Lovely things. Personal things.
Ella frowned.
Why on earth would Mimi have wanted Jim to keep all this from me?
What could possibly upset me here?
As she opened the last box, Ella’s heart beat a little faster. Right at the top, tied neatly with a ribbon above some ancient teddy bears and baby blankets, was a bundle of letters. Ella recognized William’s handwriting immediately, with its distinctive looped Gs and Fs and the left slant that made it look as if all his words were hurtling too fast onto the paper and trying desperately to apply invisible brakes. Untying the bundle carefully, running her fingers over the envelopes with reverence, Ella suddenly stopped and did a double take.
The postmark.
No. That must be a mistake.
She checked the second letter, then the third and fourth. All the envelopes were dated within three months of each other, in the spring of 2003.
Ella closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing.
That wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Her father was shot and her mother was drowned by Spyros and Athena Petridis in Greece in 2001.
Ella tried to think rationally. Had someone found and posted these letters after their deaths? With trembling hands, she pulled out the folded notes one by one. But no. The dates at the top of the letters bore out the ones on the envelopes: 2003. Most had been written by her father to her mother, but two – short, loving missives in a rounder, neater hand – were clearly signed ‘Rachel xox.’
Ella’s parents had both been alive in 2003. Two years after she’d been told the Petridises had murdered them.
So that was the lie! The ‘deception’ that Mark Redmayne and Katherine MacAvoy had been emailing about.
Athena Petridis didn’t stand by and watch my mother drown. Because my mother didn’t drown. It never happened!
Bile rose up in Ella’s throat and she sank to her knees. Her mind raced, terrible images and possibilities swimming before her eyes. Athena, dying and desperate, her eyes pleading for help. Poisoned for a crime she never committed. Poisoned by me.
The Group had turned Ella into a murderer, and they had done it based on a lie. A terrible lie, a lie that exploited Ella’s greatest weakness – her love and longing for her lost family – and that had utterly betrayed her trust.
Shaking, Ella tried to trace the deception back to the beginning. Where had she first heard the story of the drowning?
On the plane to Greece. The briefing files.
And who had given her those?
Not Redmayne.
Not MacAvoy.
She let out a cry that was part anguish, part raw fury as the awful truth hit home.
It was Gabriel.
Her Gabriel.
Gabriel had personally handed her those files. He had planted the lie! The fact that it was probably at Redmayne’s bidding did nothing to lessen the betrayal. He’d doubled down on it, too, the bastard. How many times had he referenced Ella’s mother’s drowning during their work together? Three? Four? More?
The pain was unbearable. The one person in The Group that Ella had come to trust implicitly. The one person she had really believed was on her side. Who she’d come to care about. Even to love. How ironic that she could admit it to herself now, thought Ella. Now that it was too late. Now that Gabriel had proved himself a liar and a manipulator and a …
She clenched her fists so tightly they ached. This wasn’t over. Gabriel would pay for what he’d done. They all would. But right now she needed to calm down. Keep her head.
With considerable effort, she picked up the letters again and began reading each of them, slowly, from beginning to end. Any one of them might contain a clue as to what had really happened to her parents. Or reveal what connection, if any, they had had with Athena Petridis.
Most of the notes were short, exchanges of news and love between the couple during times apart, presumably on separate missions for The Group. But two, the bottom two of the pile, dating to the fall of 2003, were from William to his mother Mimi. The gist of both of these was Ella’s father defending his marriage. Specifically, defending his wife to his mother, who had obviously expressed her disapproval of Rachel in previous notes.
From what Ella could make out, the letters were written after her mother had mysteriously gone missing. William was clearly concerned for her welfare and convinced of an innocent explanation. But Mimi seemed equally convinced that her daughter-in-law, far from being at risk, had simply abandoned her family.
I know she’s been troubled, William wrote. And it’s true things have been strained between us. But Rachel would never desert Ella, Mother. I know she wouldn’t. Something’s happened to her, and I can’t rest until I find out what it is.
In the last letter, he alluded to depression and even possible suicide, railing against what he saw as Mimi’s lack of compassion.
Until you’ve felt that darkness, Mother, how can you know? How can any of us know? I won’t let you be around our child if you continue to say these things. Please stop.
It was dark by the time Ella stopped reading. Dark and so cold that her fingertips and toes were completely numb. Like a tennis ball, or a bullet ricocheting off the walls, her mind flitted back and forth, trying and failing to process all that she’d learned in the last few hours:
Both her parents were still alive in the spring of 2003.
By the fall of that year, her mother had gone missing.
Gabriel had lied to her.
Athena Petridis had not killed her mother.
She, Ella, had been tricked into murder.
Retying the letters with the ribbon, she slipped them into her bag along with the wedding photographs and baby bracelet and tooth box that had seemed so meaningful and important a few hours ago, but now felt like trivial postscripts to a nightmare that was only just beginning to unfold. Carefully replacing the lid on the fourth box, she noticed what felt like a tiny indentation beneath her fingertips. Pressing down, she was astonished to feel a sliding sensation. A hidden panel, no more than two inches long, moved to one side like the lid of an old-fashioned wooden pencil case. In the cavity beneath was yet another letter – this one without an envelope or dates and torn at the edges. It was also signed by Ella’s father, but unlike the others it had been typed.
