40. Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty
Carys
S ince I can’t see the clock, I’m not sure how long I’ve been here. Jade came back to give my father another shot. She wouldn’t say what drug, but it’s knocked him out cold. A mercy or a punishment?
This time when the door swings open behind me, she’s wheeling a cart. On it is a device with a timer, similar to the confetti bomb from months ago. If only I could be sure this one would spew out harmless pieces of paper. A sweat breaks out under my armpits at the four hours counting down. How is Finn going to find me with so little on the clock?
“I suppose four hours and twenty-four hours are easy to confuse.” I raise my eyebrows.
She cackles and eases the bomb off the trolley. “Maybe this bomb won’t go off in four hours and then I’ll wheel in another one. Maybe I’ll drop off bombs at random intervals, and you’ll never be sure which will lead to your demise.” She rubs her chin. “An explosion of fear over and over again doesn’t sound so bad to me. How long would it take for you to become desensitized? Would you ever?”
“You’re sick,” I say.
“Please, Pearl.” My mother is out of tears, but her tone is pleading. “We’ll get you help. It’s not too late for you to have a different life. We can get to know each other. We can have the mother-daughter bond you always wanted.”
“I bet you wish you had a time machine.” She smiles at our mother. “Would you still have left him—left me—if you knew you’d end up dying with your lying, cheating husband and your weak daughter?” She crouches in front of her. “Was your life really so much better without me?”
“I regretted leaving you every day.”
She swivels to me. “Carys, did our mother seem sad every day of her life? Did she seem filled with regret over me, her lost daughter?”
No, but I’m not about to say that. How do we ever realize what goes on behind the faces people choose to show us? My father wanted her to pretend her first child and her first marriage didn’t exist, so that’s what she did. She survived, but I’m not sure she was ever free of her past. Do I agree with her choice? No. Do I think she should be murdered for it? No, again.
“My mother and I have never been that close,” I lie. There was a time when we were, but that was so many years ago I barely remember those days. “Once I learned about you, I understood why. She must have felt such enormous guilt and remorse over you. The daughter she left behind.”
Jade’s jaw clenches. “Lies,” she spits out. “You think I haven’t pored over your lives? Tried to insert myself? Figure out how a mother could abandon a child with a man like my father? A man who beat me and manipulated me and warped me into this.” She gestures to herself before rising to her full height. “But he didn’t break me. I can’t be broken.”
I’m afraid she’s far more broken than she realizes. The clock behind her keeps losing time, speeding us closer to some kind of ending. Is it a real bomb? Or has she planted another fake to enjoy our screams of frustration before it doesn’t detonate?
“You rose out of the ashes.” I try to mollify her. “There’s no point in burying us. You survived. You’re thriving. You’re leading the PLA, one of the biggest worldwide organizations. Where is Pierre-Jacques, anyway?”
“He’s out of the country on another errand.” She titters. “Or maybe several errands. We’ve been very busy planting our seeds. They’re ready to bloom.”
“You don’t need to take us down to prove your greatness.”
A hint of a smile touches her lips. “The point, dear sister, is that I can do it. I was left with a monster of a man, and I learned to adapt. Every day, a different version of myself. Whatever meant I didn’t get hurt. But there’s power in that, too, isn’t there? In being able to become the person someone wants you to be.”
“There’s a lot more happiness in being yourself,” I murmur. “You’re capable of redemption. We all are. You have to want it badly enough.” Recovering ourselves comes at a different cost and manifests in unique ways, but we can seek it, embrace it.
Her sinister smile slips a little. “ This is what I need. Once you’re gone, I’ll be happy. There’ll be no more reminders about how much better my life could have been had my mother cared enough to take me. Had that man”—she points at my father—“not been a selfish bastard.”
“Fine,” she cries. “Fine. Punish me. Punish Charles. Just let Carys go. Don’t make her pay for our mistakes.”
“We all—” Jade is cut off by shouting somewhere outside the room. Her heels click on the floor as she goes to investigate.
Hope stirs in my chest, but it’s too much to believe Finn has already found us. It’s a skirmish among her men.
“Dissention in the ranks?” I ask. “Maybe you should go out and get them sorted.”
The door opens, and Jade calls out, “What’s going—” Bullets ping off metal, and she slams the door closed. Her heels click across the floor, and she slices through whatever is securing my ankles in one swift movement, nicking my skin in the process. She yanks me off my chair and hauls me into the far corner of the room with her, using me as a shield, facing the entrance. Her knife is pressed into my side.
Outside, the shooting and shouting goes on forever. Then I hear familiar voices—Lorcan and Kim. My ears strain for the voice I want to hear most, but if he’s out there, he’s not close enough yet.
“He came for me,” I whisper. Whether or not he’s spoken, they wouldn’t be here without him. He’s out there.
Jade chuckles in my ear. “And he’ll get to watch you stabbed over and over again. You can bleed out in his arms. My knife will hit the right spots to make that happen.”
