Liquid Lies

by Hanna Martine

  Two nights in a row up well past midnight. Two nights in a row of occurrences that threatened her life and challenged the security of her people. Exhausted didn’t even begin to describe her state of mind.

  They’d just come from the Chairman’s manor in tony Pacific Heights, where she’d spent almost three hours being grilled by the Board. They’d been called out of their beds to hear her tell them about Reed and the Tedrans.

  All the Board members were now under careful watch of Griffin’s security team. In the wee hours, Ofarian soldiers were scanning the Board members’ homes, setting guards. Some families chose to leave San Francisco, heading for vacation homes or any other destination a last-minute, red-eye flight would take them.

  “Griffin. I’m scared.”

  He emerged quickly from the kitchen but stopped in the hall, one hand curled around the edge of a steel and glass armoire she’d splurged on at a designer’s auction. He tried to smile reassuringly, but even he was greatly disturbed by what she’d seen tonight, and the smile turned out to be nothing more than an odd twist of his mouth.

  “Then you can be scared for the both of us. I’m the one who’s supposed to act all brave, right?”

  She buried her face in her hands. They smelled like the bar at Manny’s—of alcohol-stained wood and dusting spray—and of Reed. Even though she hadn’t even touched him. Her whole body shuddered. “How the hell did they find us?”

  “And what are they planning?”

  When she removed her hands, Griffin was moving from window to window, checking the locks and the folds of the stiff, white drapes.

  “Isn’t the fact that they’re here enough?” She finally got her feet to move, and shuffled farther inside, every sound of her narrow heels on the parquet floor a scream.

  He swept an arm around her place. “Everything look okay? Like it was how you left it this morning?”

  Had it only been this morning? It felt like she’d been away for weeks. A quick glance told her the place was immaculate, as always. She despised clutter; there wasn’t much to disturb in the first place.

  “Yeah.” She threaded a hand through her heavy hair and kneaded her neck. “Looks fine.” Griffin nodded and continued to circle around the living room, eyeing the molding between wall and ceiling.

  “We should run,” she blurted out. “Leave San Francisco.”

  “We ran once, a hundred and fifty years ago. Didn’t do much good.” He threw her a hard look. A soldier’s look. He’d never flee. He’d stay and fight.

  “The world is so much different now,” she murmured, running a hand over the back of her white sofa. “We can’t afford a war. We can’t risk the exposure.”

  Strange, but the Tedran man and woman she’d seen didn’t look like fighters. In fact, they looked just the opposite.

  “I want to know why they’re here.” Griffin’s voice punched through the heavy silence. “How they got here without the Primaries noticing. Don’t you?”

  Of course she did. But what she really wanted was to forget she’d almost slept with a man collaborating with the Ofarians’ oldest and most formidable enemy. She scraped her fingernails over the upholstery, digging them in hard. Sick to her stomach and sick with herself.

  Griffin moved to the powder room and flipped on the light. Her whole apartment was now ablaze. She started following Griffin around, turning off the lamps and lights when he was done searching, until only a standing lamp glowed softly between the two sofas and the dim glow of her bedroom stretched down the hallway. She felt better now. Hidden.

  “If they know about the Company,” he said, “they might know about Mendacia. There’s no reason for them to target San Francisco unless they came for that.”

  The Board had said as much, too, hence the extensive protection measures.

  She started to straighten a few books on her shelves, realized they were of Magritte and Mapplethorpe and Goldsworthy, and then stepped back as though they burned. Reminders of Reed everywhere. She’d have to get rid of all the pages she loved so much so she wouldn’t constantly be reminded of her awful choice to try to indulge when she should have run.

  She had to think of something else. Focus her brain on the problem.

  “Do you think our ancestors could have learned the art of glamour from the Tedrans?”

