Chapter Thirty-Two #2
Winona ushers Sophie to the kitchen, but Rose lingers, watching me like a ghoul from the door. When they are out of sight, she closes it behind her, and I exhale, relieved to be able to end my performance.
To my surprise, Onix walks over to her and nudges Rose’s hand with his nose. I watch as she scratches behind his ears.
“He’s very sweet,” she observes. “We don’t keep pets. Their lifespans are so short that losing them doesn’t seem worth it.”
I don’t want to think about Onix’s eventual demise, especially with mine so imminent.
“Alphonse had cats,” I say. “Bunnies too, at some point.”
“Alphonse had a lot of things the rest of us haven’t,” she says. Her mouth thins into a line. “I’m sorry. I tried to convince her not to do this.”
It’s Margaret West’s confident cadence, coming from a spindly thirteen-year-old girl’s mouth.
“So you don’t think I should die,” I say blithely.
“No,” Rose confirms. “Julian has offered everything to keep you. He’s always been willing to help us, you know, but his wealth has never been ours.
We’re women. We’ve only been able to keep our own property reliably in the last fifty years or so.
He’s got a head start centuries long, but he was willing to give it up for you, and that more than anything made me see that he was serious about this.
I don’t mean the money—it’s never been about wealth, for him.
It’s about what it enabled him to do. He’s always struggled the most with the question of his existence, you know.
By being able to promote innovation, he gives himself meaning. ”
I know this, but hearing Rose reiterate it so plainly still sends me reeling.
That Julian is willing to throw his entire life’s work down the drain for a few meager decades by my side leaves me with an indescribable feeling.
It’s not joy, exactly, but something stickier, messier, drenched in sorrow.
What had he said, when he told me he loved me again?
Life at your side would feel meaningful enough to end.
“She won’t take the deal, though,” I say.
“She won’t,” Rose says. She sighs, crosses her arms. “I’m not stupid enough to come to you demanding you have empathy for her.
But you can’t imagine what it’s like. To be so powerful, yet so powerless, for years on end.
To be almost destroyed multiple times over for existing.
You might think that what she did at Ulrich Corridor was overkill, but she did it to protect us. She had no choice.”
Help me. Harold’s final grimace, his unheard death rattle.
“She murdered a room full of people in cold blood,” I say, disgusted.
“Because someone first tried to murder me,” Rose insists. “It’s a mass shooting in America. We’re a minor calamity. The news cycle is probably already on to the next one.”
I swing my feet against my bed’s footboard, and the impact booms through the room like a firework.
“Is that how you justify it to yourself?” I muse.
Rose doesn’t respond for a moment, but I can tell I’ve struck a nerve.
“You’re mortal,” she says eventually. “You have a desire to live, but also the knowledge that you can’t live forever.
For us, it’s a choice, and a hard one. I miss Alphonse every day, but I envy him too.
He was tired of living just for the sake of it.
The life he chose for himself…it was full of possibilities.
Leila saw it as betrayal, but I understood why he chose it.
I understand why Julian is choosing it now.
And if I’m honest, I’d love to choose it too.
Having to start again from childhood is exhausting. ”
“What’s stopping you?” I ask.
“My sister,” Rose says plainly. “After all she’s done for us? I can’t leave her to be alone.”
“Of course,” I say, despondent. In Ulrich Corridor, I’d thought for a brief moment that I might have an ally in Rose. But she has made her loyalties clear.
“Like it or not, Leila’s the only one of us who is willing to accept herself fully,” Rose says, as if it’s an explanation.
“To do the dirty work of crisis management. For all of us. Julian’s told you about Claire.
Did he tell you that while he was wallowing in grief, Leila was the one to track down and eliminate the men who killed her?
And that’s far from the only time we’ve been exposed.
Hunted.” She folds her thin arms over a chest that had once been full and plush and is now prepubescent.
“The work of enrapturing multiple targets is dangerous. There’s a window in the process during which the bond is at times tenuous, when our infiltration of the subconscious inspires as much alarm as lust. Our targets…
they can become obsessive. Violent. You saw what happened to me. ”
A memory comes to me in a flash: the security guard in our hospital who’d taken to following Leila into the parking garage. I’d written him off as a creep. But the way he’d looked at her hadn’t been simply amorous, it had been desperate.
