CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — Margaret's Information

LENA'S POV

Margaret came three days later.

Ghost arranged it carefully. A neutral location, a small meeting room in a building the club used for legal consultations, nothing that could be traced back to the compound directly. Two club members outside the door. Rook inside with us because Ghost trusted his ability to read people and Ghost himself across the table because nothing this significant happened without him present.

I sat beside Ghost.

Margaret walked in and the first thing she did was look at my stomach.

I had not seen her since the dressing room. Since the slap and the perfume that smelled like a trap and the veil she had pinned into my hair with hands that did not shake because she had made her decision long before that morning and felt no conflict about it.

She looked older than I remembered. Or maybe I was just seeing her differently now that I was not afraid of her.

She sat down across from us and put a brown envelope on the table and did not reach for it again. Just left it there between us like something she had been carrying for a long time and was relieved to put down.

"You look well," she said to me.

"I am," I said.

She nodded. Looked at Ghost. "You are what I expected," she said.

"And what did you expect," Ghost said.

"Someone who does not frighten easily," she said. "Edmund has been trying to frighten you for weeks and you have not moved an inch. That tells me something about who you are."

"It tells you I have something worth not moving for," Ghost said.

Margaret looked at me briefly. Then back at Ghost. "Yes," she said. "I suppose it does."

She pushed the envelope across the table.

Ghost did not reach for it immediately. "Tell me what is in it first," he said.

Margaret folded her hands on the table. "Records of seven other women Edmund arranged similar agreements with over the past twenty years," she said. "Names, dates, financial transactions between Edmund and their families. Three of those women are no longer traceable. Two signed documents Edmund's lawyers prepared that effectively signed away their legal rights in exchange for financial settlement. One is currently in Edmund's direct employment under circumstances that would not withstand scrutiny." She paused. "And one is being kept somewhere Edmund controls. Has been for twenty years."

The room was very still.

I felt Ghost go still beside me in the particular way he went still when something landed exactly where he had suspected it would.

"A woman being kept somewhere," Ghost said carefully. "You have specifics."

"I have a location," Margaret said. "Or at least the location I knew eighteen months ago. He may have moved her since."

I looked at Ghost.

He was looking at the envelope.

"The woman who has been kept for twenty years," I said quietly. "Do you know her name."

Margaret looked at me. Something shifting in her expression. "Anna," she said. "Her name is Anna Graves."

The room tilted slightly.

I put both hands flat on the table and breathed.

Ghost's hand found mine under the table. Just his fingers over mine. Steady and certain and there.

I looked at Margaret across the table and said "she is my biological mother."

Margaret's eyes widened slightly. Genuine surprise. "I did not know that," she said. "I knew Edmund had a woman. I did not know the connection to you."

"But you knew she was there," I said. "You knew he was keeping someone and you said nothing."

"Yes," Margaret said. She did not flinch from it. Did not dress it up. Just said yes and let it sit there. "I said nothing for eighteen months and I will carry that. But I am saying something now."

The room was quiet for a moment.

I looked at the envelope on the table. At everything inside it that could bring Edmund down. At the name Anna Graves written somewhere in those documents belonging to a woman who had been kept for twenty years while her daughter grew up not knowing she existed.

Ghost picked up the envelope.

He opened it and looked through the documents carefully and methodically the way he did everything. Page by page. His expression giving nothing away.

Then he looked at Rook.

Rook had been watching Margaret the entire time. He gave Ghost a small nod. The nod that meant I have been reading her and she is telling the truth.

Ghost looked at Margaret. "The location you have for the woman," he said. "Write it down."

Margaret reached into her bag and produced a folded piece of paper and pushed it across the table. "I already did," she said.

Ghost took it.

Then Margaret looked at me and did something I had never seen her do once in twenty two years.

She said "I am sorry Lena. For all of it. For the sale and the dress and the slap and the veil and every moment I chose his money over your life." She said it plainly and without decoration. "I know that does not fix anything."

I looked at her across the table. At the woman who had shaped the worst years of my life and was now sitting across from me handing over the tools to end the man who had paid for me.

"No," I said. "It does not fix anything."

She nodded. She had not expected it to.

"But it helps," I said. "What you brought today. It helps."

She held my gaze for a moment. Then she stood up and picked up her empty bag and walked to the door.

She stopped with her hand on the handle and looked back at me once.

"Your mother wrote to you," she said quietly. "I saw the journals once. She never stopped writing to you. Every year." She paused. "Whatever Edmund took from you, he did not take that."

She walked out.

The door closed behind her.

The room was very quiet.

I looked at the documents spread on the table in front of Ghost. At the location of a woman named Anna Graves written on a folded piece of paper.

Then I looked at Ghost beside me.

He was already looking at me.

"We are going to find her," he said. Not a question. Not a promise exactly. Just a fact he was stating because it was already decided.

I nodded.

He turned the folded paper over in his hand and looked at the address.

Outside the two club members were waiting. Inside the three of us sat with everything Margaret had left behind and the weight of what it meant.

Anna Graves was alive.

Edmund had her.

And now the Iron Grave MC knew exactly where to look.