by Nina Post
Romane did the same thing with her right hand and Gaelen slapped it to the left. Furious, Romane seized the back of Gaelen’s right wrist and pulled toward the door, yelling “Get out. Get out of here!”
Gaelen twisted Romane’s wrist until she could lock down on top of Romane’s left hand, then forced her sister’s wrist to the right. Romane cried out and spun under Gaelen’s grip, facing the opposite direction, arm over her shoulder.
“Let go of me!” Romane yelled, trying to regain her balance. Gaelen knew her sister’s arm would be hurting like hell.
“Shh, little puppet,” Gaelen said calmly. “We’re in the Fairmont. Mustn’t upset the other guests.”
She grabbed Romane’s hair and yanked it down. Her sister landed on her butt on the carpet, losing her wind, then she scrambled up, lunged at Gaelen and wrapped her hands around her throat.
Gaelen clasped her hands together as though in prayer, spread her elbows to form a wedge, and used the muscles in her back and shoulders — wiry and strong from playing squash at the athletic club — to drive up her arms between Romane’s forearms and push her sister’s hands away. She was the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar concern. It wouldn’t do at all to have handprints on her neck. People would whisper that she liked to be choked during sex, but she had far too much respect for herself to engage in such behavior, and more than enough sex drive to render such a dangerous game unnecessary.
Gaelen pushed Romane onto the bed, amused because her sister thought that Jude would be doing that, not her sister.
“Enough, cat’s paw,” Gaelen said. “I always enjoy an opportunity to see you in high dudgeon, but I have a call scheduled.”
It was true — she had to talk with her VP of Marketing to review the annual trade show schedule and budget. Jude’s area — or rather, his sinecure. Tomorrow, however, she would call the buyer and find out if they were ready to make the initial payment to secure their access to the information. She made a mental note to have Yuji research other potential buyers for the information, especially the direct competitors of the current buyer.
“I fucking hate you,” Romane said from the bed.
“You worship me, and hate yourself.”
Gaelen went to the door, put on her scarf and coat, and let herself out. She and her sisters had never gotten along. Romane fought her over everything and wanted whatever she had, even if Romane didn’t want it herself. Their grievances against each another would barely fit within the paper used to print a full leather-bound set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And Cate, the youngest, their father’s favorite, always so worried about everything. When Cate was younger — and for all Gaelen knew, it was still the case — she was so crippled with worry over the terrible consequences that could arise from the smallest action that she could barely function. She must have inherited that from some pathetic distant relative, because no one else in the family was like that. Certainly not their father, let alone their mother.
Romane was taken care of. As for Cate? Gaelen considered it as she exited the elevator and pushed out through the revolving door of the hotel. She had a suspicion that little miss fret may become even more of a problem than their begrudging sister.
Chapter 19
Cate hadn’t expected to be in San Francisco this long, and knew if she stayed any longer, she’d have to rent a place or stay at Benjamin’s. She didn’t want to stay, and she didn’t want to leave, either.
At a knock on the door, she threw a white robe on over her towel and looked through the peephole. It was Marcus, the front desk employee who delivered Noah’s boxes when she first got there. She slid off the chain and opened the door.
“Good evening, Ms. Lyr.” Marcus reached out his arm to give her a folded piece of paper. “Someone left an urgent message for you.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” he said. His face was perfectly neutral. “But I’m to verify that you read it.”
Cate accepted the note, stopping for a split-second to admire how elegantly her name was written on the outside of the paper. She unfolded the note:
Pack and leave right now. They’re coming for you. Car in front in five minutes. Take it.
“Is this some kind of joke?” she asked him, hand dropping to her side. “Did someone give this to you in person? What did they look like?”
“It was just a bike messenger, one I’ve seen before.”
Cate caught a subtle trace of a scent that didn’t belong to her or, she presumed, to Marcus. She held the note under her nose. Perfume. Though she couldn’t say exactly why, Cate decided to act on the instructions. “I’ll be checking out now.”
While Cate waited at the curb for the car, a lean man with dark hair watched from a hotel room across the street. When he saw a Cadillac pull up to the hotel’s driveway, he tensed and focused. He watched a figure get out of the car and cursed. “No, no, no, not her,” he murmured to himself.
He made a call. “Michael, it’s Jake. I see Erin. Yes, Erin. Who’s closer to her, you or Xavier? Then you’d better hurry.”
A late-model Cadillac sedan pulled in alongside the entrance. A young woman with a dark-haired bob left the car and strode over to Cate, flashing a big smile, which Cate distrusted immediately. The driver had creamy skin, pale jade eyes, and a slight overbite. Cate detected a kind of cloaked fervency and took a step back. Maybe it was just dedication to her job. Maybe it was her first day. Maybe she was over-caffeinated.
“May I take your bag, Ms. Lyr?” the driver asked, popping the trunk on the remote and reaching out for Cate’s carry-on.