Take care of Ella, it read. I’ve found Rachel. She’s in North Africa, and she’s with M. I know how you feel about her, Mother. But she isn’t well. She’s besotted with M, but she has no conception of how dangerous he is. I have to get her away from him and out of this group we’re involved with. I have to get us both out, for good. And I will, I promise. As soon as it’s safe and I have Rachel, we’ll come back for E.
Wish me luck, Mother. I love you. Will.
Ella held her breath. Tears welled up in her eyes.
So her parents had intended to come back for her! They had. But something – or someone – had stopped them. William’s letter clearly implied that that ‘something’ was The Group. And was that ‘someone’ the mysterious ‘M’, who had brainwashed and spirited away Ella’s mother?
My father wasn’t loyal to The Group, Ella realized. He was trying to escape them!
She thought back to the footage she’d watched, on the USB stick that Gabriel had given her after they’d first met, with William waxing lyrical about The Group and how it was Ella’s ‘destiny’ to join them. Had that been made before he lost his faith? Or had he been pressured into saying it?
What if the video wasn’t real at all, but had been doctored, digitally altered in some way, as a sick piece of propaganda, designed to draw her in? If it was, it had worked.
But now Ella’s eyes had been opened. Her father had wanted to escape The Group. Which meant that the very last thing he would have wanted was for The Group to get their talons into her as well.
Could it really be true that these people who had transformed Ella’s life – who had turned her into a vigilante, a killer, a human weapon – were not the good
guys at all, but were in fact responsible for destroying Ella’s family?
Who was ‘M’? Ella mused. And why was he so dangerous?
She had to find out what had happened to her parents after her father wrote that letter. Because William and Rachel never did come back for her. And they would have done if they could, Ella felt sure of it.
Driving back to the city, with the bag of letters and trinkets on the passenger seat beside her, Ella felt oddly alert, despite her physical exhaustion and the lack of food in her stomach. She knew more now than she had ever known in her life about the family she had lost. And yet, in a way, she also knew less. About her parents. About The Group. About herself. About Gabriel. And about Athena Petridis, and what the whole past year of her life had really been about.
The dreadful, inescapable fact was that Ella had become a killer. An assassin. She hadn’t avenged her mother’s death at all. Instead she had murdered the ‘wrong’ person, based on a lie. And yet there had been a connection between her and Athena. Some sort of recognition, some link with her parents and her past that Ella had felt so strongly, she couldn’t relinquish it now, even in the face of all today’s evidence.
Waves of fatigue washed over Ella. But she knew how much work she still had to do. And that was what was keeping her going, giving her this strange sense of energy that prevented her from falling asleep at the wheel.
She had come so far.
But her journey wasn’t over, nor her mission even close to complete.
Father Michael Murphy blinked blearily at the young woman standing in the parsonage doorway. It was the middle of the night – two in the morning, to be precise – and her ashen face looked as eerily white as the moon.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I need to confess.’
‘OK.’ Father Michael pulled the belt on his dressing gown tighter against the cold and ran a hand through what was left of his hair, trying to shake off the sleep that still clung to him. ‘And it can’t wait till morning?’
The woman shook her head.
‘I see.’ Father Michael put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Well, no sin is beyond God’s forgiveness.’
‘Even murder?’
Wide awake now, Father Michael looked at her more intently.
‘Even murder.’ He chose his words carefully. ‘You are welcome to come in, and I will gladly hear your confession, whatever it is. However, you should know that if a priest suspects a serious crime has been or may be committed, we’re required by law to report it.’
She processed this. ‘I see.’
A pause.
‘So you’re not like lawyers?’
Father Michael smiled. ‘No. We’re not like lawyers. On all sorts of levels.’
‘I see,’ she said again. She turned to go, looking back across the street towards her parked car, her troubled expression still clearly visible beneath the porch lights.
‘God’s forgiveness is boundless,’ Father Michael called after her. ‘All He wants is contrition. For you to be truly sorry for what you’ve done. To try to make amends. And not to do it again.’
It’s the last part that’s the problem, Ella thought, as she drove away. Because right now the only way she could think to ‘make amends’ for killing Athena Petridis was to kill the man who’d tricked her into doing it in the first place.
The man who’d lied to her about her parents’ murders, about The Group, about Athena, about everything.
The man she’d almost believed might be her future.
Confession would have to wait until after she was done sinning.
First, Ella had to find Gabriel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Christine Marshall pulled her skintight Hello Kitty T-shirt in the vague direction of her midriff and straightened her pleated miniskirt nonchalantly as she swung her hips back and forth, happily aware of the men from the building site ogling her as she passed. She was all for #Metoo and women’s empowerment, but Christine’s own particular ‘power’ had always come from the effect she had on red-blooded males. By using that power in the service of The Group – using it to do good and to make a difference – she’d succeeded in building a life for herself that was full of meaning, full of purpose, even if it had involved other sacrifices. And she’d done it all in kitten heels and exquisite underwear, which in Christine’s world had to count for something.
