by Camilla Monk
Once we’re inside the terminal, a nice ground attendant leads us to a bright, spacious lounge. I sink into a blue-suede-upholstered couch while Dries locks himself with Isiporho in the business-meeting room to have what appears to be a private conversation. From the corner of my eye, I watch them nod to each other through the tinted glass isolating the room. Possibly to divert my attention from their plotting, March brings me apple tea in a plastic cup before he goes to retrieve two suitcases he had his assistant deliver at the desk. One is a sleek black little thing that I’m afraid looks every bit like his previous magic suitcase—I hope they’re not too fussy about scanning hand luggage at Atatürk. The other is a regular rolling suitcase I’m guessing is for me.
He returns to the lounge at the same time that Dries and Isiporho exit the meeting room. Dries plops himself onto the couch next to me and casually wraps an arm around my shoulder. I tense involuntarily—it’s the first time he’s touched me like that since our reunion. It’s not uncomfortable, just a little foreign, the smell of his spicy cologne, that warm weight. There’s something intimate about it that I never realized existed between us until now. We’re family after all.
His gaze seeps over me, an odd tenderness laced with his usual smugness. “Our roads part here, little Island.”
I freeze.
“Isiporho and Dominik are going to check something for me at the Paris temple. You’ll go with them.” He sends a pointed look at March. “And I trust Mr. Menahem to keep you safe while we solve our differences with the brothers.”
I have no idea who Mr. Menahem is—another Lion?—and I also make a mental note that March mentioned those “temples” back in Finland. There’s apparently something going on with them that matters a great deal to the brotherhood. But it’s not what makes the blood rush to my head and my mouth quiver with sudden anger. I glare at Dries. “You’re not getting rid of me.”
He welcomes the statement with a chuckle. “Yes, I am, but I recognize your—”
“Shut up,” I snap, before turning to March. “I want to discuss this with you.”
Without waiting for his answer, I get up and walk to the business-meeting room. A couple of guys in suits are already in there, but I barge in, fuming. “Sorry, gentlemen, we’re going to need the room.”
The oldest one, a paunchy Arab guy pushing sixty, turns to me and looks me up and down with obvious disdain. “Not free. You go away.”
He shouldn’t have. I’ve taken enough shit in a short two days. I take a deep breath, puffing my chest, and without warning, swipe his papers from the table angrily. The guy steps back, his nostrils flaring in outrage, and I’m about to unleash my fury on his tacky gold MacBook, but March stops me just in time, catching the laptop before I send it crashing to the floor.
The second occupant, a young guy with a pink tie and a gelled mohawk, gets to his knees to pick up the papers with trembling hands and grabs the precious laptop. He squeaks something that sounds like Arabic, seemingly urging his colleague to get the hell out of here.
With cautious steps, they draw a wide berth around me to reach the door. Yeah, that’s right; look down: I am the law! The second they’re gone, the door closes behind us. March crosses his arms and gauges me with hard blue eyes. He’s been nothing but kind to me since he rescued me from Ingolvinlinna, but this time, in his irises the waters are dark and dangerous. I sustain his icy gaze bravely as he says, “Are you done? This is hardly like you.”
“How would I know that?” I shoot back.
“Island, I won’t be dealing with a tantrum—”
My palm slams painfully hard onto the meeting table. “I’m sorry, a tantrum? Anies killed my mother, he locked me up, he wiped my brain clean . . . he erased my entire life! And now that stuff with Odysseus, and you’re telling me to wait in Paris with Menahem-whatever-no-one-cares?” I yell, my breath short.
He takes a step forward, his expression completely blank save for a twitch in his jaw. And his eyes . . . they pin me in place, compel me. I swallow and try to control my breathing when I realize he’s got me trapped against the table. “My mother died when I was thirteen,” he says in a flat voice, like he’d comment on the weather. “She overdosed in our bathroom, on speedballs that my father gave her. I found her body.” His Adam’s apple rolls in his throat as he continues. “After the ambulance took her, I cleaned the floor. She had bled from her nose and . . . emptied her bladder.”
