by Camilla Monk
Karl looked up from the half-empty Fanta to gauge me with incredulous eyes. I knew that stare all too well. It was the same one I’d received a couple of years ago upon showing up at a Thai restaurant to meet a guy who told me he was 100 percent sure I couldn’t be legal, but he’d come anyway because it was “a total turn-on.” An expeditious date ensued: We didn’t have much to say to each other. Especially after I pulled out my ID.
Karl’s eyes narrowed. “You know, it’s cool; I understand if you want to be with an older guy.” He looked around the suite. “And he’s rich.”
“Karl, I really am twenty-five, and March is not my sugar daddy!” And if he was, what a terrible investment he’d made so far . . .
He took a sip of Fanta. “I totally understand.”
He didn’t.
I leaned back into the couch’s soft leather and let myself sink in the cushions. “How did a guy like you ever end up being a criminal?”
“My stepfather says we’re victims of social determinism.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“He deals cars.”
In spite of my parents’ teachings about observing the world with an open mind, I raised a suspicious eyebrow.
“Other people’s cars,” Karl clarified. “But it’s not violent. They just take the cars when people aren’t looking, and they resell them afterward. Their insurance covers that.”
Sure. That made it okay. I shook my head with a sigh. “So your stepdad is the one who taught you how to hotwire like that? March didn’t say anything, but I think he was impressed by your technique.”
A cocky grin rewarded my compliment that sparked life in his green eyes. Oh, once he grew out of that lanky, clumsy body, girls would like him . . . a lot. “Yes, he says that I’m crazy, but I have magic hands.”
“You’re not crazy. I think you’re the good kind of weird—”
The phone’s ring made me jump out of my skin. Karl dropped his Fanta on the carpet at the same time that I leaped from the couch and flew into the bedroom to grab the receiver sitting on a nightstand.
On the other end of the line, a heavily accented female voice greeted me. “Mrs. August?”
“Yes, yes, it’s me.”
“Mr. August on the line for you.”
I had to take several breaths to calm the drumming in my chest. “Yes, please, put him on!”
“Of course.”
There was a clicking sound, then a few bips. Then I heard people mumbling to each other in Croatian because, I surmised, something had gone wrong with the transfer. More bipping. Dammit . . .
“Biscuit, I’m on my way. I’ll be here in ten minutes.”
Upon hearing March, a zillion tiny knots instantly loosened in my body. Thank you, Raptor Jesus.
“How did it go?”
There was some continuous background noise—he must be in a car. In his voice too, relief filtered, equal to mine. “Surprisingly well, considering. I’m coming back as fast as possible. Wait for me and don’t move. There’ve been recent developments.”
“What do you mean?”
A cheery Southern drawl burst from the speaker. “It’s gonna be okay; we got you back on the right side of the law!”
Stiles? He was there too? This time I couldn’t contain the joy bubbling inside me, like a backlash to the past hours’ stress. “Okay, I’m waiting, and you’ll tell me everything,” I said excitedly.
“I’m coming for you.” With this, March hung up.
I stood in front of the nightstand for a few seconds, dazed, my heart still pumping fast.
Behind me, Karl balanced his torso forward to rise from the couch with cuffed hands and trotted to the bedroom. “Is it good news?”
“Yeah, I think we’re gonna be okay.”
The wait seemed endless. I cleaned Karl’s Fanta from the carpet to pass time and because I knew March wouldn’t like the stain. Five minutes after that phone call, I felt like I’d been mopping soda with toilet paper for a thousand years—which sounds like a mythological punishment from a perversely creative deity. Until at last there was some rapping at the suite’s doors. I felt each knock from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. Karl and I looked at each other and waited.
A muffled male voice called, “Room service.”
Panic sizzled down my spine when I didn’t recognize March’s voice. My first instinct was to take the gun, which still rested on the bed. Contrary to popular belief, I felt even more scared once I held it firmly in my hands. It felt heavy. Cold. I flipped the safety off with my thumb. Loaded. Cocked. Unlocked.
