40. I didn’t see that coming
FORTY
I DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING
Lake
Alessio disappears into the suite and closes the door. Leo’s screams penetrate through it and into my heart. I stand there without a full understanding of what just happened. I need a minute to process the fact that Alessio proposed to me.
I didn’t see that coming.
Suddenly, I’m angry that he never brought it up. Why did he never speak to me about how serious we were, how he felt about me?
But Alessio is an all-or-nothing kind of man. You either marry him or get out of his life. This is why Val was shocked that Alessio and I did it in the hotel. She knew he wouldn’t break his rules for anyone he didn’t really like. And I mean like enough to want to marry.
The sadist knew that too. It’s why they moved on me.
I make a fist and wish I had the balls to pound on the door and tell Alessio how I feel about him and his proposal. If he were less arrogant, maybe he’d have given me a heads-up. Not that the end result would matter, because I couldn’t have said yes and also lied to him about one of the most secret unions anyone can make in their lifetime.
Unlike family, we choose our marital partners.
He chose me. And I chose him. But he doesn’t know I’m a liar and that I have to go and betray his confidence, and that it’s probably a good thing he threw me out because now they can’t use me against him.
The way I protected my little brother, I must protect Leo too.
I walk toward the elevator.
The security guards outside follow me. When the hallway tilts, the man grabs my elbow.
“Steady, now,” he says, then releases me.
He leans me against the elevator wall and presses the button for the ground floor.
When the elevator doors shut, I close my eyes, and tears spill over. Now that the dam has opened, the waterworks pour, and by the time the elevator stops on the floor under it, I’m sobbing hysterically.
I destroyed a man in order to save my family. I pray Alessio moves on, and I hope Leo forgets me. He will always be in my heart. Such a wonderful and special boy.
The elevator doors close again after a housekeeper joins me. The man presses the fifth-floor button as he balances a stack of folded towels in his hands. A lollipop in his mouth catches my eye. You don’t often see grown men sucking on lollipops.
“Rough day, I’m guessing,” he comments quietly.
I don’t want to talk. I want my weighted blanket, and a hole where I can hide and feel sorry for myself. “Yes,” I say. “Good guess.”
“Thanks. I never miss.”
Despite my bad mood, I manage to give him a small smile. The man’s trying to be polite, maybe even put a smile on my face.
The elevator stops on his floor, and he exits. I expect the doors to shut, but a woman’s meaty hand stops it. When the doors part again, I recognize the tall woman who’s been terrorizing me, and the urge to wrap my hands around her neck strikes me.
I’ve never been a violent person, but this woman brings out a side of me that the devil might like. Maybe that’s just the side of me I need to get my family through this ordeal.
She jerks her head, and I follow her down the hallway. We walk a little ways away from the housekeeper with the towels. He disappears around the corner while we continue to the end of the hallway, to the door right near the exit.
She opens the door into a suite with a small living space and a bedroom on the left. Her husband’s inside, along with a man who guards the door. They take up familiar positions. The young man at the door. The woman dragging me inside while her husband waits at the desk.
But this time, I’m different. I have the information they want, and I’m angry. I make a fist, spin, and clock the woman in her face. Blood spurts from her nose and all over my blouse, and I leer at her. “Don’t touch me.”
Holding her nose, she swings. I’m faster and duck, so she throws her weight into nothing but air and falls over the back of the couch. She lands on the cushions, rolls, and flops onto the floor. On hands and knees between the couch and the table, she crawls so she can rise and come at me again.
Instead of being afraid and spilling out everything I know, I laugh. I laugh so hard that I start to cry. Then I laugh and cry all at the same time. I can’t stop either. I can’t stop, even though they hover over me, ordering me to shut up. I think I’m broken.
I’m finally broken.
I would have laughed and cried there forever if the youngest of the three hadn’t grabbed my hair and dragged me to the couch. He forces me to sit, and a few minutes later, provides me with a cold towel. I press it against my now-swollen fist while I listen to the couple argue in the spare room.
The guard is about six foot one, with dark hair and eyes, and he stares down at me.
“What are you looking at?” I sneer.
He spits at me.
I wipe my face with the towel, and when he returns to guard the exit, I lift my middle finger in his direction.
The sadist slams the door to the bedroom and sits behind the desk in the corner of the room. He wears sunglasses, which makes me think he’s still hiding his face from me.
Until he takes them off.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’ll kill me. The moment I hand over the information, they’ll end me.
“I want to write a letter to my family,” I say.
“Did you bring what I asked?” the sadist asks.