“He’ll kill you.” I try to wriggle free, but the awkward angle of my arms makes it hard for me to move. She’s also a lot stronger than she looks when she tugs me tight against her.
“I’ve got the remote to the bomb in my pocket,” she croons. “None of us are walking out of here today.”
“I’m leaving here, even if I have to crawl,” I say. Can she sense how sweaty I am? How nerves have spilled out of me in the last few hours? I steel myself. Maybe I won’t make it out of here. But I’m not giving her the gift of my fear. I’m not feeding her obsession.
She readjusts her grip on my arms, and I try to wrench myself free. Her nails dig into my skin, and the knife pricks my side.
“Careful, Carys, or you’ll be dead before he arrives. I’m so looking forward to seeing his expression when he realizes he can’t save you.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing yours when you realize how terribly you’ve underestimated him.” The shouts are outside the door, so loud they almost drown out my comment. The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire rounds my mother’s shoulders as she cries more silent tears. She thinks we’re going to die. Not today, Mother. Not today.
The door flips open, but no one enters at first. “Carys?” Finn’s voice, strong and sure, stops my heart.
“In here. She’s got a knife. A detonator to the bomb in her pocket.” The words leave me in a rush. She’d have to loosen her hold on my arms or on the knife she has digging into my side to stop me from talking. “My mother and father are tied to chairs. There’s a bomb in here. I haven’t seen a gun on Jade, but she’s got a knife pressed to my side. A very sharp knife.”
“Tell him whatever you want,” she murmurs. “Nothing will save you. He can’t save you.”
Waves of hot and cold run through my body. Finn is here. Even if she stabs me, he’ll get me to a hospital. He won’t let me bleed out on the floor. She’s no match for him. The words are a mantra in my head.
The door stays open, but no one enters. There’s low, indistinguishable talking outside and the sound of more distant gunfire. Then, Finn steps in the entryway, and my heart kicks.
He’s here. He came.
“Let her go.” His voice is gruff. His gun is trained on her and me because she’s using me as a cover “You’re outnumbered. Outsmarted. There’s no way out of this.”
“I’ll stab her over and over again before you even get a shot off.” She presses harder with the knife, and it slips in before she slides it out. I give a muffled cry. “How does it feel? To know she can’t be saved?”
Finn chuckles. “Feels like you don’t know me very well.” He shifts to his right and fires low. Jade’s left leg collapses, and she digs the knife into me again before releasing me. She tries to brace herself against the corner.
She struggles to grab me, but he lunges, bringing me to his side. The knife, still lodged in my side, burns. How deep did it go? She makes eye contact with him and smirks. “Doesn’t matter. This is the tip of the iceberg. So many Van de Berg employees will greet me on the other side. They’ll never realize I was the cause of their demise. You can’t stop what we’ve set in motion.”
Finn answers her smirk with one of his own. “I would say ‘watch me’ but you’ll be dead. Whatever you hoped to accomplish, I want you to understand you failed.”
She stares at the spot where the knife is still embedded in me, and a slow smile spreads. “See you on the other side.”
When Finn’s gun goes off, I squash my face into his chest. A second shot follows, and there’s a loud thump as Jade’s body hits the concrete floor.
A sob rises from my toes, the fear I wouldn’t let myself experience rushes up and out, and he holds me tight. He takes my tears and my pain and my fright. I glance at Jade’s lifeless body, unable to believe she’s dead, that this is over.
“I’ve got you,” he whispers into my ear. “I’ve got you.”
Lorcan and Kim rush around the room, releasing my mother and father. Kim crouches near the bomb, checking the connections and wires.
“The bomb might be a decoy. Doesn’t look like anything I’ve dismantled before. I’ve phoned it in. We need to get out of here,” Kim calls over her shoulder. “Thomas’s men are covering us. There’re still a few live ones out there.”
Finn lifts me into his arms and carries me out of the building, past the dead PLA agents, past some of Thomas’s men who are also dead. Sporadic gunfire goes off around us. He climbs the stairs from the basement to the main floor, and I burrow into his chest, relishing his closeness. My side aches from the knife.
“She stabbed me,” I murmur to Finn. “In my side, at least twice.” Tiredness is seeping in.
“She’s losing blood, Finn. A lot of it,” Kim shouts from behind us. “Get her to the hospital. Lorcan and I will wait here for backup.”
“I need a driver.” He catches one of Thomas’s men. “You. Drive us to the hospital.”
At the SUV, he slides me into the back seat and follows me. The man he flagged as the driver wheels us out of the parking lot and speeds along the highway.
“It is a lot of blood?” I try to lift my head, but I’m woozy. “I think the knife is still in there.”
“No, no.” Finn brushes a hand over my hair. “You’ll be fine. Just fine.”
The tension in his voice makes me realize maybe I won’t be, but I don’t have the energy to argue. Instead, my cheek settles against his leg, and my eyes drift closed.