  He fingered a gray-striped pillow on the sofa and frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the words to manipulate Mendacia aren’t ancient Ofarian. We always thought it was a lost language, which is why we had so few words to work the spells around. But in reality the commands are Tedran. Maybe our ancestors learned glamour from Tedrans—maybe even secretly—and when we escaped slavery, we brought it with us. But since we knew so little of their language, we only had so much to work with. I’m just thinking out loud here.”

  “Anything’s possible, isn’t it?” Griffin scrubbed his face with his hands. He looked incredibly tired, his eyes beer-and-Jack-Daniel-shots red. He wore impeccably tailored charcoal gray pants and a baby blue, custom-made shirt, dressed like he was heading to the Velvet Club. Despite the three-o’clock-in-the-morning shadow, he still looked hot. The thought made her glance away.

  “I’ll take the couch.” A hint of hope crept into his softened voice. Hope that she’d invite him to share her bed.

  “You can use the second bedroom, you know.”

  He shoved his hands into his pants pockets. “Out here I can hear better. Keep an eye on the door.”

  They looked at each other for longer seconds than she wanted to count, until he broke it by going to the TV cabinet and removing the cable-knit throw she always used when curling up for a movie. She nodded at his back and turned down the hallway toward her bedroom.

  She desperately wanted out of her work clothes, out of the pencil skirt and high boots Reed had complimented. Everything was tainted now. They were her favorites, and she didn’t think she could ever wear them again.

  “What else can you tell me about the Primary?”

  Halfway down the hall, across from the bathroom, she froze midstep. “The Primary?”

  When she turned fully back around, he was looking at her as though she were stupid. And she was, wasn’t she?

  “I told you and the Board everything.” Everything except that she’d wanted Reed. Damn it, she could still feel his hands on her leg, the fluttering of his breath at her ear.

  Griffin ran a hand through his short, dark hair. Somehow it still managed to look artfully mussed. He prowled around the coffee table, coming closer. “Tonight you told them what he looked like, that his name was Reed. You said he was kind of casual and reserved until the Tedrans walked in. Then he switched to all business.”

  The butterflies in her stomach whipped into a frenzy.

  He reached the edge of the sofa but advanced no farther. “The Board didn’t notice, but I did. You were talking to him.”

  His tone wasn’t accusatory, which made her feel even more like shit. It was clear to both of them where this conversation was headed, and any attempt to veer it someplace else would sound lame and immature. She was a grown-up; she should answer for her decisions. And she respected Griffin too much to lie to him.

  Slowly she moved back down the hall and leaned against the corner that opened up into the living room. But even after her I’m-an-adult pep talk, she had difficulty looking at him. “Yes. I was talking to him.”

  “About what?”

  “Griffin, let’s not do this now. It’s three o’clock in the morning.”

  “Do what? I’m just asking a question. You actually talked to the guy who was clearly hired by our enemies to do something.”

  She exhaled long and lifted her eyes to meet his. “What do you think we were talking about?”

  Griffin shifted on his feet and wiped his mouth as if he’d just eaten something bad. “He hit on you.” She said nothing. “Did you let him?”

  “I didn’t stop him.”

  “Even though you’d met him twice in the
same day under highly suspicious circumstances?”

  She refused to wince at his rising tone. “I thought about it a lot, okay? I weighed everything in my mind. But we got to talking and…”

  “What’d he say? Anything about us? The Tedrans?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No. I would’ve mentioned that to the Board. To you. It was just conversation.” Nice conversation. And flirting. And touching. Griffin just stared. “Look, I don’t see the point in getting into everything we’ve ever done with other people. You already know all the guys I’ve slept with anyway.”

  “Jesus, Gwen. You mean you—”

  “No! No, we didn’t. But I thought about it.” Reed’s dimple popped into memory, and she blinked hard to erase it, but it refused to budge. “I wanted to. It was the Allure, straight up.”

  She’d never seen Griffin look so disgusted. “You wanted to. With the guy who just happened to save you from Yoshi. Who just happened to find you in a dive bar later that night.” He was yelling now, and she was disappointed to find her own voice rising to match his.

