I hung my head. Did she have to put it that way? My chest already felt like Marcus slipped a serrated knife inside it. Now my sister gave it a good whack.
I stared at the rounded stones beneath my Converse. “It’s too late to do anything now. Let’s just focus on Dani.”
“Okay, I see the sign.” Keira pointed ahead.
A Turkish import shop sat nestled between a French clothing boutique and a high-end stationery store. According to Charlotte’s research, Dani Zamen and his mother fled to the French countryside for a fresh start. His mom’s journalism days were behind her, as was her imprisonment. Now, based on their kaleidoscope-like window display, they spent their time selling Turkish bowls, lamps, tiles, vases, and jewelry in colors that seemed to explode against the ancient beige stone exterior.
“So we just walk in and ambush him?” asked Keira.
“That’s the plan.”
“Well, at least we’ve got a plan.”
…
A bell jingled as we stepped into the densely packed shop. Every surface was filled with stacks of dishes featuring patterns so elaborately painted you’d never eat off of the surfaces, let alone wash them. Bulbous brass lamps looked like they held magical genies. Chandeliers dangled with glass mosaic globes. Cases were lined with sterling silver jewelry.
Next to the register was the face we’d memorized from pictures—Dani Zaman.
I looked at my sister. No turning back.
“Excuse me, do you speak English?” I asked, stepping toward the counter. Turkish was not one of my languages, but Keira and I could both speak in French if needed.
“Of course,” he answered. “How can I help you?”
“Well, Dani, we’re hoping we can help you.” I cut to the point.
His face instantly changed, a hardness falling over his maple syrup eyes. This was not the gaze of a teenager who spent his days watching cat videos on the Internet. This was a kid who’d seen tragedy. I should know; I wore that look myself.
“What do you want?” He sounded defensive.
“I realize this is unexpected.” I kept my voice calm. “But my name is Anastasia Phoenix, and this is my sister, Keira.” I looked for a hint of recognition when I said our names, but there was none. “Our parents used to work for Dresden, for Department D.”
Embers lit in his eyes at the mention of the organization’s name.
“Then you’ll understand when I tell you to get the hell out.” Dani marched around the counter.
“I know. I get it.” I raised my palms.
“You get it? Are you kidding me?” His thick black brows crumpled like caterpillars as he halted a few paces away. “Do you have any idea what they put me through, put my mother through—”
“Yes, I do,” I interrupted. “Because they did the same to us. Our parents are dead.”
He rolled back on his heels, sizing us up, suddenly not sure how to react.
Technically, I was lying. My parents were alive, but we hadn’t seen them with our own eyes, so that gave us deniability. Besides, what Keira and I knew for sure was what we actually went through these past three years as orphans, and that was the story the Dresden Kids could relate to, that was how we’d get them to identify with us.
“We thought our parents were engineers up until the day they died in a car crash, their bodies burned beyond recognition. We’ve spent the last three years on our own,” I said, reciting the carefully edited speech we’d rehearsed.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dani offered. He still sounded suspicious, but I could tell we’d quelled his anger. “But I thought you said they worked for Department D?”
“They did, but we didn’t know that, not until I started questioning their deaths, who they were. Then I was kidnapped,” Keira explained. The kindness in her voice and the softness in her body—the way her shoulders rolled forward and her lashes fluttered—made Dani’s whole chest relax. He was listening to her. “My sister and I could have died, because of the work our parents did, because of enemies we never met.” When she turned to me, any frustration she expressed regarding Antonio or my bossiness was wiped from her hazel eyes. Keira was on my side. We were the Phoenix sisters. United.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“We want you to help us get back at the people who put your mother in prison,” I explained. “We want you to help us get revenge on Department D.”
He tilted his tan face to the side like he hadn’t heard us correctly. “Your parents worked for them. So did my stepfather, before he got my mother locked up in a Turkish prison and left me to live on the streets. How do I know you’re not working for them too?”
“Because my best friend was recently murdered by Department D, and they promised to pick off every person I’ve ever met unless we pick them off first.” My tone was harsh, completely unlike my sister’s gentle demeanor, but it was all I could offer. I couldn’t pretend not to be livid. Hollywood was not in my future. “You want revenge for what they did to your mother? You are never going to meet two people more motivated to give it to you than my sister and me.”
Dani stood silently, assessing us, and I waited patiently for my words to sink in, for him to read my face and see how much I meant it.
Only the response I got wasn’t from him.
“Let’s hear them out,” said a feminine voice with a thick Turkish accent.
I turned toward a back wall, and in a darkened doorway stood a woman with flowing black hair, a full oval face, and big chocolate eyes lined heavily with pencil.
It was Dani’s mother, Selen.
Chapter Fifteen
We sat in regal Turkish chairs with tufted crimson upholstery and curved cushy armrests as we listened to Dani and his mom talk. The blinds to the store were drawn. His mother had closed the shop. It was as if she had been waiting for us to arrive—ever since she’d been released from prison.
