Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(67)

Jacks didn’t know anything about Sophia Bitter. “Jacks, that’s what you wanted to tell me? That doesn’t mean Mickey was going to shoot me! I think he intended to partner with me.”

“But you said there were attempts on you and your sister. So…”

“What about Mickey’s wife?”

“Sophia, nah. I doubt she was involved. She’s just a woman.”

“That’s sexist.” I stood up. Talking to Jacks had always been a waste of time.

“Wait! Anya, don’t go! Now that you mention it, the first time I met Sophia Bitter was right around the poisoning.”

I slowly returned to the chair.

“She’d arrived in New York maybe a week or two earlier. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but maybe you’re right. Maybe Mickey’s cover-up was to protect her.” Jacks’s pale face was turning pinkish. “Maybe that pizda is the whole reason I’m in here!” He asked me what proof I had that Sophia Bitter had been involved and I told him about the wrapper and the fact that she had been one of the few people with knowledge of my siblings’ and my whereabouts.

“She couldn’t have done it alone,” Jacks said. “She had to have had a partner.”

I knew who the obvious choice was. “Yuji Ono?”

“Sure, him. But I mean someone on the inside.”

“Her husband.”

This conversation was going in a circle.

“Yeah, but the thing is, Annie, and maybe you don’t get this, the poisonings hurt Mickey as much as anyone. He was next in line to run Balanchine Chocolate. The poisonings made everyone think he and Yuri were both weak.” Jacks ran his fingers through his invisible hair. “What about Fats? No, Fats would never. He loves chocolate too much. And he loves you kids. What about that lawyer who works for you?”

“Mr. Kipling?” I asked.

“No, Simon Green.”

That was the last name I’d expected to hear Jacks say. “How do you know Simon Green?”

“I met him years ago at the compound when he and I were both kids.”

“At the compound? Where are you going with this?”

“Nothing. Just maybe I’m not the only bastard in this family.”

“What are you saying?”

“Haven’t you ever suspected?”

“Suspected what?”

“That Simon Green is, maybe, related to Yuri. Or even to your father. And if that’s true, can you trust—”

I stood up and smacked Jacks across his ugly, broken face. I was strong from those months of manual labor, and I felt something in his cheek crumble under my hand.

A guard ran over to me and pulled me away from Jacks. At that point, I was asked to leave Rikers Island.

“It’s okay, Anya! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect to your father,” Jacks yelled desperately at my back. “I can’t stay here! You know I didn’t have anything to do with the poisoning, and I shouldn’t be in here. You’ve got to help me. I’m gonna die in here, Annie! You can ask your boyfriend’s father to help me!”

I did not turn around because a guard was pushing me toward the exit. Even if I had been physically able to turn, I wouldn’t have.

That was the problem with Jacks. He would say anything. Daddy used to say that people who would say anything could be ignored entirely.

But what had Daddy known? Now that I was older, I was starting to wonder how much of what he’d told me had been fortune-cookie crap.

Look how successfully Jacks had injected poison into my mind.

Daisy Gogol was waiting for me outside the visitors’ building.

On the bus ride home, it wasn’t that cold but I began to shiver.

“What is it, Anya?” she asked.

I told her that the man I had gone to see had said something insulting about my dead father.

“This man—obviously, he is a criminal,” Daisy said.

I nodded.

“And a liar?”

I nodded again.

Daisy shrugged her enormous shoulders. “I think you are safe to dismiss him.”

Daisy put her heavy arm around me, pulling me toward her spectacularly muscular bosom.

She was right. What Jacks had implied about Daddy couldn’t possibly be true. I didn’t want to ask Mr. Kipling about it. I didn’t want to have to repeat it. I didn’t want my sister ever to have to hear it. I wanted to erase it from my brain. I wanted to put it in the section with all the stuff I’d learned for school that I was never going to need: Hecate’s lines in Macbeth and the Pythagorean theorem and the subject of Daddy’s fidelity. Gone, all gone.

(NB: If I had a daughter, the first advice I’d give her would be that willful ignorance is nearly always a mistake.)

*   *   *

When I got up to the apartment, I needed something to do to occupy my mind or at the very least, my hands. I decided to sort through Imogen’s belongings. She didn’t have much—books, clothing, toiletries—but I figured her sister would probably want them. Had it been Natty, I would have wanted her possessions. (What had happened to Leo’s things?)

In Imogen’s nightstand, I found the copy of Bleak House Natty and I had given her for her birthday. How long ago that seemed. Bleak House was quite a lengthy novel, and Imogen was only about two hundred pages in. Poor Imogen would never find out what happened at the end of the story.