Two more men appeared out of the haze and hoisted my brother up between them.
The Rook offered me his hand. “Come on. Time to get your brother back.”
I took his hand and let him lead me out the door.
The Rook and his team retreated to the warehouse. It was well after midnight when we arrived, and the streets were dead. Riley and what remained of his team were locked inside windowless rooms on the second floor of the warehouse. My brother was among them.
“I don’t understand why he has to be locked away,” I said to the Rook as we watched my brother through a two-way mirror in the door. Overhead, the lighting was dim, while my brother’s room was brightly lit to allow us to remain unseen on our side. It gave the hallway a hushed feel.
“Because we don’t know how much he remembers, or who he’s loyal to. This is just a precaution until we can clear his head.”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. My entire body was one massive ache inside another massive ache, but I was anxious to do something other than stand here.
“Something dislodged inside his head,” I said. “He could have killed me. He didn’t. And I think he remembers that I’m his sister.”
The Rook frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. All things considered, he’d escaped the mission pretty much unscathed. There was a fresh cut, a crescent swipe of the blade, across his forehead, and blood from the wound had dried along the side of his face. A few bruises were blooming along his jaw, and on his knuckles.
At least he hadn’t been shot. Thankfully, my bullet wound was already healing.
“Just give him the night, okay?” the Rook said. “Let him rest. Let me talk to him first. And then, tomorrow, you can start poking at him.”
“I hate it when people give me orders.”
He laughed and ran a hand through my hair, messing it up. “I know you do. It’s why I do it.”
With an exaggerated salute, he disappeared from the hall. I walked three doors down and peered into the two-way mirror of another cell.
Riley sat on a bed, his elbows propped on his knees, his hands folded on the back of his bowed head.
Riley had been captured. Damn, it was a good feeling.
The Rook hadn’t said what would happen to Riley, but I hoped someone somewhere along the line would put a bullet in him.
My stomach grumbled, forcing me to give up my post outside my brother’s room for an hour or so. I found pizza, beer, and a cake in a conference room. Pounding rock music vibrated through me.
I guess if there was anything worth celebrating, this was definitely it.
I grabbed a piece of pizza and parked myself in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows as the rest of the Rook’s team reveled behind me. Outside, the city glittered in winks of light. The moon hung half full in the sky.
As the party raged on, I watched the Rook’s team down beer after beer, pizza slice after pizza slice, and wished I could join in the fun. Usually, I was the consummate party girl, but how could I party now, when my brother had risen from the dead only to have any memory of his family wiped clean from his skull?
After my second slice, and a lot of stewing in my own frustrated juices, I grabbed a third slice and a beer and slipped from the party.
I headed back to where my brother was being kept, intent on spending as much time with him as I could. I’d make him remember, goddamn it.
But as I rounded the corner into the hallway and saw the three guards lying facedown on the floor, a cold sweep of dread ran down my spine.
I tossed the pizza and the can of beer aside and raced to Riley’s cell. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, the door still locked from the outside.
I heaved a relieved breath.
If it hadn’t been Riley…
A thousand thoughts raced through my head as I ran for my brother’s room. But if my brother was loyal to Riley, why would he escape without him? And if my brother had started to remember me, why escape at all?
At his door, I peered inside to find the place empty. I yanked the door open and stepped in, my boots crunching on something metal. I bent down and found two twisted paper clips.
“Lukas, you son of a bitch.”
When I straightened, I noticed a folded piece of paper on the table beside the bed. I snatched it up. Inside was a note. For me.
Chloe,
Remember that night when Mom & Dad got into a fight over whether you should take ballet or martial arts? Mom & Dad’s fights were always profoundly epic, but that night, it was about you and you felt so bad. Where did I take you that night, Chlo? Do you remember?
—L
I did remember. The question was, how did he?
The Rook would probably kill me when he found out I’d left the warehouse without alerting him to my brother’s escape, or to the three unconscious men lying facedown in the hallway, but I’d take my chances.
The night my mother and father fought, Lukas had taken me downtown to the carousel in the city square, and from that night on, whenever I was upset over something, it didn’t matter where we were, he’d find me a carousel.
It was a memory that I had swept under the bed, and tried so hard to forget. When my brother died, I swore I’d never visit another carousel in my entire life.
Now I drove through the darkened city streets as fast as I could go. It took only fifteen minutes to reach Louis Miller Park. It wasn’t where Lukas had taken me that night, when our parents fought, but Google told me it was the closest carousel in the area. I hoped that’s what Lukas had meant when he’d left the note.
