Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-nine
It takes a moment to identify the current of worry, though.
I’m relieved to find that it’s the same old anxiety about solving the puzzle and not regret over Dane and me.
Even so, I can feel myself tense as I realize that I’m no closer to the fifth puzzle’s solution than I was when we arrived yesterday, and now we have significantly less time.
Dane trails a warm hand over my shoulder, smoothing over a tight muscle. I lean back into him, relaxing, and find that he’s hard against my ass. Desire flares, so sharp it’s almost painful.
He drags his nose up the back of my neck, sending chills over my shoulders.
I push against his hardness. He gives a low sort of growl that only stokes the fire in me as he kisses my neck, his lips soft, questioning.
We had more sex last night after we moved inside the house—we tried out that bathtub, for one—but we haven’t had morning sex. Not lazily-waking-up-together sex.
“Dane,” I whisper. A request, an agreement.
In answer, he dips his face into my hair. Soon we will have to get up. We will finish this challenge. I wonder if Allard and the 1982 have killed each other yet, and if we’re finally on the other side of running.
I stretch, arching back into him like a cat.
He slides me up his body and leans over to get a condom.
When he pushes inside me it’s like silk.
It is glorious. It is everything. He begins to move, gently, slowly, not like last night when it was harder, more eager, all encompassing.
He wraps an arm over my chest to pull me tight against him, his palm full of my breast. He breathes into my neck as he moves, placing kisses down my spine.
I let out a whimpery moan, and he drops his nose into my neck in response. My eyes flutter with pleasure. I might expire from it.
His phone rings from where it sits on the bedside table, startling us both.
He ignores it, as if we have all day to enjoy each other. He drags his cheek against mine, his stubble burning in the best way. His other hand snakes around to my front, between my legs. I’m gasping, making sounds I can’t control, and close when the phone rings again.
I know the call is likely important, but I appreciate that he reaches over with one long, muscled arm and declines it before returning it to my chest, tightening as he drives into me with a mighty thrust that pushes me over the edge.
He rides me through the orgasm and then lets himself go, his arm across my chest keeping me in place in this side-spoon position.
He makes a delicious, rough noise that I adore as he comes. His phone rings for the third time.
He slows, stops. Breathes into my hair. The phone is insistent and deeply irritating.
He reaches over, grabs the phone, and looks at the screen. He accepts the call and holds it to his ear, keeping me in place against him.
“Xhan,” he says, failing to hide that he sounds like he was running. “What is it?”
I hear her voice but not what she’s saying. Dane listens, unmoving. He’s still inside me, and I wonder, vaguely, how long we can stay that way.
“All right,” he says finally. “Give us a half hour.” He ends the call. “Xhan has some urgent information for us. She wants to do a video call when we’re up.”
“I’d say you’re up.”
“It’s my new favorite way to wake.” He places a kiss on the back of my neck. “We can stay here like this for the next thirty minutes, or I can make you coffee.”
I consider it. We have so much to do today—including hike ten miles. I need fuel because I spent most of last night awake. “Let’s do both.”
He laughs and kisses me again. We hang on to the moment as long as we can but finally have to untangle.
He cups my face and turns me toward him.
His lips are soft and seem to illustrate whatever he was going to say—perhaps an apology that the phone interrupted.
Maybe a promise that no matter what Xhan has to tell us, it’s not that bad, even though anytime someone calls at six in the morning, it’s bad.
I take a quick bath while Dane puts on the kettle for instant coffee.
I’m bathed and dressed in record time, and we both have mugs of hot coffee, plus toast that he made me, by the time Xhan and Luca call back, this time on video.
They are sitting next to each other on a sofa, so they’re both in the frame.
“It’s early,” Dane says pointedly once we’re connected.
“Sorry about that,” Xhan says. “This is important.” Her face is tight, and she’s sitting too straight, too rigidly. My pulse kicks up in worry.
Luca coughs. “We’ve been watching Eric Howland’s movements, as requested. We knew he left Madrid for Paris two days ago.”
I glance at Dane. I didn’t know it was about this. But I’m not surprised. I’m glad—Dane is taking no chances.
“He boarded a flight to Scotland last night,” Luca says. “To Edinburgh.”
“But we got rid of my phone in Inverness,” I say.
“You may have to consider that he has other methods to track you with,” Luca says.
