“This is a good lesson for you,” she grins down at me. “Never trust the enemy, especially when she leads you to believe you’re her equal. Because peanut, you are far from my equal.”
Vanessa pushes down hard on the umbrella. I can’t breathe. I can’t speak. I feel my eyes bulging out.
“Not the most triumphant day for the Wilder family,” she says. “First Ryan, now you. I get the feeling lovely little Natalie would be a more worthy opponent.”
As she talks, I grope blindly, hoping to find a weapon. My fingers make contact with something long and pointed. The end of the black umbrella. I barely have the strength to grasp the tip of the umbrella but I manage to swing it up at Vanessa and tap her on the shoulder. She looks up and I swing harder. This time the handle hits her right in the nose.
“Ow ow ow ow!” she howls, clasping both hands around her nose. I sit up and Vanessa falls backward, her head hitting the ground hard.
“Ow ow ow ow!” she howls again.
I scramble to my feet and flee to the kitchen. I slam the door closed and prop a chair against the handle. I lean forward, grip my hands against my knees, and try to calm down. My instinct is to get out of this ironically named safe house and run as far away as possible, but I can’t leave Irina and I have to find out where Ryan is. I have no choice but to go back into the living room. Which means neutralizing and interrogating Vanessa. And I can do that. I am her equal. She had the element of surprise but I constantly outwitted, out-jumped, out-gadgeted and outfought her.
I stand up straight and my breathing returns to normal. I look around the kitchen for items I can use to defend myself should Vanessa instigate another battle. There’s so much to choose from. There’s an old kettle, a frying pan, a meat tenderizer, a pizza slicer, an apple corer, a tin tray with star-shaped cookie cutters. I pick up a spatula. I’m armed and dangerous.
Vanessa doesn’t stand a chance.
I reach for the kitchen door and the handle explodes in a shower of splintered wood. I scream and stagger backward. The chair falls forward and the door swings open. Vanessa stands in the doorway, the gun in her hand, her nose starting to turn purple.
“Remember the lesson about never trusting the enemy?” she says with what I have quickly come to recognize as Classic Vanessa Condescension. “That also applies when she tells you she fired every bullet.”
There it is. That smug superiority. I throw the spatula straight at Vanessa’s face. Without taking her eyes from mine, she lifts the gun and fires at the utensil.
Click.
This time she really is out of bullets. If there was ever an occasion to seize the moment, this is it. I go to grab the frying pan from the stove but Vanessa moves faster. She whips the metal pan from the burner and does one of her long graceful lunges straight at me. I see the pan fly at my face and I do one of my chaotic jumps, throwing myself out of the pan’s path, and land on the kitchen table. I feel it sway under my weight.
Vanessa swings the pan at my ankles but I jump up and over it. As I land, one of the table legs snaps. I propel myself off the table just before it breaks and leap onto the top of the big red fridge and, from there, onto the shelves at the back of the kitchen. I cling to the top shelf with one hand and try to get a toehold on the middle shelf.
“You look like a monkey hanging up there, peanut,” says Vanessa. “A dirty, smelly monkey.”
“That’s sweet, Blabby,” I reply, and throw the contents of a glass sugar jar at her. She waves her frying pan at the oncoming cloud of sugar, but from her coughing and spluttering, it’s clear some of the grains hit their target. Encouraged, I grab the next jar from the shelf and douse her with flour.
“Stop it,” she squeals.
“Sure thing, honey,” I say, and, of course, throw the honey jar at her. She waves her pan at the oncoming honey. Dumb move, Duchess of Cambridge. The pan smashes against the honey jar, causing the contents to land on her head.
“It’s in my hair,” she screeches, and drops the frying pan.
When I first met Vanessa Dominion in the dim distant past of twelve minutes ago, she was a vision of icy cool. Now, her nose is a deep shade of red, her shimmering blond hair is coated in honey, her chic black cocktail dress is covered in flour, and her enviable poise has entirely deserted her.