Of course, she wasn’t a heavyweight like Ella Praeger. Although Christine and Ella had only been roommates in Camp Hope for a few short weeks, a time during which Ella’s abrupt manner and simmering anger had frequently frightened Christine, she nevertheless believed the two of them had forged a significant connection. She was honored when Katherine MacAvoy, the Camp Hope supervisor, had summoned her personally to her office and told her that Ella, probably The Group’s single most important asset of all time, felt the same way about her.
‘We all noticed how well the two of you got along during Ella’s training,’ Katherine told Christine, flicking a stray piece of lint from her disappointingly frumpy knee-length skirt. ‘Now that Ella’s indicated a willingness to recommit to The Group, we thought it would be a nice touch to have you make the first, personal contact. Welcome her back to the family, as it were. You’ll go to San Francisco, take her out for a meal and then hand over the detailed brief for her next assignment.’
Christine could scarcely credit that she, of all people, would have been selected for such a prestigious assignment. ‘Are you sure it shouldn’t be someone more senior who goes, ma’am?’ she asked meekly.
‘Quite sure,’ Katherine MacAvoy assured her. ‘Ella asked specifically after you and Jackson when she was debriefed by Mr Redmayne a couple of weeks ago.’
Christine flushed from ear to ear with pure pleasure.
Mr Redmayne? The big boss knows my name?
This just got better and better.
But today was the best of all. A cloudless, blue-skied, crisp fall morning in San Francisco had provided the perfect backdrop for what Christine hoped would be her and Ella’s joyous reunion. Christine wouldn’t be so inappropriate as to ask Ella about her most recent, fabled mission in Europe, or to quiz her on her rumored extrasensory ‘superpowers’, and how she’d used them to outwit the evil Athena Petridis. But she would demand an update on Ella’s love life; whether the mysterious ‘Gabriel’ had ever made a move. Or maybe some British lord or French count had swept her off her feet while she was over there, Meghan Markle style? Christine did hope so. Ella had a lovely side to her, but Christine couldn’t help feeling that the love of a good man might help to knock off some of those rough edges. Very rough, if memory served.
Christine looked up at the smart, red-brick apartment building to her right. According to her phone, she had arrived at her destination. Ella’s new digs were in an expensive neighborhood on a clean, tree-lined street, with doormen outside the front doors and new model Teslas in all of the on-street parking bays. So Ella was rich as well as beautiful, thought Christine, but without envy. Envying Ella would be like envying a bird its flight, or a fish its gills. One couldn’t compare oneself to a creature so utterly different, and special and superior in every way. Her excitement building, she practically skipped into the lobby.
‘I’m here to see Ms Praeger,’ she told the elderly man on the front desk. ‘Apartment 12B.’
‘Okey dokey.’
Christine signed in in an old-fashioned visitors’ book, and was directed towards a bank of elevators. Not exactly state-of-the-art security, she thought. Someone needed to talk to Ella about that.
Up on the third floor, she rang the buzzer of Ella’s apartment, waiting outside nervously, like a first date. After what felt like an age, it opened.
‘May I help you?’
The woman in front of Christine was around Ella’s age, with shoulder-length chestnut hair and an attractive, intelligent face. She wore an expensive cream shift dress and suede pumps and she radiated elegance, wealth and class. Christine had
never seen her before in her life.
‘I don’t know. I’m … looking for Ella,’ she said, peering over the woman’s shoulder into the recesses of the apartment. ‘Is she home? I’m an old friend.’
The woman frowned, confused. ‘Ella?’ Then it dawned on her. ‘Oh! You must mean the owner. Ms Praeger?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Ella Praeger.’
‘She doesn’t live here, dear.’
Christine blinked stupidly for a moment. ‘Ella doesn’t live here?’
‘No. She’s the landlady. She lets the place out,’ the woman explained kindly. She sensed that the pretty girl on her doorstep might possibly be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. ‘This is my apartment now. I signed a year’s lease last month.’
Christine looked pained. ‘I see. Well, do you have an address for her? For Ella?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Sorry. Everything’s done through the accountants. You could try them, I suppose. But I believe Ms Praeger’s out of the country at the moment. Europe, I think.’
‘All right Christine. Well, thank you for trying. I’ll take it from here.’
Katherine MacAvoy hung up the phone, a feeling of apprehension rising in her stomach, like foul water in a flooded drain.
Mark Redmayne had told her to act quickly. To get Ella safely distracted with another assignment before any more questions about Athena or her mother occurred to her. Or worse, before she figured out a way to make contact with Gabriel. They both agreed that that man had become a dangerously loose cannon. His feelings for Ella, and hers for him, now posed the biggest threat to The Group’s ability to hold on to Ella as their ‘secret weapon’.
The plan had been to distract Ella by pairing her with another suave, attractive agent who could seduce her, getting Gabriel out of her head. Katherine had found the perfect candidate. But it had taken her a couple of weeks to convince him, bring him back from Tokyo, and brief him fully on Ella Praeger’s history and special ‘gifts’.
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