CHAPTER 73 GIGI
GIGI
I t had been hours since the Woman in Red had walked out the door, locking them in once more. How many hours, Gigi wasn’t sure. Ominous words rang in her ears.
The time for watching is done.
For probably the hundredth time, Gigi tried to rouse Slate—and this time, he groaned.
“What happened?” His voice was gravelly and low. Golden hair, darker with sweat, hung in his face all the way down to his cheekbones. Through his hair, Gigi saw his dark eyes open—and focus.
On her.
“Do you want the extended version or the really extended version?” Gigi asked. “I also offer reenactments.”
Eve rolled her eyes, thoroughly pretending that she hadn’t been keeping vigil over Slate this entire time. “You got knocked out,” Eve told him flatly. “And someone took the bait.”
“Not in that order,” Gigi added helpfully. “The person who knocked you out wanted to know about the Grandest Game. She called herself the Watcher.”
The Lily. Calla. The Woman in Red.
Eve narrowed her eyes at Gigi. “You knew her.” Eve sounded like she’d been biting back that accusation for hours.
“I knew of her,” Gigi corrected. “She’s supposed to be missing or dead or… something.”
“I’m going with something ,” Eve replied.
Slate straightened, pulling against his bindings, his hair falling back out of his face, his posture almost leonine. “Will one of you please get this tape off me?”
“For the record,” Eve told Gigi with another roll of her eyes, “that please was for you.”
Gigi offered Eve her sweetest smile. “Full disclosure: I am still planning your doom.”
“I’m still planning his.” Eve eyed Slate. “It evens out.”
Eve rounded to the back of the chair to work on his wrists, and Gigi approached from the front, squatting down in front of Slate and attacking the bindings on his ankles. Gigi didn’t have nails as sharp as Eve’s—but she did have teeth.
The duct tape made a satisfying sound as it tore, and within seconds, thanks to Eve’s nails and Gigi’s teeth, Slate was free. As he stood, Gigi popped back to her feet.
Dark eyes found hers. “Are you all right?”
To prove—to herself as much as to him—that she was, Gigi forced a grin. “Teeth like a beaver,” she told him.
“Not what I was talking about,” Slate replied, and then he turned. “Eve?”
Eve tossed her hair, which Gigi figured meant about the same thing as her own grin. “I’m fine,” Eve said. “I gave our visitor what she wanted, and she left.”
“What exactly did you give her?” Slate shot a look at Eve.
“Lyra,” Gigi realized belatedly. “You gave her Lyra .”
Gigi had no idea what anything Eve had said meant— omega , lilies , Alice Hawthorne —but Gigi did know what throwing someone under the bus sounded like. She also knew how her brother looked at Lyra Kane. She knew that a target on Lyra was as good as a target on Grayson himself.
First Savannah. Now Lyra and Grayson.
“No time like the present,” Gigi said, and that was all the warning Eve got. Nobody expected a Tasmanian devil pounce—pretty much ever. As flying tackles went, it was a thing of beauty.
Slate gave Gigi a second or two, then hauled her off Eve. “Nicely executed.”
“Thank you,” Gigi replied. “But I’m not done yet.”
“Easy there, sunshine.”
Eve picked herself up off the ground. It took Gigi a second to realize that Eve was holding something in her hand. It looked like a coin of some sort but unlike any that Gigi had ever seen.
“How many of these is it going to take,” Eve asked Slate, “to make you mine again?”
Mine. Gigi’s brain latched on to that word. Hers.
“It was never just about the seals for me,” Slate said, “and I think you know that.” Something unspoken passed between him and Eve, the intensity in his eyes matched by a slight narrowing of hers.
Slate broke eye contact first, turning to Gigi. “And… false .”
It took Gigi’s scrambled mind a second or two to think back to the last True or False question she’d asked him. This was Mattias Slater, telling her that he and Eve did not have the kind of relationship that involved making out.
Before Gigi could make heads or tails of that, the wall to her left parted.
Gigi whirled. Slate slid in front of her and Eve as the wall closed behind a woman who wore not a spot of red.
She was tall and willowy in a way that should have made her look slight but didn’t, her skin very nearly ebony—luminescent, flawless .
Thick black braids of varying sizes streamed down her back.
She was one of the most beautiful, self-possessed, arresting women that Gigi had ever seen—and Slate slammed her back against the wall.
“Are you quite finished?” The woman’s voice was familiar, but her accent was much stronger now. The first woman in red. The one who was playacting . The one who used us to bait the other.
“You’re…” Gigi thought of about a thousand different descriptors that would have applied. “British?”
“When it suits me,” the woman replied. “Zella,” she introduced herself, like Slate didn’t have her pinned to a wall. “Charmed. Now, I’m going to need at least one of you to tell me, word for word, what the Watcher said to you.”