I swallowed hard and steadied my voice. “We didn’t order anything.”
Outside, I registered a heavy sigh. “Jesus . . . baby, I was joking; it’s me.”
Alex.
Karl’s brow jerked up, his round eyes wordlessly questioning me. Dammit! Of all the people Erwin could have sent to get to me faster than March . . . That old turd sandwich had to have done it on purpose. Just to mess with us a tiny bit more. I took hesitant steps toward the set of double doors and extended shaky fingers to the handle.
The doors came unlocked with a single click. A whiff of the good-guy cologne I knew all too well reached me before I even saw him. Brown leather jacket, worn jeans, white shirt. I didn’t look up at his face. I didn’t want to.
Alex took a step back. He’d seen the CZ in my hand. “Whoa, easy.” He sighed. “You’re becoming too rough even for me.”
I kept my eyes trained on his chest. There were four other men behind him. Jackets, jeans, one in cargo pants. Other agents wearing the same kind of worn, unremarkable clothes. Guys you might pass in the street without ever suspecting they were CIA. “Why isn’t March with you? I know he has a new deal with Erwin, so don’t even try—”
“Cool your jets. I’m only here because I have orders to pick you up. Erwin’s business is his own, and believe me, I’m done with it.”
I summoned the strength to meet his gaze. There was no anger to be found in the soft cinnamon eyes, just some mild exasperation. I knew better than to trust that candid façade though. I moved back.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose tiredly. “Island, I deliver you, and I’m done. I don’t care what happens next . . . who strikes deals with who.”
Through the pounding in my temples, the insidious pain rising in my skull, I tried to keep cool. “Okay. March said he’ll be here in a few minutes. Let’s wait for him and go.”
“Acceptable.”
I nodded, my lips pressed tight.
“Baby?”
Don’t call me baby. Don’t. I bit back the words and just said, “What?”
He smiled. “Can you drop the gun?”
Around the CZ’s grip, my palm was sweaty. I could. I didn’t really want to though. Then again, shooting Alex on the spot might significantly undermine March’s effort to haul us back on the US government’s good side. I retreated inside the suite and slowly lowered it. That was all the good will I felt capable of at the moment.
Next to me, Karl still hadn’t said a word. No unfiltered input on the situation, no request to drink another Fanta before the CIA picked him up. He was staring. Just staring. I followed the direction of his gaze to one of the men accompanying Alex. Big guy, taller than him. No more than forty, with a shaved, balding head. Never seen him. Karl’s brow quivered. He wouldn’t look away.
The guy noticed him, focusing hard gray eyes on him.
They recognized each other.
Whoever that guy was, Karl had seen him before . . . while working for the Crystal Whisperer? He darted fearful eyes at me, as if I were supposed to know what was going on. I didn’t. A rush of terror electrified my limbs, and my fingers tightened around the CZ’s grip. Did Alex know?
Oh, yes, he did.
His eyes briefly fluttered closed, and he shook his head. “Why can it never be easy?”
I’m not sure the question was addressed to me, or anyone else in particular. My legs were paralyzed as I went
through our options and tried to assess how much longer it would take March and Stiles to get here. Alex’s arm moved. Too fast.
I saw the gun in his hand. Four detonations exploded in my ears. I raised my own arm as a reflex, but my fingers remained paralyzed while Karl flew backward and crashed loudly onto the glass coffee table. The second after, Karl lay still on a bed of glass shards, blood pooling on the carpet around him. I pulled the trigger blindly. One of the men cried out and staggered back, and his colleagues drew out their own weapons. Like the crack of a whip, a surge of raw, overwhelming fear set my legs in motion. I spun on my heels and clambered toward the bathroom door. I knew I was trapped; I just thought of hiding, of putting at least a door lock between me and them.
I barely made it past Karl’s lifeless body before I was hauled backward. Someone wrenched the gun from my hand and pulled my hair hard, hands clasped around my legs, my arms. I let out a series of shrill screams, summoned every ounce of strength I possessed, desperate to slip away from them.