“Nobody beats me in the kitchen,” I say, savoring every syllable. (It’s a line from an old action movie my dad watches every time it’s on cable, but I feel like I just made it my own.)
I know what I have to do now. I have to overpower and subdue Vanessa. I have to tie her up and hide her away. Then I have to get Irina to safety and find Ryan. It would be a lot for a lesser spy, but I feel up to the challenge.
I leap—like a young gazelle rather than a dirty, smelly monkey—off the shelves and reach for the frying pan she foolishly discarded.
But as I hurtle toward Vanessa, she spins around, lashes out her leg, and kicks open the fridge door. It flies backward and hits me full in the face.
“Remember that time at your parents’ house when you hit me with the fridge door?” Vanessa says as I fall. “This looks like it hurt quite a bit more,” she says. “I certainly intended it to.”
I see a blond blur above me. I can’t focus on her face. I’m not sure where I am. I can’t keep my eyes open.
“That’s right, peanut,” I hear an echoey voice say. “You go to sleep. It’ll all be better in the morning. For me. When your mummy sees me take her crown. But for now, oleya nagusu moomane . . .”
Wait, what?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Don’t Leave Me Hanging
“Don’t scream,” says a voice. “Don’t cry. Don’t freak out. Listen to me. Focus on the sound of my voice. Open your eyes slowly.”
Is that Ryan? It sounds like Ryan. But what would Ryan be doing here in the kitchen of the safe house? I attempt to open my left eye. It requires more effort than I imagined, and now that it’s open, it hurts. A lot. I try to blink the water out of my eye so I can see straight but I feel like my head is swimming and there’s a roaring in my ears. As I slowly regain consciousness, I become aware of an odor. It’s a hot-garbage-on-a-humid-day kind of smell, and I feel like I’m going to gag.
“Are you okay?” Ryan’s voice says.
“I don’t know,” I try to say. My mouth feels like it’s filled with sawdust. My throat stings when I swallow.
“I need you to stay calm for me,” Ryan says. “I know this looks bad but I’m going to get us out of here, I swear.”
The uncharacteristic urgency in his voice blows away my cobwebs. I open both eyes and focus. Ryan’s face is inches from mine. His hair is sticking straight up. Except it isn’t . . .
Ryan is hanging upside down. His hands are tied behind his back. The rope binding his ankles together is suspended from a metal hook attached to a long silver rail filled with similar hooks. The other hooks have nothing hanging from them, but I’m guessing from the dried red blood splashed across the dirty white floor and the dirtier white walls, those hooks used to have things hanging from them. Now there’s only Ryan and me, dangling in what I very much hope is a disused meat storage facility. Even though there are no cow carcasses here, the odor of meats past hangs in the air. Once again, my throat constricts. I feel like I’m going to throw up, but if I do, I’m going to be sick down my own face. The thought of that makes me feel even more sick. And then I think about who put me here.
Vanessa.
I don’t feel any less sick, but now it’s accompanied by a burning rage. She did this to Ryan. What’s she done to Irina? Where’s Strike?
What did she say to me before I blacked out?
“How long have we been here?” I ask Ryan.
“I don’t know,” he says. “You were still out when I woke up. Are you hurt? Did you see who brought you here? Have you seen Abby?”
Ryan’s voice is getting shaky. He starts trying to squirm his way out of the ropes that hold him. I watch his face redden as he swings back a
nd forth on the hook like the hand of an old grandfather clock.
“Ryan, take it easy,” I say.
“She must be so scared,” he says. “How could I let this happen?”
“It’s not your fault,” I say. Just when I thought it was not possible to hate Vanessa Dominion any more than I already do, she ascends to a new level of evil. Vanessa knew exactly what she was doing by locking me in a room with Ryan.
“She doesn’t see the world like we do,” Ryan moans. “She’s so trusting, so childlike.”
“Huh?” I say.
“I know you never liked her. All the times she tried to reach out to you and you threw it back in her face. Why doesn’t Bridget like me? That’s what she used to say to me, and she always had tears in her eyes when she said it. And now she’s gone. She could be anywhere. She could be . . .”
