“Tell me about that night,” I say. “The night they died. I need to hear it. All of it.”
She flinches, as if she knew I’d be asking this question eventually.
Then she nods and takes another sip.
“You were at my house for a sleepover with Sissy. So hard to imagine now with the way you girls butted heads when you got to high school, but you two were once thick as thieves. Anyway, you and Sissy had been playing dress-up all evening. You were obsessed with this purple dress Sissy had, and she let you wear it. You kept twirling and making her laugh…” A small, sad smiletakes hold, and she pauses before continuing. “You were so happy. And then?—”
She stops, swallows hard.
“It was late. After eleven but not quite midnight. You and Sissy were asleep, or so I thought. There was a knock at the door. Two men. It was snowing. I remember that so clearly.” She glances at Gabriel. “They told me what happened, that Lev and Masha were dead, that Ana and Dmirtri were dead. That the house had been—” Her voice breaks. “They said it was a massacre.”
My chest tightens.
“You came out of the bedroom, must’ve heard me crying. You asked what was wrong. And I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a five-year-old that her whole family is dead? I could barely process it as an adult.”
“What did you say?” I ask, my voice a soft whisper. “I don’t remember.”
“I told you your family was going away for a while and that you would be staying with Sissy and me. It was all I could come up with in the moment. I tried to make it sound fun, like it was a permanent sleepover. But you knew something was wrong. You cried and asked to go home, kept asking for your mama and your papa.” She presses her hand over her mouth, then closes her eyes. Tears trickle down her cheeks.
She goes on.
“I learned the next day that the men who came to the house were not your father’s men; they were Gabriel’s. They came back the next day with money—a lot of money. Said it was for your care, your education. They gave me a new birth certificate,school records—everything I needed to prove your new identity, to make you Thea Andrin, instead of Teodora Fetisova.”
“How much?” I ask.
“What?”
“How much money did they give you?”
She hesitates. “Two hundred thousand. Cash.”
“And you spent it all on Sissy.”
Her face crumples. “No, not all of it. I did use some of it for you, for rent, for food.”
“But not for college. Not for the education Gabriel intended it for.”
“There was more money than that,” Gabriel says. “The $200,000 was just the beginning. You weren’t wise with that money, were you?”
Her eyes go wide. “It was hard raising two girls alone!” she says. “Yes, I spent some of it on myself. And why wouldn’t I? I was raising someone else’s child!”
I turn to Gabriel. “And you just trusted her with the money?”
“I had someone checking in periodically,” he says. “But I should’ve done so myself more often. I was preoccupied. That was when I’d just come into power in the Camorra. I was consolidating power, trying to hold onto my own rule. I’d assumed Liza would do the right thing. I was wrong.”
Liza shifts in her seat. At least she feels some shame for what she did.
“I should’ve been more careful,” she admits. “With the money. But I was put into an impossible situation.”
“An impossible situation you could only get out of by abandoning me,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, Thea. I have no excuse. I raised you for so long, and when you turned eighteen, I just wanted to get my life back to normal, to not have to look over my shoulder with worry for once that some Bratva thug would be there with a gun, ready to kill all of us.”
I don’t know if I can forgive her. I don’t know if I want to. So I push the matter aside—for now.
“You were watching me for months before the auction,” I say to Gabriel. “How many months?”
“Six.” He doesn’t hesitate with his answer.