  “It was talking. Like two people who are attracted to one another talk. The second I figured out his contacts were Tedrans, I ran. You think I don’t feel like a complete ass right now?”

  His emotions shifted; she watched them play across his face. The red in his neck paled. His stance softened, his shoulders dropping. His eyes turned sad, even regretful. “Have we ever fought before? After I became your protector, I mean.”

  She thought about it and couldn’t remember a time. This whole marriage thing had screwed with their relationship in more ways than one. “I don’t think so.”

  With a heavy sigh, he sank to the couch and fixated on his hands, clasped tightly between his knees. They stayed that way for a while, physically whipped and emotionally fried. But there were other things that needed to be said, and she knew that neither of them would sleep until that happened.

  “You know,” he finally said, “I get the Allure now. I really do.”

  She crossed her legs at the ankle and pressed her head to the corner. Funny, they hadn’t ever mentioned that word until tonight. And now was as good a time as any.

  “With all the speeches we got growing up,” he went on, “warning us about the Allure, about wanting something we can’t have, it’s easy to make vows when you’re fourteen or fifteen and don’t know what’s out there. ‘I won’t ever do that,’ you tell yourself. ‘I’ll be true to my people.’ But it’s so different when you’re older. When you’re faced with forever with someone you didn’t choose yourself.”

  “I know about the woman. The Primary a few months back.”

  His thick, dark eyebrows lifted, then he gave a small, humorless laugh. “Of course you do. But I bet you don’t know about the others.”

  Wow, okay. Strangely, it didn’t bother her. “I’m not judging you, Griffin. Not one bit. I bet the vast majority of us gave in to the Allure more than once. Everyone except me, that is. But we know it’s just temporary. It’s not permanent. We understand where our true loyalties have to lie.”

  He raised his eyes to hers. “Except for Delia.”

  “Yeah. Well. She’s an exception.” Gwen couldn’t think of anything more to say that wouldn’t bring out long-dormant tears. She pushed away from the corner and started for the kitchen. “Want some chamomile tea?”

  She could change while it steeped, and then she’d lie in bed and let the hot brew calm her nerves until she passed out and didn’t wake until after the engagement was announced.

  He brightened, and his tiny smile indicated a truce. “Sounds nice.”

  She knocked around in the kitchen until she found the teakettle and filled it with water, the normalcy of the action already calming her. As she set it to boil on the stove, she heard Griffin rise and start to pace the living room.

  “How many times have I told you to take down this picture?”

  She smiled. The framed photo sat among her collection of Art Deco architecture books. It was of her, Griffin, and David in high school. She’d dyed her hair a hideous platinum blond and had a love of shiny shirts. Griffin was doing his best Marky Mark impression, and a bespectacled, scrawny David hadn’t yet learned how to lift weights. She thought it was hilarious; both the men had aged so well.

  “Wow.” His voice softened as his feet shuffled down the length of the bookcase, to a new photo. “That’s a great one of you and me.”

  She paused in removing two mugs from the cabinet. Taken years ago, long before marriage had ever entered their consciousness, it was her favorite picture of just the two of them. They were more carefree then, less serious. She’d been working for the Company, of course, but she had yet to approach the Board about opening an international division. And he’d been her protector, but hadn’t yet risen to head of security. In the picture, they had their arms around each other, cheeks pressed together, the effects of a few glasses of wine glinting in their eyes.

  “Hey, Mr. Bodyguard,” she called to him. “You forgot to check the balcony.”

  She was half kidding, but he swore, muttering something about being distracted. His quick footsteps crossed the floor. As she plopped tea bags into the mugs, she heard the click of the French doors and the hard heels of his shoes out on the balcony. Then a thump. Then nothing.

  “Griffin?”

  Ducking her head out of the kitchen, she saw the balcony doors hanging wide open, the curtains flapping. Griffin’s body lay half inside the apartment, half on the balcony. She couldn’t tell if he breathed.

