by Mari Carr
“Then what do you want?” She wandered to check the view from the window in the adjacent wall. Green hills, blue sky, and even some picturesque, fat white clouds. A little cottage in the country.
Once upon a time, the two of them had dreamed of running away to a place like this. They’d been young. And stupid.
“What do I want? I want to stop them.”
“Stop them from doing what? You saved Tabby. Caden’s dead. The game’s over. Congratulations.” She clapped twice. “You won.”
“And you. I saved you.” His tone was perfectly neutral.
“I didn’t need to be saved.”
And that might have been the biggest lie she’d ever told.
“Really? Because when I found you in those tunnels, it looked like you were planning to stand there while a tunnel collapsed on top of your head.”
“And so what if I was?”
She hadn’t heard him move, but he spoke from just beside her. “Suicide, Rose?”
She jumped, and turned just enough to look at him over her shoulder. He was standing only a few feet from her—tall and broad, with a hardness to him that hadn’t been there all those years ago.
“Revenge,” she said in the coldest tone she could manage. “On the people who killed Caden.”
“They all survived.”
Relief flooded her. She’d had nightmares while she slept, in which she lay trapped under the rubble listening to Christian and his trinity moan in pain and die slowly. She forced out a snort. “I’ll have to try harder next time.”
“You plan to go back to Boston and murder someone? Maybe burn down another building?”
“My, my, aren’t you well informed.” She turned to face him. “How?”
“I bugged Victoria’s phone.”
“You bugged your mother’s phone?”
“Victoria,” he said firmly.
Obviously, Victoria had stopped being Weston’s mom once he’d learned that she had encouraged Rose to accept Elroy’s training.
Rose had been the one to expose Victoria, to reveal she wasn’t as unwitting as Weston had believed.
“We’re leaving. I have enough money to get us out. Do you have your passport?” Weston asked, shortly after spanking her. They were both still shaken by the incident and he was desperate to escape.
“No, your mom took it.”
“Mom! She’ll help us. I’ll text her—”
“She knows.”
Weston froze. “What?”
“The first time he…” Rose swallowed hard. “I tried to run. Your mom was there. She sat me down and explained about how all trinities need a Dom, a switch, and a sub. That they were training me to be a perfect sub. That I was lucky to be trained, that this was something I had to do.” Her sentences were short and choppy, her breathing fast and uneven. “That it was going to be hard, and he would have to hurt me, but I had to go through it. She called…called my dad. He told me to do exactly what they said and to be a good girl.”
“Elroy kept tabs on you and Caden. He changed out cell phones regularly, but Victoria didn’t. I was able to hack it and install software that did voice-to-text transcriptions of any phone calls she had and sent those transcripts to me.” He paused. “Did you know they were watching you?”
“We knew. We did our best to keep them in the dark.”
Weston nodded, as if that made sense. “Elroy didn’t trust Caden. Didn’t think he was committed to the cause.”
“No one ever said he was dumb. Caden wasn’t committed to the purists.” She spat the last word. “But he, we, danced on their strings.”
“You said Caden thought he was close. Close to what?”
“I don’t know. There was always another puzzle, another clue. Caden was sure they were hiding something—something more than the tunnels and the art.” She shook her head. “He still had hope.”
“And you didn’t?”
She wanted to say “no.” Since she was sixteen, she’d been under their control—nearly half her life, and all of her adult life. It would be beyond stupid to still hope. Yet she had. Without that hope, she would have been nothing more than a hollow husk by now.
She didn’t answer his question. Weston waited. If he thought she’d be intimidated into answering, he was wrong. Though the submissive in her was screaming that she had to answer the question or she’d be punished, that same impulse also helped her stay quiet—a good submissive was silent.
Weston cleared his throat. “Caden was right. They were hiding something. Something that they couldn’t risk the Grand Master finding out.”
“And you figured it out?”
“Most of it.”
Rose shook her head. She’d heard that before.
“I need to finish this. Flying to the U.S. threw off my timeline. I was able to reschedule with—”
“Flying to the U.S.? Where are we?”
“England.”
Rose looked out the window again. A little cottage in the English countryside. Her stomach twisted and it felt like there was a lead knot just under her breastbone.
“Six months,” he said softly. “I figured six more months and then I’d be able to get all of you out.”
“The end, the solution, they’re always just around the corner. One more puzzle, one more game.”
“I’m serious.”
“And you think I’m not?”
Weston’s jaw clenched and he looked away, only his one remaining eye moving. She swallowed.
“The art and artifacts in the secret tunnels—you know about them?”
Rose winced, remembering a cold day spent bound and almost naked, being whipped so Caden would work faster, and more recently following Christian and his trinity down there. It has seemed like a fitting tomb. “I know about them. How do you know about them?”
“Barton took me to retrieve something when I was still in high school. That’s when he told me our family were guardians of important secrets—elite even within the Trinity Masters.”
Rose snorted. “A nice way of phrasing it—prettying up being racists by calling yourself purists.”
