CHAPTER 25 GIGI
GIGI
Gigi valiantly resisted the urge to open the door and peek in on Brady and Nora, because she knew what she’d find—the same thing she’d found the last time she’d peeked: Brady sitting on the floor, quiet and still, committing every last hair on their captive’s head to memory while Code Name Sentimental Knives thoroughly pretended she couldn’t see him at all.
“Brady’s going to untie her.” Knox sat with his back up against the wall, one leg dangling off the platform. “I should call Ortega and tell her everything, but if I do that, Boss Lady’s going to expect me to haul your ass out of here.”
Gigi plopped down next to Knox. “You could try, but my ass has its ways. Can I ask you something?”
“Does it, in any way, involve your ass?”
“No.”
“Then ask away, Happy.”
Gigi had so many questions, but she settled on one. “Why did Calla start coming out to the bayou in the first place?” Gigi couldn’t help feeling like if she could just understand Calla Thorp, she might be able to make some part of all of this make sense.
“Calla tracked Severin down when she was about twelve.” Knox didn’t even look at Gigi as he answered.
“She was soft, spoiled, the only girl. All the male Thorp cousins hated her for that. Severin was her great-uncle and the family black sheep. Calla, being Calla, got curious about him, maybe because rumor had it the reason Severin was disowned was that he got a city girl pregnant, way back in the day. Helena made an example of her son. Knock a woman up without making her a Thorp, and you were done, kicked out of the family, completely cut off, even if the baby died before she was ever born.”
“She.” Gigi picked up on that.
“She,” Knox echoed. “I always thought that was why Calla tracked Severin down—the idea that he had almost had the first daughter.”
Gigi realized something then. “So if Calla’s father did have an illegitimate child and Helena found out about it—”
“There’s no way.” Knox cut Gigi off and stood. “A man like Orion Thorp would never risk being disowned. This Zella woman, I promise you she isn’t Orion’s. I’m going inside.”
Gigi followed him, and this time, she saw something on the floor between Brady and Nora. The calla lily someone left me. Gigi took a step toward it, but Knox caught her by the arm.
“Stay put, Happy. Don’t go anywhere near her.”
“No offense,” Gigi told Nora hastily.
“None taken.” And just like that, their captive’s hours-long silence came to an end. She wasn’t looking at Gigi, though, or at Knox. Nora’s attention was on Brady and only Brady.
Brady didn’t seem to mind. “Would now be a good time to ask you what that means?” he asked, nodding toward the flower on the floor.
Nora leaned back on her hands, and Gigi realized with a start that Knox had been right: Brady had untied her. When it became clear that Nora didn’t intend to answer his question, Brady leaned forward and drew a shape in the thick dust coating the floorboards of the shack.
A fleur-de-lis. The one from Calla’s necklace.
“What is it you think you know?” Nora asked Brady, her voice somehow both calm and sharp.
“Quite a bit about symbology, as it happens,” Brady replied.
“For example, I know that the fleur-de-lis dates back to the Middle Ages, at least. For centuries, it was used as a common heraldic symbol, associated with the noble families of France, England, Albania, and the Roman Empire, among others. Here in Louisiana, it has a darker history. A version of it was branded into the flesh of enslaved people caught trying to run away.” Brady gave the horror of that a moment to breathe.
“The Thorp stylization of the fleur-de-lis, however,” he continued, nodding to the one he’d drawn, “is, to my knowledge, unique. I have only ever seen this particular stylization used here in St. Adelaide Parish, on buildings erected by the Thorp family, starting around the nineteen-fifties. The library. The town hall. The Musée.”
“Is that it?” Nora said calmly. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
Brady set the paper with that image of Saint Adelaide and Gigi’s name on it down next to the fleur-de-lis.
“Adelaide of Burgundy. She was a saint, an empress of the Roman Empire, and arguably the most powerful woman on the planet in the tenth century. In her lifetime, she married two kings, at least one of them on her own terms. In addition, she was imprisoned at one point for a marriage she would not consent to, but she managed to escape and eventually ascended the greatest throne of her time. Interestingly enough, St. Adelaide Parish, as such, did not exist until the Thorp family swept in and renamed it.”
