24
“Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.”
—Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
Whatever they had injected me with didn’t last very long. By the time they dragged me to a car in a backstreet, my mind was clear enough for me to register that I had been handcuffed, blindfolded, and that I was in as deep a shit as could be. The memory of Karl’s lifeless body sent a renewed surge of distress in my brain, and my lungs were struggling for oxygen as the vehicle’s tires screeched on the asphalt.
I had no sense of time or direction. Alex remained silent throughout the ride, but I knew he was here, no doubt in the driver’s seat—I recognized the constant accelerations and rough turns that characterized his driving, until it all came to a stop. I was taken out of the car with surprising care, compared to the violence with which they’d taken me from the hotel room. Alex’s scent no longer lingered; he was gone. For now.
Someone undid my blindfold with rough gestures, pulling at my hair in the process. At first, everything was just blurry sequins glittering all around me. Faces came into focus. I shook my head and stared blearily at the two armed men flanking me, then at our surroundings. My best guess was that the end of the world had occurred at some point during my kidnapping, and I’d awakened aboard mankind’s last hope for survival: a massive flying saucer.
Okay, maybe the ship was going nowhere because it was in fact an abandoned building planted in the middle of a forest. We stood on the ruins of a patio atop the saucer’s first floor. In the center of what I surmised to have once been a garden, pines and cypresses soared toward the sky, completely out of control. Above us, hundreds of identical square windows—most of them broken—lined a circular platform supported by concrete pillars.
Sandwiched between the bald guy Karl had recognized and a second, younger man, I was led inside the building, through a lobby that looked like a war zone, and up a long incurved ramp leading to the second level I had seen from outside. We made our way through a decrepit hallway circling around the saucer. Doors lined the opposite wall, some opening to what must have been bedrooms. Empty bed frames and broken chairs still rested on the dusty floor, as if their owners had fled and might someday return to this rotting dream.
I didn’t really mind the atmosphere itself, and I’d have found the paint peeling off from the walls oddly romantic hadn’t it been for my dire circumstances. This would certainly fit March’s personal definition of hell, though. Wherever he was, now would have been be a good time to barge in and shoot everyone except me.
I held my breath as one of the doors creaked open. So, Alex hadn't been far after all. His brown curls were damp with perspiration. He raked a hand in his hair, combing it back. When he walked up to me, I inched away from the reek of sweat overpowering soapy cologne. His hand reached out for me, clasped around the nape of my neck. I jerked back to no avail as he brought my face closer and pressed his lips to mine.
I had suffered through some not-so-great kisses during my early dating experiments, but they were nothing compared to this. Whatever I had felt when Alex used to kiss me, what little chemistry had ever bound us . . . it was gone, and when his tongue forced its way inside my mouth, slithered against mine, nausea swelled at the back of my throat. I tried to break the kiss and bit his tongue, hard enough to taste the metallic tang of blood. He drew back, and I saw his arm rise. I braced myself, but his hand stopped in midair. He lowered it with a deep breath. In his eyes, the anger had evaporated already; they were as soft as ever.
“For old times’ sake,” he said.
I clenched my jaw tight, since all I could feel building in my mouth were insults, and I knew I had to keep my cool. I had to get through to him somehow. “What is this about?”
He cupped my jaw and ran his thumb across my lips. “You don’t get it, do you?”
I shook his grip off, held on to my rage to help me focus and keep the fear at bay. “Enlighten me then. Does Erwin know about this? Or is it some shitty stunt to bait Dries so you can kill him yourself?”
Alex indulged in a chortle. “Erwin can go fuck himself. He’s days away from retirement. And Dries . . . he didn’t die today. Fine, he’ll die tomorrow. He’s done; he just doesn’t realize it yet.”
Gerone’s words came back to me. Hadn’t he said the same? He’d called Dries an old man who couldn’t see he had served his purpose. He’d said Dries had to go . . . and Alex seemed to already know that Dries had narrowly escaped death earlier today.
