of the dean himself.”
“Like father, like son.”
Personally, Rae had never seen it. Sure, the two of them looked alike. The dean was a tall, handsome man. A man who, although he sat behind a desk all day, exuded an aura of being able to handle himself. Of being able to handle most things, really. Same impossible, unreadable eyes. But an agent of the Privy Council as talented as his heroic son? She would never have thought it possible.
Maybe she’d been wrong.
“Maybe you should give him a call,” she suggested lightly. “Invite him over for Christmas or something? I’m sure he’s been reading about everything in the papers already. It might be a good idea for the two of you to sit down and talk.”
Devon raised an eyebrow, his lips twitching up in a reluctant grin. “You want me to invite my dad over for Christmas dinner? You think we can get all the way through the main course before another rock comes flying through the window? Before the kitchen explodes and we wake up halfway across England in medical jail?”
Rae bit her lip. All valid points. All worth considering. “I think the odds of that happening twice are pretty—”
“Rae?”
By now, both she and Devon knew well enough to jump at Molly’s tone. They rushed out the door without another word, flying down the stairs before coming to a sudden stop on the landing. Molly was standing there. With Luke. And Julian.
And Simon.
“What the hell is this?” Rae demanded, instantly placing herself in between the uneven groups, making a barrier between her father and her friends. “Why is he up here?”
Molly’s face flushed guiltily. “I was just bringing him some food,” she said nervously. “I figured he hadn’t eaten today, what with the mob attack and all. When I was down there, he…he asked me if…”
It wasn’t often that Molly ran out of things to say. Whatever little speech Simon had given her down in the basement, it had to be one for the books.
“What?” Rae addressed the question not toward her stuttering friend, but to her father—glaring at his audacity to have asked anything of Molly at all. “What do you want?”
Simon was cautious, but steady. Matching her inch for inch. “While I’m here, in your house, you’re in complete control. Is that correct?” he asked without a hint of resentment. Just a practical kind of curiosity. “You have the authority to determine where I go, what I do, in what manner I’m confined. Am I understanding that correctly?”
Rae shifted uncomfortably, nervous as to where he might be going with this. “Yes, that�
��s right.”
Simon nodded once and smiled. “In that case, I have a request.”
The gang blinked back at him, bowled over by both the charm and confident audacity of the fugitive standing before them. In a lot of ways, it probably reminded them of Rae.
“You do.” Luke looked like he was torn between a smile and a profanity, both of which would probably have ended with Simon lying on the floor. “You have a request?”
Rae recalled Simon’s assessment of her friends, and bit back a little smile.
High-spirited. Yep. That’s them alright.
“I do.” Simon folded his hands in front of him, and settled his gaze on his daughter. “Let me preface this with the fact that, in just three days, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I’ll be convicted on all the charges brought against me. As well I should be. If I’m not killed outright I’ll be carted off to some hellish prison where I’ll live out the rest of my days in solitude, as I’ve been doing for the last decade and some years. Never again to see the face of another human being.”
It was times like this that all the maturity, posturing, and hard-earned experience of the gang melted clean away. Hearing Simon say the words. So practical, so resolved. Hearing the man talk about, essentially, having just three days to live, shook Rae and all of them to the core. For a second they were all very much their age, staring with wide eyes as he delivered his message.
No wonder Molly brought him upstairs.
“I’ve accepted this.” There was nothing presumptive or resentful in his voice; he was simply speaking the truth. “I fully intend to accept responsibility for my actions. To resign myself to whatever punishment the court deems fit.”
A chill ran down Rae’s arms as he recycled her words from in the basement.
“That being said, I have but one request. A ‘last meal’ if you will. My one final act before I’m taken away to die.” His eyes fastened on his daughter’s. “I want to go home.”