I was rot and corruption, ruining everything around me.
I heard my mother say something about how my father had been raised and I felt a prick of interest. They never talked about their parents. They’d told my brothers and sisters and me that they had no living relatives, and they cut us off immediately when we tried to ask questions. It suddenly occurred to me how odd it was that two wealthy, successful people had absolutely no family to speak of.
But as their voices rose, the thought faded away. It didn’t matter.
What mattered was that my parents looked at me as something other now.
My father walked back in, stiffly. Alone. “Camille told her parents that you made her do…certain things for you.”
She’d told them that? Why, for the love of God? That was between us. That was our secret.
I smoothed my face into a mask of indifference. “You’ve made it clear that you will believe anything she says and nothing that I say.” I picked up my book again and flipped it open, staring at the page. “Why even bother asking me?’
He pressed on, relentless. “They also said there are all kinds of ugly rumors flying around school. Rumors that seem to have been started by you. And your sister, unfortunately, seems to be encouraging it.” I didn’t need to ask which sister. Emilie was a fierce warrior who would throw herself on her sword for me. “We’ve spoken to Emilie about it. She’s grounded for the next three months, but the damage is done. Nobody at school will talk to the poor girl. What you’ve done has been very harmful to her. Camille’s parents dragged her to the doctor and forced her to undergo an exam to verify she’s still a virgin.”
She was so shy, so fiercely protective of her body. That would have been excruciating for her. Instead of remorse, I felt a fierce swell of triumph. I imagined the scene—Camille forced to strip naked and spread her legs for a stranger, weeping with humiliation, and it excited me.
I smiled coldly at him. “Commit the crime, be ready to do the time. She lied to the police and lied to her parents. What happens to her hardly concerns me anymore.”
The look on his face was resigned. “So you have no more feelings for the girl you claimed you wanted to marry someday. Just like that,” he said grimly, shaking his head. “You can turn your feelings off just like turning off a switch?”
He was upset by it, so I threw open the door to my refrigerated soul and let an ice-cold smile leak out, the kind of smile I’d never showed him before. “Yes. Just like that.”
He scrubbed his face with his hand. My father, the strongest, most confident man I’d ever met, didn’t know what to say or do. “Do you want to ask how your dog is doing?”
I flipped a page, pretending to read. “Not unless you plan to give him back to me.”
“You know why we can’t.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
He stood there, anger settling into the lines of his face. “From now on, I think it’s best if you’re homeschooled.”
I didn’t even bother to look up from my book. “Yes, we wouldn’t want me to go on a killing spree in the lunchroom and embarrass you, now would we?”
He turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the door shut behind him without a word.
From then on, there were thrice-weekly, utterly pointless visits with a psychiatrist. Bodyguards followed me everywhere. I wasn’t even allowed to be alone with my own siblings. I didn’t bother protesting until I turned seventeen and got sick of it. Then I started ditching them on a regular basis, just because I could.
My brothers and sisters looked at me with pity and worry. Emilie was still close to me. We shared a special bond. She was furious with Camille. Hated her. Made her life hell at school, no matter how much my parents punished her for it. Camille dropped out of school when she was sixteen, and her family returned to the United States. I heard that her father died of a heart attack only months later.
My father finally got sick of me disappearing all the time and threatened to send me away to military school, right before I turned eighteen. That was when I ran away for good.
Even after I got back in touch with my parents, things never went back to normal. As I traveled around the world, my parents sent people to spy on me and report back to them. I got very good at hiding and evading. I frequently traveled under forged passports, just because I was so angry with my parents for trying to watch over me like a naughty child.
And I made an enormous amount of money with my company.
I never had a normal relationship with a woman. I lost my virginity to a whore.
Using a fake name, I created a chain of very discreet, very exclusive BDSM clubs called Dark Desires.
I’ve found that some of the female employees tolerate my extreme requests. I pay them extra to let me whip them until they bleed, to hurt them until they scream in genuine pain. I feel nothing when I do it, except a brief, temporary release of pressure. They’re just flesh puppets with conveniently placed orifices.
The women want my money, but they’re scared of me, and I like that. I think of Camille when I come, every time, and it fills me with such hatred that I have to fight very hard not to kill the women I’m fucking.
I’m afraid someday I’ll lose that fight.
I imagine myself on such a day, standing over the broken body of a dead hooker, and I feel nothing at all. No guilt, no pleasure.
Just dark emptiness.
Someone is talking through the thick fuzz that wraps around my brain.
My stomach roils, and I open my eyes. Someone has pushed the button on my bed, and I’m being raised into a sitting position. I blink hard and rub my eyes.
I’m awake again, back in the hospital room.
And I’m looking at a man who’s frowning at me impatiently. There’s something wrong with his face, and a psychic shockwave rolls through me as I realize what it is.
I’m looking at my own face.
Chapter Five
Bastien
My head swims, and I force myself to focus on him. Those cheekbones, the arch of his black eyebrows, the refined European nose, the shape of his jaw…it’s like someone made a mask of my face before the accident, and he is wearing it.
“Is this some kind of fucking joke?” I snap at the man as I sit up.
