“I know,” the Head agrees. “I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that what was done was fair or kind. It was neither. It was my attempt to re-break you to my will.”
It’s hard to maintain outrage when the person being accused of terrible things just admits them directly to you. It’s even harder to process what she is saying, that I am joined to her by a genetic legacy, and that killing her would be more than destroying my captor. It would be matricide.
I look at Tom with a what now look. He holds me closer and begins to negotiate.
“We will stay here,” he says. “Recent events aside, this has worked well for our family.”
Fuck, I love hearing him say family.
“We want down time,” he continues. “Real down time. We will live on site, but surveillance will not be allowed in our home, which you will provide. Electra will perform missions with Ken and Mary only. She will never be imprisoned again, unless she does something which I agree truly warrants it, and you will not treat us as your slaves. We’re more than that,” Tom says. “We’re family. You. Electra. Ken. Mary, and I. We are bound in ways I’m sure were never intended, but we cannot pretend they do not exist.”
“Family,” the Head smirks darkly. “What a nonsense.”
I can’t help but laugh at her response. It echoes my own thoughts. How can we be family? We’re secret agents working for a bloodthirsty shadow agency with its own agenda. There are only the thinnest of genetic ties linking the Head and me. Ken and Tom are brothers, but is that enough? Two points of genetic connection and a madwoman at the helm?
I look over at the Head and I see that none of this is truly touching her. I suddenly understand the tragedy of her existence. In her fucked up way, she has been trying to save me, even though every instinct she has tells her to destroy happiness. She has been trying to set me free, though all she knows how to do is keep captives. She gives with one hand and takes away with the other, because she is a broken woman. She was shattered long ago, too long ago to be put back together.
“You’ve been very brave,” Tom says. He’s not talking to me. He’s talking to her. “I know saying this is not easy. Being here for this must be almost impossible.”
“Thank you, Doctor Ares, but commiserating is unnecessary,” the Head says. “I find attempts at empathy rather tedious, bordering on nauseating.”
“Do we have an agreement?” Ken speaks up. He has been hanging back, watching proceedings with his bicolor gaze.
“None of us will kill the other today,” the Head says. “I will allow some increased autonomy within this facility, but I will never, ever tolerate outright insubordination.”
“And I won’t tolerate what you did to us either,” I say. “I’ll fight you with every breath I have. I won’t let this happen again. If you trick Tom into thinking he lives in the Arctic again…”
Mary lets out a snort.
“If you imprison me in a box again,” I say. “I’m going to take piano wire and I’m going to turn your facility into a headless ghost town.”
“Enough with the threats, Electra,” the Head says. “I agree to a working truce. Now, untie me, before I send you all to Siberia.” She looks at me and her expression softens just a fraction. “I know you will never see me as a mother, never love me as one either, just as I may never know how to love you as a daughter. But I want the best for you, in my own, very flawed way. And I am…” she pauses, as if she cannot quite process the word she wants to say. “… sorry.”
So this is what they call a happy ending. A laying down of weapons. An admission of guilt. An attempt at love. It is not enough, but it is more than I could ever have asked for in the days when my world was nothing more than a cell. Now I am held in the arms of a man who loves me beyond all understanding, whose care has freed me from the miserable purgatory the Head lives in.
She gave me all she could. Her gifts were flawed and delivered with alternating cruelty and care, but what I do with it now, is up to me and Tom, the man who offers me real connection and love. He is my present, my future, my everything. In his arms, I feel the walls of the emotional prison I was living in unfolding like the petals of a lotus flower.
We may die tomorrow, but he is my happily ever after.
Epilogue
Tom
It’s another day in Paradise.
I stand on the barrier overlooking the pit, watching Electra train. I am not alone. The Head is standing by my side. She is much shorter than I am, but her presence is far larger. This, I suppose, is the closest thing we’re going to get to family time.