“Gwennie!”
Dad.
The Chairman stepped from the boardroom at the far end of the corridor. The crowd around her parted. In that moment he wasn’t anything but her father, and the need to go to him was instinctual. She hurried toward him, the weight of their past hardships and present problems trailing just a nose behind. He was sobbing as he pulled her into his big dad bear hug. Too tight for comfort, but too wonderful to matter.
“I thought I’d lost you, too,” he murmured, only for her ears. “Oh, Gwennie, I didn’t know how I’d go on. Your mom, Delia, you…”
“I’m here, Dad. I’m okay.”
When he stepped back, his hands firmly on her shoulders as though she might disappear again, she saw the extent of his grief. Uncharacteristic stubble dusted his chin and cheeks. His Italian suit was rumpled and he smelled faintly like the cabin of an airplane. But the most disconcerting detail of all was the fact that he wasn’t using Mendacia.
There he stood, Chairman Ian Carroway, laid bare with his own face and wearing his grief, for all the Company to see. He took her face in one hand and nodded toward the boardroom. “You don’t have to do this now. You can rest—”
“No.” She definitely had to do this now. Reed was trapped in the Plant with the Tedrans, and Griffin feared committing treason. She was the last fighter standing, and she was going in with weapons hot.
The whole Board waited inside. She noticed, as she crossed the threshold into the boardroom, that the waterglass had already been activated. How long had they been all together, waiting for her?
As the door closed behind her, she made the rounds, clasping hands and accepting gentle embraces from men and women she’d long considered superior. Despite their caring words and benevolent smiles, a chill hung in the air, enhanced by the consistent murmur of the waterglass.
At last she shook Jonah’s hand. She flashed back to seeing him in the Plant, when authority and tension had buzzed around him, and he’d glossed over the Tedrans as though they were unfeeling machines. His grip on her hand was disturbingly normal, though he held her eyes for a beat longer than he ever had.
“Welcome home,” Jonah said. “We’re glad you’re back.”
And she thought: But you were the reason I was taken.
Her father patted the chair next to him and she sat, gazing over the group of men and women she’d once longed to be a part of. Was that only a week ago? A week and a lifetime ago. A week and thousands of lifetimes ago, because that’s what had been wedged between her and her former aspirations: the truth behind thousands of Tedran and Ofarian lives.
She sifted through everything she’d learned and everything she thought she knew. If she was the last warrior capable of doing what’s right, she wouldn’t back down, even while being hopelessly outnumbered. She thought of Xavier and how he’d offered her a place on Genesai’s ship. He hadn’t done it to hurt her; he’d done it because deep down he believed in her. What she did now, she did to erase the reasons why he’d flinched from her that day in the Plant.
She took her dad’s hand and squeezed it once. He looked at her questioningly, the curve of his wrinkled mouth troubled.
She faced the Board and announced, “I know about Mendacia.”
Inside her fingers, her dad’s hand went slack. “What do you mean?” he asked, and his voice sounded lower than she’d ever heard.
“I mean I know everything. Where it’s made. How it’s made.”
As she spoke, the story of the Plant came out true and hit its mark. She looked every one of the Board members in the eye and related the horrors she saw. The most satisfactory part was the sheen in her father’s eyes. She hated to take solace in his devastation, but his reaction was exactly what she’d needed to see. He wasn’t heartless.
He pressed his lips together to keep his chin from quivering, but it wasn’t working. “What did they want with you? Out of all of us, why take you?”
Here she paused, considering where she wanted her words to steer her elders. Nora had once told her that Mendacia was nothing but liquid lies. She’d been right, but right now that term also applied to Gwen, because she was made of water and the time for telling the truth to the Board had ended.
“Nora thought I would be able to speak with the pilot of the ship of the First Immigration. She believed he could take the Tedrans home, but Genesai is useless without his ship. It no longer exists.”
The limo pulled up in front of the stunning white, three-story Victorian manor in Pacific Heights. She’d practically grown up there and had never thought of it as ridiculous or opulent, but now, staring up the grandly curved front steps, all she could see were the faces of glamour-drained Tedrans in the stained-glass windows and sex-dead men and women in the carved porch posts.
“What are we doing here?” she asked her dad. They hadn’t said anything on the short ride from HQ. Just sat next to each other, her head on his shoulder like she was twelve again. “I thought I was staying with Griffin.”
He gave her knee a pat. “Why don’t you stay here tonight? It would make me feel better.”
It rankled her, but she pushed the feeling away. She’d sleep in the second-floor bedroom that had once been hers and think about what to do next. Think about how to get Griffin on her side. How to get around the Board. How to save the Tedrans.
In a daze she trudged up the steep front steps and into the warm, rich interior of the Chairman’s manor. Two members of the security team followed her and her dad up the creaking staircase to the second floor. She didn’t recognize either of the soldiers.
She paused at the door that had once been decorated with puffy stickers and teen pinups. “Where’s Griffin?”
“Away on my business.”
That was fast. She frowned as an itch started on the back of her neck. Dad swept an arm into the bedroom that had been redecorated in rich jewel tones. She went inside, lost in thought.