Alex roared. “Fuck, give her something!”
A sharp pain cracked in my shoulder, like a powerful sting. I howled louder, harder, until my throat hurt, as if it could delay the inevitable numbness spreading through me. At some point I thought I’d rolled away. No. Someone else had done that, flipped me on my back. I saw Alex’s face, blurry. I tried to claw at it as he picked me up. Bait for Dries. You’re bait for Dries, a little voice repeated in my head.
Until it went quiet.
24
The Little Princess
“Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”
—Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
Whatever they had injected me with didn’t last very long. By the time they dragged me to a car in a backstreet, my mind was clear enough for me to register that I had been handcuffed, blindfolded, and that I was in as deep a shit as could be. The memory of Karl’s lifeless body sent a renewed surge of distress in my brain, and my lungs were struggling for oxygen as the vehicle’s tires screeched on the asphalt.
I had no sense of time or direction. Alex remained silent throughout the ride, but I knew he was here, no doubt in the driver’s seat—I recognized the constant accelerations and rough turns that characterized his driving, until it all came to a stop. I was taken out of the car with surprising care, compared to the violence with which they’d taken me from the hotel room. Alex’s scent no longer lingered; he was gone. For now.
Someone undid my blindfold with rough gestures, pulling at my hair in the process. At first, everything was just blurry sequins glittering all around me. Faces came into focus. I shook my head and stared blearily at the two armed men flanking me, then at our surroundings. My best guess was that the end of the world had occurred at some point during my kidnapping, and I’d awakened aboard mankind’s last hope for survival: a massive flying saucer.
Okay, maybe the ship was going nowhere because it was in fact an abandoned building planted in the middle of a forest. We stood on the ruins of a patio atop the saucer’s first floor. In the center of what I surmised to have once been a garden, pines and cypresses soared toward the sky, completely out of control. Above us, hundreds of identical square windows—most of them broken—lined a circular platform supported by concrete pillars.
Sandwiched between the bald guy Karl had recognized and a second, younger man, I was led inside the building, through a lobby that looked like a war zone, and up a long incurved ramp leading to the second level I had seen from outside. We made our way through a decrepit hallway circling around the saucer. Doors lined the opposite wall, some opening to what must have been bedrooms. Empty bed frames and broken chairs still rested on the dusty floor, as if their owners had fled and might someday return to this rotting dream.
I didn’t really mind the atmosphere itself, and I’d have found the paint peeling off from the walls oddly romantic hadn’t it been for my dire circumstances. This would certainly fit March’s personal definition of hell, though. Wherever he was, now would have been be a good time to barge in and shoot everyone except me.
I held my breath as one of the doors creaked open. So, Alex hadn't been far after all. His brown curls were damp with perspiration. He raked a hand in his hair, combing it back. When he walked up to me, I inched away from the reek of sweat overpowering soapy cologne. His hand reached out for me, clasped around the nape of my neck. I jerked back to no avail as he brought my face closer and pressed his lips to mine.
I had suffered through some not-so-great kisses during my early dating experiments, but they were nothing compared to this. Whatever I had felt when Alex used to kiss me, what little chemistry had ever bound us . . . it was gone, and when his tongue forced its way inside my mouth, slithered against mine, nausea swelled at the back of my throat. I tried to break the kiss and bit his tongue, hard enough to taste the metallic tang of blood. He drew back, and I saw his arm rise. I braced myself, but his hand stopped in midair. He lowered it with a deep breath. In his eyes, the anger had evaporated already; they were as soft as ever.
“For old times’ sake,” he said.
I clenched my jaw tight, since all I could feel building in my mouth were insults, and I knew I had to keep my cool. I had to get through to him somehow. “What is this about?”
He cupped my jaw and ran his thumb across my lips. “You don’t get it, do you?”
I shook his grip off, held on to my rage to help me focus and keep the fear at bay. “Enlighten me then. Does Erwin know about this? Or is it some shitty stunt to bait Dries so you can kill him yourself?”