I grit my teeth, shivers coursing through my body as his pain flows to me, like poison I’m absorbing. He’s not finished, and I wish I could look away, but he’s taking me with him kicking and screaming somewhere I’m not sure I’m strong enough to go.
“You’re not the first woman I’ve loved,” he continues, the same cold anger enveloping each word.
This time I flinch and avert my eyes. I’m still standing, but it’s like I’m losing my footing. “Who was she?”
“One of Erwin’s agents. Her name was Charlotte and I was”—his brow quivers, and he shakes his head, as if rejecting that particular memory—“I would have done anything for her, but she didn’t love me. She left me because she didn’t want . . . that level of complication. I scared her, and she was probably right to go.”
One of my hands lets go of the table edge to rest flat on his chest. His skin burns under Isiporho’s wool sweater, like he has a fever. “March . . . what are you trying to tell me?”
He wrestles his features back into an emotionless mask. “She died too. She was killed during a mission in Ivory Coast. I struck a deal with Erwin to go rescue her, but I made it too late. The soldiers necklaced her.”
Each beat of my heart echoes painfully all the way up to the back of my throat and I think a deeply buried part of me already knows, fears what’s coming next. “Necklaced?”
March takes a sharp breath. “They trap the victim’s body in tires, douse them with gas, and set them on fire. She was barely alive when I found her, and all I could do was end it . . . I shot her. I killed her myself.”
My eyes squeeze shut, and I clutch his sweater. A vision of a charred body flashes behind my eyelids. I picture March’s finger, pressing the trigger. I steel myself. He weathered my pain and my anger; I’ll shoulder his. I stroke his chest soothingly. “March, I am . . . so, so sorry.”
One of his arms snakes around my waist while his free hand cups my cheek. “Island, I lost them both because I couldn’t protect them. Like I lost you once already. You can’t”—his voice catches as he holds me tight—“you can’t ask me to bring you back to him.”
It dawns on me that because March bared himself to me like that, I’m now carrying a little part of his memories, as he carries mine. I understand how he feels, and I measure the magnitude of the gesture, from this man who shields himself so much. I only wish I could let him protect me the way he wants to. Life is a bit more complicated than that though . . . I relax in his embrace and return his hug. “Was I like that before?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you told me to do something, when you wanted me out of the way, did I obey?”
A pained chuckle rumbles through his chest between us. “Yes. You were . . . very reasonable. And you always let me keep you safe.”
“Nice try. I must have been a dream girlfriend then.”
His lips press in my hair, the words muffled against my temple. “You were bliss and chaos . . . still are.”
“I need to do this,” I say quietly. “I need answers; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, hiding and being afraid. I want a life with you, but for that, we need to end this first. And you’ll need me; if Stiles was right, I’m Anies’s weakness as much as I’m yours.”
“Island, I’m not certain that’s what I want to hear . . .”
He’s right. No amount of rational arguments will change the fact that he wants to protect me and I want to fight this battle. I know what he needs to hear, words I’d have never imagined saying two days ago, and which now
seem so evident. They tumble from my lips, hushed yet confident. “Je t’aime.” I love you.
Against me, I can feel his posture relax. “You’re not playing fair,” he murmurs. “But I love you more than anything.”
“Then keep me with you.” I smile, nuzzling his chest.
“What do you make of Dries’s opinion?”
“I think he’d want his child to show some balls.”
March’s chest shakes with suppressed laughter. “That sounds wrong on so many levels.”
•••
We were wrong. Dries wanted his disciple to have balls. His anger has been slowly simmering under a stone-cold mask since March and I came out from the meeting room and announced a minor change of plan. He led us in dignified silence to a damp tarmac glistening from the afternoon drizzle, and waited, as Isiporho and Dominik said their good-byes and wished us good luck with a respectively heartfelt and reluctant bro hug.