Nora stared Brady down and shrugged.
“That slice of history I just recited meant something to you,” Brady said evenly, his eyes making yet another study of hers. “But the Thorp fleur-de-lis means more.”
“That symbol,” Nora said, “has no place in this town.”
Gigi couldn’t bite her tongue any longer. “What does it mean? The symbol, the calla lilies, Saint Adelaide—all of it.”
No response.
Brady brought his hand to touch first one side of the fleur-de-lis he’d drawn, then the other.
“The leaves on a typical fleur-de-lis are top-heavy. Not so for this one. There are additional lines of symmetry here and here—and see these embellishments? Turn the leaf portion of the symbol on its side, and suddenly, it begins to look more like a symbol of a different sort. The Greek letter omega.”
“Stop.” Nora’s voice was commanding in ways that Gigi couldn’t even describe. “You know nothing,” their prisoner told Brady, “and you are a man. The wrong kind of nothing could be a death sentence for you.”
“So you’re going to kill me now?” Brady said calmly.
“Not me.”
Death sentence? Gigi’s mind was reeling. Before Avery disappeared, Eve had mentioned three things to the Woman in Red in her attempt to throw Grayson and Lyra under the bus, and one of those things had been omega.
The other two had been calla lilies and Alice Hawthorne.
“What did you mean when you said that it’s not going to be me?” Gigi burst out. “What isn’t?”
Nora answered in a language that wasn’t English or anything even remotely close.
Brady glanced back at Gigi. “Run away, little girl. You’d never survive.” It took Gigi a moment to realize that he was translating, and by that point, Brady had already turned back to Nora. “I have an affinity for languages, as well as symbols.”
“Survive?” Gigi repeated. Death sentence. Survive. She wrenched her arm out of Knox’s hold. “What do you mean survive?” Gigi had signed an NDA. She couldn’t say Avery’s name, but she had to ask. “If I have a friend who—” Gigi didn’t even get the chance to say the word disappeared.
“Your friend,” Nora said, her voice going eerily quiet in a way that struck Gigi as lethal. “It was not supposed to be her.” Nora switched back into what Gigi assumed to be her native language, the words coming fast and furious and sharp as all of those knives.
“It was supposed to be me,” Brady translated. “It was promised to me.”
“What was? And promised by who?” Gigi asked, her mind going five thousand miles an hour. “The same person who sent you here? The one who gave you my name?”
Without warning, Nora was on her feet, and Brady was flat on his back. Half a second later, Knox was down, too. And then Nora was gone. Just… gone.
Brady leapt up, blood dripping from his mouth, and bolted, clearing the door, leaping the railing.
“Stay put,” Knox ordered Gigi, as he took off after them.
Gigi did not stay put, but by the time she’d made it to the ground, she couldn’t even see Brady or Nora anymore. Knox was slowing to a stop forty or fifty yards away when Rohan and Savannah suddenly appeared. Savannah had something cradled in her arms, but Gigi couldn’t tell what.
Knox turned toward them, and he must have said something, because Rohan shot off like a well-muscled, British bullet. Savannah followed suit, and Gigi broke into a jog. Curse you, cardio.
Knox met her halfway, positioning himself firmly in her path.
“I’m not a little girl,” Gigi informed him. “And I’m not running away.” Nora’s words had stung. “And okay, maybe I’m not fast. Maybe I can’t fight and have no real physiological endurance to speak of. But if you can’t play hard, you play smart.”
“Define smart,” Knox said, pinning her with a look.
Gigi’s brain kicked into overdrive as she went back over the exchange between Brady and Nora. Not the way it had ended. Not It was supposed to be me, it was promised to me. Not Run away, little girl or You’d never survive, but the rest of it.
Gigi thought about Nora telling Brady that he knew nothing and that the wrong kind of nothing could be a death sentence for a man. She thought about Brady calling Nora on the fact that the history of Adelaide of Burgundy meant something to her. But the Thorp fleur-de-lis—that means far more.
“Which way to town?” Gigi asked Knox.
Knox narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Because once I win this argument,” Gigi told him, “and I will win, you’re taking me to the statue of Saint Adelaide, in front of the museum Brady said was marked by a Thorp fleur-de-lis.”