“It was true—they were guarding a secret.”
“The map, the tunnels.” She huffed out a laugh. “They gave me what I thought was the only copy of the map—I got to pass it out to the other purists. But even that was a lie. I didn’t have the real map.”
“It’s not about the tunnels.”
“It’s about what’s in them,” she said.
Weston shook his head. “No. It’s about where all of it came from.”
“It’s all stolen. I know. They would sell off pieces when they needed cash. All the purists did it—that’s why they each wanted the map.” Rose had doctored the maps, editing out information—a small rebellion. “It was their own private bank, treasure chest.”
“That art wasn’t just stolen. Come on, I’ll show you something.”
Rose followed him out of the cottage’s front door. There were large pots on either side of the door planted with lavender, each bush bursting with fat purple blooms. She brushed one with her fingertips, lifting her hand to catch the sweet scent.
Weston guided her around to the back of the cottage, where there was a small addition stuck onto the building, no more than four feet by four feet. A heavy silver padlock held the door closed.
Weston tipped up the padlock and pressed his thumb against a small black square on the underside. Rose raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment.
“This was originally the boiler house, but I’m using it for something else.” He opened the door and reached into the gloom inside, flicking on a light.
Rose was curious despite herself. She braced one hand on the doorframe, then leaned in, looking at the walls. “A serial killer room. Lovely.”
Cork mats had been affixed to the walls, and pinned to those were hundreds of pieces of paper. The wall to her left had everything neatly organized, with pictures and printed pieces of paper in neat columns and rows. The w
all opposite the door was a bit messier. This one looked like an organizational chart, with pictures and names.
She spotted a photo of herself—a formal portrait she’d had taken for work. She was toward the bottom of the tree—where the pawn should be.
The right wall was a mess of small notes. Toward the ceiling was a piece of butcher paper, affixed lengthwise. A black line was drawn along its length with shorter lines coming off of it—a timeline.
“After you,” he said.
Rose leaned out. “I think not.”
Weston frowned. “You don’t want to know?”
“I don’t want to be locked in there.”
He blinked, as if that had never occurred to him. “I wasn’t…” He stepped in.
She looked at the door. “I could close this and lock you in.”
“You could.” He didn’t move.
“You trust me.”
“I do.”
“You shouldn’t. You don’t even know me anymore.”
His posture softened. “Maybe not, but I know who you were, and I know the core of you hasn’t changed.”
“Yes, it has.”
They stayed that way, staring at one another. She could run. She could go…where?
She had nowhere and no one.
Rose sighed and followed Weston in. “What is all this?”
“This is everything I know.”
She pointed at the wall with the pictures. “The purists?”
Her picture, along with Caden’s, which she tried to avoid looking at, were there. The Andersons, including Elroy, and Jessica Breton, and a dozen more. Her mother’s picture was there with a question mark, as were the Hancocks’.
“You’re wrong on a few of these,” she said. “Grant Breton isn’t. He had a piece of the map, but that was handed down to him from his aunt, Jessica.”
Without hesitation, Weston reached out and took Grant’s picture off the wall. That surprised her—that he’d take her word for it.
Rose turned to the left, to the neatly organized wall. She took a minute to study it, then said, “This is some of the art that was in the tunnels.”
“Yes, I spent a lot of time tracing the most identifiable pieces back to their last known owners.” He paused, and Rose looked over, curious despite herself. “Much of this art was confiscated by the Nazis.”
“We guessed that,” she said. “The purists were Nazi sympathizers. It made sense that they would have taken some of the confiscated pieces to keep them safe, or maybe they bought them to help fund the war.”
“That does make sense,” he conceded, “but not all of these were confiscated by the Nazis.” He pointed to the images on the right of the board.
Now that she was looking at it, she could see that each column had information about a single piece of art. A photo of the art in question at the top of the column, and under each were printouts with information about the last known owners, written descriptions, and snapshots. She peered at one of the snapshots. A painting was propped against a stone wall. The lighting was terrible, the colors washed out by the camera flash.
“This was taken in the tunnels?”
“Yes.”
She stiffened. “You took them?”
“Yes.”
She crossed her arms, hugging herself. “How many times?” she demanded. “How many times did you come to the U.S. and go into the tunnels?”
“Many.”
“So you were right there…” She swallowed against the rage that was filling her again. “Were you there in the tunnels with us? Did you listen to…” Listen to them beat me? She shook her head, unable to finish the sentence without bringing up too many emotions she couldn’t deal with. “You should have come back.”
“If you don’t see why I didn’t, then there’s no point in me explaining.”
Rose clenched her hands into fists, sliding her arms behind her so she hid her hands at the small of her back. She couldn’t show such obvious signs of anger—that would earn her a punishment.
He looked at her arms, frowning, then turned back to the board. “See this piece?”
Rose nodded once.
“This pastoral was last seen in the London home of Lord and Lady Ellington.”
He was looking at her expectantly. Rose stared back, no idea what he was trying to tell her.
