All along, Penelope Morrison had been the one orchestrating everything behind the scenes—the invitation to her party, the planned execution of her father, the seizing of his shipments. She had known about Panacea’s recruitment of him even before he did.
“You let me give the ring to Connor,” he said.
She looked evenly at him—and he realized that she’d purposely led him into the private party room with Connor so they could meet, had probably planted false documents in Connor’s hidden museum vault. If he and Sydney were silenced now, then Panacea would look responsible for what happened to Eli Morrison, and remain empty-handed in terms of evidence to convict him. Penelope would get away clean again, the good daughter horrified by what happened to her father.
They had thought they were using her as their pawn, when she was using them all along to cover her own plans.
How did she know?
“Why would you want the publicity of my shooting around you?” he said hoarsely.
One of the guards near her handed her a pair of gloves. She took them and started pulling them on. “Maybe a fan crazed with jealousywanted you dead. Maybe someone couldn’t stand the idea of you being close with anyone, being my private guest.” She smiled, somehow still wearing a naïve expression on her face. “Whatever the reason for a random person to shoot you from a crowd, your story will generate such a firestorm of interest that any news about my father’s death would be reduced to a footnote.” At his expression, she shook her head mournfully. “I’m a true fan, if that’s what you’re wondering,” she said. “And I’m sorry it has to be like this. I regret this is how we’ll say goodbye.”
He had been brought here to be assassinated. He thought of his hazy memories in the ambulance, the way the driver had acquiesced calmly to Penelope’s directions. She’d arranged for him to be taken here, when the world probably thought he was at a hospital.
“I know why others would want your father dead,” he ventured. “But why doyou? Why all this effort?”
Penelope stayed silent as she pulled on her second glove.
“You murdered him because of something he did,” Winter continued. “Was it something done to you?”
Still no answer.
“To someone you loved?” he pushed.
There was the faintest tremor on her face, and in that tremor, Winter saw some sense of loss, some memory of a broken family, that felt familiar to him. His instincts stirred. “Your mother?” he guessed.
This time, Penelope looked away for a split second before settling back on him. He had hit true.
“I heard she passed away from an illness,” Winter said.
At that, anger sparked in her eyes. “My mother didn’t die from an illness,” she answered coldly. “She died because my father killed her.”
Winter felt a chill ripple through him. So this was it.
Penelope turned away from him, walked over to one of the shelves, and gingerly took one of the canisters in her hands.
“She met my father during her side job,” she continued in a soft,quiet voice. “Catering one of his parties. I watched him hit her for years. It was my earliest memory. She always told me that he didn’t mean it. He isolated her, cut her off from her family, refused to let her speak to them, ignored their pleas. The day he finally killed her in a rage, I was five. I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life of what he did to her.” She looked at him, and this time all her innocence was gone, replaced by the expression of someone haunted beyond her years. “I watched his power protect him, how it allowed him to sit there with a team of detectives and police who all quietly understood that they were to erase the evidence. I promised myself then that I would kill him someday.”
Her words swam in Winter’s mind. So that was the reason behind it all. He pictured the charismatic smile of her father, then his elegant hands stained with the blood of his late wife.
Attending parties to make her father happy. Being the nice girl. She had hidden herself away so well.
“You grieved his death,” he said, “even though you ordered it.”
For a moment, he saw a glimmer of the softhearted girl he thought he knew. She looked away. Her fingers ran lightly across a phrase in Italian tattooed on her wrist. “He was still my father,” she said.
“But you’re not going to stop his endeavor,” he said, his eyes darting around the room. “This ship’s still sailing for Cape Town with its illegal haul.”
Penelope opened the top of the canister and reached in. She pulled out a small cube that looked like it was made of glass, its translucent surface a very faint tint of blue.
“Think, Winter Young. What does someone like me have to lose if you and your agency successfully convict my late father of how he built his empire?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Money.”
The fragile part of Penelope’s heart retreated behind a hard shell. “Do you know what happens to all of my father’s wealth if you finally get evidence against him? Frozen. Confiscated.” She held the cube carefullyas she walked over to him. “And I’ll be damned if I see all of that end up with some government instead of me, all the money that should have gone instead to my mother.”
“So you took matters into your own hands.”
