CHAPTER 9 GIGI
GIGI
Just so you know, cardio is not my strong suit!” Gigi called to Knox, who wasn’t exactly making it easy to keep up with him as he pushed deeper and deeper into the bayou, skirting the water but not by much. “Lungs,” Gigi wheezed. “Hate me.”
Knox was the very picture of sympathy, empathy, and concern. “No one asked you to come with me.”
“You’re my bodyguard,” Gigi labored to remind him. “And I’m your very favorite thorn-in-side.”
Knox snorted, but he slowed his pace. Slightly. “You going to tell me why you, your sister, and that British asshole are looking for Brady?” he said.
Gigi decided to take the fact that Knox had tired of stormy silence as a good thing. “Are you going to tell me when your birthday is?” she countered.
“I don’t do birthdays.”
Gigi officially had a new mission in life, once life had returned to normal: Project Birthday. See also: Confetti Pants.
“Brady’s sponsor knows things.” Gigi figured she owed Not-Yet-Confetti-Pants an answer of some sort, but she kept it vague. “And we might need Brady to draw her out.”
Knox had been there when Gigi had told Jameson and Alisa all about the duchess and the Woman in Red, Zella and Calla, and the fact that they’d been sisters, once upon a time. Knox had just been thoroughly pretending that none of it mattered to him.
“I don’t like this.” He picked up his pace again as their path twisted away from the water. Gigi shined the light on her phone after him, but it did very little against the velvety blackness of the night.
“Where are we?” Gigi asked.
“Heaven or hell, depending on who you ask.”
Gigi wondered what this place looked like during the daytime, wondered if it was beautiful or just wild, wondered what Knox felt coming back here.
“This is where you trained, isn’t it?” Gigi knew she was pushing her luck, but cardio always made her a little reckless. “You and Brady and Calla. Severin trained you out here.”
Gigi still wasn’t sure exactly what that “training” had entailed.
Fighting, clearly, but she had the general sense it went beyond that.
She knew that Calla had been an archer, and that Severin Thorp had been former military and comfortable living in the wilderness, so hunting, tracking, and intense survival training also seemed like real possibilities.
“Let it go,” Knox ordered. “And watch out for the roots.”
“What r—” Gigi’s foot caught on something, and she pitched forward.
Knox turned and caught her before she could face-plant.
Gigi took that as an opportunity to give his hand a little squeeze.
“You and Brady, you became brothers out here. You trained together. And Calla—she was part of it, part of you.”
Even Gigi wasn’t brave enough to say You fell in love with her, let alone Brady fell, too.
“Calla was a Thorp,” Knox said abruptly, like that was all Calla had been. He set off again, like a half-mad hound who’d scented prey. “Watch out for the damn roots this time.”
Gigi struggled to catch up and managed a record ninety-three seconds of silence before she tried again. “You haven’t asked me. About Calla.”
“What about her?”
“Anything?”
Knox went very still. At first, Gigi thought she’d finally pushed him too far, but then she realized: He was listening. To something? For something?
Brady?
“Wait here,” Knox ordered, taking off full-speed into the dark.
It was a truth universally acknowledged that Gigi Grayson was not particularly good at waiting. She aimed her light in the direction Knox had gone, but he’d already disappeared. Gigi heard a twig snap somewhere in the distance, and then Knox’s voice cut through the night.
“What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Daniels?” Knox said.
That rather questionable greeting was followed by the sound of someone being shoved into what Gigi could only assume was the trunk of what she hoped was a very sturdy tree.
She had no idea whether Knox had been the shover or the shove-ee.
“I can take care of myself, Knox.” Brady. “And it’s none of your business, either way.”
“You’re my business, Brady.”
“Since when?”
“Since always.”
Gigi headed in the direction of their voices and hit a clearing. Moonlight directly overhead illuminated the outlines of her former teammates’ bodies—more specifically, the outline of Brady’s forearm getting up close and personal with the outline of Knox’s windpipe.
“Not on my watch, boys!” Gigi called, jogging toward them and catching them in the beam of her flashlight. “This is a place of nature and peace.”
Brady let loose of Knox and turned toward Gigi. She gave herself a second to look at him—just one. When in doubt, rip the bandage right off.
“Calla’s alive,” Gigi blurted. “I saw her.”
Gigi had always thought Brady had gentle eyes, but right now, in the light of the moon, his velvety brown irises were like roiling waves, like churning lava barely contained by earth.
She had his attention. His full attention.
“In my mind,” Gigi said, forcing her voice to come out steady, “I called her the Woman in Red—capital W, capital R. Her entire body was covered—gloves, boots, cloak, hood, a scarf over her face, all red. But I saw her eyes. She showed me her eyes. One blue eye. One brown.”
“That doesn’t mean that it was Calla,” Brady said. “Heterochromia might be rare, but anyone with colored contacts could fake it.”
To Gigi’s ears, he sounded like a skeptic desperate to believe. Calla had been missing for six years. Her disappearance had broken Brady. It had broken Knox. It had broken Brady-and-Knox.
And now Calla was back—only she wasn’t Calla anymore.
Gigi pushed down the urge to shiver. “The Woman in Red, she knew things, Brady. About Calla’s life. About her family.”
“What sort of things?” Brady asked quietly.
Gigi didn’t particularly trust Brady, but she didn’t have to trust a person to feel for them. “She told me that Calla was the first Thorp daughter born in three generations and that having the first girl was more important to Calla’s father than the fact that Calla wasn’t really his.”
“Helena Thorp made Orion the family heir because he had the first daughter.” Brady studied Gigi like she had hieroglyphics on her face, like he was the only one who could possibly decipher them. “But Calla never said anything about her father not being her father.”