Griffin would hate to be away now. Even in the light of their strained conversation at the diner, he wouldn’t want to be away from her. She was still his responsibility. She hoped the Board wasn’t punishing him for “failing” to protect her.
“Won’t he expect me back at his place? He’ll worry if I’m not there.”
“He knows where you are and that you’re safe.” Dad shut the door and leaned against it. They were alone in her old bedroom. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through.”
She stood in the center of the room, tightening her arms around her waist. “You need to see it, Dad. You need to go.” Nothing like the truth. It was her strongest weapon now. “And we need to stop it. You and I.”
That weight settled on his shoulders again. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, looking his age. He shook his head with great sorrow. “I’m so, so sorry you had to find out like that.”
“Find out…Oh, God.” Her legs fell out from beneath her, and she sank into a brocade-upholstered, wing-backed chair. “You knew. You knew everything and did nothing.”
He lifted his eyes to hers, and there was unfathomable sadness behind them. “Of course I knew. I’m the Chairman.”
Nora and Xavier had been right. Reed had tried to tell her—Griffin, too—and she hadn’t listened. She deserved a silver medal for foolishness and a gold in naïveté.
Instinctively, her hand went for her pocket. She wrapped her fingers around Reed’s watch and squeezed. Hard.
An open wound yawned in her spirit where Reed had been ripped away from her. Griffin’s absence burned like acid poured into the crevice. And her own father’s treachery lit the whole thing on fire.
“Dad, how could you…”
He came toward her and rubbed her numb arms in an achingly fatherly gesture. When she looked into his weathered face, she could barely see straight she was shaking so hard from anger and hurt.
“You have such a good heart, Gwennie. Your people are everything to you, as they are to me.” His voice was too soft, too compassionate. It was making her think h
e was someone he actually wasn’t. “We had to ease you into it.”
“Ease me?”
“Yes. The internships, the opportunities for advancement. We wanted you to be as involved with the Company as possible. Become invested in it, heart and soul.”
She ripped herself from his touch and he let her go with the opening of his hands. The misery in his eyes, paired with the awfulness of his words, confounded her.
“Wait.” Her voice was nearly as dead as she felt. “The international division was my idea. I came to you and Jonah and wanted to give my gift to the Company. To the Ofarian people.”
He put a hand to his chest, and he actually had the audacity to have tears in his eyes. “And we were so happy you did that.”
“Oh, my God, you planned that, too? Stay where you are!” she shrieked when he came for her again with the hugging arms and tormented expression.
He settled back into place, drawing himself up like the Chairman he was. “We didn’t plan it. We wanted it. But we wanted you to want it more.”
And she had. Her ambition had overridden everything.
“Haven’t you seen how much you’ve helped your people?” he said. “You gave more wealth to more Ofarians. By expanding internationally you did so much. Our future is more financially secure, thanks to you.”
The sympathy in his eyes was terrifyingly real, because it meant he was too far gone into the world he’d created—the one she’d expanded with her own ignorance.
“I made them make more babies.” The statement sliced at her throat because it was the first time she’d said it out loud.
“Sweetie. Gwennie. You have to stop thinking of them as babies.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know it’s hard. Believe me, I do.” Was this for real? Was she really hearing this out of her own father’s mouth? “You don’t think every one of us struggled when we found out the secret behind Mendacia?”
She put the wing-back chair between her and Dad. “And you did nothing?”
He considered the floor, chewed the inside of his cheek, which meant he was choosing his words carefully. “We have rules for a reason,” he said slowly. “Do you think I liked exiling Delia? It destroyed me to do that to my own daughter. But she chose not to be a part of us and we did what we had to to protect ourselves.” He’d advanced several steps without her knowing. She circled around the chair. “Do you think I like knowing there are living things being kept in a dark building for our benefit?”
She tasted salt and realized she was crying. “They’re not things. They’re Tedrans.”
His palms came together, as though praying in the Christian religion. “No. They are things. And their purpose is to help Ofarians. Don’t you understand? Everything we’ve ever done since coming here is to keep ourselves hidden and safe from the Primaries. If the Tedrans were suddenly just allowed to…run about, they’d compromise everything.”
She literally had no words. It didn’t matter; he had enough for both of them.
“We’ve been safe for a hundred and fifty years. Who am I to say that it’s time to stop Mendacia?”
“You, Dad, are the Chairman.”
“And it’s my job, my life’s calling, to serve my people.”
It might have been easier to react to if he yelled or maniacally rubbed his hands together or cackled evilly at the sky. But Ian Carroway carried a bone-deep conviction that he was a philanthropist through and through. He believed every word he said. And that screwed with her head even more.
“You know,” he said, “I had a similar conversation with the Chairman before me.”
That shoved her into motion. She exploded. “Don’t say that like you want me to take your place. I’ll never lead. Not this. Not what we’ve created.”
That injured him. She recognized the agony. She’d witnessed something similar the day he learned Delia’s affair with John was more than the Allure.
She skirted around the chair, advancing on him. “I won’t ‘come around.’ I won’t ‘ease into it.’”
