Butterfly in Amber (Spotless Book 4)

by Camilla Monk

Louis glances at us in the mirror. He must be forty; the temples of his black crew cut are graying. His mouth curves down in something I suspect to be half-contrition, half-protestation. “He said it was allowed because he likes that one!”

  The mention of the mysterious “he” appears to settle the conflict: Selena keeps singing as we enter the freeway and race toward Paris. Her voice urges us to remember that no war was ever won in anger, and by then, I’m pretty sure I know who summoned us, who finds his solace in pop when he rides . . .

  Soon we’re driving along, Haussmannian stone buildings, cafés, and naked trees lining the street—on the Seine’s right bank, if I’m correct. We take a few turns left onto small streets, reaching Paris’s historical center, where the oldest mansions still stand. The SUVs park in front of an ancient stone wall in which a set of wrought-iron gates bars access to a private French garden.

  “We’re at the Paris temple,” March says.

  I suspected so. I think of Isiporho and Dominik: Did they make it here? And more important, if so, did they make it out? Alive? My fingers briefly lace with March’s before we climb out of the car, seeking reassurance. As the gate creaks open, his palm lingers on the small of my back, a warm reminder that whatever happens, he’s at my side.

  We follow our sort-of-but-not-quite captors into the garden. Our feet crush gravel as we make our way toward a neoclassical hôtel particulier, whose heavy wooden doors are guarded by two fierce lions roaring for eternity in the sculpted stone. The doors open and warmth engulfs us. It’s now a soft Persian rug under out feet, over a parqueted floor whose heavenly beeswax scent tickles my nostrils. An ample flight of stairs leads to a series of salons on the second floor. Crystal chandeliers gleam softly above our heads, the floorboards sigh under our steps, and Roman warriors watch us with eyes of marble. This atmosphere could only get any Frenchier if someone pulls out a beret.

  After we enter a salon whose walls are lined with cream brocade, Blond-beard invites us to sit on a baroque sofa lined with burgundy velvet. I gaze at the dead trees in the garden, past windows that reach all the way up to a fifteen-foot ceiling where angels frolic among gilded moldings. I remember March saying that the temples are museums of a sort: I concur.

  Blond-beard goes to knock at a set of doors at the other end of the room. They come ajar, and a few words are exchanged in hushed tones. March watches the exchange with narrowed eyes, and I peer in anxiously, hoping to get a glimpse of our host. The door opens at last, and the first thing that comes out, well . . . suffice to say that my jaw goes slack.

  Blond-beard and his colleague stand in quiet dignity as the orange tabby rides past them, enigmatic and regal on its black Roomba. The noble steed whirs around the room, vacuuming the Ghum silk carpet’s intricate pattern with steady alacrity.

  “The commander will see you now,” Blond-beard announces, his gaze straight, as if he didn’t notice the Roomba now bumping against his boots repeatedly while the cat stares up at him with guileless turquoise eyes.

  March and I get up and enter the room in a state of mild stupefaction. A war has been won without being fought, and indeed without anger. Stiles stands before us, wearing his eternal gray suit and soft, bulletproof smile.

  He walks up to us and holds out his hand to shake with March, who stands still—some wounds won’t close anytime soon.

  I manage to find my voice, not without some effort. “You . . . took his place.”

  “It was time for some change, and I can’t thank you enough for your help.” He’s talking to me, but his eyes are set on March as he adds, “My friend.”

  March gauges him, dark ice crackling in his irises. “Never.”

  Stiles gives a good-natured shrug. “The offer remains on the table.”

  Meanwhile, I’ve managed to swallow my shock. “You used us against him . . . from the start.”

  He walks to a finely adorned liquor cabinet standing behind a long Napoleon desk covered with papers. “I’m a romantic at heart,” he says. “When we found Auben and his fingers in Rio and it became clear that Mr. November was still in the picture, I had an inkling that love could move mountains, with a little help, of course.”

  March’s lips set in a hard line. “You would have never gotten your way through rebellion, not in Anies’s dictatorial system. So you undermined him and chose Dries and me to strike the finishing blow. It couldn’t be you killing him, nor one of your men.”