Cate didn’t move, and held on to her bag. When the driver realized that Cate was apprehensive, she came closer. “Benjamin sent me,” she said, with a tilt of her head. Cate narrowed her eyes, and after a moment, the driver stepped forward until she was only a few inches away. She leaned over toward the bag as though to pick it up, then with lightning speed, stuck a syringe in Cate’s arm. The driver pulled her over to the open trunk and maneuvered her body inside, then shut the trunk with a solid thud.
Whatever the driver shot in her was like a heavy mattress smothering her fear and anger. The car started moving, which made her want to throw up, and she had a bad taste at the back of her throat. Pay attention, she told herself, and remembered the scene in Sneakers where Robert Redford told David Strathairn’s blind character what kind of noises he’d heard in the trunk so Strathairn was able to determine where he was taken.
The ride became rougher and Cate heard gravel under the tires. Her heart raced. Did Benjamin really send her? Was this woman going to kill her?
Goddammit, Benjamin, she thought. Maybe he was her matador, luring her from her place of safety to certain death. She should have stayed in Istanbul, because this was what happened when you left the house. This was what happened when you went back to San Francisco. And this was what happened when you helped someone you owed.
If she died — and she was used to immediately jumping to the worst conclusion — if she died, in the trunk or after someone took her out, would she see her father again? Her family? Noah, Benjamin? Argos, Vulcan, Mercury? Would she see them again in another lifetime, when they were all different people, working out the same things? Would she get another chance? Had she done anything good, anything worthwhile?
Time passed. It was so hard to pay attention. She might have passed out; it was difficult to tell.
Eventually, the car came to an abrupt stop, brakes screeching, and Cate dug her nails into the carpet. If this asshole was going to stick her in a trunk to kill her later, she could at least have the decency not to drive like a sadistic cab driver. She tried to control her breathing and fought to stay alert. She put all of her effort into listening, but her senses were dulled and all she could discern was another car, maybe, and a fragment of tense conversation.
“-ake, it’s Michael. Yes, I … in time …. let Erin go. Not my priority.”
And then she started to laugh, because it was suddenly ab
surdly funny that her father banished her, that she got into a car accident and lost her baby, that her fiancé took one look at her in the hospital and cut his losses, that she moved to Belgium, that she was a thief, that she watched her father die then missed his funeral, that Mohini was dead. It was hilarious that she had always been so afraid of what could happen, and that she was currently locked in the trunk of a Cadillac.
Her stomach hurt, she was laughing so hard, and that’s how the man found her when he opened the trunk and peered inside.
Cate wound down, took a deep breath, and sat up to take stock of the situation. Her head swam, probably from laughing with limited oxygen, and her vision malfunctioned. When her sight cleared, she saw the man who opened the trunk. He had high-set cheekbones and chestnut brown hair that fell past the collar of a black coat. A thin white scar angled up along his face to the outside corner of his right brow.
His mouth twitched in a smile. “What’s so funny?”
She shrugged. “Life. Also, I’m in a trunk.” It wasn’t how she expected her day to go, really. There was a lot more in between those things, but he didn’t need to know that.
He reached out a hand. “I apologize for the delay. The traffic was absolutely diabolical. May I take you to the airport, Ms. Lyr?”
She tilted her head at the trace of an accent, but couldn’t place it. “I already fell for that once and look where it got me.” She ignored his hand. He dropped it and gave her a gracious nod. She crawled out of the trunk and had every intention of putting her feet on the ground, but fell onto the pavement instead.
“Ow.” Her control over her limbs was numbed.
He helped her up, then onto the backseat, facing out. The door stayed open.
“Who are you?” she asked him. “And who the hell put me in that trunk?”
“My name is Michael Radin, and I am in statione manebant.”
She had no idea what that meant, but hey, he got her out of the trunk, and hadn’t tried to stick her with a syringe yet. Things were looking up.
“I believe you are familiar with the town car service I own, which, to be clear, does not employ the woman who so rudely kidnapped you at the hotel.”
She had used the service several times but never thought she would ever meet the owner.
“What just happened?”
He smiled. “I knew where she was going, so I found her and then I … derailed her. I know we haven’t met, not that you would recall, but I’m the one who took you to the hospital after your accident. You were wearing that same locket, I remember.” He bowed slightly. “It’s a pleasure to see that you’re in good health. Considering.”
“You took me to the hospital? I thought … never mind.” She had always presumed that a passer-by called 911 when they saw her destroyed car.
“We have to go.” Michael opened the door to the backseat and gestured for her to get inside. “Please.”
Trusting him could be a mistake, but she tentatively believed him about taking her to the hospital after the ceremony — how else would he know? — so she got in. With a fluid efficiency of movement, Michael hurried around the front of the car, then positioned himself in the driver’s seat.
“Here are your boarding passes.” He angled his arm back to hand her a leather pouch, which she put in her small bag.
“When you arrive at Ataturk,” Michael said as he pulled back onto the road, “look for a man in the arrivals area. He’ll be wearing a red shirt with a white tie. When you say ‘dark wood,’ he will reply with ‘blissful mountain,’ and then he will drive you to Eskişehir. The driver will take you to a pre-arranged drop-off point two miles from the house. You’re to walk the rest of the way. You can’t tell anyone that you’re leaving, or where you’re going. The address is in that pouch.”
