by Camilla Monk
I shuddered at the explicit threat and listened, stiff, as he greeted his interlocutor in Afrikaans. “Goeie môre, broer.” Good morning, brother. Brother? March? If so, the woman he had called a bitch must be Phyllis. “I give you thirty minutes to bring me the real diamond. I’ll send you my instructions. Try not to run away this time . . . of ek gee haar ’n forty-five.”
I frowned as Dries hung up. There was a part he didn’t want me to understand. Too bad for him that the sticky gruel of Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans I had stored somewhere in my brain as a child was enough to get the general idea. Said idea being that if March didn’t bring him the Ghost Cullinan, he intended to give me a . . .
“What’s a forty-five?” I tried to sound badass and almost uninterested, but believe me, it wasn’t easy.
“I thought you already knew.” He smirked, pulling me into a loose embrace and tracing the nape of my neck with his thumb. “We cut between the fourth and fifth vertebras. You’ll keep the ability to breathe on your own. Everything else is lost.”
As he said this, I thought of Rislow, who had called Dries March’s master before getting forty-fived himself. Nice. I can’t say I looked forward to becoming quadriplegic, but I couldn’t stand the idea of cowering in front of this bastard, so I summoned what little courage I had left.
“You’re wasting your time. He’s gonna give the real Cullinan to the Queen. Then she’ll pay him to forty-five you, asshole!”
Damn, Rislow had made me tough. Not super tough like March, but enough to face my demise with some semblance of dignity . . . I hoped. Dries laughed again and pressed me closer, his lips grazing my earlobe. “Perhaps. You’ll be my consolation prize then, little Island. I’ve never fucked both a mother and her daughter.”
I’m not sure what happened to me . . . I flung my hand at his face, clawing at his cheek and hair. I didn’t want to slap him; I wanted to hurt him, to fucking destroy him. It was like a bomb had exploded inside me and shards of pain, hate, and horror were scattering throughout my body in the same way the glass replica had disintegrated itself upon hitting the floor. For all my rage, I didn’t accomplish much: only a couple of faint scratch marks on his cheekbone. His hair got tousled too, so that was something.
I quickly regretted my move, however, as he grabbed my throat, applying sufficient pressure to remind me who was gonna destroy whom in this evil lair. “Careful, Island . . . You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
Again, he wasted no time in regaining his composure. Shaking his head in a way that reminded me of March, he directed his gaze to a pair of open French doors that led to a dining room. “Would you like to join me for lunch while we wait for our friend?”
TWENTY-NINE
The Puppet
“No, Ramirez! I’ll never be your sex doll! I’d rather die than belong to you.”
—Kerry-Lee Storm, The Cost of Rica
Dries cultivated a sense of aristocratic entitlement and profound douchebaggery that had me wondering how a “Jesuit” like March had ever been able to look up to a guy like him. The mile-long glass table and the huge black Renaissance dining chairs already hinted at a seriously inflated ego, but the crystal tableware was the finishing touch. All he needed was a fat white Persian cat, and I would have been eating lunch with Ernst Blofeld. A silent and uptight Japanese butler crossed the room and served each of us a glass of what I assumed to be some super expensive wine. I didn’t touch mine because I feared I had the one with grape juice and polonium.
With a ferocious smile, Dries cradled his glass in his upturned hand and caressed the long stem. “So, how do you like my creation?”
I frowned. “Your creation? Are you talking about March?”
“Straight from Cape Town’s gutter . . . and look where he is now.”
I forced myself to look into his hazel eyes. “You’re the one who taught him how to kill people?”
He raised his glass, toasting me. “I taught him much more than that. When I met March, he was a nobody, a small-time thug breaking into houses for a little cash. His father was a British dealer who sold mandrax in the slums of Lavender Hill . . . and his mother was dead, I believe.”
As I processed his words, a few pieces of the puzzle that was March came together. March was of British descent, so my guess about his accent had been half correct. Now, mandrax . . . I frowned, scraping at the memories of my brief stay in Pretoria. It was a popular drug, some kind of barbiturate equivalent that made people all squishy and stupid, like pot. So March was basically the son of a small-time British drug dealer and had grown up without a mother. Not much of a fairytale.
