“Your admiral has asked me to brief everyone as to what we know so far.”
Annalise looked at Jakob, and his stupid, stupid heart fluttered in his chest.
“This includes some new information pieced together thanks to the work of several of the people in this room.”
A few of the security officers and knights Jakob didn’t know nodded. Oh. That was why she’d looked at him. She was about to say something new. He was an idiot. An idiot in love with a woman he couldn’t handle when it was just the two of them, and a man whose life and future was an ocean away.
Annalise glanced down at the paper in her hand and began to summarize the information on the page.
“Ava Chapman was born in Devon, England. When she was a child, her father joined and eventually became a priest in a strict, devout Anglican church. Shortly after, he moved his family, including a four-year-old Ava, to Mozambique where he set up a small mission, focused strictly on conversion. In particular, they were focused on members of the Catholic and amaZioni churches, which were the two primary houses of worship in the township where her father opened his mission.
“Relatively little is known about what exactly happened over the course of the six years that the Chapman family lived there. This may be due to the records having been deleted, as were most of Ava’s records beyond her birth certificate, or it could be due to the fact that the mission wasn’t affiliated with any international faith-based aid groups. Either way, based on the outcome, I think it would be safe to say there was a divisive relationship between the English family and the community.”
Everyone was listening intently, and Jakob realized he was seeing the pre-stalker Annalise. He’d never loved her more.
She continued speaking. “Thanks to Maxim, who found recently digitized copies of a local paper, we know that when Ava was ten, the mission was attacked. Five people were killed—three locals, as well as Ava’s father and mother. The article mentions that they were beheaded and then dismembered.”
“She saw it happen,” Vadisk said after translating for the man beside him.
“Based on her statements, yes. Her mother was raped, and had limbs removed, prior to her death. Again, Ava saw this. I am not going to offer a diagnosis, as I haven’t done a diagnostic interview with her, but given what we know, I believe she has been recreating her mother’s death, in what is not an act of rage, but one of mercy.”
“She’s mercy killing and torturing people?” Walt asked incredulously.
“Not mercy killing in the sense of euthanasia, but as a release.” Annalise paused to think. “Perhaps a better way to phrase it would be exactly that. She believed she was releasing or freeing women who, like her mother, have what she calls ‘moral fortitude’. Her victims are selected based on what she describes as a visible halo.”
Jakob felt the first stirrings of pity for Ava. It didn’t excuse what she’d done. The woman was undeniably nuts and needed to be—at the very least—locked up for life. Jakob had seen plenty of death in his time before becoming a knight. Death that came without trials, judgment rendered and execution carried out in darkness. When he became a knight, he walked away from that mindset, though clearly not the skillset, as evidenced by Axel’s death.
As a Ritter, enforcing their laws and carrying out any punishments was his duty, but he acted in response to laws and at the direction of his admiral and vice admiral.
Despite all that, there was a part of him, a remnant of who he had been, who wanted to walk into that safe room and snap Ava’s neck.
“She was torturing Zasha,” Maxim said softly.
“Yes, and there is no doubt that her other victims also suffered prior to death, but her actions were not rooted in a desire to cause them pain. I don’t believe there is a sexual sadism fulfillment element to her action, despite the fact that she is raping the women using, based on what was found in Odessa, homemade wooden phalluses.”
Everyone took a minute to process that horrific detail. Annalise cleared her throat and continued.
“Though her records and information are missing from most major databases, by searching lower-level—provincial, parish, individual academic institution—records, some of her life has been pieced together. Several years after the death of her parents, she was brought back to England where she became a ward of the court until the age of eighteen. I suspect she suffered some abuse, most likely in those years between when her parents died and before she returned to England.”
A ten-year-old suddenly orphaned in a small town where her parents had been hated and she was an outsider in every possible way. Yeah, some really bad shit could have happened.
“Though,” Annalise went on, “it is possible the abuse came from one or both parents. She attended medical school in Brazil—we can and should assume she speaks fluent Portuguese.”
“How did she get from being an orphan with nothing to medical school?” someone asked.
Annalise nodded slowly. “That is an important question to which we don’t have the answer. It is one of the things I may ask her in today’s interrogation.”
“Do you think the traitor Petro was helping her back then?”
Jakob noticed Nyx stiffened a little, only to relax when Grigoris wrapped an arm around her, leaning in to whisper in her ear. Nikolett glanced at the couple, and then quickly looked away.
“It is possible, given what we know of the timeline,” Annalise replied. “But it would mean that Ava was one of Petro’s first—”
“Pets.” The word echoed with menace, the speaker’s tone quiet but full of rage.
Around the room, men and women jumped to their feet, weapons appearing in their hands—everything from swords to small guns. Maxim and Grigoris had stepped in front of Nyx, Annalise, and Nikolett, protecting them from the speaker who filled the open doorway into the large office.
Walt propped