Michael wound expertly through congested traffic. She heard a melodious ring, and he checked the screen of his phone. He answered, paused, and handed the phone back to her. “It’s for you.”
Of course it is, she thought, putting the phone to her ear. “Yes?”
“They won’t give up, Cate.” A woman’s voice, low-pitched, refined, and careful.
Cate’s heart jittered. Was this who left her the note back at the hotel?
“These factions, they think you appeared in the original vision, and to be honest, I think you did, too. Some of them believe you’re going to bring about the events in the books, or are somehow involved.” Cate heard an intake of breath then an exhalation, like the woman was smoking.
“There’s what? Factions? What factions?” Cate asked her. Her hotel room, ransacked. That feeling she was being watched, but marking it up to her anxiety.
“They’ve been watching you your whole life. Talking to you, approaching you, following you, trying to take you.”
Cate jolted at this. Those strange people who talked to her when she was little — little, and out with her mother. Even later, during high school and college. They were in these factions?
“But this has all grown beyond my ability to protect you,” the woman said. “It’s safer for you to return to Turkey and sequester yourself there. Do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone where you’re going.”
The driver weaved the Town Car through traffic toward SFO with smooth precision.
“The Zaanics books are known beyond the family. I’m sure you realize that by now.”
She knew because Mort told her. Someone who should have no idea that the language or the books existed had told her that other people knew about both. Another exhalation.
“Benjamin was right: you need to learn as much of the language as possible, as quickly as possible.”
“Why? And how do you know Benjamin?”
The woman bypassed this, too. “You need to know your role in the vision. You are the true steward of the language, not Gaelen. But don’t put undue trust in Benjamin. There is more to him than you know, and there is more to the family than you know. More to my family.”
Cate’s breath caught. She curled her fingers over her locket and took a risk. “Mom?”
There was no reply. Cate was afraid she’d hung up.
“I did it to keep you safe,” the woman said with a new edge of urgency. “They wouldn’t leave you alone, not since you were born. I had to find a way to be on the inside, to infiltrate the most dangerous of the factions. And that meant giving up any normal life of my own.”
“What do they want from me?” Cate’s stomach plummeted as the car sped down a steep hill.
“Listen. Everyone in your life has their own agenda with the Zaanics books. Translate the books to protect yourself. There is a war happening around you. Don’t stop now.”
There was a pause, then a click.
“Hello?” Cate said. “Are you there? Hello? Please, answer my — ”
But the woman was gone.
Cate fell back against the seat and closed her eyes. “Escargots,” she muttered, adopting Noah’s habit.
“Not all of these groups are dangerous,” she heard, and opened her eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“She’s trying to protect you,” Michael said, eyes flicking up to the rear-view mirror, “so she’s focusing on the threats.”
Cate shot forward. “You know about this?”
“I’m in one of those factions.” He put up a hand. “But we’re on your side, promise.”
Cate knew damn well that people you thought were on your side could turn into threats. They could hurt you much more than people you knew weren’t on your side. So that promise meant little to her, despite the intention behind it. Michael had taken her to the hospital, if that were true, and got her out of a trunk, but her father had done a lot more for her, and he nearly destroyed her.
“Which faction? What are you talking about?” Cate leaned towards the front seat.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, you know.”
He was going to tell her or he wasn’t, and she was in no mood for games. But she played along. “C�
��mon. You just popped me from the trunk of a Cadillac,” Cate said, with a grin and a shrug. She kept leaning forward.
“All right.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’m in a group that’s called Gochu Cherdaþi, or Separate Truths. We believe in and guard an oral history of the vision that was passed down from Jean Dumont.”
The scribe. She wanted to sort all of this out in her head, but there wasn’t time. She just needed to get as many answers as she could before he dropped her off at the terminal.
“Jean Dumont, the Zaanics scribe?”
“Yes,” he replied.
She felt around in her bag and found the card, which she handed to Michael. “Do you know this guy?”
Michael glanced at Jake Dumont’s card. “Yes, Jake is in the same group.” He handed back the card. “We’re running a tight schedule, Ms. Lyr. Your flight leaves soon. I need to get you to the airport in time for you to get through security and to your gate. But I’ll tell you what I can before we get there. We still have a few minutes.”
“Okay, so Jake is in your group. Who else?”
“Xavier. Jake, as you know. Capri Seenan. I believe you know her. A few others.”
“Capri. Gregory Severn’s housekeeper.”
“Mm-hm.”
She let out a long breath. She wanted to think about that, but needed more answers. Because answers were rare birds.
“That woman told me some of these factions think I’m going to bring about the events in the books.”
“She’s right: at least one of the Zaanics factions believes that.”
The Zaanics factions. Even though Mort informed her that other people knew about the books, it still stunned her. Her father never said anything about it, and neither had Gaelen.
“And what does your group think about me?”
“We think you’re going to stop these events from happening,” Michael told her. “So we look out for you. And we’re more benevolent,” he said with a twitch of his mouth. “If we had a motto, it would be, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to your friend.’”