13. Quinn
QUINN
The soap in the bathroom at Gino’s is the pink kind that looks like Pepto-Bismol. Lillie pumps it no fewer than six times until her little hands are overflowing with it. “I think that’s enough,” I finally have to gently suggest.
Of course, she looks at me like I’m a complete, hopeless idiot. “I have to make sure I’m very clean.”
“And I appreciate that, because it’s very important to keep yourself from getting sick.” I watch her tiny hands as she rubs them together very seriously, very thoroughly, before rinsing. As I watch, my thoughts drift a little. I can’t help it. My face hurts from smiling so much tonight.
“Quinn? Do fish wash their hands?”
I swear, I don’t know where she comes up with these things. “Well, for one thing, fish don’t have hands.”
“But if they did?” She’s taking this very seriously. “Because, you know, they’re always underwater anyway. So wouldn’t they just always be clean?”
“That’s a very good question. I’ve never thought about it before.”
“I think about lots of things.”
I can’t describe how much I love this kid. “I know you do.”
The door opens behind us, and a woman walks in wearing the same black apron as the other waitstaff. I barely glance at her—a brief, polite smile in the mirror.
“All done,” Lillie announces. I reach past her for the paper towels in the dispenser mounted to the wall.
“Don’t turn around.”
The voice is flat. Wrong. Too calm for a sentence that starts with don’t.
I freeze with my hand on the dispenser, and my eyes go to the mirror over the sink.
I catch sight of the gun in the reflection.
It’s small and dark, and pointed at a spot between my shoulder blades.
The woman holding it isn’t shaking. Her face is blank, like she knows exactly what’s going to happen next.
All at once, my whole body goes cold as if it was just dropped through ice.
“Both of you,” the woman says. “You’re coming with me. Now.”
Meanwhile, Lillie is busy playing with the faucet, turning it off and on.
She’s going to have to wash her hands again.
It’s amazing, the things that go through our heads at a time like this.
Like it matters whether she just dirtied her hands again when there is a gun pointed at my back.
She is completely unaware that the world just changed.
“Please.” It surprises me how steady my voice comes out, since I’m screaming inside. “She’s only five. She’s just a little girl. Take me. Just take me, leave her here. Someone will find her. Her father will—”
“Both of you.” The woman steps closer. The gun doesn’t move. “I’m not asking again. Got it?”
“Quinn?” Lillie looks up at me. Her hands are dripping on the floor. “Are we going someplace?”
I look down into her face. Those dark eyes of hers, Dorian’s eyes. Trusting and completely unaware. I have a decision to make here, and there’s really no choice involved. Breaking down is not an option. Failing her is not an option.
So I do the only thing I can do. I take her hand and give it a squeeze. “Yeah, honey. We’re going.”
I pick her up off the floor because I don’t trust this woman. I mean, obviously—she has a gun. God forbid she decides to make a grab for Lillie. With her in my arms, I maintain a scrap of control.
The gun prods my lower back while the woman moves us through a door at the back of the bathroom I hadn’t noticed.
It leads to a service corridor, gray concrete, and the hum of a refrigeration unit fills the air.
We pass a stack of boxes and a mop bucket, and a fire exit propped open with a brick.
Beyond it, there’s an alley. In the alley is a white van with no markings.
The sliding door on the side is already open.
Two men are waiting for us, one of them sitting behind the wheel.
“Get in,” the second man growls.
This is actually happening. It’s not a dream.
It’s the most surreal situation I’ve ever been in, but it is very real, and I have to protect Lillie.
That is the single imperative, the one task I have to train all of my energy on.
Forget me. This little girl needs me to hold it together and be on her side, or else.
I lift her into the van first, then climb in after her. The door slides shut, robbing me of the light from the bulb over the exit we just took. A man takes my wrists and wraps them together with a zip tie. Fast, practiced, as if he’s done it before.
Then he reaches for Lillie. Something inside me detonates. “Don’t touch her.” It comes out savage, a voice I didn’t know I had. “Tie mine? Fine. But not hers. She is five years old.”
The man and the woman exchange a glance. The woman frowns but nods, so the man leaves Lillie’s wrists alone. I feel a small victory that means nothing and everything at the same time.
The van starts moving.
I pull Lillie into my lap, and she curls against my chest. I wrap my bound hands around her as best I can and hold her close.
My heart is hammering so hard, I’m sure she can feel it.
I’m sure she can hear it, too. But when I look down at her face in the dim light that leaks through the front windshield, she doesn’t look scared.
No. In fact, she looks curious. “Where are we going?” she asks, looking around.
“I don’t know, sweetie.”
“Is it a surprise?”
“Something like that,” I whisper. Yes, it is most definitely a surprise. I never did like surprises very much.
“Do I need my shoes? Because I don’t have my shoes.”
I look at her feet, prepared to tell her she’s wrong. She’s not. Somewhere between the bathroom and the van, her shoes came off. I was so shocked I didn’t notice. She’s in her socks—the ones with the little strawberries on them.
That detail is the thing that almost breaks me. Not the gun or the zip tie. Not the van with no windows. It’s the thought of her shoes on the bathroom floor back at Gino’s, and Dorian sitting at the table, waiting for us to come back. He has no idea.
He doesn’t have the first clue.
I press my face against the top of her head and breathe in her strawberry shampoo. “Everything’s going to be fine,” I murmur. Who am I trying to convince?
“Why is that lady angry?” she whispers, looking toward the front seat where the woman sits as a passenger.
“She’s not angry, sweetie,” I assure her, almost choking on my own lie. Well, maybe it’s not a lie. I don’t think she’s angry. “She’s just—”
“But she has a gun.”
My stomach drops. “You saw it?”
