Page 101 of Once a Hero

“He will be soon.” Molyneux motioned to her guards. “For now, he’s still useful to me.”

“Am I useful to you?” Beatrice wished she hadn’t asked.

“It depends if you’re your mother’s daughter or your father’s.” Molyneux touched Beatrice’s chin and lifted it slightly. “You have my eyes, but I didn’t give birth to you.”

Beatrice didn’t know the answer either.

“Don’t try to find your birth mother,” Molyneux continued.

Beatrice’s heart raced.

“She is dead.”

Beatrice could hear her own heartbeat thumping in her chest.

“Your father knows who she is.”

“I thought both of you adopted me together?” Beatrice asked.

“We did, but he found you first.”

Interesting. Potentially Dad could tell Beatrice who her biological mother was. Beatrice recalled Jake asking whether she’d ever be interested in looking up her own genetics.

Speaking of Jake, Beatrice hoped that he and Benjamin would try to find her. She felt that she was about to regret the plan she had set in motion that had somehow turned awry. Now she had to find the Trojan horse brooch box in the hope that Kenichi could locate it and come get her.

Molyneux walked past her, and the whole entourage followed. “We’ll talk about family later. Right now, I need you to open the door.”

“Open what door?”

Chapter Forty-One

Beatrice did not want to go down the stone stairs. Something smelled horrible and it wasn’t the guards on both sides of her.

“Move!” Molyneux yelled into her ears.

“No!” She stood her ground at the top of the stairs, hugging the stone wall to one side.

She could see shadows as the flashlight danced down the stairs. At the bottom of the short flight of stairs, she saw stacks of skulls.

“What is this place?” Beatrice barely got the words out.

“They’re all dead. They won’t bite.” Molyneux motioned for her guards to take Beatrice down.

They couldn’t carry her because the ceiling was too low. Two guards held each of her arms. They dragged her and gave her no room to fight. Her hiking boots thumped-thumped all the way down the stone treads.

At the bottom of the stairs they dropped her to the ground, right in front of a wall of skulls.

Beatrice screamed.

“Tsk. Tsk,” a man’s voice said. “We agreed to leave the kids out of this, Imogen.”

Dad?

The flashlight wasn’t bright, but the man came out of the shadows, extending a hand toward Beatrice.

His cheeks were chubby and his eyes were kind. He even had white hair. All he needed was as red suit for Beatrice to think it was Christmas.

He helped her get up. On her feet, she was a foot shorter than the elderly man, who seemed to be in his seventies.

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