Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Dane stumbles into the wine cellar as though pushed. The door slams behind him and locks, and he immediately grabs the handle, but it’s too late. He turns back around, stares at the room with wide, searching eyes. “Zoe?”
I worm out of my space, stumbling as I emerge from between the shelves. I make it a few steps before I fall on my knees.
“Fuck,” he hisses, and then he’s on the ground in front of me, hands on either side of my face, on my shoulders. “God, Zoe, I’m so sorry. Are you all right? What happened?”
I open my mouth to tell him, but tears take over.
Dane gathers me in his arms and holds me against him.
After the way I was yanked around by Allard, I shouldn’t want it, should still feel betrayed, but there’s an undeniable and instant comfort in his arms. No matter what Sophie or Allard said, I realize I do trust him. In my bones.
Although panic surges through me with fear and upset and anger, his arms are warm and gentle and I let myself sink into the relief of him finally getting to me even though we’re locked in here.
He seems to feel the same because he’s almost crushing me to his chest. I disentangle only in order to breathe.
“How—why are you in here?” I ask, wiping away a tear.
Dane shakes his head. “Sophie wanted us to join her team. She started off using some of her people to sweet-talk me—that’s who you saw me talking to.
I refused, and then it got ugly. Sophie threatened me, threatened you, everything she could think of.
Then the lights went out and you were gone.
I was running around trying to find you.
” His words do something to me, ease a tender bruise.
“I kind of lost it. Finally one of Sophie’s people told me you’re in the cellar, and I made him bring me down here.
” He looks around at the shelving. “What happened to you?”
I tell him about Allard and the book and how he dislocated my wrist and shoved me in here. “He wanted to know what we’re doing in Paris. He wanted me to tell him where we’re going. I didn’t tell him, but he wasn’t nice about my answers.”
Icy rage shines in Dane’s eyes. “Your lip is bleeding too.” He brings a thumb gently to my lip and sighs. “The door to the stairs is everything-proof. It’s a tightly coded lock. They want us to sweat it until we agree to work with them.”
“There’s no breaking out of here?”
“Sophie changes the code frequently and takes care to erase signs of thermal printing on the keypad. And I happen to know that after five entries, the code changes itself. Only the owner would have the master set of codes.”
“Would sure be good to have your lockpicking friend about now,” I say, as I wonder exactly how he knows so much detail about Sophie’s locks.
He drops his hands and runs a hand down my shoulder, and I wince as he passes a tender spot from when Allard threw me against the wine rack. He reacts, immediately moving his hand. “The good news is she should be here any moment.”
I stare at him in disbelief. He grins. “Sophie turned off the Wi-Fi upstairs, and of course there’s no internet connection down here, but I used my satellite app upstairs when the lights went out to ping my friend.”
I shake my head, picturing his programmer phone. “What friend? And how will she know to find us down here?”
“She’ll know that a distress text from me at Sophie’s will mean the cellar.” His face is grim. “I’m familiar with the methods used here.”
“It seems like you have more to tell me about your work with Sophie.” I can’t help the note of hurt in my voice. “Starting with the fact that you lied to me about working with her before. Delphine and Théo told me.”
His forehead knots. “I never worked with her. But our paths have crossed in the course of my work with ProtoDark. I’ve been here before, to her apartment, to another of her parties where I wasn’t the one being interrogated. I should have been clear about my association with her.”
The words help, but I need him to understand how important it is that he’s honest. I’m not sure I can demand that from him, and I try desperately to work out how to even say such a thing. “Dane. I—I can’t—”
“Listen.” His thumb comes up to my bloody lip again, but he doesn’t touch it.
“I can imagine it was shitty to hear them say I’ve worked with her.
And I also get that you don’t know me well and yet you’re relying on me to get through this challenge.
” He shakes his head. “I’m too used to giving half-truths when people ask me where I’ve been and what I’ve done.
It’s a defense. But I get that it isn’t helping. I’ll try to be better at it.”
“I want to trust you.”
“And I want you to trust me. Here, let’s get your wrist stabilized.
” He pulls his shirt out from his pants, flashing skin and muscle, and for a moment, my attention is laser focused on his abs.