March’s words when we had discussed his educational background—or lack thereof—rang in my ears. “He mentioned he went to jail. Is it because of the housebreaking?”
Dries smelled the wine in his glass and closed his eyes in apparent delight. “I’m surprised he told you about that. He served nine months at Pollsmoor when he was seventeen. Did he tell you how he got caught? I love this story!”
I shook my head, glancing at the Japanese butler from the corner of my eye. He was waiting with two plates covered with ornate silver domes.
Dries took a swig and went on. “One of the prize idiots he worked with tipped a jar of marbles in a child’s bedroom. They scattered all over the place, and March lost it. When the cops picked him up, he was still crawling on all fours to put them back in the jar!”
I pictured March as a young boy growing up in poverty and left to cope alone with his disorder. My chest tightened. It wasn’t funny at all; it was fricking sad. “Did you meet him in prison?”
“No, shortly after he got out. I heard about him from a 28 who had met him in jail . . . I thought that a piece of white trash who had spent nearly a year in Pollsmoor and had not only made it out alive but AIDS-free might have some sort of potential.”
My eyebrows shot up. “AIDS-free . . . ?”
After his butler was done serving the two plates, revealing a small pile of caviar and a couple of mini-blinis, Dries resumed his explanations. “The 28s are a gang infiltrating pretty much every single prison in South Africa. Those gentlemen’s specialty is ‘slow puncture,’ which consists in having a man raped by AIDS-infected inmates. It was the new hype back then.”
My breath hitched in my throat. “What the . . . thank God, March didn’t—”
He topped a blini with some caviar and went on. “I never cared much about that part of his life. He was obedient and fit for training. Nothing else mattered.”
I hated the way Dries talked about March, like he had been nothing but a dog, a blank canvas rather than an actual human being. My fingers itched with the need to stab him with my fork. Staring down at the glistening caviar that looked like a heap of boogers on my plate, I squeezed my eyes shut and slammed my palms hard against the cold glass. Dries was trying to mess with me. And it was working.
Glancing at my untouched food, he gave me a knowing smile. “Am I unsettling you? Are you worried that March won’t come for you?”
I pushed the plate away and got up from my chair under the wary scrutiny of his guards at the other end of the room. “He won’t. There’s no point.”
He shook his head, leaving the table as well. “No. Trust an old Lion. March will answer my invitation, and he will show up with the diamond. Aren’t you hungry anymore?”
“No, I’m not! And you shouldn’t be either. If March comes here, it will be to kill you and all these guys!”
Dries flashed me a confident grin and gestured to the Star Trek couch. “He’s never going to betray me. I’m the one who carved him.”
I sat on the white cushions and looked up at him. “You mean that lion? Do you have one too?”
“Yes,” he confirmed as he sat near me again.
I inched away. “You say he’ll never go against you, but he left the Lions.”
Dries stayed silent for a few seconds until he pulled me toward him, forcing us into a fake embrace that made me want to scream. “He
did . . . because of you,” he murmured, taking one of my hands in his larger one and leaning even closer to smell my hair.
Creep factor at being petted by Dries, on a scale of one to ten: twenty.
Shock factor at hearing that March had supposedly left the Lions because of me, on a scale of one to ten: forty.
I jumped on the soft cushions, pulling the hand he had touched as if I had been burned. “What?”
Dries leaned back on the comfortable sofa, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “After Léa’s death . . . after you, he decided to fly solo.”
My chest exploded with pain at Dries’s words, and my scalp prickled in growing panic. “What do you mean? Did March . . . No! He didn’t kill my mother! He didn’t!”
“Who said he did?”
A wave of incredible relief washed over me.
March hadn’t killed her. Yet he had been there; he had been involved. In truth, I had suspected he was hiding something for a while—felt it when I looked into his eyes, when he touched me as if committing a sin he was powerless to resist. There was this bond between us, which I didn’t fully understand, but I knew it went far beyond our non-encounter at my dad’s Christmas party.