“Keep your voice down,” he says mildly. His accent is American. Southern. He’s from a wealthy family. I can see it in the way he carries himself and the way he dresses. He’s wearing a gunmetal gray Chambray suit, white Oxford shirt, and suede double monk-strapped shoes, and he has an ostrich-skin briefcase. A Patek Phillipe watch glitters on his wrist.
He glances at the door, then his ice-blue gaze drifts back to me. His eyes are the exact same color as mine. It’s uncanny. “No, it’s not a joke. I’m your cousin Robert. Well, distant cousin, like twice removed or something like that.”
My cousin. I have family that my parents never told me about. Why?
“We’re like twins.” I stare at him in amazement.
He returns the stare, examining my new features with a critical squint. “Not anymore, thanks to the surgery. But last month we were. A friend of ours spotted you on the news at the security expo in London and told us about you. As soon as we saw that news clip, we knew you had to be family.”
I remember that. My mother was very upset about it. Another of my family’s paranoias. Because we’re rich, they insist on keeping an extremely low profile. We’re not supposed to be photographed in public, ever. My mother is petrified of kidnappers.
My company, Cyber-X Solutions, had a booth at a security expo in London, and I made a public presentation. That was the first time my picture had ever been made public. My mother was hysterical when she found out, and my father was grimly angry, telling me I’d put our entire family at risk. I thought it was a bizarre overreaction, but I was also used to their strange behavior when it came to me.
Or maybe not so strange, since apparently they’ve been keeping some pretty big secrets.
“Who’s �
��we’?” I have a million questions for him.
“Our family. The men in our family are very distinctive-looking. We knew right away that you were related to us. We’ve been…researching you ever since.”
I frown at that. I’m not crazy about strangers digging into my private business. Why didn’t they just call me and introduce themselves?
That’s a subject that needs to be explored more, but first I need to know why I’m in the hospital. “You said there was no car accident,” I prod.
“Your father paid someone to drug you and had you brought here to be operated on. He paid a fortune to the doctors not to ask any questions. There was also some blackmail involved.”
A shockwave rolls over me. My God. My mother would have to have been in on it too.
But all along I’ve sensed on some level they were lying to me about the accident.
The only surgery was on my face. There wasn’t a single mark on my body. How could I have had a car accident and only injured my face? And the way both my parents were acting when they came to visit me, jumpy and guilty. No wonder my father ordered me a new car. He was the one who trashed my car to lend credence to the story of the car accident.
“Why?” I say faintly.
“So you wouldn’t look like yourself anymore. Too great a risk of exposure. You bear a very strong resemblance to your father—or rather to the way that he used to look. Your mother and father are fugitives.” That soft, lilting voice of his is tearing my world apart. “They fled the United States almost thirty years ago, and have been in hiding in France, under false identities, ever since. If anyone in law enforcement spotted you and traced you back to your father, it would end their lives as they know them. They’d have to go into hiding, they’d lose everything. And your father was a very famous man back in the day—his picture was in the news all the time. His disappearance was a big deal. The risk was significant.”
“But that can’t… It doesn’t….” For the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. My mother’s irrational terror of the United States, the way my parents fiercely guard our privacy and always refused even to have our pictures in the school newspaper or yearbook, suddenly seem to make sense.
Robert pulls a tablet from his briefcase and clicks a button. When he holds it out for me to look at, my stomach clenches.
It’s an article from a New York newspaper, twenty-eight years ago. There’s a picture of a man named Joshua Smith, who looks exactly the way I used to, and exactly like Robert. Joshua Smith was a billionaire corporate raider. And the article says that the police are investigating him for the disappearance of a woman named Tamara Bennett.
“Tamara is your mother’s real name. And Joshua is your father. That wasn’t his real name, actually, but that’s another long, very complicated story.”
In the picture, Joshua Smith has wavy, ripply black hair, and he’s clean-shaven. That’s why all the men in our family had to keep their hair cut so ridiculously short, and why they all wear beards. To disguise our appearance.
He shows me more newspaper articles, including one about my mother. They’re mind-boggling. She was kidnapped by my father’s twin brother, and tortured for a week before she was rescued by a rogue police officer.
Apparently she suffered a mental breakdown from her ordeal. She shot and killed a pedophile on a busy downtown street at lunchtime, and then, months later, escaped from a psychiatric institute, five months pregnant.
I do a quick mental calculation. She would have been pregnant with Emilie if that’s true. I stare at the pictures. She doesn’t look at all like my mother—does she? Tamara’s hair was wavy and brown; my mother’s hair is sleek platinum blond. Both my parents have brown eyes, but then again, both my parents wear contact lenses. They could be colored contact lenses. My mother’s jawline is a different shape, nose is shorter and snubber, mouth is fuller, her cheekbones higher…but as I stare, I realize it could be possible, with a lot of plastic surgery.
And there’s no denying I’m staring into my own face when I look at Robert—or rather the face I was born with.
He’s not lying.
My mother was crazy, and a murderer. My father was once suspected not only of kidnapping her, but other women, and he was a suspect in the murder of some man named Baxter Warburton, according to the articles Robert showed me.
