Chapter 222: The one in the shadow

What was left, when the mask and the beard and the hood were gone, was a woman’s face. Blond hair fell loose around it.

She looked to be in her early forties, though something in the way she carried herself made it hard to be certain.

She began to take off the dark jacket too, slowly, and underneath it her figure was tall and striking, the kind of presence that filled a room even standing still.

Her eyes were beautiful, and there was something in the shape of her face, something in the set of her eyebrows and the curve of her mouth, that Aria noticed almost at once.

"Please don’t tell me," Aria said slowly, a smile breaking across her own face even as she said it, "you are Sienna’s mother. You two look alike. Damn."

Sienna did not smile. She could not move. She sat there on the edge of the bed, very still, staring at this woman’s face the way a person stares at something they have waited their whole life to see and are suddenly afraid to believe is real.

"Hello, girls," the woman said, and there was a smile in her voice now too, gentle, almost shy.

"Get up. Get up, let me have a look at you." She crossed the room without waiting for permission, reached for Sienna’s hands, and pulled her gently up off the bed. Sienna let herself be pulled. Her body felt far away from her, like it belonged to someone else.

"My little princess," the woman said, holding both of Sienna’s hands now, her eyes moving slowly over her daughter’s face as if she were memorizing it all over again. "My beautiful princess."

Sienna’s throat felt tight. It took her a moment before the words would come. "For how long," she asked quietly, "have you been watching me?"

"For a very long time." The woman’s smile faded, just slightly, and something more careful came into her face.

"But what have you done, sweetheart? For everything I did, everything I gave up, to keep you hidden and safe," she paused, and her eyes searched Sienna’s face for an answer, "you went poking Konstantin."

Sienna felt something rise in her chest, something that had been building for hours now, maybe for years. "Since when have you known," she asked, "and didn’t show yourself?" Her voice was not loud, but it had an edge to it now, sharp underneath the softness. "Why did you need to hide me from my fath..."

She could not finish it. The word stuck somewhere in her throat and refused to come out whole. She had already said it too many times in the last day, that one word, and every time it left her mouth it twisted something in her stomach, tight and sick.

"Don Konstantin," she said instead, slower, careful, like she was setting the name down on the floor between them rather than speaking it.

The woman’s face changed when she heard it. Something in her softened, and something else in her went still, the way a person’s face goes still when they are about to say a thing they have carried alone for a very long time.

"Sit," she said. "Listen, baby." She guided Sienna back down to the edge of the bed, sitting close beside her, still holding one of her hands. "I found you the day those people raided your adopted family. The day they killed your adopted brother." She paused there, letting the words settle before going on.

"Believe me, I wanted to come get you. I wanted to show myself to you. Hold you, baby. But I couldn’t. Konstantin would have found you too. And I couldn’t let that happen."

The room was quiet after that. Even Aria, who rarely stayed quiet for long, said nothing for a moment. Then, gently, carefully, she stepped into the silence, because someone needed to, and because she could feel the heat building behind Sienna’s eyes and thought it might help to slow things down.

"Sienna’s mother," Aria said, "what’s your name? Because we couldn’t find any information on you online. Not even a name. I think that’s strange."

The woman looked at her, and a small, tired smile touched her lips. "I’m Helena Ivanov," she said. "But I go by Hannah now."

"I see," Aria said. "Miss Helena. But why do you want to hide Sienna from her father?"

Helena was quiet for a second before she answered, choosing her words carefully. "Because I don’t want her to be used," she said finally.

"Konstantin doesn’t only want to trap me by his side. He wants to use my baby girl to do it, because she is the key to ultimate power." She turned to look at Sienna now, and her eyes were heavy with something that looked almost like grief.

"In your blood, sweetheart, is not only the cure. They started the DNA mutation work back then, and you were the very first successful patient. It was not even the plan. You had just had a heart transplant. But it became the answer to so many things they had been chasing. If they could repeat what happened to you, baby, it would be chaos. Real chaos."

Sienna sat very still, listening. She was a medical student. She understood, in a way that made her stomach turn cold, exactly how serious a thing like DNA mutation was, what it could mean in the wrong hands, how much damage could grow out of one small success repeated a thousand times over.

And yet, even understanding all of it, some part of her still could not make it fit together. It still did not feel real, hearing it said about her own body, her own blood.

"That’s why you had people take her blood work every time," Aria said slowly, the pieces falling into place in her mind one after another.

"Yes," Helena said. "I know how these researchers and doctors work. They talk. One will call another, and before long they’ll be calling researchers all over the world, and word travels faster than any of them realize. Before you know it, Konstantin would have found you."