Confident that he had my full attention, Dries scooted closer again and wrapped an arm around my shoulder, which I tried my best to ignore. “I was in the ideal position. The Lions and the Board have a long history together, and when the Queen realized that Léa had fled South Africa with the Cullinan, she called me immediately.”
“But you were also the one who had arranged her escape,” I murmured, remembering how fast we had packed and flown to Tokyo in first class back then.
“Yes. I believe I should also be credited for the idea of creating a replica of the Cullinan to help her create a diversion. I have to admit I never thought I’d fall prey to my own tactic or watch you destroy this little souvenir before my eyes, for that matter.” He laughed bitterly. “Regardless, Léa betrayed me as well. As soon as you two had landed, she went off the grid. She never showed up at the apartment I had arranged for her in Roppongi.” His hand squeezed my shoulder as he said this, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intentional or not.
“You found us anyway,” I said in a brittle voice. For the first time, everything was clear. We should have lived in a Star Trek apartment with Dries in Tokyo, but my mother had fled from him, hiding in our little house in the modest area of Sumiyoshi, where she thought a posh asswipe like him would never think to look.
“Of course I did. Léa was good, but not that good.” He chuckled. “So I came here with March to get her and the Cullinan back, all with the Board’s blessing.”
“So why did you kill her instead?” I snapped. I felt mad, mad at Dries, mad at March, but the tears wouldn’t come.
Dries rolled his eyes. “Have you lost your mind, little Island? Léa was the only one to know where the Cullinan was. I was going to take you both and make her talk.”
I shoved him away. I couldn’t stand that fucking arm around me anymore. “But someone shot her! I remembered on Rislow’s table. She was shot in the head!” I shouted.
“Yes one of my men,” he said coldly. “March and I were watching you two, along with a third Lion, who was supposed to cover us during the operation. We were about to intercept Léa, and I gave the sniper orders to stop the car. According to him, he merely meant to blast her shoulder so she would drop the wheel, but he shot her in the head.” Dries caressed his chin. “I wasn’t entirely convinced by his explanation, but he was a Lion and he had disobeyed my orders, so I executed him.”
There had been little doubt in my mind after remembering the circumstances of my mother’s death on Creepy-hat’s table, but hearing it suddenly made it real. It was like a burn that would have been numbed by the initial adrenaline rush, only to start hurting afterward. Now the flames were real, perhaps even more so than ten years prior. One of Dries’s men had murdered my mother in cold blood.
I felt my jaw trembling and struggled to regain control of my emotions. “Victor Koerand said that she was afraid, that she knew she was going to die. And here you are, with a dead scapegoat ready for use. Isn’t that convenient?”
His nostrils flared, and a flash of anger darkened his golden eyes. “Rather than making pathetic accusations, you should thank me. You would be dead as well if I hadn’t brought March here to Tokyo with me.”
My spine turned to ice. “What are you talking about? What happened?”
“After the shooting, Léa’s car kept speeding down the avenue with you inside. You already know that.”
I nodded weakly.
“Since the operation was a complete failure I ordered fallback, but March ran down the street after the car. You might not want to believe it, but each professional has his soft spot: mine is armadillos. I’d never kill an armadillo.” Dries sighed. “March’s . . . I suppose it’s little girls. Poor fucker made it just in time to pull you out of the wreckage. He left the Lions shortly after that, a matter of guilt and misplaced pride, I believe.”
I think Dries said something else after that, about how he had sent a cleaning team for March at the time, so he wouldn’t appear too lenient to the rest of their “brothers.” I wasn’t listening. My ears were buzzing, and my heart was beating so loud, too loud. I thought of the dream I had experienced on Creepy-hat’s table and tried hard to remember. My mother’s still figure, the fear, the pain, and then him. His face, the blue eyes, the smell of the mints, and the black knife, the relief when my body was picked up from the seat, the way I had wanted to hold on to him, but my limbs hadn’t been able to respond. March had intended to kidnap my mother and me for Dries, but ultimately he had saved me from that burning car. For no reason, no reward. Just because it had been the right thing to do.