What did I have to lose at that point? I decided to tip my hand and see how Alex would react. I took a circular look around the room, at him and his men. “You’re all Frumentarii.” I jerked my chin at Alex. “You, you’re walking in your father’s footsteps. He was a frumentarius too, and Dries murdered him and your mother. And now that Anies wants to take Dries down, you’re all too happy to help, aren’t you?” I went on, fixated on the slow expansion of Alex’s pupils as he listened to me. “Gerone is part of the plan too. Dries took the heat for the plane bombing and kept everyone busy while Gerone got ready for his pièce de résistance in Rangiroa. And now Anies no longer needs Dries, and he’s becoming too much trouble anyway. So he wants him dead.”
I held my breath, praying that Alex would let something slip, help me fill the largest blank in this picture: how the hell did Lion king Anies and faceless mad scientist Lucca Gerone connect, and why would the Lions try to blow up the Poseidon Dome?
Alex mimicked some lazy clapping. “Bravo. See? You get it like a big girl.”
No, dammit. I did not get it, and that was the problem!
“So what am I in all this?” I asked again. “Bait?”
He gave a weary shrug. “I didn’t lie to you, you know. I’m just here to pick you up and deliver you. Honestly, you’re lucking out. When this is over, Dries and March are gonna end up in a dozen bags”—he rolled his eyes—“but God forbid anyone touches the little princess.”
I let that sink in. Deeply. Gerone too had promised March I’d be safe, and back in Cape Saint Francis, Alex had warned me to get away from the house. He’d requested satellite tracking on us. I was starting to understand that even then, he had been working on recovering me alive and unharmed for Anies . . . because brothers shared everything?
I held out my handcuffed wrists to Alex. “Take these off.”
He smirked. “I think we’ll leave them on, if that’s okay with you.”
“Take them off. Or I’ll have to tell Anies I wasn’t exactly treated like a princess.” I studied Alex’s reactions to each word, the way his lips thinned. “I’ll have to bring up those impulses you seem to have trouble reining in.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. Behind him, the bald guy Karl had recognized crossed his arms. From the looks of it, I’d just hit the bull’s-eye, and we were about to know exactly how much my dear uncle valued his little princess.
A whole lot.
I tried to control my surprise and feign cool detachment as Alex fished a key from his back pocket and freed my wrists from the steel cuffs. I wouldn’t be going anywhere though: around me, baldie and his two colleagues moved closer, like the bars of a cage.
Alex considered me thoughtfully. “I always knew you couldn’t be that innocent. No one ever is.”
“Not even Poppy?” I shot back, wanting to hurt him, to wrestle his true self out. “What’s gonna happen to her if you switch sides? Surely you can’t imagine Erwin is that dumb—”
“Island, you mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.”
It was as if his face had suddenly turned into a mask of wax. No life in his gaze, just a blank expression. Threatening in a way no snarl could have been. I had a feeling that my status as Anies’s very special snowflake wouldn’t weigh much in the precarious balance of Alex’s mind if I kept taking jabs at his sister. I decided to leave that rock alone, be it only to live through dawn.
“So what now?” I inquired, keeping my tone casual.
“We wait. Our little party back there attracted more attention than I’m comfortable with, so we’ll have to lay low until my colleagues pick us up.” He walked to a broken window and leaned by its dilapidated frame. Outside, a gust of wind whispered through the pine trees, making the heavy branches shiver. “Do you know what this place is?”
“No.”
“The town is called Krvavica—pardon my French—and this is an abandoned children’s hospital. Spooky shit.” When I remained silent, he prodded on with a humorless smile. “Are you afraid of ghosts?”
I stood taller, straighter. “No. Are you afraid you’re gonna end up like your father, Alex?”
He stared at me, unblinking, leaving me a spectator to whatever sick internal dialogue was playing behind those soft brown eyes. After a while, he ran a hand across his face, his fingers lingering to scratch the stubble on his chin, as I knew he did when something wouldn’t compute. He walked up to me, too close, verging on invasive. Just the way he liked it. I staggered back, my battered ballet flats crushing leaves and paint chips.