He examines the hem like he’ll tear a strip off—and in fact, gives it a yank.
The fabric doesn’t budge. He pats his pockets, stops, and pulls something out.
It’s my underwear that Sophie picked up.
Wordlessly, he stretches the undies out and takes my wrist. He wraps the fabric tightly around my wrist, binding it. I have to admit, it feels better bound than the floppy mess it was. He pulls and rips them a bit so he can make a tie.
“You…kept them,” I say.
He looks at me. “I haven’t stopped thinking about them.”
My heart stops. Heat blooms through my body.
“We’re going to have to move fast when they come in,” he says. “Let’s be ready to run.”
I’m not sure I’m ready for whatever’s going to happen. But Dane helps me to my feet and gently pulls me back among the wine racks, away from the door. I hear it then: the door handle jiggling. I stare at it, on tenterhooks.
The door bursts open, slamming into the wall and bouncing back with the force. I cower and realize why Dane pulled us against the wine.
A couple stands in the doorway. A white guy with russet hair grins at us. He is ruggedly handsome, his face almost symmetrical perfection. Behind him stands a short, beautiful Asian woman with an absolutely killer curvy figure and a long braid, dyed blue on the end.
“The service here is terrible,” Dane says with a smirk. “Can’t get a rescue worth a damn these days.”
“That’s the fastest it’s ever been, asshole,” the man says, and grins widely. It reminds me of a golden retriever.
The woman shoulders past him and says to me, “I’m Xhan and this is Luca. You must be the Zoe we’ve heard so—”
“Introductions later,” Dane barks. I see from Luca’s smirk that Dane has cut Xhan off from saying something potentially embarrassing. Dane takes my elbow carefully and nudges me toward the door. Xhan and Luca back through it, and then we’re moving up the hallway, to the door with the code.
“How did you get in here?” I ask.
“Same way we’re going out, through a service door,” Luca says. “And Xhan opening this lock.”
“Five entries total,” Xhan says. “The code we used coming in was the third. Two tries left.”
“Her favorite kind of lock,” Luca says. His accent is lightly German, whereas Xhan’s is American. “It’s an Encode. Top-shelf stuff, right, baby?”
Xhan murmurs agreement. “Yeah. This is a good one.” She’s doing something at the keypad, holding what looks like a battery up to it. “It’s a matter of overriding the power with an external source, if you know how to reset it.” There’s an audible pop, and she pushes the door. “Got it.”
We get through the door, and I peer up at the column of black spiral stairs.
If Allard comes down those, there’s no chance.
But we don’t go up. We go around the stairs to a small door in the wall, hidden in shadows.
It’s a troll-size door, like one of those small access doors you find in house attics, and Luca pries it open. A dark tunnel looms.
“Ladies first,” Luca says, waving his hand urgently for us to go.
Xhan ducks inside and disappears from view. I don’t want to go in, but Dane says in my ear, “It’s all right.”
I lower my head to go, and then I hear it: boots pounding on the spiral stairs high above us, belonging to what sounds like a heavy body.
A sharp prick of dread propels my entry into the darkness of the passage, followed by Dane and Luca.
Luca lingers at the door, and I hope it’s to place an explosive device on it that will blow Allard’s face off if he opens it. A girl can dream.
I crouch-run, wondering how on earth Dane and Luca are managing the space.
It’s some kind of old service tunnel. At least the passage isn’t that long, and Xhan pushes open a door at the end.
I follow her through, and we’re in a dark space that smells like must and disuse.
Xhan opens a second narrow door, and we go through, followed by Dane and Luca. And then we are outside in the night.
“Hurry. Go,” Luca says, and there’s delighted excitement in the words, in his voice, like he’s having a fantastic time.
Xhan runs and I follow, and she unlocks a black SUV parked on the curb.
We all pile in, with Xhan in the driver’s seat, and in moments she’s speeding through the narrow one-way streets that are only wide enough for one car at a time.
The tires bounce us over the cobblestones.
“Are you familiar with Montmartre, Zoe?” Luca asks me, twisting in the front passenger seat to look at me, as though we’re not speeding away from a bad situation. “Lovely part of Paris.”
“I’m afraid I was too busy being kidnapped and pushed around to take in the sights,” I reply.
