Page 61 of Pretty Little Assassin

I am. I hadn’t known I was.

Without even thinking, I lunge toward the chair and start untying her. Surprisingly, my stepdad doesn’t intervene. Instead, he stands off to the side, gloating as if he’s lapping up our anguish like a dog licking meat juice from a plate.

“See? I promised you a happy little family reunion? Look at that, how sweet. Mother and daughter back together again. It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”

I ignore him.

“What is she doing here?”

As soon as she’s untied, I turn right back around to face him again. “Why is she here, and why was she tied up? Did you go hunting her down thinking that you could drag her back to me and use her as bait?”

“Not exactly.” His laugh sounds like that of a constipated hyena.

I’ve always hated his fucking laugh. Mostly because I know what he finds funny. Anytime my stepdad ever laughed, it was in response to someone else’s suffering.

“I didn’t have to look too far to find Elena, Valentina. I didn’t have to track her down at all, really.”

“What do you mean?”

My hand rests against Mercy. Give me one reason, motherfucker. One reason to choke off that asinine laugh and then kill you.

“Since the family is all together again, I think now would be a good time for us to all confess some of the family secrets.”

“What family secrets?” I grit my teeth so hard the words barely squeeze out.

“I know you and your mom have a bit of family drama to wade through, but not all of it was entirely her fault.”

What is he talking about?

My mom barely gets a chance to open her mouth before she’s interrupted.

“You see, your mother didn’t leave you willingly, Valentina. She went to rehab, meaning to come back to her little girl.” He shrugs. “Every time she tried, something happened.”

“It was you.”

“It was an investment.”

My mother’s hand finds my wrist. Not to stop me. To hold on.

“Rehab to rehab. No phone. No visitors.” He counts it off on his fingers, the way you’d list groceries. “As her husband, I had the right. And as long as she was high on whatever went into her food, she stayed in the system, and you stayed mine.”

Her fingers tighten on my wrist.

“Sixteen,” she says.

I look down at her. “What?”

“Sixteen times.” Her voice is thin and perfectly steady. “I got as far as the parking lot on six of them.”

She isn’t telling him. She’s telling me. She has been keeping that number the way I keep numbers, for nine years, for this.

Six.

Everything I built myself out of was a lie he paid for. Worthless. Forgettable. Easy to put down somewhere and not come back for. He installed every one of those thoughts, and I have been carrying them around, calling them me.

“She was persistent,” he says, pleased with her. “Annoyingly so. She almost slipped through my fingers more than once. Almost.”

“Six,” my mother says.