“Our door was broken down by police at five o’clock in the morning,” Selen said, her hands folded in her lap. “Our home was raided, and I was arrested in my night clothes by shouting men armed with machine guns. I had never been questioned by the police before that day.” Selen tucked her thick black hair behind her ear, a silver earring with a white and blue stone that looked like an evil eye hung toward her jawline. “They searched our house—”
“Searched?” Dani interrupted. “They destroyed our house.”
Selen nodded. “They took everything—my laptop, my books. Every thought I ever wrote in a notebook, on a scrap of paper, was submitted as ‘evidence’ of my crimes.”
“The crime of being a journalist and telling the truth,” Dani continued.
Selen was looking at Keira and me, but her gaze was lifeless, as though she were telling the story about someone else, someone she hardly knew. “I didn’t know why I was arrested, for months. I sat in jail, unable to defend myself, because I had no idea what evidence they had against me. Any attempt my lawyer made to obtain this information was ignored, and eventually he was accused of being a criminal just for defending me. The media, journalists I considered my friends, called me guilty—all of us—because of stories we wrote, because we did our jobs.”
“Hundreds of people were arrested on the same day,” Dani added. “Military officers, politicians, journalists, anyone the current regime saw as a threat. The whole thing about a potential coup was a ploy, an excuse to give the government a reason to get rid of people it didn’t like, that it couldn’t control.”
“I know.” I nodded. I’d read the information provided by Allen Cross and confirmed by Charlotte’s research. So far, our intel on Dani and Selen was accurate, but it was missing the details that twisted something from being a news story into being someone’s life.
“My own newspaper reported I was guilty. They published evidence that supposedly proved I was a traitor, all given to them by the police but that was never given to me,” Selen continued.
“It was a blatant conspiracy between the news and the c
ops. They weren’t even shy about it. No one bothered to check if the supposed evidence was true. It was like they didn’t care.” Dani shook his head in disgust, his wavy black bangs swishing on his forehead.
I thought about Department D, their specialty in spreading false information through the media. It was so obvious that they did this. The criminal organization started by my parents was responsible for the pain this family went through. How many more families would there be? I peered at my sister, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing. We felt guilty for something we hadn’t done.
“They called me a terrorist.” Despite the ugly word, her voice continued to hold the numbness of someone completely desensitized. “Because I dared to investigate the case, because I didn’t believe those fake coup documents. And if I didn’t believe them, then I must have been in on it. They acted like I was the one planning to overthrow the government—me, a journalist with a young son, who had never been in trouble, not once, before.” She wrung her bronzed hands in her lap. She was wearing black wide leg pants and a black button-down shirt with her hair loose, not what I expected of a Muslim woman. “The people who did this—to me, to everyone—they’re still in power. No one was arrested for framing us. No one apologized for putting us in jail. I spent two years in prison. Two years. I shared a single toilet with sixty women. There were one thousand of us in a prison meant to hold half that number. Some women slept three to a bed. It was so crowded, we couldn’t breathe—no air, no windows, flies bit us while we slept. I was kept in solitary confinement for three weeks in a cell barely as wide as my reach.” She held out her slender arms. “And Dani…” She hung her head and released the emotion she was holding in, the tears of a broken mother.
Dani wrapped his arm around her. “My uncle took me in, he tried to get my mom out, he hired a lawyer, but then he was harassed. He was brought in by the police, and they held him for more than a week. For nothing. After that, things got bad…for me.” He looked down at his Nikes, black Air Jordans in the middle of a village in France. He rubbed at his forehead, and for the first time, I noticed a scar that stretched into his dark wavy hairline. When he met my eyes, he didn’t need to say more. The abuse was obvious.
“Now we’re here.” Dani clutched his mom’s hand, a silver gemstone ring on every finger. He squeezed with love. “And we must move forward.”
Selen nodded, but in a way that suggested she wanted to believe that more than she really did. I imagined every time she closed her eyes, she was back in that prison, back in that cell the width of her arms, back reliving that fear. I knew what that was like. Only my private prison looked more like a bloody bathroom.
My sister and I exchanged a look and nodded—it was time to say what we’d come here to say. “What if you could get back at the people who did this to you?”
“How? What happened to us goes all the way to the top, to the prime minister of Turkey. How are you going to take him down? Plan your own coup?” Dani asked. “Because I wouldn’t suggest it. It doesn’t end well, even fake ones.”
“No, not the Turkish prime minister. We can’t help you there,” I said, though honestly I wasn’t sure. Once we blew the whistle on Department D, who knew how far the winds of justice would fan? Maybe Department D was hired by Turkey’s top official; maybe there was proof of that somewhere. It could happen, but I couldn’t promise it.
“We’re talking about your ex-husband and Department D,” said Keira, looking intently at Selen. “We’re talking about the people who really did this, who really framed you. What if you could bring them down?”
“How? Your parents worked there, too.”
“Actually, they started the organization,” I said plainly. There was really no way to get around our uncomfortable family connection but the truth. “Then Department D killed them, kidnapped my sister, sent assassins after me, and murdered my best friend. They left me a message promising things were going to get worse. So we have to stop them, and you can help us do that.”