A tear I hadn’t felt roll onto my cheek fell on my lap as Dries spoke again. “I suspected he wouldn’t have the courage to tell you.”
“For all I know, you still might be the one who shot her.” I sniffed, looking away to regain my composure.
“I’m not. Believe me, I wanted Léa alive.”
“Whatever you say . . . Who got the idea to keep the diamond instead of giving it to the Board? You?”
“Léa shared my views. She never did anything she didn’t want to.”
“Is that what you tell yourself to feel better about what happened to her? She was blinded by her feelings, and you used that against her, you vile piece of shit!” I yelled. I couldn’t believe my mother had died for this asshole.
“A feeling I’m sure you can relate to . . . History has a way of repeating itself, or so it seems.”
Leave it to an arrogant turd like Dries to imagine that March was manipulating me to keep the stone for himself. No. March had been part of all this, done terrible things, and chosen to leave Dries and the Lions afterward because of it, but he wasn’t greedy. As he had told me in his car, back in Paris, this was not the way he did things. “You’re wrong. March has many flaws, but he isn’t trying to keep the diamond. He’s completely anal about his moral code.”
“You seem to admire him,” Dries mused.
“More than I admire you, obviously. What happened? Why didn’t Mom give you the Cullinan in the end? Her notary told me that in her letter, she said she had made a mistake, that she wanted to make things right.”
A flicker of sadness shimmered in his eyes, and for a moment Dries seemed almost human. “I’m going to disappoint you. I’m not entirely sure. I thought Léa and I were working toward the same goal, building the same dreams, but she grew distant, and by the time we left Pretoria she seemed to have stopped trusting me entirely. She even tried to talk me into returning the Cullinan to the Board, to smooth things over with them. I think . . . I think she believed the Board would kill you too if she was caught, and she didn’t trust that I would protect you,” he recalled, his gaze a little unfocused, as if my mother’s distrust still gnawed at him more than a decade later.
“She was right.”
>
He nodded. “Indeed. There’s business, there’s pleasure, and you were none of those. I wouldn’t have risked losing the Cullinan for your sake.”
I fought the lump in my throat. “I think she really loved you, you know. Did you ever—”
“Love her back?” Dries’s lips moved, as if he had been about to say something else, but then he seemed to think better of it and paused. “No. She knew that, and she never expected me to. I doubt you can understand this, but I was offering more than love.”
“Power?”
“You understand, after all.”
Oh yes, I understood . . . I understood everything. I looked at his hazel eyes, mirrors of mine, the little moles here and there on his face and hands, the slight gap-tooth. I closed my eyes and remembered his shadow, standing in my doorway, mere feet away from my bed.
The scent of sandalwood, floating in the bedroom.
“Are you my father?”
“No. Simon Halder is the father Léa chose for you.”
I felt a prickling sensation in my rib cage upon hearing his words. I pondered their meaning as he left the sofa to answer a phone call.
The father Léa chose . . .
Was Dries implying that he would have preferred being chosen over my dad? I didn’t want to ask him that. I wasn’t certain I could handle the answer to that question.
Meanwhile, he had hung up and turned to me with a predatory smile. “Dear little Miss Chaptal, didn’t I tell you that you could trust the instinct of an old Lion?”
THIRTY
The Toy
“Destiny knew that Colt would take his revenge against the cartel when they expected it the least, and he would leave nothing but ruins in his wake.”
—Natasha Onyx, Muscled Passion of the SEAL
Let me tell you this. I had no idea what the expression “conflicting emotions” truly meant until after that disastrous first lunch with my biological father. Did I hate Dries? Yes. Did I wish that, in another life, he had been a real father to me and loved my mom? Sadly, yes. Was I mad at March for having concealed the truth about his involvement in the Cullinan affair? Yes. Was my unhealthy crush on him getting worse now that I knew he had been my mysterious rescuer? God, yes.