His chest shuddered beneath his Italian suit. He stared at the tasseled rug, hands still in his pockets. She tried to convince herself that this was not her father, that this was a man who’d been brainwashed into being upset over her treasonous words.
“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded.
“You would have learned when the Board voted you in. You were close, too.”
She wanted to believe that, even if she hadn’t been kidnapped and her previous life’s dream came to fruition, she wouldn’t ever have fallen victim to the Board’s propaganda.
“Who else knows?” he asked, his voice markedly sharper. “Who did you tell? Griffin? That Primary?”
The two men she cared most for in the world were as good as dead if she admitted that. Her lips remained closed, her face impassive.
Her father backed toward the door and put his hand on the doorknob. “These are your people, Gwen. Choose your side very, very carefully.”
She glared. “You can’t keep me here. I’m your daughter. I’m all you have.”
A lightning bolt of pain crossed his face. “You’re an Ofarian first.”
He left. The lock clicked from the outside.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Closing in on eleven o’clock, and sleep was a thousand hours away. Gwen lay curled on her side atop the burgundy coverlet on the huge canopied bed. Reed’s watch indented a fringed pillow next to her face. She’d been staring at it so long she saw his face in the crystal.
He wasn’t smiling.
Last night she’d been sleeping in Griffin’s guest bedroom—because the thought of going back to her place was way too scary and odd—when he got a secure call from inside the Plant. A guard had asked if Gwen wanted her kidnapper kept prisoner. Her immediate reaction had been to demand Reed’s release, but with Griffin looking on and remembering what he’d said about keeping up appearances in front of the Board, she’d checked herself. She told the Plant guard that Reed was where he belonged. She needed the Board to think she was still on their side. Fat lot of good it had done her.
She’d tried the bedroom door many times since her father had left. Banged the crap out of her hand. Shouted her throat raw. No response. She gave up pounding but didn’t give up thinking.
Tap tap tap. It came from the window. At the lake house she might have attributed the sound to tree branches or squirrels. It took her a moment to remember that she was trapped in her old bedroom on a treeless lot in downtown San Francisco.
Tap tap tap.
With a gasp she snatched the watch from the pillow and swiveled to the narrow corner window near the bathroom door. A dark figure loomed on the other side of the glass. Feet propped on the steep incline of the roof, rope extending from his waist up to who-knows-where, she knew his shape, the cut of his hair.
She scrambled to the window and tried to open it. Sealed shut; the perfect cell.
Outside, Griffin waved her away from the glass. Still dangling from the rope, his hand skated around his black vest, taking out tools that glinted in the city lights. He fiddled with the window frame and snipped some nearby wires. When the bottom half of the window finally slid upward, fresh air and the faint hum of the city leaked inside.
“Griffin, what…how…”
“No time. Cameras on this side of the house are out for a few minutes. Any more and they’ll notice.” He extended a hand.
She took it but stood firm. “Genesai?”
“David’s got him.”
David. Stars. She’d dragged Reed into this, then Griffin. And now David.
She put her foot on the window ledge and Griffin pulled her up and out so she balanced over the back patio.
“I only have eight others,” he said.
It was eight more people than she’d had on her side two minutes ago.
“If I’m caught…if we’re caught…”
Griffin drew a sad, strained smile. “Then at least I’ll know I was one of the goo
d guys.”
Wrapping an arm around her waist, he curled her body into his, locked her in with his legs, and rappelled down the side of the house. Wind rushed through her hair, her stomach dropped, and she clung to his neck.
On the patio, he released the rope from his belt and pulled the entire length of it back in a flurry of his arms. Looping the thick coil diagonally across his body, he sprinted across the patch of back garden with her in tow. He hoisted her over the garden wall and scrambled over after her. They darted through strangers’ backyards and burst out onto the street the next block over. A dark green sedan—plain, not one of the Company’s—waited and she threw herself inside.
The red-haired woman behind the wheel slammed her foot on the gas, and they peeled out of Pacific Heights. God, he’d brought Zoe in, too. What could Griffin have said to his soldiers to turn them against their people so fast? And what had changed his mind to help Gwen? He’d left the diner with such steadfast denial, and aside from the phone call coming from the Plant, they hadn’t spoken at all since then.
Genesai and David huddled in the backseat. David nodded at her, his mouth drawn tight. Genesai grinned and embraced her awkwardly. She clung to him.
As the sedan swerved onto the Bay Bridge, Gwen tapped Griffin on the shoulder. “Do they all know?”
“Yeah,” Zoe replied, raising her troubled eyes to meet Gwen’s in the rearview mirror. “We know.”
“How did you know where I was?”
Griffin turned in the front seat. “I didn’t. When you weren’t at my place, I knew something was wrong. I knew the Board had you.”
“No.” She pressed her forehead to the seat back, ground it in nice and hard. “My dad had me.”
Griffin said nothing. He didn’t have to. He knew he’d been right and he took no joy in it. The time for tears had passed. Even if she dug for days, she knew she wouldn’t find any more. And that was fine by her, because she had to be focused to get to the slaves and Reed. She was sick of being jerked around and this time she’d be on the offensive.
Liquid Lies Page 31