A jolt—a snap of recognition. Something in the curve of his nose.
He took a step toward me. “I’ve tried to teach you patience. I’ve tried to make you see threats everywhere, to question everything. I’ve tried to make you better at what you do.”
My head started spinning.
Our early texts.
Your parents never taught you patience?
They never taught me anything.
“Twelve years ago, an alert came up that a DNA sample taken at a murder scene had enough alleles in common with mine to be my offspring.”
He was saying he was my father.
My actual father.
The Chameleon was my father.
Not Mike Martin.
Alain Drake.
“Until then, I never knew you existed. And it didn’t take me long to realize what you were up to.” He smiled. “You clearly took after me more than you did your mother.”
Twelve years ago. One of my very early kills. Pre-Fox days. A bad man who’d hit me—before I hit him back. With a skillet pan. He did draw blood. I just hadn’t had the sense to make sure it was all cleared up.
“Last year when I got an alert that your DNA had been registered at Find My Heritage, I thought you were trying to find your father. It was a good opportunity to make contact.”
This wasn’t making sense.
“Why did you create Mike? What was the point?”
“I wanted to get to know you, although it soon became clear it was Fox pretending to be you. And I wanted to see if you were interested in getting to know me.”
“So you created a perfect grandfather with a twee, wholesome life?!”
“It didn’t matter who I was pretending to be. You turned up that day. Before you realized that Mike didn’t exist, you were going to meet him. You wanted to meet your father.”
Everything I’d felt when Fox first told me he’d found my father was still there. I wanted to know more about my history. About where I came from. Now, I was just trying to work out how I feltknowing that he was a violent gun-for-hire working for a shadowy criminal organization.
I kept looking at him, trying to determine if I could see any of myself in him. Was this even true? Could he just be some bullshit artist who got off on lying?
The Chameleon.
How often had I thought of myself as the same thing? Playing up whichever side of my heritage I figured was going to help me fit in more. Mine was an identity that could be changed whenever I needed it to.
I could see it now. I did look like him. He was a little darker than me, but I could see it.
The Chameleon. He could adapt to whatever surroundings he was in. Interpol agent. Assassin. And his hard-to-identify heritage. He’d used it all to his advantage. No one could ever quite work out what I was, and he’d been afforded the same privilege.
I thought of “Mike’s” messages with Fox. The way he wrote, the things he said. It was all so believable. Nothing gave away that English wasn’t his first language. The multilingual Chameleon. It was all part of being able to be whoever he wanted to be.
“Where did you meet my mother?”
“In a bar. She was very beautiful, but troubled.” A polite way of describing a messy fucking drunk. “We only spent a few nights together. The last time, she told me she was pregnant. But how was I to know she wasn’t lying? How was I to know it was even mine?”
“And you realized she’d been telling the truth when you discovered someone you shared DNA with was out there committing murder?” If I’d been more careful when I’d killed that first bad man, Drake would never have found out about me.
