“Understand,” I finished for her. “Except I bet I understand a lot more than you ever expected me to. And if you had bothered to keep better track of me over the past thirty years, you would know that.”
Natasha looked up, her eyes bright with the threat of tears. “What are you talking about?”
I shook my head in disbelief. “I ended up at Waverly University for graduate school anyway. Not that I was able to complete my degree, of course. The Black Raptor Society took care of that.”
Natasha’s bottom lip trembled. “No. Please. Don’t tell me—”
“I found out about them,” I plowed on. Now that I’d started speaking, the words just kept pouring out of me, no matter how hurtful. “It all started when my history professor disappeared several weeks ago. Do you remember George O’Connor? You went to school with him, and I’m pretty sure he was in love with you. He’s dead now, by the way. Anyway, O’Connor was trying to bring down the Raptors before they could get a hold of me. It didn’t really work out, but at least he tried. Right, Mom?”
Natasha looked at me. “Nicole, never in a million years did I ever expect you to find your way back to that hellhole of a university,” she said. “I was scared and out of options. Catherine Flynn had already killed your father, and she tried to kill you next. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Wait. Flynn tried to kill me?” I asked, confused. From my mother’s old diary entries, I already knew that Flynn had arranged my father’s death and that she had driven Natasha away from Waverly University by threatening her life as well, but I’d never heard anything about an attempt on my own life.
Natasha nodded. “It was shortly after your second birthday. I thought I had shaken off the Raptors. I thought that you and I were safe. In the beginning, it was never my intention to give you up, but when that happened…”
“What happened?” I pushed.
She shuddered, as though attempting to repress the memories. “I don’t want to talk about it. It was awful, but the incident made me realize something.”
“Which was?”
For the first time since we had arrived at the farmhouse, Natasha maintained eye contact with me for longer than a few seconds. “That the Black Raptor Society and Catherine Flynn were always going to haunt me. They were always going to track me down. If I kept you, we would have led a life on the run, a life burdened by the need to keep moving lest the Raptors discover us again, and that would have been no life for a child. It would have been selfish of me to put you through that, and at the time, I thought that the only way to lose the society for good was if everyone believed I was dead.”
“It didn’t work though, did it?” I asked. “Henry told me that you’re still in contact with Catherine Flynn.”
My mother’s brow furrowed. “He said that?”
Before I could respond, the stairs in the entryway creaked, announcing Henry’s return from upstairs.
“Whew!” he said, wiping his forehead as he made his way into the kitchen. “My knees are getting too old for all of these steps. Nicole, you’re more than welcome to use the bathroom off of our bedroom if you’re desperate for a shower—what happened?”
He glanced between Natasha and me, taking note of Natasha’s shimmering eyes and the look of consternation that I knew must still be present on my face in response to my mother’s revelations.
Natasha wiped her face with the back of her hand and turned to Henry with a defiant scowl. “How did you know?” she demanded of him. “How did you find out that Nicole went to Waverly? How did you even figure out that I had a daughter?”
“Well, you certainly weren’t ever going to fill me in,” said Henry. Though he was firm, there was no anger in his tone. I marveled at his self-control. His wife had hidden huge secrets from him for the past twenty years, yet he remained cool and collected in the face of her withheld truths.
“I kept these things from you for good reason,” declared Natasha. “It was imperative that I cut all ties with Waverly and stay far away from anything that had to do with the Black Raptors.”
“An hour and a half’s drive from campus isn’t exactly ‘far away,’” I pointed out. “Why didn’t the two of you move out of the country? Or at the very least, out of the state?”
“I did,” growled Natasha. Her gaze remained fixed on her husband like a laser pointer, but his calm demeanor didn’t falter. “Henry and I met in Palo Alto. He was the one who suggested we move back to the area. He told me that he’d always dreamed of moving back into the farmhouse that he had grown up in. Even then, it seemed like a suspicious coincidence, but I agreed because I thought I was simply being paranoid. Now, I’m starting to wonder if I was right to suspect. Henry, darling?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Would you like to pitch in to the conversation?”
“I’m quite content, but thank you for asking, my love.”
Natasha’s answering glare was sharp enough to burn holes through Henry’s flannel shirt. He sighed, reached into his back pocket, and extracted a small, black wallet.
“Agent Henry Altman,” he said, flipping open the wallet to reveal a shiny, gold badge. “FBI. Over twenty years ago, I was assigned to investigate white collar and violent crimes occurring in and around Waverly University.”
There were two hundred and twenty-five concrete blocks that made up the far wall of Lauren’s containment room. She’d counted them. Twice. Soon, she feared that she may die of boredom. Her
