Joan was about to step into the kitchen when she stopped, her daughter’s scent surprising her.
Slowly, Joan turned, and yes, her daughter stood behind her, just a few feet away. Unsure what she was doing at their safe house in Chicago, Joan was about to ask. But Olivia cut her off.
“Who did we bury, Ma?” she asked.
Joan blinked. “What?”
“Who did we bury in Dad’s grave?”
Without looking behind her, Joan knew from the sudden silence that her sisters and aunt were listening to every word. Not that she blamed them.
“Who did we bury?” Joan asked. “Well . . . your father, of course.”
Livy shook her head. And Joan now realized that her daughter was angry. Not just angry . . . livid. And because her daughter was a lot like Joan herself, that was a very rare sight.
“It can’t be Dad.”
“It can’t?” Joan asked, trying to sound bored. “Why not?”
“Because I just saw him.”
Joan felt her heart pound in her chest while she fought her anger at him for not contacting her in all this time. “He’s alive?”
Her daughter stared at her for a moment. A long moment that told Joan something was very wrong.
“Livy?”
“No. He’s not alive. He was stuffed and placed next to some bitch’s fireplace for all her friends to gawk at while eating hors d’oeuvres and drinking champagne.”
Livy’s words tore through Joan, her heart no longer pounding from excitement but despair and anger.
“So it can’t be Dad in that grave. Now I’ll ask you again, and then I’m going to start flipping the fuck out . . . who did we bury in that Washington graveyard?”
As soon as Livy cursed, she knew she’d hear it from her aunts and great-aunt. They might be honey badgers but the whole respecting-the-elders thing was big among her brethren. So as soon as that “fuck” left her mouth, her aunts were on her, yelling at her in Mandarin and shaking fingers at her while her great-aunt Li-Li helped her mother into the kitchen to sit at the large table and held her hand.
Livy, in no mood for any of this, pushed past her finger-wagging, yelling aunts and stalked into the kitchen after her mother.
“Answer me.”
Livy’s aunts followed, but before they could get in the middle of this, she spun on them, bared her fangs, and hissed a warning.
“Stop it,” Joan said. “All of you.”
“I’ll get you some tea,” Li-Li said before going to the stove, briefly stopping to give Livy a hard “Li-Li glare,” as it was called among the Yangs. Then she scratched the big, brutal scar on her old neck and continued on to make the tea.
Livy ignored her relatives and pulled out a chair, catty-corner from her mother, and dropped into it.
“Sit down,” her mother ordered her sisters.
They did as they were told, but Livy’s aunt Kew stopped to poke Livy in the shoulder while snarling, “You were always a horrible daughter.”
“Touch me with that finger again,” Livy warned, “and I’m eating it.”
“Kew, please,” Joan pushed, and for the first time, Livy heard her mother sound very tired.
Aunt Kew stomped over to her chair and dropped into it, arms crossed over her chest, legs crossed at the knee, one foot shaking dangerously.
Yeah. Livy knew she’d be hearing about this little episode until the end of time. But she really didn’t care.
“I want to know what’s going on,” Livy told her mother. “And I want to know now.”
“Your father and I,” Joan began, “may have divorced when you were eighteen—”
“You divorced when I was fifteen.”
“The first time.”
And that’s when Livy began to get a headache.
“Anyway,” her mother went on, “we never stopped—”
“Messing with each other’s heads?”
Her mother paused, lips pursed, before she admitted, “It’s what we always did well. Long before you ever came along.
“But no matter how much we argued,” her mother continued, “no matter how much we threw things at each other and cursed at each other . . . we still loved each other.”
“And were business partners.”
“Yes,” Joan hissed. “That, too. We had an agreement. No matter where we were; whom we were seeing at the time; or what jobs we might be working on, we always—always—met on certain dates at this little hotel we loved by the Baltic Sea. Dates and a location that only we knew.”
Livy frowned, wondering how only she managed to have parents who would pick the goddamn Baltic Sea for their romantic getaways.
“And?”
“And your father didn’t show up for two of our set meetings. We’d been meeting each other like this for more than ten years and he’d never not shown up once, let alone twice. Even when he was dating that porn star. Even she couldn’t keep him away from me.” She shook her head, started to rub her eyes, but quickly remembered the amount of makeup she used on her face, so she stopped, and pulled back any tears that might threaten to ruin all that careful work.
“I checked with his brothers and sister,” Joan went on. “Checked with the police and morgues in several countries. I did everything, but he never made contact with anyone. I spoke to Baltazar and he agreed with me.”
“Ma, Uncle Balt would agree with anything you asked him, because he’s had the hots for his brother’s woman since the day Dad brought you home.”
Joan slapped her hand against her knee. “Stop acting like I killed Damon myself!”
“I never said you killed him . . . you just lied to me. About my own father. And I have no idea what you did to the body that’s actually in that casket.”
“That one was already dead and not by me. And I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d make a big deal about it.”
“And you had to make sure you got that life insurance before his girlfriend or Aunt Teddy did. Right?”
And that’s when they all started yelling at her. Aunts, great-aunt, mother. Standing over Livy and yelling at her in English, Mandarin, and for some unknown reason, a little bit of Italian.
All of which proved that Livy was right. Because when her family started yelling, it was usually because they were lying their collective asses off.
“She must have found something,” Shen said, busy on his laptop.
“But what could she have found? I mean, the woman was once poisoned by a cult member whom she did really horrible things to once she woke up from a brief coma, and I can still say . . . I’ve never seen her look that angry before.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Have you found her yet?” Vic asked, looking over Shen’s shoulder.
“I think so. Yes. Here it is. She took a flight into O’Hare. No bags checked. She arrived this morning. She didn’t rent a car, and it looks like she paid cash for the flight.”
“O’Hare? She goes into Whitlan’s daughter’s apartment, comes out, and immediately goes to Chicago?” Vic stared at an equally confused Shen. “Dude . . . what the fuck?”
Livy had nearly made it out the front door when she heard, “So what are you going to do about all this?”
Livy stopped and faced her family. Her mother, aunts, and great-aunt were all staring at her, arms crossed over their chests.
“What do you think I’m going to do?”