Page 24 of Vicarious

“Old friend? Like the ones that used to work with you and Dad?” Lady asks.

“Something like that,” I reply.

Lady looks at me, then nods in satisfaction before looking at Phae and saying, “Hi. I’m Lady.”

“And I’m—”

“Leon,” Phae breathes. Then she shakes her head and says, “Ad—De—Your mother. Your mother’s told me a lot about you.”

“Well, she hasn’t told us about you,” Leon says bluntly.

Oh but I have. I have. And even though they’ve seen a few pictures of Phae that their dad kept over the years, she looks so different from the woman in those pictures that they don’t recognize her. They don’t recognize that this is the dead woman who gifted them to me because she couldn’t take care of them.

And then I realize, that it might have been less cruel not to bring Phae here to meet the twins at all. Because in my effort not to be cruel, I’ve done the cruelest thing I possibly could to her. Presented her children to her while they don’t know who she is and while they’re calling another woman “Mama.”

But it’s too late to take back now. And it’s too dangerous for the twins to know right now.

So I say, “Lena, why don’t you tell the twins and Velia what you did when you used to be a journalist while Bella and I make sure dinner is ready.”

Bella adds, “Cres, why don’t you join them?”

That’s Bella’s way of saying she needs to talk to me privately without saying that she needs to talk to me privately.

“Right,” Cres says ushering the children and Phae into the sitting room while Bella and I go to the dining room. The same dining room we first met in.

Bella wastes no time looking up at me expectantly, even though I’m several inches taller than her, especially with heels.

“Adele Nina Bianchi, you are going to tell me right now who the fuck that woman is and why the fuck she looks like Phaedra Blake.”

“That’s because she is Phaedra Blake,” I reply.

“She’s dead.”

“We thought the same thing.”

“We?”

“Me and Viper.”

Bella sits in her chair at the head of the table and kicks the chair next to her from out under the table and says, “Explain. Now.”

I do. From the child trafficking shipment and ring we were following, to finding out about the facility, to discreetly taking it over, to finding Phae locked in a cell beneath and being forced to take care and nurture the children there under the threat of her own children and not knowing if they were trapped with her.

Bella taps her hand on the chair, having gone from the shrill woman outdone by something one of her closest friends have pulled to the mafia queen she is.

“I’m assuming the body was fake, then?”

“That’s what we think.”

“Well, bodies certainly aren’t hard to come by in this line of business. And it wouldn’t be the first time someone in this line of business faked a death by switching the body and making it look like the person you want to appear to be dead,” Bella says.

I’m not going to even ask Bella who she’s helped fake their death before. But she’s right. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I can’t believe that I never thought of it before. But usually, when these things happen, you don’t discover the person that was supposed to be dead.

Then Bella asks, “What does she know?”

“She knows Viper and I are trying to take out Pray. But that’s it.”

“So she doesn’t know that you’re trying to sit Viper at the top of Pray’s empire, not destroy it.”

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