Dane runs his hand through his hair. “This isn’t ideal. What about Sophie?”
“She’s gone underground,” Luca says. “It’s like she’s stopped playing and left for holiday in Saint-Tropez or something.”
“Can you find her?” Dane asks.
Luca nods once, and I understand he’s already on it.
“I don’t like that Eric called you in Edinburgh, Zoe,” Xhan says. “He had nothing to impart, but he knew you left Paris.”
“He just wanted to rile me, I think.” I shake my head.
Xhan and Luca glance at each other quickly.
“What?” I ask.
“Something big is coming,” Luca says.
“The 1982 and Allard are both on our tail,” Dane admits.
“What did you do?” Xhan gives him an incredulous look.
“We planted a fake fifth puzzle that orders the 1982 to kill Allard,” Dane says.
Luca sucks in a breath. “You are playing with fire.”
“I agree, this is unwise, Dane,” Xhan says. “The 1982 enjoys killing. You set him after Allard, and Allard’s after you.”
Dane puts an arm around me. A statement, a display of protection, who knows. Xhan and Luca exchange a quick look, and I know they’ve clocked it.
“We were already being tracked,” Dane argues. “This could solve the problem. Anyway, it’s too late to take it back. The 1982 opened the puzzle last night.”
Luca runs a hand over his face.
“Please be extra cautious,” Xhan says. “Don’t let anything distract you. There aren’t any other houses around?”
“It’s isolated out here,” I say. “Just our cottage for miles.”
“I see,” Xhan says.
“Did you figure out the rest of the fifth puzzle, Zoe?” Luca asks.
The worry from earlier reappears with fresh urgency. “I’m working on it.”
“But you’re hiking out to Fisherfield Forest today?” Luca asks, his voice slightly shrill.
“We’re aware that we need to figure it out,” Dane says, his tone dry. But his words add to my anxiety. We’re running out of time.
“Should we start making our way to you?” Xhan asks. “With the 1982 and Allard coming and now Eric, you could use the backup. We can get a flight today.”
“They don’t know where we are,” Dane says. “But let’s reassess later today. I’ll call you once we get going on the trail.”
Luca nods.
“When are you leaving?” Xhan asks.
“Soon,” Dane says. His hand moves to my thigh, offscreen. It drifts higher, slowly. “I want to pick up an ordnance map for this area to have extra detail.”
“I always like an ordnance map,” Luca says.
“Dane,” Xhan says, and both her expression and tone are serious again. “I’m sorry to have to ask this so bluntly…but I don’t think we have time to be coy here.” I feel my face heat. She’s going to ask if we’re sleeping together. “Have you heard from ProtoDark at all?”
There is a long silence. It’s so long and pointed from the three of them that I turn my head to look at Dane. He’s frozen, tense, and a sense of foreboding fills me.
“No,” he says finally.
Xhan blinks and licks her lips nervously. Like maybe she thinks she shouldn’t have said that.
“Okay. We’ll let you go,” she says. “Stay safe.” She ends the call, and they disappear from the screen.
“Why would you hear from ProtoDark?” I ask.
He nods, because of course I was going to ask. “Work things, since we’re nearing the end of this challenge.”
That is not the whole answer, and we both know it.
But as I wait, watching him, I know he’s not going to say anything further.
I open my mouth to tell him that I can take it, whatever it is, but he kisses me and says, “I’m going to pack up the tent and sleeping bags.
You see if you can make headway on the puzzle, and we’ll go out and get the ordnance map. Then we’ll start off on the hike.”
He stands, and I let him walk away with that. He doesn’t look at me as he shoves on his shoes and opens the front door, and I hope he knows I’m allowing whatever he doesn’t want to tell me to go unsaid, for now.
■ ■ ■
I lay out the puzzle papers. I’m starting to identify a few patterns. Words are emerging across all of it, but none of the usual ciphers apply. It’s incredibly frustrating, and the dwindling time isn’t helping.
Dane comes in and plants a kiss on my shoulder. “You’re beautiful when you work.”
“We’re just saying things like that now?” I tease.
“I would have told you every day that we’ve spent together, but I didn’t want to come on too strong.”
I shake my head, amazed we’ve gotten to this point. I turn back to the papers, scratching out notes. It’s like a giant map, but I don’t know where it goes or what it captures.