  Stiles gestures to the row of rare spirits sitting inside the cabinet. “A drink?”

  March remains silent, but my eyes widen when I recognize the green hue of the absinthe bottle. Stiles notices the direction of my gaze. Pure kindness shines in his baby blue irises as he says, “Oh don’t worry; I wouldn’t give you that. Never to a friend.”

  My throat constricts. “You were poisoning him; that’s why he was sick.”

  His mouth purses comically, like a little boy caught stealing from the cookie jar. “He did have terminal pancreatic cancer, but you know how it is . . . Sometimes the schedule needs a little adjustment.”

  And Stiles adjusted Anies’s schedule . . . weakened him so he’d die faster. I’m starting to think he could almost scare me more than Anies, this kind killer. Because in the last moments, I saw Anies for who he was—I saw a man and his madness. I can’t find that in Stiles. I stare at him, scan every line on his face, the pleasant and banal features forged by surgery fifteen years ago, and I can’t find the man underneath. I sense no anger, no weakness. Sweet Jesus, that new boss is gonna be much worse than the previous one . . .

  He closes the liquor cabinet with a sigh. “I know you’re angry, and I’m sorry I had to play you both a little. It was for the best. No more nuclear warheads,” he announces, his voice suddenly a notch sterner. “We’re going back to our roots. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done to preserve the temples and a lot of people who need a little shove to the other side. That’s what we do best; we’re not cut for the light.”

  That’s true, but listening to him casually mention the people he’s going to kill, I see no major improvement in the Lions’ line of business.

  “And I’m working on smoothing things with the Board and the agency,” he adds. “Mr. Erwin was very happy to collect our friend Bahjin in Nassau. And the Queen . . . well she wasn’t exactly pleased that Anies died before she could get a hold of him, but I think she likes this new direction we’re taking, and of course, we’ll help her regain her position. We need that balance between all the players; your father was right about that.”

  My heart tightens unbearably when he mentions Dries. “You watched him die,” I rasp. “You didn’t lift a finger.”

  He shakes his head sadly. “We’d have ended up with another succession war on our hands. There was no other solution, and your father knew it. Both he and Anies had to go. We needed a clean slate.”

  “Or rather you didn’t want to risk competition after Anies’s death,” March grinds out, his chest heaving with the same pain and anger I feel crushing mine.

  Stiles winces. “You really won’t give me any credit, will you? Well, let me tell you this: Dries and I had our differences in the past, but it’s all water under the bridge. I forgave him a long time ago.” He tilts his head at us, in that attentive, predatory way I’m pretty sure he inherited from Anies. “I could have executed his men when they came here to search the archives.”

  March’s jaw works silently while I try to remain indifferent, my spine rigid. He knows about Isiporho and Dominik’s mission.

  “But I let them take what they wanted because I didn’t mind. We need to stop killing our own brothers like that all the time or else we’re gonna have to lower our recruitment standards,” he muses, sending a pointed look at March before opening his arms wide. “I want reconciliation. If they ever want to recover their place among us, tell them they’re welcome.”

  I listen to Stiles’s little tirade warily, wondering if he let Isiporho and Dominik live out of the goodness of his South
ern heart or rather because he wanted them to succeed and let Dries know that Anies’s reign was coming to an end one way or another . . . “So you really won’t go after them?”

  He shrugs. “Not unless they give me a good reason to. By the way, Island, in the same spirit, I want you to know there’ll be no retribution for your heinous crime under my watch.”

  The floor seems to collapse under my feet, like I’m free falling again in the reentry pod. “I’m sorry, my heinous—what?”

  Stiles tuts me. “Island, you murdered the Lions’ commander. Anyone else would face dire penalties for that.”

  “Don’t even try to go there,” March warns him, his fists clenching.

  “Calm down, Mr. November,” Stiles chides. “You’re always so testy . . . I didn’t bring her here to point fingers.” His eyes cut to me. “I brought you here because your father asked something from me, and I intend to deliver.”

