I raised my eyes. Had the two other girls escaped somehow? Fought them off?
“Your bros are gone, likely to the airport and from there to San Francisco,” Resi explained. “A threat to report them to the feds for being accessories to human trafficking means they won’t be back for a while.”
Thank you.
“You must be crushed,” Resi remarked. “I could tell how much you all bonded. Because you have so much in common and everything,” she added.
My face burned, but she only laughed as she gently smoothed my limp hair back from my face. Her lips parted to reveal her catlike tongue, which flicked around the perimeter of her mouth delicately, her breath soft and delicate and sweet, like all of her edges. A stinging sea anemone tossed in the current. Beautiful, alluring, and pure artifice.
In a flash, she dropped her hand lower.
I squeezed my eyes shut, the memory of what had happened the last time it had ventured down there still ringing in my pain receptors.
“I know, I know. God, you aresomuch easier to condition than you think you are. But you know,” she breathed into my ear, “I can make it good, too. For boysandgirls. For Alma. For Sloane. Your sister wasn’t as playful, I’m afraid.”
I bit back my growl.
“But I made itreallygood for Lemaya.” There was something different in the way she spoke this last name. Something in the way her light blue eyes flashed.
I raised my head without thinking, only to have it forced back down toward the floor with a harsh chop to the back of the neck from Noam. “She led me here. It was a trap.”
Resi didn’t seem to notice. “It was adoubletrap,” she clarified, glancing back at Louisa, forgetting she didn’t want to hear my voice.
Yes. That’s it. Keep the villain talking. Classic stratagem. Let’s go.
Subtly, I tested the cuffs. Obadiah had fucked up the double lock on one of Louisa’s; chances were decent he’d done the same thing with mine. Maybe I could feel for it without either of the goons catching on.
“Your sister and Lemaya became such good friends,” said Resi. “Teaching each other and everything. It was super cute, actually.”
Well, fuck. It seemed that whatever Louisa and Maeve and Erica’s plan had been, it had been doomed from the start the same as mine because we had all been going off the same wrong information—the layout, the locations of the girls, the timing and habits of Resi and the security guards—from Lemaya. But they had had no reason to disbelieve Maeve, while I had hadeveryreason to disbelieve Lemaya. Hell, Ihaddisbelieved her, but I’d done it anyway. She—like the new suits and gold watches and aged bourbon—had been just another accouterment, another accessory, sent in to distract me, to play both meandmy sister.
“Where’s Maeve?” I asked.
Resi’s eyes flashed again, but she didn’t answer. I swallowed. What did that mean? Resi hadn’t spoken much about her whereabouts, or those of the other girls, either, except to hint that they’d been mercifully spared the attentions of Arlo and Felix.
“Before Lemaya was either your friend or your sister’s, she was mine,” Resi was explaining, gazing out the narrow window almost nostalgically. “And no wonder. When you’re the only slave in a crumbling mansion with a filthy, senile owner on death’s door, it doesn’t take much convincing to let someone finish him off for you. Someone who’s promised you a job, followed by freedom. And especially someone who’s pulled it off once before.”
Before?
Suddenly, some puzzle pieces fell into place. “With Max’s—withyourfather,” I said. “After Max came back. And wrote himself into the will.”
Resi laughed lightly. “Yup. Nothing like murder—if you can really call it that when the personsodeserves to die—to bring long-lost siblings together again.” She gazed around the cave of a room, with its pillars and vicious griffins like sacred carvings;its massive bed like a white marble slab. “Huh. Come to think of it, it happened right here in this room.Everythinghappened in this room. Master, or should I say, Daddy, used to let his friends go at me right over there, in that bed, while Max was tied up in the corner and forced to watch, poor guy. All he ever wanted to do was help me, but he couldn’t. Explains a lot.”
There might actually have been something genuine behind her voice, but it was hard to tell, concealed behind layers upon layers of trauma and sociopathy.
“Until a few years later, when he stood right over thereby choice, watching me press a pillow over dear Daddy’s face.” She looked around fondly. “Probably why I haven’t changed up the decor much. Too many happy memories.”
I could almost see Louisa’s skin turn a shade of green, her body seeming to squeeze in on itself. Fucking hell, how long had she been lying on that bed of horror, waiting for more? ThemoreI’d given her? I had to end this. I had to make it right. My wrist wriggled in the cuff, trying to expand its circumference without drawing attention to it.
“You see, Lemaya and I had a lot in common, obviously,” Resi was saying. “We both loved my brother, for instance. And that’s when I put the idea in her head,” she continued. “Why be a vet tech when you can be a billionaire’s trophy wife instead?” She giggled. “Promising her I could make it happen was one of my best bedtime stories. Good enough to get her to do anything I asked, anyway.”
Lemaya had betrayed me, and Maeve,andLouisa. Ishouldhate her. But she’d been through as much hell as any of us, maybe more, and I couldn’t blame her—or any of the girls, really—for cashing in everything for a free ticket to a life she’d never before dared to dream of. She’d been a victim twice over—once of slavery and again of Resi’s false promises of freedom.
“You put ideas in all their heads, from the sounds of it,” I said. “Ideas that didn’t exactly pan out, did they?”
She tossed her head back. “Well, see, my brother and I—I gather he told you about this, right?—had this dream. One from a long, long time ago. And we agreed that it would be my job to figure out how to remove the tracking chips from the girls we chose, ones we could be confident their owners weren’t looking for,” Resi said. “And that we would save them; and in time, all slaves. That was our dream.”
“It washisdream,” I muttered, too low for Resi to hear. However, it prompted the former gardener, who must be getting paid a shitload of money to continue to act like a good slave, to punch me in the ear, leaving the echo of pain ringing through my frontal cortex. Despite this, it was enough of a distraction to give me a chance to expand the one cuff that hadn’t been applied properly, nearly enough to slip it off. Assuming neither thug noticed, it was a start.