Alex indulged in a chortle. “Erwin can go fuck himself. He’s days away from retirement. And Dries . . . he didn’t die today. Fine, he’ll die tomorrow. He’s done; he just doesn’t realize it yet.”
Gerone’s words came back to me. Hadn’t he said the same? He’d called Dries an old man who couldn’t see he had served his purpose. He’d said Dries had to go . . . and Alex seemed to already know that Dries had narrowly escaped death earlier today.
What did I have to lose at that point? I decided to tip my hand and see how Alex would react. I took a circular look around the room, at him and his men. “You’re all Frumentarii.” I jerked my chin at Alex. “You, you’re walking in your father’s footsteps. He was a frumentarius too, and Dries murdered him and your mother. And now that Anies wants to take Dries down, you’re all too happy to help, aren’t you?” I went on, fixated on the slow expansion of Alex’s pupils as he listened to me. “Gerone is part of the plan too. Dries took the heat for the plane bombing and kept everyone busy while Gerone got ready for his pièce de résistance in Rangiroa. And now Anies no longer needs Dries, and he’s becoming too much trouble anyway. So he wants him dead.”
I held my breath, praying that Alex would let something slip, help me fill the largest blank in this picture: how the hell did Lion king Anies and faceless mad scientist Lucca Gerone connect, and why would the Lions try to blow up the Poseidon Dome?
Alex mimicked some lazy clapping. “Bravo. See? You get it like a big girl.”
No, dammit. I did not get it, and that was the problem!
“So what am I in all this?” I asked again. “Bait?”
He gave a weary shrug. “I didn’t lie to you, you know. I’m just here to pick you up and deliver you. Honestly, you’re lucking out. When this is over, Dries and March are gonna end up in a dozen bags”—he rolled his eyes—“but God forbid anyone touches the little princess.”
I let that sink in. Deeply. Gerone too had promised March I’d be safe, and back in Cape Saint Francis, Alex had warned me to get away from the house. He’d requested satellite tracking on us. I was starting to understand that even then, he had been working on recovering me alive and unharmed for Anies . . . because brothers shared everything?
I held out my handcuffed wrists to Alex. “Take these off.”
He smirked. “I think we’ll leave them on, if that’s oka
y with you.”
“Take them off. Or I’ll have to tell Anies I wasn’t exactly treated like a princess.” I studied Alex’s reactions to each word, the way his lips thinned. “I’ll have to bring up those impulses you seem to have trouble reining in.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. Behind him, the bald guy Karl had recognized crossed his arms. From the looks of it, I’d just hit the bull’s-eye, and we were about to know exactly how much my dear uncle valued his little princess.
A whole lot.
I tried to control my surprise and feign cool detachment as Alex fished a key from his back pocket and freed my wrists from the steel cuffs. I wouldn’t be going anywhere though: around me, baldie and his two colleagues moved closer, like the bars of a cage.
Alex considered me thoughtfully. “I always knew you couldn’t be that innocent. No one ever is.”
“Not even Poppy?” I shot back, wanting to hurt him, to wrestle his true self out. “What’s gonna happen to her if you switch sides? Surely you can’t imagine Erwin is that dumb—”
“Island, you mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”
It was as if his face had suddenly turned into a mask of wax. No life in his gaze, just a blank expression. Threatening in a way no snarl could have been. I had a feeling that my status as Anies’s very special snowflake wouldn’t weigh much in the precarious balance of Alex’s mind if I kept taking jabs at his sister. I decided to leave that rock alone, be it only to live through dawn.
“So what now?” I inquired, keeping my tone casual.
“We wait. Our little party back there attracted more attention than I’m comfortable with, so we’ll have to lay low until my colleagues pick us up.” He walked to a broken window and leaned by its dilapidated frame. Outside, a gust of wind whispered through the pine trees, making the heavy branches shiver. “Do you know what this place is?”
“No.”
“The town is called Krvavica—pardon my French—and this is an abandoned children’s hospital. Spooky shit.” When I remained silent, he prodded on with a humorless smile. “Are you afraid of ghosts?”