I meet his eyes.
“My family managed to get a look at the rest of your family after your picture popped up. Your brothers and sisters do bear a resemblance to us, and to the way your father used to look, but not as obvious as yours.” He turns the tablet off and slides it back into his briefcase. “We’d been looking for your family for a while, actually. Your father’s late brother tipped us off about them shortly before dying in prison a couple of years ago.”
“My uncle? The man who kidnapped my mother?” I say, struggling to untangle the many threads of the lies my parents have woven.
“That’s the one.”
The gears in my mind spin helplessly. My parents are complete strangers, and I am cut off from my life because my past was a fairytale. I feel unmoored, a vessel drifting at sea with no familiar landmarks to steer by. I want to rage at Robert, accuse him of printing up fake articles, but I can’t—not when my own face is staring right back at me.
“We did a DNA test on you to be sure, after we spotted you in London. Grabbed a coffee cup you threw away at a café,” he tells me. “There’s no doubt about it. You’re one of us.”
“And who is ‘us’, exactly?”
“We’ll get to that soon enough. But I want you to know something. There’s no reason to be ashamed of what you are.”
What the hell does he know about me?
As if reading my mind, he says, “You have strong urges. You’ve tried without success to suppress those urges. You’ve gone to therapists and taken medication. None of it has helped—nor should it have. What you are is a natural born ruler, a dominator, a man of superior strength and passions. We’re different than most men, and it’s a privilege, not a burden.”
“Different how?” I say warily
He smiles slyly. “You share certain inclinations with us, shall I say.”
I’m sick of his smug attitude, this man who’s just blown up my life with his words. “You don’t know me.”
“We know more than you think. We’ve been through the records of your therapist. We know about Dark Desires. We know what you do there.”
At my angry look, he says, “We’re not judging. It’s a family trait, passed down through the men. That and more. Much more.”
I’m furious right now, choking on a lifetime of betrayal, but there’s also a deep, hungry yearning inside me, a need to feel as if I’m not all alone in the world. “Tell me.”
He stands up. “Soon. If you’re as much like the rest of us as I think you are, you have an excellent memory.” He recites a phone number. “That phone number is good for one week. Come to the U.S. and call me as soon as you arrive. Don’t travel under your own name. There’s a reason for that. I’ll tell you more when we meet again.”
I check myself out of the hospital, against medical advice, that afternoon. That evening I pack up two suitcases, pay a small fortune to have a new fake passport made with a picture of my new face, and buy a first-class ticket to New York City.
Chapter Six
Camille
I love Philly in the spring, the way the city hums with excitement as the temperature climbs. The sun burns away the dull gray fog of winter and the world is reborn. Everyone sheds their winter layers, like butterflies bursting from their cocoons, and pours out onto the sidewalks to bask in the warmth.
I gaze out the coffee shop window, trying to summon up the joyous sense of anticipation that April always brings me, but I can’t. Planning my upcoming wedding in June is turning out to be a minefield of stress and guilt, and I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be feeling guilty about most of the time.
But I’m sure my mother’s abo
ut to tell me.
It’s lunchtime, and the café is swarming with the kind of people she hates. They have nose piercings and gorgeous tattoos and hair in colors not seen in nature. That’s why I picked this place when she called me up, shrill voice stabbing at me, and ordered me to meet her for lunch—it’s one of my tiny rebellions against her crushing grip. It’s also right across from the building where I work for a large behavioral health practice, but I could have picked a more refined meeting place. Passive aggressive, me? Just a tad.
My mother marches towards me, eyes straight ahead, a Chanel-clad shark slicing through the sea of grubby rif-raff. Her shining blond hair is flat-ironed and scraped back into a bun, and she’s accessorized down to her Chanel purse, shoes and pearl earrings. She grabs a chair from another table, even though there are already two chairs. It’s a weird thing she does—she always pulls up an extra chair for my late father, who died of a heart attack eight years ago. Every time we see each other, my mother finds a way of reminding me that the stress and shame of what I let Bastien do to me are what drove Father to an early grave. I literally broke his heart.
The irony of me going into therapy as a profession is not lost on me.
My mother sweeps the room with a look of disgust, then settles down into the chair opposite mine. I can see by the look on her face that I’ve done something to make her unhappy.
My gaze wanders the room, and I get a sympathetic look from Pandora, one of the waitresses. Pandora helped get my artwork placed with a local gallery. She’s a single mother, a total sweetheart, and one of the few people I confide in. I mean, I don’t tell her everything—she’d run screaming. Any sane person would. But she knows how much my mother harps on me all the time.
“Really, Camille,” my mother says severely, jerking my attention back to her.
My heart squeezes, and I feel a dull throb of resentment. This should be the happiest time of my life.
I’m marrying Landon Hollingsworth, the son of one of my mother’s church friends. Last year, my mother forced me to go on a date with him, and amazingly we clicked. He ticks off every box. Blond, blue-eyed, all-American good looks. Successful investment advisor. Adores me. Incredibly sweet and attentive. And best of all, he’s the complete opposite of… No.
Camille, Claimed Page 4