Chapter 19 - The Woman Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
Catherine Carter had not died.
The funeral had been real.
The body had not been hers.
Rebecca uncovered the switch within hours.
Catherine had used another woman’s identity to leave the country.
She returned three months before the ballroom gala.
The truth was worse than any of us expected.
My aunt had been part of SAINT from the beginning.
She had raised me because Victor needed someone near me.
Every childhood memory suddenly felt contaminated.
The bedtime stories.
The school lunches.
The woman who held me when I cried over my father.
She had loved me.
Maybe.
She had also watched me.
Definitely.
Catherine contacted me directly.
“Come to the Carter house.”
The house where I grew up.
I went with federal agents surrounding the block.
Dante waited outside.
This part belonged to me.
Catherine sat at the kitchen table.
She looked older.
Tired.
But alive.
“Hello, sweetheart.”
I felt eight years old for half a second.
Then I remembered everything.
“Why?”
She looked down.
“Your father was going to destroy all of us.”
“He was exposing murderers.”
“He was destroying our family.”
“Our family?”
She laughed sadly.
“You think your father was innocent?”
My stomach tightened.
“He built the first version of SAINT.”
I stopped breathing.
“No.”
“He built it to track criminal money.”
She nodded.
“Victor turned it into something else.”
“So Dad tried to stop him.”
“Eventually.”
That one word hurt.
My father had not been perfect.
Gabriel had not been perfect.
Dante was not perfect.
Neither was I.
But Victor and Catherine had made the same mistake.
They believed imperfection erased the difference between guilt and conscience.
Catherine reached for a gun beneath the table.
I had already seen the reflection in the microwave door.
I stepped back.
Agents entered.
She was arrested without a shot.
As they led her away, she looked at me.
“You think Moretti is your happy ending?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
Her expression changed.
“He isn’t my ending at all.”
I looked toward Dante waiting outside.
“He’s a choice.”
For the first time in my life, that word belonged completely to me.
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And when Catherine Carter was placed in the federal car, SAINT finally lost its last active controller.
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