As soon as they’re out of sight, the pressure cooker of Dries’s fatherly resentment explodes. “Is that how you thank me?” he hisses at March as we make our way toward a long navy-blue jet next to which a ground attendant awaits us. “My leg hurts every day, you know.”
My gaze drops to said right leg, the one I noticed was sometimes a bit stiff back in Finland. Did he wound it when dragging March out of the Poseidon?
“It hurts,” Dries goes on while March follows him in cautious silence. “And the pain gets even worse when an ungrateful little maggot who owes me everything, including his life, stabs me in the back.”
“Look,” I begin. “It was my decision and—”
“Silence, young lady!” He flashes me a withering glare. “You shouldn’t even be here.” He points to a distant point at the other end of the tarmac. “You should be on that plane, bound for Paris!”
My neck shrinks into my shoulders, and March shakes his head in silent encouragement not to egg the beast on.
As he’s about to climb onto the airstair, Dries freezes and spins on his heels with surprising ease for a fifty-three-year-old guy whose leg is supposedly causing him constant agony. His eyes turn to hateful slits as he tells March, “I’m rescinding the authorization I gave you to touch my daughter.” He pauses for dramatic effect and adjusts his jacket. “Permanently.”
It could be a trick of the dying daylight, but I think I just saw despair flash across March’s face.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE MARK
Gender stereotypes be damned, this jet is the work of a woman.
Sitting next to March in a ridiculously soft leather seat, I grip my armrest as the jet gains speed on the runway. Low vibrations travel through my body as we take off in the closest thing to heaven I’ve experienced since leaving the poisonous cocoon of Ingolvinlinna. It’s obvious that extreme care went into every detail of the plane’s interior, from the soft white and beige palette of the furniture, to the vibrant gold of embroidered silk cushions strategically flung on a long couch—all matching the bed’s linen in the small bedroom I noticed at the back of the plane. Black peonies rest in a Ming vase on a lacquered cupboard right next to a wall-mounted screen, and of course, there’s a ceiling shower in the bathroom.
So yeah, a woman was here, and I don’t mean the flight attendant Dries is wooing behind us. I know I shouldn’t, but I listen, because this is basically a master class in seduction. A suave compliment about the beauty of her ebony skin got her to admit her mother was South African. What a coincidence—so is he! And which town does the hartjie come from? The darling—whose name is actually Isabelle—is from Johannesburg. Another coincidence! Why doesn’t she sit down for a moment and share a flute of champagne with a fellow Joburger?
Perhaps sensing a trap, Isabelle declines with a gentle but stern reminder that she can’t drink on the job, and much less with passengers. Damn, foiled!
Next to me, March dozes, his eyes half-closed. His gaze follows Isabelle when she retreats into the galley, probably out of a deeply ingrained habit to scan any potential threats. She’s pouring a flute of rosé champagne for Dries. Threat level: low.
I pat his thigh. “I’ll go take a shower and change.”
He nods with a tired smile. “Take your time. You need to relax.”
What a gentlemanly way to say that he’s the one who needs to relax and that he’ll fall asleep as soon as I’m gone . . . Dries pays little attention to me as I pick up my suitcase and head to the bathroom. His lips resting against the rim of his glass, I can tell he’s mentally undressing Isabelle. She tucks a stray curl back into her tightly braided bun with a gracious hand and smooths imaginary wrinkles from her navy blue dress. For all her professionalism, I’m not entirely certain she minds his attention . . .
Once I’m alone in the bathroom, I immediately proceed to strip from Dominik’s Springboks T-shirt and the black mechanic pants I’m floating in. I tumble into the futuristic oval shower stall with a sigh and rest my forehead against the glass panel as warm water pours over my head like a summer rain. I let myself slide down until I’m sitting in the tray and gather my knees against my body. I think of Anies, who promised we’d go to Ecuador together. The prospect of facing him again has been kind of abstract in my mind until now, but now I’m on this plane, and it’s becoming real. Strangely, I’m not scared as the droplets hit my back, drip down my chin. I’m well aware that there are still a number of ways he could hurt me if he wins this round, but the whirlwind of these past few days has made my skin a little thicker. I’ve tasted despair and, with it, found a renewed hunger for life. I scramble up and grab a bottle of shower gel with a determined huff. We’re going to get the world rid of at least one sketchy uncle.