“In the mirror.” She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Like she’s too polite to say duh, but she’s definitely thinking it. “I know what guns are. Uncle Tristan has one.”
Of course she knows what guns are. Of course Uncle Tristan has one.
Of course every detail I’ve been explaining away for months is now rearranging itself into a picture I should’ve seen a long time ago.
And of course it’s all coming together while I’m sitting in the back of a van with my hands tied together.
“Are the people who took us bad guys?” she asks.
“I think so.”
“Does Daddy know bad guys?”
I can’t answer that one. I can’t, because the most honest answer is I think your daddy might be a bad guy. That is not a sentence I’m going to say to this child. Not now, not ever.
She shifts in my lap and is quiet for about ten seconds, which I’m pretty sure is a record. “Quinn? What are those things around your wrists?”
“They’re called zip ties.” And they’re pretty damn tight. Biting into my flesh.
“How do they work?”
“I don’t know, honey.” Just like I don’t know whether I’d rather she be quiet or keep asking questions. At least if she’s asking questions, I can distract myself with the answers. But I need to think, and I can’t do that while going through a how-to on zip ties and their origins and uses.
“Can you break them?”
“Not right now.”
“What if you pulled real hard?”
“I don’t think that’s how they work.”
“You could use your teeth,” she suggests, looking up at me and bringing her jaws together, snapping them shut.
“I don’t think that would work. Do not try,” I add, when it looks like she’s going to do just that.
The driver shifts in his seat. The woman in the passenger seat sits with the gun resting on her knee where I can see it. She’s staring straight ahead, but I know she’s listening hard. Tension has every one of her muscles locked.
“What’s your name?” Lillie asks her. She doesn’t get an answer. That’s never stopped Lillie. “My name is Lillie. This is Quinn. She’s my dad’s girlfriend. She used to be just my nanny, but now she sleeps in Daddy’s room, so she’s his girlfriend. She’s really good at braiding hair.”
The woman’s jaw tightens.
“Do you have a pony?” Lillie continues. “I do. His name is Poptart. He pooped in our car once. And in my daddy’s bedroom. Daddy stepped in it. It was really funny, but I didn’t laugh when he could see me. He would’ve been really grumpy about that.”
I can feel my throat closing, half from terror and half from something else.
Maybe hysterical laughter? Yeah, that sounds about right.
Because a five-year-old is attempting to make small talk with her kidnapper, and the kidnapper clearly doesn’t know what to do with this.
There is something so purely, defiantly Lillie about it that I want to cry.
“Does your gun have bullets in it?” she asks.
“Be quiet,” the woman snaps.
“My Uncle Tristan has a gun with bullets,” Lillie explains slowly, patiently. “I’m not allowed to touch it. He said if I touch it, he’d be very upset. And when Uncle Tristan is upset—”
“I said be quiet!”
“—it’s really scary. He doesn’t yell or anything. He just looks at you. Quinn, tell her how scary it is when he looks at you.”
“Sweetie.” I tighten my arms around her. “Let’s play the quiet game.”
“I hate the quiet game.”
“I know.” Boy, do I ever. “Let’s play it anyway.”
She huffs and puffs and clicks her tongue, but she complies.
For roughly forty-five seconds. “Quinn?”
“Yeah?”
“Why does my daddy have so many guards?”
The man driving the van snorts. The woman glances back at us over her shoulder and snickers.
“Because your daddy is very important,” I murmur.
“Important how?”
“He runs a company.”
The second man, the one who tied my wrists, arches an eyebrow.
He hasn’t said a word through all of this, sitting across from us on a bench seat like the one we’re on.
He’s younger than I would’ve expected—maybe a few years older than me.
His face might be handsome if it wasn’t attached to a person who steals kids.
“A company,” he repeats. There’s something between disbelief and amusement playing across his face.
“That’s what I said.”
“Lady, your boyfriend runs the Moretti family.” He rolls his eyes and laughs.
“He doesn’t run a company. He runs every dock and warehouse on the eastern seaboard.
He’s not some finance guy. He’s the head of the largest crime organization in the state.
You and the kid are staying with us until he does what we need him to do. ”
The van goes very quiet. We hit a bump that jostles us, and I almost hit my head. I kind of feel like I already did.
Lillie looks up at me. “What’s a crime organization?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. There’s too much brainpower being used up by what just landed on me like a bomb. The wall around the estate. The cameras, the guards, the men who nod at me with their earpieces. The car that follows Dorian’s car.
It all makes sense. Every single piece of it. The way a puzzle makes sense when somebody finally shows you what the picture is supposed to be, and you realize you’ve been holding the pieces upside down the whole time. You realize you didn’t see it because you didn’t want to see it.
I’m so stupid. Deeply, profoundly stupid. The kind of stupid that isn’t about intelligence but willingness to be blind. About the things you choose not to look at because looking would mean losing the thing you want to keep.
I chose not to look. I built a version of him that let me stay. That version was a lie, but the lie was as much mine as his.
I told myself he was in finance. Finance! I almost laugh. It comes out as a breath, sharp and short. The woman with the gun looks at me over her shoulder once again, and I press my lips together while holding Lillie tighter.
Lillie pats my arm with her small hand. “You’re squeezing too hard.”
“Sorry, baby.” I have to force myself to loosen my grip, which isn’t exactly easy now that the bigger picture is clear.
These aren’t disgruntled investors. These are people who are capable of doing terrible things—because we’re both involved, in one way or another, with a man who probably does terrible things.
“It’s okay,” she tells me in a whisper, patting my arm gently the way I pat hers whenever she’s anxious. “Daddy will come get us.”
She says it with the complete certainty of a child who has never once been let down by her father. I want to believe her, and I’m furious, and I’m scared out of my mind. The van keeps moving, and I hold her against my chest while waiting for whatever comes next.