  My vision blurs a little as I picture Dries’s peaceful golden gaze again, the last seconds . . . You’ll fix my daughter. No matter what it takes, you’ll fix your mess.

  “Follow me,” Stiles requests.

  He leaves the office and returns to the salon where his tabby is still ambling around Blond-beard and his pals. Stiles kneels, and the cat immediately leaves its Roomba to trot to him. He pets it amorously and picks it up. “Bring her in,” he orders his goons.

  The salon’s doors open, revealing a lean and elegant gray-haired woman clad in a pink turtleneck and beige pants. I instinctively take a step back, my stomach heaving. He didn’t kill Bentsen. The faded gray-blue eyes that used to pick me apart during our sessions gaze at me, quiet fear now simmering in their depths. She doesn’t want to be here any more than I do.

  Next to me, March has gone still. His nostrils flare. I wrap my hand around his clenched fist in an attempt to placate the storm I can feel roaring inside him.

  “You will take this thing out,” March orders, his usual politeness frightening in its absence.

  She crosses her arms and stares through the window at the bare trees outside, unable to sustain his gaze. “The procedure is invasive. Island should recover well, but there might be some marginal loss.”

  March inhales sharply, but I take the hit without flinching. Without really knowing it for sure, I’ve come to terms with that possibility. I was ready to live again even if I didn’t recover any of my memories: the sacrifice of some of them suddenly feels trivial in light of everything that happened to us.

  I nod slowly. “When do we start?”

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE PHONE CALL

  “Ramirez lay in a pool of his own corrupted blood, his thick mustache forever still. Rica gazed down at his mutilated groin. ‘You and your evil shaft can sell cocaine in hell! I defeated you, Ramirez!’ Rica screamed, shimmering tears streaming down her beautiful eyes and soaking the perfect globes of her breasts.”

  —Kerry-Lee Storm, The Cost of Rica #4: Vengeful Passion

  I remember that the hallway was very white, that March held my hand all along, until I closed my eyes and dreamed. I came out of the operating room with a bald spot and twenty-nine grams lighter.

  The dream lasted another five days, my mind wandering in a place that wasn’t death but wasn’t yet life. March watched me dream and waited for me to find my way back to him, surviving on hospital meals and crosswords. I was reportedly carted out of my room at the clinic on the sixth day. I remember nothing of that, but that’s okay. Eight months of retrograde amnesia has the merit of putting that kind of minor disagreement in perspective. I’m a survivor: now all three parts of The Hangover sound like a joyride to me.

  I have vague memories of March making a phone call after the ambulance ride, of his voice speaking over the phone in French to someone and telling them that I was getting dehydrated, and I wasn’t fully comatose because my eyes would occasionally flutter open, but I still wouldn’t move or speak, and he was worried.

  What I do know for sure is that on the dawn of the seventh day, I blinked awake, for good this time. The first thing I saw was March’s back, clad in his usual white shirt—wrinkles in the cotton suggested an end-of-the world situation, but the room was actually quiet. I lay on my side, in a large bed, buried under a gray comforter. The whole thing felt as fluffy as my brain as I blearily took in my surroundings. I stared up at the intricate floral moldings decorating the ceiling, then down at the chevron parquet and marble fireplace at the other end of what looked like a nearly empty bedroom. I wanted to scratch my skull under the gauze taped to my nape, but I feared that my brain might leak out in some horrific and never-before-recorded medical accident. I decided against it.

  I touched his back tentatively, and he jerked awake, rolling to his side in a heartbeat to check on me. Sweet Jesus, end of the world indeed: I took in the circles of exhaustion under his eyes, and not one, not two, but probably three days’ worth of whiskers. He was looking at me, haggard; I brought my fingers to his jaw, feeling the rough bristles there. I smiled. Dimples pocked his cheeks in return, and he shifted closer to kiss my forehead. “Welcome back on Earth, astronaut.”

  “Island has landed,” I confirmed with a croaky chuckle.

  “Are you thirsty, biscuit?”

  I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “Yeah, parched, actually.”

  “Wait for me here,” he commanded before getting up from the bed.

