Chapter 30
CHAPTER
THIRTY
ASHER
Glocks decorate my dining room for the second day. Two fucking days and we’ve heard nothing, which tells us everything. She’s with Emeric. Who she is now is anyone’s guess, if we go by what Leon’s been spitting about Emeric triggering her bride-of-death side.
Punk hasn’t eaten. Nobody has, much less showered, and I’m about three side-eyes from Khloe away from ripping this island apart with my bare hands. Fuck my ancestors, duty, and anyone who gets in my way.
It’s as good a time as any, since Atlas has killed my Macallan.
The fact that he chose my most expensive bottle tells me he wanted to make this my problem too.
At least he’s reached the quiet, philosophical stage of drunk, which in Atlas means depressed and useless.
One less person I’d have to punch through if I do decide to go rogue.
“Move the handoff to relay three,” Amélie says, not looking up.
“Relay three is burned,” my mother answers from the other end of the table. “You know it’s burned.”
“He torched four relays, Elea. Three still has the secondary node—”
“Which he’s had forty-eight hours to find. You’re sending Punk into a graveyard.”
“I’m sending her into a network I built.” Amélie’s la conseillère role crawls out through her exhaustion. “Trust my architecture or find another Monét. There are so many of us to choose from.”
Elea’s jaw tightens.
Leon doesn’t look up when I drop into the chair across from him. He’s on his fourth gun. Slide, spring, barrel, oil, reassemble, repeat. The rhythm is the only calm thing in this house.
“You’re going to wear the finish off,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“Keeps my hands busy.” Click. “You should try it. You’ve been pacing since six.”
He means pacing like a caged animal, and he’s right. My leg won’t stop bouncing. My fingers drum the table, and every ninety seconds I check my phone even though it’s been dead silent for two days.
Two mother-fucking days.
She’s alive. I know she’s alive. There’s no point in going through everything he has just to kill her, even if he did order the hit on her in the first place.
“Punk.” Amélie sits back from her keyboard. Guns stop clicking as Atlas lifts his head off the couch. “Run the node scan again. From the top.”
“I’ve run it nine times.”
“Run it again. The last pass came back wrong.”
Punk’s hands stop moving. “Wrong how?”
“Fast.” Amélie turns the monitor, and I get up, crossing the room before I’ve decided to. Lines of code scroll past. I don’t read code, but I read Amélie Monét, and she’s gone very still. “Every time we probe his perimeter, it closes before we touch it. That response time isn’t automated.”
“It’s a person,” Elea says.
“It’s not a person.” Amélie looks up at me, and the thing I’ve been refusing to say out loud for two days is sitting right there in her eyes. “No Cipher alive is that fast. It knows how I think. It knows how Punk thinks.”
“Is she alive?” The words barely make it out.
Amélie nods once. “She’s alive.”
Khloe drops her head back against the wall and lets out a breath she’s clearly been holding since she came in with Ivy’s phone.
“Okay. Okay, so then what’s the play? Because I don’t get what he gains here.
Ivy’s not a nut case. She’s not going to walk into a room and blow us all up because Daddy asked nicely. ”
“Ivy’s not, no.” Luce says it quietly, and every head turns.
She’s got her knees pulled up in the armchair, sleeves stretched over her hands, and she looks at Khloe almost gently.
“Mariée de la mort is. That’s the whole point of her.
I’ve seen the notes Nonna kept. He didn’t teach Ivy to kill.
He built a second person underneath the first one and gave her the same face.
The second one doesn’t get scared or tired, and she’ll look straight through us like we’re strangers. ”
Leon sets his rag down. “Emeric spent eleven years layering it in during dissociative states. It’s woven all the way through her, down in the wiring.
If he has in fact managed to get his hands on her, she could love you in the morning and put a round in your eye at noon, and the girl at noon wouldn’t remember the girl at breakfast existed. ”
I lean forward with my elbows on my knees, because I’ve been waiting two days to say this to somebody’s face.
“For the record, this is exactly why the fuck I didn’t want shit blowing up too early.”
Khloe’s head snaps around. “Tell that to your dick. I took her out for one drink, Ash. One. And by the time I got her home you’d fucked her into a brand-new bullet wound.”
Atlas chokes on nothing.
Jord makes a sound that dies halfway.
“That’s not—“
“It’s exactly what happened.”
Amélie clears her throat, and the room shuts up.
“You’re both wasting breath arguing about timing.
” She closes the laptop halfway, and the screen light goes out of her face.
“Emeric doesn’t have a plan. He has an appetite.