He can’t finish his sentence and I can’t make him feel worse by doing it for him.
Ryan strains against the ropes knotted around his wrists and ankles. He keeps moving from side to side, trying to make the rope fray against the hook. What should I do here? Do I tell him the truth about Vanessa? He’s only just discovered he has a heart. I can’t break it already. But if I don’t tell him, he’ll be driven mad by the sudden inexplicable disappearance of his girlfriend.
I have to choose how deeply I want to scar my brother.
Well played, Vanessa.
“Ryan, stop wriggling on the hook like a worm,” I say.
“Start wriggling,” he shouts at me. “Do something. We’ve got to get out of here and find Abby.”
“That’s what I want, too,” I say, and I’m not lying. “But let’s think this through logically. Where were you when she vanished? What’s the last thing you remember?”
The wriggling ceases.
“Abby wanted to go to Chinatown,” he says. “She was on the platform. I jumped the turnstiles because the train was about to leave. The subway ticket guy shouted after me that I was in big trouble. When we got to our station and we were out in the street, I lost Abby in the crowds. I tried to run after her and then I don’t know what happened; everything went black.” Ryan goes silent for a second and then says, “I should have paid the fare. We could have caught another train. I put a target on both of our backs.”
“You think the subway people are behind this?” I say. “Taking Abby, tracking me down, hanging us on hooks?”
“I’m not from here,” he bawls. “I don’t know how they do things.”
Ryan goes back to swinging and wriggling. His exertions seem to make the knots tighter.
A sneaky thought pops into my head. “What if she’s seeing someone else?” I say.
“What?” he groans.
“You’re right, I don’t care for Blabby, but we’re just exploring possibilities here. What if she used the free trip to New York to hook up—no pun intended—with the other person she’s seeing? Not that I’m saying there is one, but if there is, wouldn’t that explain her random disappearance?”
“The pressure of blood on your upside-down brain has made you go mental,” says Ryan. “Not a word of what you just said was anywhere near sane.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I say. “Because you know every little thing about Miss Abigail Rheinhardt. You know every little thing about who she knows, you know every member of her family and every one of her friends and you know for an absolute flying certainty she doesn’t have a boyfriend in New York she never told you about. A boyfriend who would be capable of going to extreme lengths to get you and me, the little sister who never liked her, out of the way.”
“That’s crazy,” says Ryan. But he says it quietly, as if he’s thinking about it. And that’s all I wanted to do. I just wanted to sow a few seeds of doubt and let Ryan’s imagination bring forth a beautiful garden of paranoia and suspicion.
“I mean, how . . . ,” I hear him say. “I mean, I’d know if . . .”
“’Cause it’s not like people you meet online ever lie about themselves,” I say, deliberately overdoing it. “Everyone online tells the absolute truth. No one has a hidden agenda. No one keeps secrets. No one’s so blinded by someone they don’t know claiming to like them that they believe everything that person says.”
“Shut up,” shouts Ryan. I know I’ve hit a nerve. I know his fear is now tinged with speculation.
“But maybe I’m wrong,” I say mildly.
“I would know if she was lying,” he says. “Wouldn’t I?”
We hang in silence from our respective hooks. Ryan’s mind is, I imagine, swarming with the most horrifying thoughts. He’s probably replaying his last few weeks with Abby/Blabby/Vanessa and starting to question everything he took for granted. He’s probably feeling like the biggest sucker of all time. Good. That’s how I want him to feel. Because the alternative—finding out he’s the pawn of an ambitious criminal who drugged him, then hung him on a hook—is way worse. He’d never be able to trust anyone again. I know a little about how that feels. I don’t recommend it.
“What about your secrets, Bridget?” Ryan suddenly says.
“My what now?” I squeak, taken aback.
“We never talked about where you went all those times you snuck out at night. Or how you suddenly developed this tough, confrontational personality. How’d all that happen, Bridget?”
