Jennifer stared at her unflinchingly. “You will pay. For my brother and my parents.”
“The murder of your parents gave us no pleasure,” said Sister Dawn, dropping her smile. “Unfortunately, when Noah set off on the boat, he’d managed to steal one of our phones, and he had it with him. While at sea, he texted your father. If he’d contacted the police instead, it might have been all over for us. But he didn’t. That was his mistake and our fortune. We located your parents by their phone signal and sent one of our own who lived the closest to that location to take care of it.”
I heard a gasp under Jennifer’s breath. It must be hard for her to hear that small detail and know that Noah had come so close not only to escaping but to destroying the Yeqon’s Saviours.
Sister Dawn nodded to indicate the conversation was at an end, and she turned to the tall man beside her. “I’ll leave the proceedings to you now, Brother Sage.”
Brother Sage bowed his head and slipped the hood back from his face.
All breath left my lungs.
His features.
Features I knew so well.
Steel-blue eyes. A firmly set mouth and chin. The expression that was fixed and vague at the same time. As though he saw right through you, but his mind was operating on another plane.
My husband.
James.
Mentally, I tried to push the image of him away. This wasn’t real. It wasn’t— It was real.
No hallucination. My life of the past ten years instantly rearranged itself and turned into something completely other. A lie.
He waited with that veneer of patience I’d seen so many times before.
“Constance,” he said. “You weren’t meant to see . . . any of this. How is it that you made your way here?”
“I don’t—” I gulped breaths of air that caused my lungs to burn.
“Of course you don’t,” he said. “You can’t understand it. You can’t process any of this or the reality of who I am. But I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. I think you realise what’s going to happen here next. I see it in your eyes. In any case, it wouldn’t have gone well for you had you done what I requested and come home. Your daughter would have remained missing. And then I would have divorced you. Without Kara, I have had no reason to stay with you.”
Horror and confusion raged inside me, and my voice rose to a scream. “What do you want with my daughter? Why did you bring her here? Why?”
He stared at me coldly. “She’s been coming here since she was seven.”
Gasping, I shook my head wildly. “That’s not true. It’s not—”
“It is true,” he insisted coldly. “You were only too grateful for me to take her away on my overseas business trips. You got your time alone without her. She was too much for you to handle. Too strange. You never understood her. Well, I understood her. And I showed her the ways of the Saviours.”
His words cut into my skin like razor blades.
All this time. He was bringing my little girl here.
I wanted to tear him limb from limb. “My God, why would you do that to a child? You’re evil. A monster.”
“Stop pretending, Constance. Kara was never the perfect little girl. And you were far from the perfect mother. The best thing that happened to both of you is when I married you and adopted Kara. You were living in the poor end of town—you and your useless boyfriend. What was his name—Otto? Yes, it was Otto. A scum-of-the-earth drug addict. You two spent all your time at your drug-fuelled parties, barely taking care of your own daughter. She was alone and frightened so many times that she kept knives hidden under her bed. And invented an imaginary brother for herself—Santiago.”
“That’s not true,” I breathed. “I didn’t—”
But I couldn’t finish my words. Because it was all true. I had found knives under her bed more than once. She did invent a naughty little brother that she called Santiago. Otto and I had partied too much.
But I hadn’t used drugs since I’d found out I was pregnant. I’d been devastated by the discovery of the pregnancy. But then, something changed everything. I’d started bleeding and felt a sudden, unexpected terror at losing the baby. Like a miracle, the bleeding stopped and the pregnancy continued.
And I’d never left Kara alone. Except for one night. Just one night. Otto was the one who couldn’t manage to stay off the drugs. He’d been growing increasingly erratic, to the point where he was threatening to kill himself. He sped off in his car, leaving me terrified. I’d jumped in my car and followed him, leaving Kara asleep upstairs. Otto did die that night, but not through suicide. A man driving his elderly mother home from the hospital somehow misjudged a turn and plunged his car straight into Otto’s.