I don’t remember Phyllis, March’s assistant, but she remembers me: every single clothing item neatly folded in the suitcase she had delivered at the airport for me is a perfect fit—including the underwear, I realize with a blush. Also those trashed jeans and the gray T-shirt featuring a cartoon cat double-flipping its audience off is likely what I would have gone for if left unattended in a shop. I fumble in the little bag with a smile. It’s a bit silly, a drop of water in the grand scheme of things, but having forgotten my entire life, I’m inordinately happy to discover the bottle of perfume. I spray some on my wrist and inhale the clean, flowery scent. I decide that my former self made sound decisions: I indeed love White Musk.
I come out of the bathroom to find Dries sitting on the couch with Isabelle—looks like she finally agreed to share the champagne with him. I register the hushed notes of a guitar playing in the background while he tells her about the beauty of Oman, especially at night. Has she ever been there? No? Maybe he should take her then. I purse my lips to contain a sigh—as long as they don’t start making out right in front of me . . .
Still in his seat, March is hunched over a tablet, seemingly—or willingly—unaware of the fact that he’s been made an extra in an Enrique Iglesias video. I shake my head and return to my seat. He didn’t seem the type, but March is deeply engrossed in crosswords. I watch him beat a particularly tough definition before victoriously typing prurient in the remaining empty squares. I offer a round of applause while he sets the tablet on the mahogany table facing our seats.
He studies my new appearance with a tender smile. “Much better . . .” His head dips to my neck, to inhale the fragrance clinging there.
“How do you like the Queen’s Gulfstream, Island?”
I jump at the sound of Dries’s voice, and March’s head snaps up. I’m reminded of March’s tale about Dries barging into our room on his yacht when we were about to . . . Then there was Dries’s claim that March is no longer allowed to touch me, as per some unwritten rule he made up and intends to enforce. An imperceptible sigh deflates March; his mentor isn’t done with him yet.
I wrestle my wince into a smile. “It’s a beautiful jet . . . But what kind of queen are we talking about? A real one?” I’ve come to understand that Dries remains a powerful man even after his downfall, but somehow I didn’
t picture his connections including royalty.
Suddenly a notch cooler, he glances at the puzzled Isabelle, who’s still curled on the couch with her half-empty flute of champagne. “Why don’t you go take care of dinner, hartjie? I’m starving.”
Ouch . . . rough douche move. Thirty seconds ago, she was a goddess he planned on taking all over the world with him, and now she just got relegated back to the kitchen. What a complete dick he can be. Regardless, once she’s disappeared into the galley, Dries sits across from us and crosses his arms. “It’s a pity you forgot about her, because Guita hasn’t forgotten about you.”
“Guita?”
“The Queen.”
“Of what?” I insist.
“Of the Board,” March clarifies. “It’s a large criminal organization. Many, if not most criminal networks answer to the Board one way or another.”
“Or rather used to,” Dries corrects.
My gaze travels between the two of them. “And is there a king?”
Dries chuckles. “No. He’d be long dead. Guita doesn’t like to share.”
“But she lent you the jet,” I counter.
He clasps his hands. “Let me put this in a way I’m certain you’ll understand: the Board used to be instrumental in bringing balance to the force.” My ears perk up as he goes on. “The Poseidon, which Anies destroyed, belonged to the Board. It was both a tactical and symbolic asset. The Board’s most influential members used to meet there, and it was also a considerable source of revenue.”
My head bobs up and down as I process all this. “And destroying the Poseidon rattled the whole organization?”
“Precisely,” March confirms. “The Queen’s leadership was brought into question, and with Erwin losing control over the Directorate of Foreign Operations around the same time, the Board’s cordial ties with the CIA have been all but severed. This means no more cooperation or mutual protection for the players on either side.”