Luca laughs. It’s a giant, joyful laugh. “Ah, Dane. Dane, Dane. I must say, I like it.”
Dane grunts and purses his lips.
“Don’t tease him, baby,” Xhan says, placing a hand on Luca’s forearm.
“She needs a hospital,” Dane says in a tight tone. “Her wrist is dislocated, maybe fractured.”
Luca glances at my underwear-tied wrist and purses his lips. “A hospital could attract the wrong sort of attention, if the two of you are being watched. I know a clinic outside the city. Are you in pain, Zo?” Zo, like we’re pals.
“It’s…bearable.” It’s only bearable because we haven’t stopped for it to sink in. And because my undies are holding it together. My cheeks heat again. I haven’t stopped thinking about them. I’ll examine that later.
“No point in me saying how stupid it was to go to Sophie’s,” Xhan says dryly.
“None,” Dane agrees.
“I was hoping he would introduce you to us in a less dramatic fashion, Zoe,” Xhan says.
Dane’s mouth flattens to a thin line. “We wanted to find out how far the other players had gone. Whether there’d been another egg.”
I give him a sharp look. So he’s told Luca and Xhan all about the puzzles? When? I don’t have any right to feel slighted by the fact that he’s obviously been in touch with them and didn’t tell me. But I do anyway.
Dane seems to pick up on what I’m thinking. “I trust Luca and Xhan with my life. Frequently. We can speak freely about the game with them.”
“Let Zoe get comfortable with us on her terms, Dane,” Xhan admonishes. I like that she speaks to him like this. It seems like he needs it.
“For what it’s worth, Delphine and Théo said there was a second egg,” I say. “I don’t know how much to believe them, but they said Professor Marini got it.”
Dane frowns. “That means the 1982 will be after it.”
“Shit, the 1982 is playing again?” Luca tsks. “We have much to catch up on.” The car exits onto the A1 expressway, and a sign says we’re heading north toward Saint-Denis. I’m glad that Luca doesn’t seem to know everything. It makes me feel less out of the loop.
“And Sophie’s using Allard again,” Dane says. Luca gives a low whistle at that. Dane looks at me. “I shouldn’t have allowed you to get separated from me at Sophie’s. It was a mistake.”
I hold up my undies-wrapped wrist. “Kind of a costly one.”
“I’m sorry,” Dane says, his voice low. He does sound it.
“I never thought I’d hear Dane Seaver apologize,” Luca says. Dane glares at the back of his head.
“Who is he?” I ask. “Allard.”
“Sophie’s dog,” Luca says with a derisive snort. “Played in the last challenge. He does her dirty work.”
“He was deleted in the last challenge,” Dane says. “He appears to have recovered.”
“My guess is Sophie recovered him,” Xhan says. “She has the money and means. And it would indebt him to her.”
“It’s like leashing a demon,” Luca says.
Dane says to me, “Allard is one of the nastier players, obviously. I was hoping not to see him again after the last challenge.”
I shake my head and turn away to look out at the passing city streets. “You should have made sure.”
“I should have.” Dane’s voice is quiet.
There’s a part of me that’s mollified that he feels bad about it, but Allard scared the shit out of me.
Xhan’s eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. “I’ll lend you some clothes tonight, Zoe. Dane’s assistant, Araceli, has a package coming for you guys tomorrow.”
“Oh—thank you, but that’s not necessary. I have clothes at the hotel.”
“Can’t go back to your hotel,” Luca says. “Sophie’s crew will have ransacked it by now.”
I sigh. Dane was right about that. At least I have my documents in my thigh holster.
I feel his hand on top of my uninjured one.
The pressure is light, and I get it: He’s still apologizing, this time quietly, just between us in the dark of the back seat.
I’m still furious with him, but I allow his thumb to run over my skin, slow.
It feels like a deeper apology than his words.
Chills race up my hand, my arm. My shoulder.
How bad would it be if I forgave him because his touch feels good?
I glance to check if Luca has seen this, but he’s facing forward.
I get the sense that Luca misses little.
I can’t quite bring myself to touch Dane back and offer full absolution, but I keep my hand where it is as we enter Saint-Denis.