I grab the piece of plastic and the screwdriver from my pocket and throw them on the glass coffee table.
“Careful.” He jumps out of the chair, seemingly terrified his precious object might break.
“And what are you going to do if I’m not careful? Shoot me? Go ahead. I’m dead anyway. If not by your hand, then Alessio will surely end me. I don’t know how my life will end, but I want to write a letter to my family, and I need guarantees that my family won’t be harmed.”
“We made a deal. Your family will be fine. As for Alessio, his end is coming.”
I snort, totally unladylike. “You’ll be dead before him.”
The only leverage I have is the information I gathered yesterday, and I’m not giving it up unless I can write a letter to my family. I can’t go back to Alessio, so I’m useless to these people. They don’t know that, but they’ll find out when I refuse to go back. Even if I agreed to return, Alessio wouldn’t let me go near him.
The sadist slides the plastic piece I handed him into something that looks like the spare battery of a telephone. He hooks the battery by a cable to the computer. I haven’t seen cables in a while, so that equipment seems old, but what do I know.
Whatever he sees on the screen makes him slam his fist on the desk and curse, or at least I think it’s a curse. He dials someone and speaks in a foreign language. I make out the word Paris and can tell he’s displeased.
“The code name for the weapon was Margaret. What is it now?”
Margaret was a weapon? Oh my God. They want a weapon, and Alessio has it. At least that’s what I’ve now put together. I swallow hard, contemplating my answer. I must give them something. “Susan.”
“Do you know the location?” he asks, looking at me.
I pinch my lips. When I listened in on Alessio’s conversation yesterday, I gathered it was an international crisis, but I didn’t quite know exactly what they were talking about. Alessio’s conversations are clear as mud, and I’m sure he was even more careful with me around. I did, however, deduce enough so that I can make an educated guess of which location the sadist is talking about.
“What kind of weapon are you looking for?”
“The kind that wins wars.”
“A big weapon, then.”
He stares at the screen. “Useless.” He pulls out a gun and slams it on the desk. It’s a threat.
But I won’t say a damn thing until he guarantees my family’s safety. “I want to speak with your prime minster, and I want guarantees for my family. I want to write them a letter, and I want them to be left alone. After that, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“You’re playing dangerous games, girl.”
“I’m not a girl. I’m a woman, and I’m not playing. I know Susan is en route, and you can’t pin her down. I know the secret codes they’re using to enter the secured areas, and I know that if there’s any interference from anyone outside of a small security team handpicked by Alessio, the repercussions will be severe. I know that the weapon leaked and that Alessio managed to contain it, and I know that the original buyer was your boss, whom you’re betraying now. I know you can’t call your prime minister because you’re the commander who wants to overthrow him.” I don’t know half of this stuff. But I make a decent journalist when forced.
The sadist rises from the desk. He turns the computer toward me, and the screen shows my uncle’s hospital bed.
Oh God. This time, I grit my teeth and don’t collapse in tears. “You need this information, and if you touch him, you’ll never get it.”
“You will talk.”
“No.”
“Fine.” He grabs his phone and dials. “The man who pushed your uncle down the stairs is on standby.” While waiting for the man on the other side to answer, he walks around the desk and leans against it. “I need the location.”
I cross my arms over my chest.
“Give me the location,” he says, growing inpatient.
His wife enters the room. She changed out of her bloody clothes and shoved bits of tissue into her nostrils. I doubt her nose is broken, and while my hand is swollen, I don’t think I broke anything either. We’re almost even. Almost.
They exchange foreign words. The sadist hurls his phone at her. She struggles to catch it, but when she does, she dials and waits. Her frown deepens because the man they’re trying to reach doesn’t pick up.
She hangs up and turns to me. “I only want to know the name of the man who killed my brother, and I swear your little brother will live.”
“Well, see, that’s the thing. Yesterday, you threatened my aunt too, and now I have a lot more to lose than I had before, so you need to up the ante at this point.”
“What do you want?” she asks.
The man comments in the foreign language again. She retorts. They argue again before she walks up to me and pulls out her gun. I see my life flash before my eyes. “Tell me his name!”
Something hits her temple, comes out the other side of her skull, and, wide-eyed, she drops to her knees right in front of me. Her husband lifts his arm, but a bullet hits his forehead, splattering his brains all over the curtain behind the desk. His body slumps in the chair.
I turn, expecting the man at the exit to have betrayed them, but someone else stands in the room.
It’s the housekeeper from the elevator. He moves his lollipop to the corner of his mouth and points a suppressed pistol at me.