Everything he’s built for years exists to feed one thing, and it isn’t power. ”
“Revenge,” my mother says.
“Revenge on me,” Amélie corrects. “You should understand what she is to him, so I’m going to start here. I didn’t know I was pregnant.”
Punk’s hands come off the keyboard.
“This should be good,” Luce grumbles, rolling her eyes.
Amélie continues. “To cut a very long story short, I was in a coma when I became pregnant, and during the birth.”
Everyone fucking stops, like the oxygen just got sucked out of the room. Too bad Ivy doesn’t know this already, and sure, this is most likely going to trigger another round of foreplay sparring before I hate-fuck her into forgiving me, but it was never my story to tell.
Not that she’s gonna give a fuck about that.
Amelie’s thumb moves once against the edge of the table.
“When Nonna found me, I was still in the deep sleep, hooked up to monitors in his bedroom, but there was no sign of a child. She woke me, snuck me out, and didn’t look back.
We didn’t know about Ivy until Nonna saw her on the yacht.
” She blinks back the tears in her eyes.
“She said the resemblance was just too much.”
“But—wait—” Luce shakes her head. “So you didn’t run off with Emeric and then leave her there to save yourself?”
I don’t know who the fuck Luce has been talking to, but that’s not the original story. My father, Emeric, and Aléia meant to bury the Monét name the second Emeric got the chance.
Amélie jerks back. “No, Lucinda. That was one of the many planted stories, but no. I imagine he was going to wake me when the time came, to train Ivy, which I would have, as I am obliged to do. He would have killed me the second she inherited the knowledge. He never wanted a child. He wanted a Monét. Our architecture, our relays, our intelligence lines—all of it, placed into a body he could aim.”
Luce blurts, “Why the hell would you date him in the first place?”
“I never dated him,” Amélie answers, fatigue thick in her tone.
“Luce.” I don’t raise my voice. “She’s innocent in this, all the way down. She didn’t have a choice, so drop it.”
Luce’s mouth closes.
“So it ruined his plans when Nonna took you,” Punk whispers, staring blankly at the wall. “And forced him to go through other avenues, but when none worked—” she waves her hand toward me. “—he decided she was worthless.”
“But Ivy still doesn’t have the knowledge or codes or whatever! Because she doesn’t even know Amélie is alive!” Damn. Luce is trying every way she can to not like Amelie, and I get it.
“Actually…” Amélie says, stopping us all.
“She does. Nonna was a great teacher. Ivy herself doesn’t even know she has the knowledge.
Nonna planted it in lessons, very slowly, weaving it carefully through her training.
When the time is right,” she pauses, nodding at me, “she will have everything she needs.”
“What does this mean?” Jord’s hands go up. “I’ve known that girl since I was fourteen years old and nobody in this fucking room will tell me who she is other than the woman I fucking know! Which even during Plays, she was never anything different!”
“—because he hadn’t fucking triggered that part of her yet, Jord! Stay up!” Luce snaps.
“You know what?” He flips her off. “Fuck you. Fuck—”
My phone chimes, and I dig it out of my pocket.
Unknown number. Just a video file, sitting there with a play button over a frozen frame of gray concrete.
I press play.
Ivy hangs from her wrists in the middle of a room I recognize before the camera even pans.
Dovecrest. Her toes drag across the concrete, her head hanging forward, sweat pasting her hair to her face.
She’s been up there too fucking long. A mechanical whine runs under the feed in cycles.
Every spike seizes her whole body against the restraints.
“Ash?” Atlas sits up. “What is it?”
I can’t answer.
Camille slides in from the left and plants her hand against Ivy’s ribs, dragging it up while she speaks into Ivy’s ear. Can’t hear shit; the voices have been cut, leaving nothing but that frequency.
Ivy shakes against the chains with no control over any of it.
Cross-trauma. Every response caged, poked, prodded: every memory that caused it hitting her at once. Emeric is forcing her to relive all of it so he can condition her to obey him again.
The whine spikes, and Ivy’s mouth opens on a scream I can’t fucking hear.
“Asher.” Amélie ’s voice drifts from somewhere far off. “Asher, what are you—”
My hands are shaking. The phone slips out of them and hits the floor with a thud, and everyone rushes for it in slow motion.
“Oh God,” Punk breathes.
I snatch the two semi-autos off the table, slinging one and carrying the other, and grab three magazines, jamming them into my waistband without slowing down.
“Ash—” Atlas lunges off the couch. “Ash, it’s bait, you know it’s bait—“
I don’t give a fuck what it is. It’s her, in pain, and me, sitting here doing nothing.