I parked near the entrance and jogged inside, my gun in my hand.
I wasn’t sure what I’d find.
The carousel came into view when I crested a hill. The horses were frozen in mid-stride, their black eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
“Lukas?” I called.
His answer came instantly. “You showed up.”
I whirled around. “What is this about? Why did you escape?”
“Do you remember that night?” he asked.
“Of course I do. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“That night, I promised you things wouldn’t always be so fucked up.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t exactly keep that promise.”
He smiled a lopsided smile and spread his arms out. “I’m here now to make it up to you.”
I took a step closer and narrowed my eyes. “How much do you remember?”
He leaned closer, as if we were conspiring siblings. “All of it.”
The confession nearly knocked the wind from me. “Did you… I mean… did you just start to remember? Did it all come flooding back tonight?”
Even after I asked it, I knew what the answer must be. Memories didn’t come back all at once like that. They came back in pieces over months and months. Putting them back together was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have the box as a reference.
“I never went through a memory alteration,” he said, confirming my suspicions.
I rushed toward him. “You tried to kill me tonight!”
He laughed and grabbed my wrists as I swung at him. “It was all in good fun, Chlo!”
“How could you?”
“I’ve missed you.”
I yanked away from him. “But why go to all this trouble? Why keep up the ruse when we saved you?”
He shoved his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. “My goals were threefold. One, get Riley out of the picture without incriminating myself. Two, allow Riley’s enemies to feel as though they’ve had their revenge. Three, reconnect with you.”
“Me?”
“I knew family was the one thing that would motivate you to finally take action. So I made sure you knew you had some left.”
Realization crept in. “You were the Rook’s inside informant? You fed him all of that information. About you, about where Riley would be and when.”
Lukas nodded. “Your friends, the Turncoats, they
did my dirty work for me. It’s the way I prefer to operate,” he added with a grin. “Of course, they didn’t know I was the informant.”
The way Lukas talked, the way he acted, it reminded me too much of Connor. Clever and dangerous and charismatic. Maybe he did have his memories, after all, but the Branch had changed him.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked.
He shrugged. “With Riley gone, guess who’s in charge?”
I sighed. “You.”
“Me.”
“Then what do you want me for?”
“I want you to join me.”
“In doing what?”
He smiled again, and the light in his eyes burned like the heart of a fire. “Remaking the Branch.”
I shook my head. “I hate that fucking place. I don’t want to hear that name ever again.”
“Then we’ll rename it. I’ll even let you pick.”
Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the chopping of helicopter blades. I scanned the sky and saw the blinking of its lights. It looked as though it were headed our way.
“What’ll it be, sister?”
Lukas had been right about one thing—the best way to motivate me was with family. Family was more tantalizing than a cure for the Angel Serum. The truth was, I didn’t want to be cured. I didn’t want to be vulnerable, weak. What I wanted was to not be alone, and being normal again—being without the Angel Serum’s effects—had seemed like the easiest route to that.
Lukas was promising me a different solution. With my brother by my side, I wouldn’t be alone anymore.
And my problem had never been with the Branch so much as it’d been with the people running it. If Lukas were in charge, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we could do great things.
“What do you say?” he asked again as the chopper descended from the sky behind him, landing near the riverbank a hundred yards away.
I brought an arm up to shield my eyes as debris blew in every direction.
I had to shout to be heard over the roar of the wind. “I’ll come with you,” I said, “under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Riley will never be in charge, of anything, ever again.”
“Chloe,” he said. “If Riley comes anywhere near us, I’ll let you be the one to put a bullet in his head.”
I hooked my arm in his. “Then let us go remake the monster in our own image.”
“There she is,” he said. “My devilish little sister.”
“Race you there,” I said over a shoulder, and ran for the chopper.
Lukas took off after me, but he didn’t stand a chance.
I would win. I always did.
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About the Author
Jennifer Rush began telling lies at the age of five and was immediately hooked. Fiction was far better than reality, and she spent most of her teens writing (about vampires, naturally). She currently lives in Michigan with her husband and two children and enjoys eating ice cream in her spare time. She is the author of the Altered Saga. Jennifer invites you to visit her online at jennrush.com.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Rush
Cover art © 2015 by Shutterstock/CURAphotography
Cover © 2015 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: February 2015
ISBN 978-0-316-25896-8
E3
Played: An Altered Saga Novella Page 4