For him, after ten years, the tables had turned. Here I was, and here he was. The only thing standing between us was every depraved thought he’d ever had about me.
“Why would you do this?” I gasped. “You’re risking your freedom. They’ll catch you. You’ll be a slave again. “
He laughed. “You’re one to talk, in that position.”
My face burned. “You’ll get thrown in a mine.”
“Is that right? For doing what?”
“For kidnapping, dumbass,” I said. “For, um”—I swallowed, gulping to get enough air in my lungs to at least finish my sentence—“for rape.”
He laughed. “Rape? You wish. No, princess,” he said. “Not me.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face into the pillow as he leaned in close enough to choke on a cloud of his fetid, alcoholic breath, see the coarse gray stubble lining his heavy jowls, shudder as he ran his finger, permanently yellowed by dirt and decay, up and down the soft, unbroken skin of my arm.
“Well, not yet.”
HIM
“On behalf of Langer Enterprises,” I muttered, leaning back in my chair, squeezing my stress ball, and concentrating on forcing out my rounded European vowels and hard consonants for flat, nasal, elided American ones.Again.“On behalf of Langer Enterprises.”
I had spent all Friday afternoon hunched over the files from Corey’s tablet, squinting at the spreadsheet that I’d now transferred onto three different drives. Scanning the columns and lines for anomalies, I recited what I’d learned from the free online accounting course I’d sped through, a quiet dreadbuilding in my chest. Corey and Resi had been plotting something financially, of course. That didn’t surprise me. The file prominently labeledWainwright-Phillips—and what it contained—did.
So much so that I thought there had to be a mistake. I went back through the files, backward and forward, looking for some other explanation, but found none. And worst of all, I still couldn’t prove the theory I did have. That would probably take days, and I didn’t have days. I didn’t even have hours. Eventually, I collapsed back onto my beanbag chair, my mind on one and only one member of the Wainwright-Phillips family.
Louisa would suffer. I’d known that. From the goddamn day I arrived at her house, I’d known that. And I’d tried. I’d tried so fucking hard not to love her. Because I didn’t want her to have to end uphere, face-to-face with what I’d found in that file. But here she was anyway, and a maudlin love message out of a dusty old poetry book by some dead fucking Irish guy was not going to make up for it.
And even though I was doing it for her—had convinced myself I was doing it for her, even if she couldn’t see it, even if sheneversaw it, which seemed likely—neither was what I was about to do tonight.
Because right now, I had two different pieces of the puzzle. One was the finances, which Istillcouldn’t prove. The second was whatever was going on at the house itself. Lemaya—in the single message she’d been able to get out to me—had all but confirmed my suspicions about the spreadsheets, implying that nothing was okay over at 211 Cholla. But I needed to get there to provethat. And that was why I needed to convince Felix Sorrentino and Arlo Callwood, arriving at 5:15 p.m. from San Francisco and who I was 99 percent convinced were headed there—to let me take them there. Lemaya had given me all the details about the security goons’ movements, and assured methat Resi would “set up” the girls for Felix and Arlo before she left. Which was disgusting, but it was also key, because it meant that I could first, prove to Langer what Resi was doing to the girls, and second, get them out of it.
Assuming I did every single thing right with no slip-ups, of course. And assuming Lemaya was telling the truth.
And nobody could know anything. If the marketing guys found out, it would implode the company. If Resi found out, she’d implodeme.
In other words, I’d need to deliver the performance of a lifetime. At least until I got to the house. After that, I could only improvise.
I checked the display on my phone. It was almost four. It was thirty minutes to the airport, and the rest of what had been on my to-do list for that day—like rehearsing how not to get myself killed—was shot.
“On behalf of Langer Enterprises,” I said one last time, slowly. This time, I tried to emphasize the laconic West Coast cadences Louisa had always told me she heard in my voice, to my amused disbelief.
Right. Now I not only sounded like a foreigner but a foreigner with brain damage.
Fuck it. It was time to get out of here. My heart beat faster as I opened my top desk drawer and pulled out a small, exquisite emerald-green box. I’d brought it from my bedroom at Langer’s condo this morning but hadn’t dared open it since. The more I did, the more nerve I’d lose.
I didn’t open it now, either. Instead, I slipped it in the pocket of my gray pinstriped suit jacket, turned off the computer, stepped out, and locked my office.
If only someone had informed Lizette, the assistant with the candy jar, that I had a very important con job planned and couldn’t be interrupted for a blow-by-blow account of herdaughter’s piano recital last night. But the way I figured it, I had exactly ten minutes to rummage through one of the downstairs storage rooms for the very specific tool that Langer had told me was sitting on the third shelf up, do what I had to do, and be behind the wheel of the Porsche en route to the arrivals terminal.
So I nodded and smiled and silently watched the floor numbers tick down as we descended, reminding myself that even in the close confines of the elevator, there was no way she could hear how hard my heart was pounding or see that my hair was damp despite the air conditioning.
“The nerve of some of these parents. Walking out after their own kid finished,” Lizette was saying. “I suspect they’re just jealous that Hallie is progressing so fast. Why?—”
“I’m sure she’ll be playingLa Campanellabefore you know it. Have a good one,” I said like a tool, ducking out the second the doors opened and reminding myself for the millionth time that here, turning my back on a free person was not going to earn me a beating. And that I had a very important date with a pair of very illegal industrial-strength bolt cutters.
Or so I thought until I actually checked the shelf.
Fuck.I set the green box down and rummaged frantically through the junk cramming the closet, feeling along every crevice, cursing myself for waiting this long to check. Meanwhile, the chain on my wrist, which most of the time felt like just another part of my body, suddenly seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, chafing my skin like the day they’d first welded it on me at fifteen, replacing the one intended for the wrist of a smaller, skinnier kid. As if it had sensed what was coming and was crying out for release.