  Not that I was going anywhere. Not without a beanie, obviously. He brought back a glass and a bottle of water; I sipped some with cautious gulps, dehydration and hunger making my stomach knot in protest. After I was done, I handed him the glass back and glanced through the window. “We’re still in Paris, right?”

  “Yes, Ilan found the apartment for me.”

  Ilan . . . It was like my neurons had just gotten whipped—hard—but they too were still waking up. They stalled, and I felt March’s anxious gaze on me, until a face flashed in my mind, a black-haired man in his late forties with piercing green eyes, a graying beard, and leathery olive skin. With him came another memory: that of a beautiful black woman, her long hair, her warm smile. I was in their apartment; we talked together about March. Kalahari. March’s nice ex, Ilan’s wife, and the one who had first told me about . . . Charlotte. New emotions welled in my chest; joy and pain laced together as the memories surfaced, one after another, like bubbles in a mile-deep pool.

  “Ilan . . . he worked for the French secret service, but now he kind of . . . freelances, and he has a weird friend who sells burgers and depleted uranium rockets,” I droned, in a mild daze.

  Relief lifted ten years off March’s features. He nodded. “Yes . . . exactly. We can see him later if you’d like. I thought it might jog your memory to convalesce in Paris.”

  Convalesce . . . My face bunched. “No convalescing. It’s all I’ve been doing for the past eight months,” I mumbled, pushing the covers aside to get out of bed.

  His arms automatically snaked around my waist as I sat up. “Island, you need to take it slow.”

  “But I don’t want slow,” I whined. “I need to move, to do stuff . . .”

  What kind of stuff remained to be determined, but already I could feel the cogs spinning in my brain, names, faces, ideas hovering close to the surface. For the first time in almost a year, I felt like my old life was at hand’s reach.

  “Wait here a second,” March said, letting go of me. “I have something for you. I thought it might cheer you when you woke up.”

  I watched him get up and leave the bedroom through a set of French doors opening to a long hallway—typical of a Haussmannian apartment. Through the window, I noticed the spire of Notre-Dame, turned grayish by a bleak morning light. Since I had a direct view on the east end of the transept, I gathered the narrow bridge crossing the Seine had to be Pont Saint-Louis—which would place us somewhere on the west side of the eponymous Île Saint-Louis.

  March returned with a bag he placed on my lap, a lovely pink thing tied with a white satin ribbon. He sat b
ack on the bed while I inspected its contents. Upon discovering the book inside, I was reminded of Bentsen’s warning that removing the implant wouldn’t restore my memory exactly like it was before but rather allow me, with some effort, to access data that had been sealed away until now. I studied the cover silently. The muscular chest and ornate red font were familiar, and I could tell I was happy, that my heart was fluttering with excitement in fact, but the reason why hovered frustratingly out of reach.

  My lips pursed as I flipped the book to examine the back cover. I grinned. Yes, this was . . . “Oh my God. Cost of Rica four came out?”

  Relief lit up March’s face. “Yes, a few months ago.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

  I leafed through the brand-new pages in utter delight. “Have you read it?”

  “I might have skimmed through it while you were asleep,” he admitted, ducking his chin to conceal a guilty smile.

  “Is it good? Does it end well this time?”

  “I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’m fairly certain you’ll enjoy it though.”

  “I’d better . . . I mean, Rica’s been fighting Ramirez for ages, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone get kidnapped and raped so many times. This guy seriously needs to die. Also that cliffhanger in the previous book? Give me a break. I hate authors who do that! What was the point? We all know she’s going to end up with Ricardo anyway. Seriously—”

  My rant was silenced by March’s arms flying around me, squeezing me tight. Against me, he was shaking. I returned his embrace and tucked my head under his chin while he let out all the stress, the fear, and the pain in a long, hoarse chuckle. And he laughed and laughed, and at some point, I started laughing too, because Rica would probably end up chained in Ramirez’s basement again, and I loved March so much my heart might burst.

  After we’d both calmed down, I looked up at his face and traced the dark circles under his eyes with my thumbs. “When was the last time you slept, Mr. November?”