  Fear snatched her in its terrible jaws. “Oh, sh—”

  She lunged for the front door, thinking escape get the hell out of there RIGHT NOW run run run.

  Someone grabbed her from behind. He was huge and silent as wind. She kicked out. She squirmed violently, the terror taking hold and thrashing her body like a puppet. But the attacker held her fast with one massive arm.

  She opened her mouth to scream but his other hand whipped around and clamped a damp swatch of fabric over her mouth and nose. She panicked, gasping for air. There was none. Some chemical sawed and hacked at her throat. It clawed its way into her head, making her dizzy and buzzy. Her vision doubled, then blurred. The room dove and twisted, and she lost all control of her muscles. The only thing left in her head was fear.

  All sound swirled into a vacuum, fading softer and softer. The last thing she heard was a man’s voice.

  “Sorry, Gwen. I had no idea it would be you.”

  NINE

  The angry buzz of a thousand bees roared through Gwen’s head. The vibrations stretched to the tips of her limbs and beyond; no amount of concentration could control the shaking of her arms and legs. Her teeth felt like they’d been jammed backward into her gums and her mouth tasted gritty, like she’d been chewing on hair. She tried opening her eyes, but invisible concrete weighed down the lids.

  Awareness came agonizingly slowly. After hours or days or years, the hum started to dissipate. Gradually, gradually it decreased to the perimeter of her consciousness. The shaking stopped, but her limbs now moved on a delay. When she got them to budge, it was never more than an inch, and even that left her panting with effort.

  The fear still beat at her with a sharp club. Palpable, unrelenting, vicious.

  Finally she managed to pry open her eyes. Though it was only a crack, she nearly cried, feeling victorious. Tiny red lights glowed around her. The world smelled of rubber and plastic carpet, the kind her grandma had lining the breezeway in her house in Pleasanton.

  She recognized a few sounds. Pavement whirring beneath tires. The whoosh of cars intermittently passing in the opposite lane. She lay in the back of a windowless van, rocking as it barreled down a highway.

  With a groan, she tried to roll over. The buzz wasn’t the only thing inhibiting her movement. Rope bound her wrists and ankles, and she ended up gracelessly on her belly, chin gouging into the prickly fake rug.

  At first she didn’t remember what had happened, how
she’d got here…then she remembered everything.

  Griffin’s body on the floor of her apartment. The intruder.

  She’d been kidnapped.

  “Take it easy,” said a smooth, deep voice. “It’ll take a bit to come around.”

  That voice.

  A small flashlight clicked on, illuminating a frighteningly familiar man. The black half-zip, the shaved head, and that maddeningly innocent-looking vine tattoo climbing up his neck.

  “You!”

  Fishlike, she flopped onto her back and tried to scramble away, but the sudden movement tossed her stomach and sent her head spinning. Acid leaked into her mouth and she dry heaved.

  Reed started to reach for her, then changed course and instead banged on the wall dividing the back from the cab.

  “I said to take it easy.” Whatever soothing she thought she’d imagined coming from him before was gone now. “You’ll probably throw up. I told them to expect this. We’re stopping.”

  He stretched for her ankles but she snatched them away. “Don’t touch me!”

  Her stomach contracted. He was right; she was going to lose it.

  The van slowed. They turned off the paved road onto one full of potholes and rocks. As the vehicle pitched side to side, her stomach echoed the movement. Reed shined the flashlight on her green face, blinding her, and swore under his breath.

  He clamped the flashlight between his teeth and moved to her feet. She could either kick him off or concentrate on holding in the contents of her stomach. She chose the stomach.

  He jerked the ankle ropes until they loosened, then he snapped them free and tossed them against the metal van wall with a clang.

  At last the van stopped, brakes squealing. The passenger-side door opened and footsteps headed toward the back. The doors opened, and it wasn’t too much lighter outside than it was in. She couldn’t see who was responsible, but she had a really good idea.