Ah. I didn’t want to tell Ryan the hideous truth about his appalling girlfriend, but should I tell him the exciting truth about me? We’re stuck in this smelly white room hanging upside down from hooks. It’s not like we have anything else to do. I take a second to decide the simplest way to explain it to him. I breathe in, which is a mistake because it’s noxious.
“I—”
“Do you hear that?” Ryan hushes me with a gesture.
I listen. Footsteps and muffled voices, both of them getting louder. The sound of a thick metal chain being dragged from the handle of a door. The sound of a key in a lock.
“Oh God,” says Ryan.
It’s Vanessa. I know it’s Vanessa. She’s come to gloat, come to luxuriate in her superiority over me, come to crush what’s left of Ryan’s heart.
From my upside-down position, I see the metal door open. A cold wind rushes in and overpowers the smell.
“Nice to see you guys hanging out,” says Joanna.
“Some people will do anything to avoid going to the Brooklyn Flea,” says Sam Gunnery.
“Gunnery,” I snarl. “I asked you to do one thing. When I get down from here, I’m kicking your butt.”
“Fair enough,” he says, unworried. “But maybe first you want to thank me and this little dude for tracking you down.”
Sam squats and holds a closed fist inches from my upside-down face. He opens it to reveal a long-lost friend.
“Red!” I gasp. “Oh, Red, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Who’s Red?” I hear Ryan say.
“The love of her life,” Joanna says.
She starts to tug at Ryan’s ropes, and as she does, she casually says, “So you know your sister’s a spy, right?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That Little Gang of Mine
“Bridget?” I hear Ryan call after me as I stumble out of the abandoned meat place into the chill of a New York Saturday morning.
“Is it true? What she’s saying, is it for real?”
I know Ryan’s having to process a lot of new disturbing information. For example: he doesn’t really know his girlfriend. For another example: she might have used him to get to New York and then abandoned him on a crowded street. He has to consider Joanna’s revelation that I am the offspring of two spies and still have ties to the family business.
“It’s complicated,” I tell him. “But yes, that’s my secret and now it’s yours.” I scowl at Joanna and Sam. “Do a better job than those two,” I say to Ryan. He looks shell-shocked and I don’t blame him, but at least he’s safe. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to worry about. It’s been hours since Vanessa sh
owed me the literal door. She could be anywhere. Irina could be anywhere. Strike could be anywhere. What do I do? Who do I try to find first? Which birth parent can I actually save? I feel my teeth start to chatter and I realize I’m freezing. Vanessa did me the huge favor of removing my tourist garb, but all she left me was a white T-shirt and jeans.
And all of a sudden, I’m enveloped with warmth.
“Here,” says Sam, and I realize he’s given me his hoodie.
I shrug it off and kick it back at him. Not my smartest move because—I don’t know if I mentioned—I’m freezing. But I’m also mad at him, and with good reason: he ran when he should have stayed and found Strike, and he betrayed a confidence. Sure, Joanna probably already knew I was a spy, but he never should have confirmed it. If I have to keep secrets, everybody has to keep secrets.
Sam bends down to pick up his hoodie. “I don’t have cooties,” he says.
“Beg to differ,” I retort, and yes, I know I’m being harsh, but this kid has a way of getting under my skin.
He blinks at me. “I let you down,” he says. “I freaked out. We’re not all spies.”
I feel myself soften toward him.
“And I came back for you,” he says. “That’s got to count for something.”
“You came back . . .” I look at my watch. It’s ten minutes before nine on Saturday morning. Last time I saw Gunnery it was late on Friday afternoon. “Fifteen hours later.” It might even be more. Numbers are not my strong point.
“He tried to sell the marble to some dude he owes a ton of money,” Joanna suddenly says.
“Shut up,” Sam growls at Joanna.
“Username tedb,” I say, giving Sam my best steely glare. “I remember.”
His cheeks redden. “That’s not what happened.” He pauses and grimaces. “That’s not all that happened. I was going to use Red to settle the debt . . .”
“Who’s Red?” I hear Ryan ask.
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