“Are you hoping that I’ll be understanding?” I say. “That I’ll tell you it’s totally fine that she’s putting me and my family in danger, because she’s trying to protect yours?”
“No,” Rose sighs. “I wasn’t lying when I told you that I was happy for you and Julian. I want to help you get out of this. I’ll do what I can to protect your family. Especially this one,” she adds, scratching behind Onix’s ear. Then she looks back up at me. “But not at her expense, Sean. I can’t.”
What can I do but nod? My head feels heavy as a corpse.
She nods back. From the living room, I hear Sophie call for her. Rose gives me one last lingering look, then throws open the door and runs to her.
Finally, I’m alone. I crumple to the floor. Onix trots to me and collapses into my lap, his tail thumping happily on the floor. I lift his head and press it to mine.
“I missed you, baby,” I tell him, and he groans his agreement.
I begin to inspect my new space, pulling the drawers open to find all my potential necessities: satin pillowcases for my hair, clean towels, socks and underwear, pajamas, a single change of clothing.
The adjoining bathroom is clean, and fresh eucalyptus hangs from the showerhead.
I search for cameras and find none, but that doesn’t settle my nerves; if Leila is paranoid enough to strip me to search for tracking devices, there’s no guarantee that I’m not being watched.
It doesn’t escape my notice that the room is completely bereft of any objects I could use for self-defense. The lamps are glued to the tables, and the furniture is too heavy to use as a barricade. I have a window, but it’s bolted shut. For all its niceties, I am still in a prison.
There’s a clock on the wall. My exploration has taken ten minutes, and I fold onto the floor, trying not to dwell on how many I have left.
In the cath lab, we learn to prepare for the unexpected, for a worst-case scenario.
We work based on inference with limited information, using injected contrast and X-rays to get the closest we can to the lay of the land in which we work, but we don’t have the full picture that a surgeon might.
When shit hits the fan, we have to be ready for a bailout, and that requires preparation, but also creativity and quick thinking.
And when that doesn’t work, the humility to call for backup.
I’m trapped in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with an armed man who has most certainly killed before and who is magically devoted to the mastermind of my kidnapping, with my entire found family unknowingly held hostage.
Right now, I can’t find a bailout, and my backup is currently halfway across the country.
Frustrated, I flop backward onto the floor. Onix is on my chest immediately, lavishing my chin with kisses, and I’m squirming at his loving assault when I turn my head and a metallic glint catches my eye.
A floorboard under the bed, one of the nails just barely sticking out from the wood.
Leila is right that I probably won’t be able to overpower Robbie.
But I have an excellent grasp on anatomy, and she’s also correct that I can find a vein, or an artery, in record time.
Enough force, and I’ll have her. And while Robbie will almost assuredly kill me for it, it might buy Winona and Sophie some time to run.
Suddenly I don’t care if there’s a camera trained on me.
I turn off the lights, wedge my hand as far under the bed as I can manage.
I can feel the ridge of the loose nail, but can’t quite get my fingers underneath the head.
Frenzied, I try the thin edge of my press-ons, avoiding the thumb because if I lose that, I lose my backup too—
Someone opens the door, and the light flickers on. I sit up so quickly that I bang my head hard on the bed frame.
“Dinner’s ready,” Winona says, looking down at me with consternation. “Why are you rolling around on the floor in the dark?”
“Winny,” I breathe, so relieved that I have to fight back laughter.
Winona slips inside my room and shuts the door.
“Something’s off,” she whispers. “I’m not wrong, am I?
Leila wouldn’t tell us exactly where she was bringing us, and I still don’t understand how she was able to find you.
She said she talked to Julian, but I know for a fact that you two broke up in the worst way and that you’d rather lose your big toe than let him back in, and you’ve literally never gone on a trip without telling me, and I don’t care what she says, there’s no way you’d do that while everything was going on with Brandon.
Plus, the vibes between Leila and this cook are weird, like they’re together or something, and what happened to your wrists—”
I suck in a breath, not quite expecting this confrontation so soon. To be known is to be loved, I think. This is my best friend; she can read me like an open book, and my split second of silence is answer enough.
“What is going on, Sulley?” she says.