Alex cracked his neck with a tired groan. “Oh, baby . . . you think you’re getting off easy, huh?”
Not really, no.
“Then let me tell you this: I know him. He won’t touch that little doll face, but”—he lowered his voice, his words a secret between us—“he’s gonna . . . Fuck. You. Up.”
For some reason, Boxing Helena came to mind. I let the chills racking through my body run their course, focusing my efforts on standing still, straight. I didn’t want him to see that, right now, I felt like a six-year-old huddled under her covers in a dark bedroom, staring wide-eyed at the closet door behind which all the other kids claim a monster lives. Chances were Alex could smell that particular fear though, and either the Lions or the CIA must have taught him that building anticipation is 50 percent of the pleasure.
Behind me, I registered movement. Baldie had pulled out his phone and nodded to Alex, who flashed me an adolescent grin. “We’re moving.”
One of the men went to open the room’s door, and I was escorted out, Baldie and Alex leading the procession.
With the multitude of identical doors and windows, our walk down the darkened circular hallway felt like being thrown inside a spinning zoetrope, so much so that I was becoming dizzy—but it could have been the aftereffect of the drug they had injected me with earlier. Once outside, a light breeze caressed my face, which turned the sweat drops dampening my temples to ice. Half concealed by a bed of fragrant humus, a concrete path led away from the saucer and into the woods. In the distance, something roared and breathed. The ocean. The sound was getting clearer; we must be no more than a few hundred yards from the shore.
Treading deeper in a labyrinth of oddly angled trunks and gnarled branches, I thought of March and Stiles probably looking for me anywhere but here. I shivered. Beyond the woods, lurking in the dark, an ogre awaited. And he’d sent a boat—between two pine trees, a strip of sand appeared, fifty yards down a gentle slope. Dark shapes moved in the distance around what could be a Zodiac. Ashore, a single yacht awaited, all lights off, its bow a razor-thin black blade against the horizon: something designed for a fast break.
I squinted my eyes at the slope to my left. The trees and shrubs formed a mesh so thick in places that the beach was no longer visible. We would reach it soon though. There, in plain sight, there’d be no hope left for escape.
Do you remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator? Covered in mud, crawling in the woods, setting up traps and singlehandedly offing a beefy alien with dreadlocks and a bad braces job? Yeah, I’m not like that. I’m not sure I would have found the strength to make a run for it, had it not been for the sudden beam of blinding white light falling from the sky and swiping through the trees ahead of us.
Because I had precisely been contemplating pulling a Schwarzie on Alex and his men, the first words that flashed in my brain were: alien abduction. The distant droning of a rotor, however, suggested a helicopter instead.
Alex grabbed my arm, and he looked up. “Shit, we got company. Hurry up.”
I had no idea what was going on; I didn’t even care if the chopper was here for me or if the Croatian police were just totally hardcore about people hiking outside designated trails. I wrenched my arm from Alex’s grip with a scream and, without thinking, leaped down the slope in the dark. It was a hard landing, to say the least. Pain tore through my left wrist, shooting up all the way to my shoulder as I rolled down a bed of dirt, pine needles, and, unfortunately, rocks. A long-dead trunk stopped my fall at the same time that gunshots cracked above my head.
I caught Alex’s furious hiss. “Hold your fire! I need her alive.”
I curled into a fetal position behind the thick trunk, nursing the throbbing pain in my wrist. I prayed it wasn’t broken, but I could barely close my fingers, making me fear that some bits weren’t where they should have been. Thank God I couldn’t see how bad it looked in the dark. That helped me keep it together. At the top of the slope, heavy footsteps crushed twigs as Alex and at least one other guy attempted to skid down in the direction I’d thrown myself.
I heard his voice call to a third man. “Get down here with me. And no one shoots. If she needs to be neutralized, I’ll do it myself.”
“Okay,” a gruff voice answered.
