Chapter Twenty-Four #2
We race down the steps. If this passage doesn’t lead anywhere, then we are well and truly fucked. I can’t catch my breath, and the familiar pull of a stitch forms in my side, but there are still more stairs to descend.
I’m slowing, I know I am, and Dane’s picking up my slack by righting me when I stumble.
The guy behind us doesn’t seem to be slowing at all.
But at last we’re at the final set of stairs.
I’d fall down them if there weren’t a metal railing in the middle.
We grab it and skid down three, four steps at a time, and finally we’re out, on the curve of Cockburn Street, and we race to the corner to the roundabout on Market leading to Waverly Bridge.
“You are dead!” the guy behind yells. I fervently hope that’s not about to be true.
We run into the roundabout. We narrowly avoid a white van coming up the street into the circle. Behind it is a green Peugeot, and I only have time to think that it’s going way too fast.
The sickening thud of a car hitting a body comes from behind us. Dane pulls me hard, yanking me the final stretch out of the street. We get clear of the roundabout, and I turn to see the man is down in the middle and unmoving.
The Peugeot rips through the rest of the roundabout and speeds off up the hill. Light rain begins to fall.
“Oh fuck,” I breathe.
Two people who were on the bridge are running to the roundabout, yelling for cars to stop, but it’s rainy and gloomy enough that the next car coming into the roundabout doesn’t see the body in time.
The car hits it with a nauseating squish that is easily the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
That car slows, but the car behind it doesn’t, and it too rolls over the body with another horrid thump that now includes cracking noises.
Those cars have the decency to stop, and now everyone is crowding around, stopping other approaching cars, calling for help.
Now would be the ideal moment for us to walk away, but Dane says in a low voice, “Let’s see if he has anything on him that tells us who sent him.”
“Are you kidding me?” I say, but Dane approaches the awful lump.
I follow even though I don’t want to. No one else seems to want to get too close either, possibly because the gore includes a sizable blood splatter across the asphalt and appalling chunks of something coming out of the man’s broken skull.
Dane pretends to feel for a pulse and says, “Check his pockets.”
I will myself not to vomit as I feel his pants pocket. I try to make it look like I’m doing a kindness and straighten him out. There’s the flat, hard lump of a phone in his pocket, and I pull it out.
“Hide that,” Dane says, and I shove it in my coat pocket. He stands up and calls out, “He’s gone,” as though that wasn’t completely obvious. I get that it’s to cover why we checked the body.
Sirens wail in the distance, and more onlookers gather.
There’s quite a crowd now, and the driver of the car that hit him the second time is crying and being comforted by someone.
Dane pulls me toward the edge of the gathering crowd, slowly, making it look like we’re simply jostling for space to watch the commotion, and he backs us, painfully slowly, toward a path at the corner that leads into the big park below the castle.
He keeps me close to him, but our steps are unhurried. We don’t want to be seen running.
“Down here.” Dane leads me through a leafy path next to the roundabout, and we’re in the park. I can’t go any farther, and I lean over in the grass and vomit.
He stays with me, a hand on my back as I heave. Tears slide down my face, a reaction from the carnage in the roundabout, from having touched the man, and the adrenaline. I hate it, I hate all the death and the chasing, and we haven’t even finished the game yet.
“Take your time,” he says gently. “But as soon as we can, we need to keep moving.”
The rain is heavier now. I spit out the last of the sour taste and let him take my arm. We keep moving down the path, toward the huge Greek-style buildings of the National Gallery of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy in the middle of the park.
I shudder back a sob. I’m overwhelmed by the relentlessness of this game, of how what should have been a pleasant evening walk turned into that. “God. This game. The chasing. Sophie. Allard. The 1982. Everything.”
“I know.”
We emerge onto Princes Street and walk down to our hotel. Everything aches, and the pain in my wrist threatens to make me puke again. Dane murmurs, “Just a bit farther,” and then we’re at our hotel, in the elevator, sopping wet, and finally in our room.
“Hold on.” He shuts the door and peels off my sodden jacket, then hangs it over a chair. I let him pull my shirt over my head and then unbutton my pants. He carefully unfastens the brace on my wrist. The skin looks like what I imagine the guy in the roundabout looks like now—blackened, battered.
“Here.” He propels me into the bathroom and turns on the shower, adjusting it until it’s steaming. He unhooks my bra for me and steps back. “You can do the rest. Take a long one and warm up. We’ll figure this out.”
He backs out of the bathroom and shuts the door behind him. I shuck off my underwear and bra and step into the shower’s heat. I cry a bit more, and I’m not even sure about what.
When my stomach and my tears have settled, I turn off the water and towel off.
There’s a pile of clean, dry clothes just inside the door; Dane must have slid them in.
I clumsily dress, forgoing the pants altogether, and open the bathroom door.
He hands me a glass of water and two of Luca’s pain pills.
I swallow them, and he helps me into the leggings as though he guessed why I left them off.
He winds my hair away from my head and into a hair clip I’m holding. It’s up before I realize he’s done it.
“Feel better?” he asks. “I’m having room service sent up.”
I nod, grateful. There’s no way I can deal with going back out there tonight. Perhaps not ever. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“Thank you,” he says. “For kicking that guy when he got me.”
I want to say that I was never going to let that guy get Dane without a fight, but there’s something else that I don’t want to say: that I would do quite a lot for Dane, I think.
He’s been so attentive. He helped me in Paris too, and he has continued to anticipate what I need at exactly the right moment.
This sensitivity, that kiss, and his ability to make me laugh might make me swoon if I’m not careful.
“Find anything useful on the guy’s phone?” I ask, partly to distract myself from my runaway thoughts.
He holds up the phone. “Somewhat. Burner phone, naturally, but he should have deleted the text he got from Allard. Idiot.”
“How do you know it’s from Allard?”
Dane hands me the guy’s phone.
Unknown: Elle est au Castle Hotel sur Princes Street. Je lui ai déjà cassé le poignet. Emmène-la, mais tue Seaver si tu peux.
He reaches over and holds down on the text so a little Translate option pops up. He selects the English option and shows me.
She’s at Castle Hotel on Princes Street. I already broke her wrist. Take her but kill Seaver if you can.
My heart is in my throat. That’s definitely Allard, if he thinks he broke my wrist. And kill Dane…
“How is he tracking us?” I ask, fresh horror washing over me as I realize Allard knows exactly where we are. Has probably known all our movements since leaving Sophie’s. “We have to figure it out. It’s not like he stuck a tracking device to me.”
“Can I see your phone?” Dane asks.
I get up and grab my phone, then hand it to him.
He scrolls through the screens, tapping on various apps as I try not to freak out about the order to kill Dane.
I watch him, a little loopy and maybe close to tears again.
Might be the pain meds, which are kicking in nicely, or the evening in general. It’s a toss-up.
“Tracking app,” he says with disgust. “Look.” He turns my phone so I can see. I see nothing but a blank app that has a small advertisement for mascara on it. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. I should have checked all your apps. I didn’t think Allard was capable of this.”