CHAPTER 78 GIGI
GIGI
W here is the remote?” Slate demanded. “The one that opens the door.” As far as Gigi could tell, Slate’s grip on their captor’s throat hadn’t wavered once since he’d slammed the British woman to the wall. “I want it. Now.”
“You wouldn’t be the first man to strangle me when all I wanted to do was talk.” This woman— Zella , she’d said her name was Zella —had poise to rival a queen.
“You aren’t the one calling the shots right now,” Slate informed her, and then he glanced back over his shoulder at Gigi and Eve. “Get me what’s left of the duct tape.”
“There is no need for that,” Zella declared. “Answer my questions, and you have my word that you will all be free to go.”
Gigi raised her hand. “Skeptical. Me. Very. Again. What about the Grandest Game? Noninterference? Eve being an emotional bull in a china shop of your making?”
“Unless I am mistaken,” Zella said, in the tone of someone who knew quite well that they were not, “the Grandest Game will soon be coming to its end. I have put in motion all I can on that front, and now it seems there are bigger games to play. Tell me what the Watcher said.”
Slate stared her down for three full seconds—and then he dropped his hand and backed away. There was something unrecognizable in those dark eyes of his, and Gigi thought about his knife, about the number of horrible things he claimed to have done. Fourteen.
“Who is she?” Eve walked to stand toe-to-toe with Zella. “The Watcher. How did you know she would come? How do you know her?”
“We were sisters,” Zella said, “once upon a time.”
Gigi’s eyes widened. And widened some more. “Calla is your sister ?” Gigi thought back to the Woman in Red and her story about the seventeen-year-old girl she’d once been. She’d said something about Orion Thorp having a biological child, even though Calla was the one who’d borne the Thorp name.
“ Calla is long gone.” Zella let her disconcertingly calm gaze settle on Gigi. “Now, what did the Watcher want with you?”
With me. Gigi thought about the flower she’d found—the calla lily she’d been sent . “She wanted information about the game.” Gigi had always excelled at trusting people who’d done nothing to deserve it, so why change now? “About Lyra.”
“And what information did you give her about Lyra Kane?” Zella asked.
Gigi glanced pointedly at Eve. “ Someone told her all sorts of things.”
“Oddly enough,” Eve said, crossing her arms over her chest, “I find I’m no longer in a sharing mood.”
“Defy your mood,” Zella replied, “and in return, I will arm you.” One second, her hands were empty, and the next, she was holding a sheathed blade.
“My knife.” Slate’s voice was flat, even for him, and Gigi’s sixth sense for broody boys told her that he was about half a second from going for that knife.
“Omega,” Gigi blurted out. Her optimism had run desert-dry, and she wasn’t taking any chances with that blade.
With Mattias Slater.
“That’s what Eve told Calla,” Gigi continued, trying not to sound like she was babbling. “Something about omega , something about lilies , something about Alice Hawthorne .”
There was the slightest incline of Zella’s chin. “That will give her the ammunition she so badly desires. She always was the ambitious one.”
“Ammunition for what ?” Gigi said, but all she could think was: The time for watching is done.
Zella spun the knife in her hand to grip it by the sheath and held the handle out to Slate, who took it.
“If you’re still keeping a tally,” Zella told him, nodding to the knife, “you’re not all the way gone yet.
” The elegant woman turned to Gigi and Eve.
“As for the two of you, I will arm you with this: If the time comes that you see my sister again—or anyone like her—know that it is in your power to say no.”
Gigi blinked.
“ No to what?” Eve said.
“Regardless of how the question might be phrased or what pressure is brought to bear, it is an invitation, an ask. And asks may be answered, invitations declined.” Zella turned back toward the infinity fountain on the wall, and a moment later, it parted.
Freedom.
Zella waited for them to take it. “Four miles, due north,” she told Slate. “There’s a bar. It’s a rather seedy establishment, but if you take her there, someone Hawthorne-adjacent will come for her soon enough.”