It was that moment the helicopter chose to return with a vengeance, thrumming closer and closer. When the beam reappeared less than twenty yards away from me, I saw Alex, briefly bathed in white light, gun in hand, before he disappeared, swallowed back by the night. I breathed through my nose and desperately tried to think. Progressing any lower down the hill would not only deprive me of the relative protection offered by the dead trunk but would also get me closer to the beach and the Zodiac waiting for my sorry ass there. And—God—the pain in my forearm was relentless, hot, raw.
I sniffed back tears and rolled to my side, careful not let my injured wrist hit anything else. Maybe the trunk was large enough for me to slip inside and hide in there. Alex and his men needed to escape the helicopter’s insistent search too. Their boat was waiting, and the clock ticked against them. Maybe if I could just scrape enough time . . .
“Baby, we don’t have all night. Don’t make me shoot you in the knee. That shit hurts.”
Alex’s voice petrified me. He was closer than I’d thought. I could pick up his soapy cologne over the mingled scents of earth and pine. Above us, the helicopter’s persistent noise felt like a drumroll in my skull. I flattened my body to the ground, deadly still. I didn’t dare release a single breath. One set of footsteps seemed to move away from the trunk, but another remained, its movements now almost imperceptible save for faint creaking sounds.
“Island. Get out!”
I saw Alex’s legs, less than ten feet away, recognized his rugged boots. The gun’s barrel glinted in the obscurity. I willed myself smaller, flatter, merged with the dirt and leaves. Invisible.
Beyond Alex and the tormented shapes of the trees, something flashed twice. A signal, coming from the beach.
A voice bellowed. “Morgan, we need to move!”
Alex swore under his breath. “Go ahead. I’ll join you in a minute!” To himself, or perhaps to me, he growled. “Shit . . . you’re here. I know you’re in here.”
When new gunshots echoed from the direction of the saucer, I figured Alex’s men had just decided to ditch his orders and try to randomly shoot me. Bullets crashed into a tree right over me. Wood splinters landed in my hair, on my face. I bit the inside of my cheek not to scream and tasted blood. Tires screeched at the foot of the building, and the gunshots were getting closer. Alex took cover behind a tree and fired a series of shots. By then I was shaking so badly I thought that alone would give my hiding spot away.
That’s when Raptor Jesus came down from the sky in his white toga. Except it was rather the helicopter’s beam . . . But one thing is certain: Agent Alexander I-refuse-to-give-up Morgan retreated. With a final expletive, I saw his boots run past me and skid down the rest of the slope, toward the beach. I didn’t try to move to see whether he was gone; I just stayed there, shielded behind my trunk, one with the earth, listening to new footsteps coming toward me. I didn’t even want to know, especially when the razor-thin red rays of laser pointers started to appear all around me. I feared my earlier guess regarding the strict enforcement of hiking policies in Croatia was correct, to the point that it involved enrolling help from special ops to take down the offenders . . .
The footsteps stopped, and I thought I heard a whisper, something unintelligible. The flurry of red dots whirled my way, clustering on the trunk and the trees surrounding it. Every single muscle in my body froze.
A terrifying bark reached me. “Get out, with your hands in the air!”
American accent. Erwin’s men? For real this time? In any case, I couldn’t comply. My legs were shaking so badly I’d need both my hands to haul myself up, and that just wasn’t happening, not with the pain still pulsing through my wrist in tune with my heartbeat.
“I can’t get up.” The words were a barely audible whistle. I gulped down and gave it another try. “I can’t . . . I can’t get up.”
“Island!”
March’s shout pierced through my daze. I rolled onto my back, keeping my wrist tucked against me. For the first time since nightfall, I noticed the stars, like millions of diamonds in the clear indigo sky. Combat boots trampled the bed of pebbles and pine needles I rested on, and soon, a group of men hovered above me, looking like big insects with their black gear and round infrared goggles. I didn’t care; I could hear March wrestling his way to me past a guy telling him to stay back. I registered Stiles’s voice too, asking one of the soldiers if I was wounded.
At last, March knelt by me. “You’re going to be all right. I promise—”
“I know,” I said, my voice oddly calm, even to my own ears. “But Anies is going to be pissed.”