“To you,” Knox interjected. “She never said anything about it to you.”
Brady swiveled his head toward Knox. Three or four seconds passed in utter silence. “You’re telling the truth,” Brady said. His next breath hitched as he looked back to Gigi. “He’s telling the truth. And that means…”
Gigi could practically see Brady’s heart and lungs and soul seize up, all at once.
“One blue eye, one brown,” Brady whispered. “Your Woman in Red, Calla—what else did she say?”
She said that you love a memory. That you love a dream. Even after everything, Gigi couldn’t bring herself to tell Brady that. “She told me that there was no Calla Thorp anymore. She also said that hers was a higher law.”
“Brady.” Knox’s voice went dangerously low. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.”
“This doesn’t sound off to you?” Brady demanded, his voice strained.
“It sounds like Calla to you? Calla, who always knew exactly who she was. Calla, who never gave up on herself—or you. Damn it, Knox, we’re talking about the girl who taught you to read through sheer force of will when you were fourteen and nothing but a ball of rage. The one who saw you. Saw us.”
“I don’t need you to tell me about Calla.”
“Who’s had her all this time, huh?” Brady shoved Knox, trying desperately to get a response. “What have they been doing to her? Because disavowing her own name and citing a higher law sure as hell sounds brainwashed to me.”
Gigi could see the logic in that argument, but she couldn’t help thinking that the Woman in Red hadn’t seemed like a victim of any kind. Zella had referred to Calla as ambitious.
“Gigi.” Brady reached out and touched Gigi’s face, angling it up toward his, his hand gentle and warm. “There must be something else you can tell me. You’re the kind of person who notices things that other people miss.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “You—”
Brady went flying backward.
“Keep your damn hands off her,” Knox growled.
Gigi shot Knox an offended look. “Even I’m not naive enough to fall for it twice,” she told him, and then she gave herself a mental pep talk: I’m not a wounded dove. I am an angry koala. And you do not want to make a koala angry.
“Touch me again,” Gigi told Brady, steeling her voice, “try to manipulate me again, and see what happens.”
Behind his thick-rimmed glasses, Brady looked down. “I owe you an apology.”
Gigi wasn’t sure she wanted one. “All you had to do was ask,” she told him quietly.
“This is me,” Brady replied, “asking.”
Gigi swallowed. We need him, she reminded herself, but deep down, she knew she would have told Brady everything regardless, because she wasn’t cruel.
“The Woman in Red called herself the Watcher and the Lily.” Memories washed over Gigi the moment she said the words.
“I got the sense that those were titles, ones she was proud of. She and Zella obviously knew each other. Zella said they were sisters, once upon a time. She kidnapped me to lure Calla out, I guess because Calla had left me a cryptic lily, which was supposedly some kind of warning that I was being watched, whatever that means.”
“Who’s Zella?” Brady asked intently.
“Your sponsor,” Gigi replied. “You didn’t know her name?”
“I do hope we’re not interrupting,” an accented voice called. Gigi turned just in time to see Rohan stepping into the clearing, Savannah at his side.
“Did I mention that I turned on location sharing with Savannah as soon as I got this phone?” Gigi asked Knox. “On a related note, I’m impressed there’s even cell service out here.”
As Savannah drew closer to them, she held something up. By the time Gigi had realized the object dangling from her sister’s fingers was a necklace, Brady had already surged forward to try to snatch it—try being the operative word.
One second, Brady was moving toward Savannah, and the next, he was on the ground. Rohan was that fast, like lightning in broad-shouldered, morally nihilistic form.
Gigi glanced at Knox, who didn’t seem to care much that Rohan had just put Brady on his ass. “Where the hell did you get that?” Knox demanded, staring at the necklace.
“They stole it from my bag,” Brady answered. “My sponsor sent it to me as proof that she had information about what happened to Calla after she disappeared.”
“We found the inscription quite fascinating,” Rohan told Brady. “For the one to whom it was promised. For the girl who would be queen. I take it your Calla was quite the princess?”
The only girl born into her family in three generations, Gigi thought, her head pounding.
“Calla was no princess.” Brady climbed back to his feet and turned to Knox. “Admit it, Knox. Something is very wrong. Calla needs us. All these years, I told you—
“And I told you: Calla left.” Knox brutally grabbed the collar of his own shirt.
The moment he did, Gigi knew: We shouldn’t be here.
Not me. Not Savannah. Not Rohan. As Knox bared the brutal scar at the base of his neck, the one he’d called a Calla Thorp good-bye, Gigi did the only thing she could think of to do: She turned and fled.
“Savannah,” Gigi called back over her shoulder. “Come on.” This was between Knox and Brady and no one else.
But Savannah didn’t come.
“The night Calla left”—Knox’s voice reached Gigi no matter how hard she tried to block it out—“she told me to meet her here at midnight. I was standing right here when Calla dug the head of an arrow into the base of my throat and warned me not to come after her, not to look for her. Ever. She made it crystal clear to me that she was meant for greater things than St. Adelaide Parish and a barely literate, backwoods nobody who’s broken inside and always will be. ”
Gigi stumbled in the dark, her heart hurting for Knox, because it couldn’t have been more obvious that the words he’d just said were a direct quote. Belatedly, Gigi remembered her flashlight. Her eyes tearing up, she shined it on the ground in front of her—and then she stopped.
Stopped fleeing. Stopped breathing. Stopped thinking in words.
Because there, at her feet, artfully arranged on a massive, twisted root, was an enormous white calla lily.