Rose was waiting for him to say more when it clicked. “Wait.” She stepped closer to the wall, peering at the information on the board. There was a black-and-white photo of an elegantly dressed couple standing in a tastefully appointed room. On the wall behind them, barely visible, was a painting. That same painting was in the first photo, which had clearly been taken in the secret tunnels running into and out of the Trinity Masters’ headquarters.
“In London? Then it must have been destroyed during the blitz.” Rose was thinking out loud, thoughts flickering like fireflies, hard to catch.
“That’s what everyone assumed.”
“But instead it ended up in America, among a bunch of Nazi-stolen pieces.” She stepped back, eyes darting around the room. “Art from England had no way to end up with Nazi art. London was nearly destroyed, but never raided.”
“Exactly.” Weston’s cold, hard demeanor softened, and the word was suffused with satisfaction.
“How?”
“There’s a long, complicated story as to how I came to this theory—”
“Don’t drag it out, Wes!” Excitement got the better of her, but she stopped short when she realized she’d used her old nickname for him.
He paused for only a breath, the barest acknowledgement of what she’d said. “Here’s my theory. The art and papers the purists hid in the tunnels weren’t given to them by the Nazis. In fact, I don’t think it was stolen by the Nazis. I think a bunch of rich and powerful families from all across Europe put as much disposable wealth as they could together, and shipped it to America.”
“How? I mean, there were sympathizers on both sides, but to pool their resources and sneak it out, while there were naval battles going on all around them…” Rose slipped past Wes to walk a tight circle around the room. She thought better when she was moving. “Do you think the Ellingtons were Nazi sympathizers? That would make sense—they put all this together and ship it to the purists, the most powerful group of racist scum in America.”
“That would make sense, but these pieces,” he pointed at a few images, “were owned by wealthy, powerful Jewish families. I doubt they were sympathizers.”
“Then what’s the connection?”
“Exactly. That’s the question.”
“And do you have the answer?”
“Yes.” He went to the tree of pictures. There was a smaller group of photos off to the side. At the top was a flag—a field of red with three legs on it in a triskelion.
A trinity of legs.
Below the flag was a small strip of paper, held in place with two red push pins. It read “The Masters’ Admiralty.”
She turned wide eyes to Weston.
“Everything in those tunnels belonged to members of the Masters’ Admiralty.”
* * *
The clock was ticking.
“Thank you very much for your assistance, Gregory.”
The middle-aged man in the bright red uniform shirt of a car rental agency nodded once, seemingly surprised that Marek had remembered his name. Common courtesies were lost to many.
Tick-tock.
With a final nod of thanks, he left the small rental agency in Sussex. He’d followed Ms. Hancock’s trail from Boston to London. From there, he’d been able to acquire photos of a rental car leaving a small private airstrip in Greater Incorporated London to this small establishment, where it had been dropped off.
Gregory had been on duty three days ago when the car was dropped off, and remembered that the gentleman who did it had his own vehicle parked there. Unfortunately, the security cameras had broken a week ago and hadn’t been fixed.
That coincidence was a bit too co
nvenient for Marek’s liking.
But he had a description of the man and his car. The car was a blue Toyota SUV, not totally out of place in the countryside, but not as common as a red Fiat compact, so there was hope on that front.
And the owner of that blue SUV had a lazy eye. Gregory was sure of that. “Only one of his eyes moved when he looked around.”
A personal detail like that might be all he needed.
Marek looked at his watch. It was just past two in the afternoon. He’d been in England nearly twenty-four hours.
Tick-tock.
His time was up.
If he didn’t call now, they might find out he was here from someone else—they had many, many sources. If that happened, there would be hell to pay.
Plus, it had been a week since he’d spoken with his grandparents. He was due to call them again.
Sliding into his own rental car—an anonymous gray Peugeot—he took out his cell phone.
“Lee residence,” a smooth male voice answered.
“Good afternoon, William,” he said politely to his grandparents’ house manager—their butler. His grandparents didn’t like the classist implications of “butler” so they had a “house manager.” Who did everything a butler did.
“Master Marek, how are you?”
Marek’s lips twitched—William was less than ten years older than Marek, but he’d been trained by the old house manager when he retired, so Marek was still referred to as if he were a child.
“I’m well, and you?”
“Very well, thank you. Your grandmother is sitting down to tea. Sir Masoor Lee is in a meeting, and Mr. Caradoc Jones is in the back garden.”
It made Marek smile to hear his grandfathers being referred to so formally.
“I don’t want to interrupt Grandmother’s tea, or Tadcu’s gardening.” His grandfather Caradoc was as Welsh as the day was long, and out of respect, he used the southern Welsh word for “grandfather.”
“Excuse me a mom—”
There was the sound of fumbling, a distant conversation punctuated by exclamations, and then his grandmother came on the phone.
“Who is this?” Her voice was shaky with age, but there was still power in those words.
Marek smiled. “Hello, Grandmother.”