Selen sat back in her chair, the wrinkles in her face, the set of her shoulders showed her years in a Turkish prison. She was used to the world being against her.
“My mother was locked up for not breaking any laws,” Dani pointed out. “Now you want us to actually conspire with you?”
It was like I was asking for the blood in their veins, and maybe I was. My sister had been held for a few months, not two years, and her conditions included queen beds and newly purchased comforters. It was nothing like the horror Selen described. So would I really agree to help a complete stranger after just getting Keira back?
“People are dying. We could be next.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. If we couldn’t convince them, we couldn’t convince anyone. “If you have any evidence against them, anything that could help us, please…”
Selen reached for her son’s arm, squeezing it as she sat up straighter. “My ex-husband’s name is Faruk Onart, though you probably already know that. I’m sure his name was a lie and he wasn’t really Turkish. I think he was born near Russia and spent time in America.”
“Anne, yapma,” Dani said to his mother in Turkish, but she shook her head. They began to argue in their native tongue, and it seemed as though Dani rebuffed his mother’s decision to help, but it was hard to say for certain given that I didn’t understand the language.
My hope lied in Selen’s need for revenge. She was an educated, strong, modern Muslim woman who was hideously betrayed and humiliated by a man who claimed to love her. He married her to control the reporting in her newspaper, and when she didn’t assist his criminal needs, he turned her into not only an accused terrorist but a fool. He took everything: her job, her friends, her home, and most importantly, her son’s safety. I had to have faith that she wanted to strip away her ex-con label and slap it on the back of the man who did this to her.
A lull finally fell on their conversation.
“We have information,” Selen offered, giving her son a do as I say look.
Dani winced, clearly hating the idea, but obeyed his mother. “The day after my mom was arrested, I followed Faruk, my stepfather—though I despise calling him that—and I saw him meet with a man in a suit, not Turkish. Money exchange hands. They were speaking English.” He looked me dead in the eyes, and I caught a sense of hatred as he remembered this scene. “I have it on video.”
My eyes stretched as I fought a smile that wanted to creep across my face. It was exactly what we needed—evidence, real hard evidence. I turned to Keira, whose eyes were just as wide.
“If we give this to you, how do we know our door isn’t going to be kicked in at five in the morning, only this time by the assassins who came after you?” Selen asked, expecting promises I couldn’t make.
“How do you know that won’t happen even if you don’t help us?” It was the depressing truth. “My sister and I already have come to the conclusion that we’re never going to be safe as long as this organization exists. They will keep coming after us. And you will probably always be looking over your shoulder. Unless we bring them down for good.” It was the best I could offer.
Selen nodded. “I’m all right with whatever happens to me. I did this. I chose to write those stories. But what happened to you.” She looked at her son. “I can’t live through that again.”
“And I can’t live through you spending another day in that hell,” Dani replied.
“You can’t expect us to just hand over our evidence to you.” Selen looked at me. “It’s our only protection, our only proof. It’s why we’ve hung on to it.”
“How do we know you won’t destroy it?” Dani asked.
“I understand, and I would probably feel the same way,” said Keira as she reached into her pocket, four inches of Madonna-style jelly bracelets sliding down her wrist as she pulled out her burner phone. We all watched as she swiped at the screen and turned it to face Dani and his mother. On it was the photo of Keira shoved into the back of a classic car in Rome. She swiped to the next
image and displayed the picture of her in captivity, skinny and malnourished, holding a church bulletin in Venice—her proof of life. I didn’t know how often she looked at those pictures, but I imagined it was more often then I would have liked.
“It may not have been a Turkish prison,” Keira went on, staring as Selen, “and it may not have been two years, but I know what these people are capable of. We are not lying to you.”
Selen gripped Dani’s hand for support, as if there was only one thing left to do. “We will give you our evidence.”
“But I want to come with you,” Dani interjected. “I want to see what you’re dragging us into.” His tone turned deadly. “I will not let you hurt my mother.”
He wants to come with us? That was unexpected.
“Sure.” I nodded. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”
“Then our choice is made.” Selen released her grip on her son’s hand, and for the first time, I noticed an expensive gold watch on her wrist. For a boy who was living on the streets a couple of years ago and a woman who recently got out of a prison hellhole, it seemed like an unlikely fashion accessory. Selen noticed my gaze. “It was a gift from my lawyer, when he finally got me out,” she muttered quickly, pushing the watch back under the sleeve of her black blouse.
“We think it’s fake,” Dani added, abruptly rising from his upholstered chair.
It didn’t look fake. But what did I know about fashion?
“You’ll put Faruk behind bars.” He said it like it wasn’t a question.
I stood to meet him. “We will do everything we can to destroy him and everyone he works for.”
Dani nodded, but when he turned to his mother, I saw the doubt in his eyes. He dropped to his knees, clasping her delicate hands like he was at the foot of a queen. “Will you be okay here? We can change our minds. I can stay.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s up to you now to be the strong one, to end this for us. Go with them, and you will get back at the people who did this. Don’t forget that.”
Lies That Bind Page 15