“I know I don’t have any right to be, but I was very proud when you went on to study technology,” he told her, the smile on his face a ghost of who he must have been. “You get it from me. You’re so much better than I was at your age.”
The pride in his voice, the pride she had never been on the receiving end of in her entire life, twisted something inside her chest. Morana searched his face and found the resemblance to her, in the hazel of his eyes, in the way his nose tilted slightly upwards. She felt her eyes fill up again and shook it off, asking the question that had been burning inside her for days. “Why steal the codes? You were never going to use them. Why frame Tristan?”
He straightened his leg, a slight wince crossing his face. “I needed to make you and Tristan cross paths.”
Morana blinked, surprised. “Excuse me?”
Tristan’s hand tightened on her shoulder.
Her father chuckled, the sound genuine. “Oh, you think I was the only one keeping an eye on you? The boy was always there. He caught me a few times, didn’t you, Tristan?” her father directed it at the man behind her, looking at him over his glasses in a gesture Morana recognized in herself.
Heart stuttering at this new piece of information, Morana tried to remember any moment in her past when she’d felt watched. She knew he had a picture of her. But was that all he had? Did he have more? How long had she been watched? She had been watched, not by one but by two people and she didn’t remember a single incident?
“I knew what he’d done to protect you once,” the man deliberated. “And I knew, with the way he kept his eye on you through the years, that he would protect you again when the time came.”
“The time for what?” she croaked out, her mind barely hanging on to everything.
“Justice.”
A shiver going down her spine, Morana clenched and unclenched her fists, considering this man before her. The hollow warehouse echoed the emptiness in her stomach as everything she had known about her life crashed down.
“So, let me get this straight,” she leaned forward, watching him with an even gaze. “You had Jackson steal my codes and frame Tristan all so I could find him? You were matchmaking?”
The man, huffed a laugh. “It sounds a little silly when you put it like that, but it worked didn’t it?”
“He wanted to kill me,” she told him.
“I did,” Tristan confirmed from behind her.
The older man shook his head. “I think you didn’t recognize
it, Tristan, and I don’t blame you.”
He remarked to Morana, “The men in this world don’t love like normal men, little doe. Their love is more intense than any other. He fell in love with you as a boy and as a man. And watching it happen has been the only peace I have found in years, knowing you will be loved and cherished and protected after I’m gone. I needed to give you that.”
Pulse throbbing with his words, her throat tight with unfamiliar emotions, Morana shuddered, shaking off the severity of his voice.
“Who has been trying to kill me?” she asked him, trying to understand everything.
“The Syndicate.”
“Why did you send me towards the Alliance and the Syndicate then? Shouldn’t I have stayed away?”
“You can’t stay away. You’re involved already because of who you are, and I had to prepare you for the truth,” he stated simply. “If you weren’t prepared, your mind wouldn’t have been able to cope. And I wanted your relationship to be successful.”
Morana shook her head. “And what am I going to do with all this truth? What is the point?”
The man, her father, smiled indulgently, looking from Tristan and back to her. “You’ll do what you want to do, Morana. This world needs people like you to stand up for those who can’t do it for themselves. There are so many lost children who cannot find their way home, so many parents who grieve for their babies. The pain of that is unfathomable, my little doe. You don’t know the agony that goes through a father when he loses his child, never to find her. Help them.”
A throb started in her temples. “How? I don’t know.”
The man leaned forward, about to say something, when the sound of a vehicle stopping outside made him straighten. He looked at both of them and uttered one word, “Hide.”
Uncertain, Morana picked up her gun and felt Tristan pull her up, guiding her to the side, hiding behind one of the pillars. Putting her back to the pillar and shielding his body with hers, she saw him lean to the side and watch the door. Morana twisted her neck and watched the scene herself.
Lorenzo Maroni and her father – no, Gabriel Vitalio – walked into the space, both dressed in suits. Morana saw her father, her actual father, simply smile at them and greet them like old friends. She realized she didn’t even know his actual name, or hers. She didn’t know about her mother or her unborn baby sister.
Breathing through the pain invading her heart, Morana simply took strength from the man standing pressed into her, took courage from his presence, and kept her eyes on the scene and focused on it. She could break down later.