Bianca took a quick, shallow breath, then nodded. “Okay.”
She reached over the desk for the mouse, moved the cursor, and clicked the play button. It didn’t have sound, but it didn’t need it. Cheyenne felt her mom come toward her to watch the video at her daughter’s side, but the halfling’s eyes were glued to what she hoped was the last piece of her missing-father puzzle.
The recording wiggled a little, probably from a brisk wind buffeting the camera. The shot was taken from an elevated angle and showed a tall chain-link fence topped in barbed wire, open gates at its center. For several seconds, there was nothing else. Then a man in a pair of jeans and a sweater stepped into view at the top-right corner of the monitor.
He was tall and good-looking, for as much as the grainy texture of the camera had captured his features. His dark hair ruffled in the breeze, and the man strolled across the pavement toward the open chain-link gates. He stopped and raised his empty hands beside his head.
Cheyenne glanced at her mom, but Bianca was still fixated on the monitor. “Keep watching.”
The halfling did as she was told and waited. Is that him?
Another man entered the frame from the bottom of the monitor. This one wore a security guard’s uniform and a black baseball cap. A rifle strap was slung over his shoulder, and while he held the rifle in front of him as he approached the tall man in the suit, it was clearly implied that the guard didn’t need to use threats when he had a weapon.
The man glanced up at the security camera and flashed a wide grin. Cheyenne’s heart fluttered in her chest. Despite the graininess of the shot, there was a glimmer of something mischievous and unmistakably deadly in the man’s eyes.
And then he changed.
The light-brown hair lost all its color, taking on the familiar bone-white and lengthening until the short-cropped hair hung in a loose bun at the nape of the man’s neck. The jeans and sweater melted into a white t-shirt and loose gray sweatpants with dark letters Cheyenne couldn’t read printed down the leg, and the man’s skin, so normal-looking that she hadn’t thought twice about it, was now the purple-gray of a drow. She couldn’t see his ears from the camera’s angle and distance, but she had no doubt that they were tipped in the same points as her own when she slipped into the form this man had bequeathed her.
The guard stiffened, then another guard raced into the frame. Both of them trained their weapons on the drow prisoner, who slowly and without an ounce of fear or alarm lowered himself to his knees. One guard snatched the drow’s wrists out of the air and bent them behind the prisoner’s back. Cheyenne didn’t see the cuffs, but she knew they had to be there. Soundless words were exchanged, then the drow was yanked to his feet and pushed toward the camera.
He didn’t resist. In fact, he looked like he was getting what he wanted—especially when he glanced at the camera one more time before disappearing from view at the bottom of the monitor. Then there was nothing in the shot but the open chain-link fence and the barbed wire and the empty pavement beyond it.
Showed up long enough to make an impression, then disappeared. Just like with us.
The monitor went black but for the circular play icon at the bottom of the screen, and the study was utterly silent. Cheyenne swallowed and took an involuntary step back. When she looked at her mom, Bianca had one arm folded across her midriff, propping up the opposite elbow while she pressed her fingers to her lips. The drow halfling read the emotions on her mother’s face—anger, shame, confusion, regret, and the barest hint of amusement.
All that was swallowed up again in an instant by her mother’s infamous composure, and she lowered her hand before turning to meet her daughter’s gaze. “This is what they gave me, Cheyenne, a month after I met your father. Two days later, I had a positive pregnancy test in my hand.”
The drow halfling blinked. “Why this?”
Bianca raised her eyebrows and didn’t need to ask for clarification.
“Why did they give you this footage?” Cheyenne gestured toward the monitor. “I mean, how did they know to bring it to you?”
“Hmm. I had to wheedle that out of them when they brought this to me.” Bianca took a deep breath and straightened her posture, rolling her shoulders back. “This is the man you were asking about. Inmate 4872. Apparently, he’d escaped from a facility, as I was led to believe, that was built to make it impossible to escape.”
“And three days later, he came back. To turn himself in.”
That was the weird part about that encrypted report I found—after three days, a voluntary return to the prison for Inmate 4872.
Bianca pursed her lips. “Yes. They wanted to find out where he was and what he’d been doing for those three days. Of course, they wouldn’t tell me, other than how they’d made the connection to me.”
When her mom paused long enough to make the silence frustrating, Cheyenne muttered, “Mom?”
Blinking, Bianca offered a small, twitching smile. “In 1999, Cheyenne, I spent New Year’s Eve at a very well-funded party in the event ballroom of D.C.’s St. Regis Hotel. It was not in my character back then to indulge as much as I did, but things were going very well for me in my career, and I’d convinced myself I owed it to myself to ‘loosen up’ if you will.”
She partied like it was 1999. Cheyenne didn’t know if she wanted to smile at the thought of her own mom getting hammered with the political elite and Washington’s finest.
“I met a man at that party. He was charming and sophisticated and…” Bianca glanced down at her open hand, then closed it into a fist and dropped it