“It’s so quiet out here,” I say, looking up and out the big window to the gray expanse of Gruinard Bay.
“I’ll feel better once we’re on the trail and we can see that no one is around.”
“Do you think Allard and the 1982 will find us here?” I turn to him, already craving his solid warmth, as though that would stop those two psychopaths.
“I don’t trust anything, but I think we might be okay. Our fake fifth puzzle was brutal, but it had to be done.”
“I’m not sorry.”
He kisses me again. “Neither am I.”
I am about to allow his kisses trailing down my jaw to waylay me from the puzzle when I see it. I sit up straight. “Dane. Look.”
I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. I point at a rabbit sitting in a hunched-over position, so cleverly incorporated into the border that I’ve passed over it many times.
He bends down to the paper to look. He straightens and points to the opposite corner of the paper. “And another one.”
I follow his finger, and—yes, there’s a similarly hunched rabbit. I check the other corners of the page, and there are rabbits hidden there too. It’s like they’re multiplying in real time now that I see them.
“Oh,” I breathe. Numbers sit on top of each rabbit. It’s so obvious now. I write them out.
10 23 6 13
Anyone working frequently with ciphers automatically knows the number for each letter of the alphabet, so I recognize 10 as J and 13 as M. The letters, then, when counting from A, are JWFM, which means nothing to me.
I apply different ciphers to JWFM, my pen flying over my scratch paper, but there’s nothing obvious. I’m hoping it’s not a dictionary cipher, where the numbers correspond to a page in a book, because while I’d have loved that kind of puzzle, there isn’t anything to suggest a related book.
I tap my teeth with the pen, thinking. The rabbit continues to make an appearance in these puzzles. All the ciphers we’ve used have been random—or so it seems. This is the fifth puzzle, so…I use a ROT5 Caesar cipher for JWFM and get:
ERAH
Which is, of course, HARE backward.
My heart races. Dane is watching me.
“HARE has to be a keyword for a cipher that must be here in the rest of the photos.” It’s the only explanation for it being in the four corners of the last photo.
“There’s another one.” He points to another small rabbit built into the border of the first photo.
I move over to study the first two pages again and see another, and then another.
They’re everywhere. They’re tiny and easy to miss, but I’m embarrassed that I overlooked them.
Some of the rabbits are so small that the only way I know them is by the ears sticking up from the dot of a body.
I trace my finger from rabbit to rabbit along the borders.
I look at the full picture, and there’s even one large rabbit in the way our arms and faces are outlined in gold.
It’s so clever how they’ve done it. The long ears are the only indication of it, but it’s unmistakably a rabbit in a whole series of them.
He leans down over my shoulder. “Letters.” He points.
He’s right. Letters are built into each rabbit. I start from the first photo of us having tapas in Barcelona, writing down the letters in what are now incredibly obvious rabbits.
The following lines appear:
AT LONG LAST, THE STARS ALIGN WITH THE MOON
CHECK THE MAP AT SOLAR NOON
It’s not even in a cipher, which feels oddly insulting. And it was hiding in plain sight, just like the rabbits were.
“Figures that the last part of this puzzle is easy,” I mutter. “THE STARS ALIGN WITH THE MOON. What in the Celestial Seasonings does that mean?”
“Solar noon is a specific time.” He moves around his phone, which is in his other hand. “That will be 1:18 p.m. tomorrow on June fifth.”
It’s always so damn cryptic. Riddles are far harder than ciphers because you have to make leaps of logic, and solving ciphers isn’t about logic. It’s about codes and math.
“The word HARE wasn’t a keyword,” I say. “Just a hint to follow the rabbits. But now this riddle.” I sigh. “Why check a map at solar noon? I have no idea what it means, and we’re running out of time.”
“You’ve figured everything else out. You’ll get this.”
“Let’s go buy your ordnance map,” I say. I check my watch. “It’s almost nine.”
“I’m looking forward to tonight in the tent with you.” He is ignoring my attempts to get up, burying his nose in my hair, my neck.
“If we can’t figure it out and my identity is deleted, I might be living in a tent full time.” I push back into him, and he takes the pen out of my hand and turns me toward him.
“Fine by me.” He runs his fingers up under my hair.
I wonder again what he wasn’t telling me about ProtoDark earlier.
I’m a lot less clean than you think I am, Zoe, he also told me.
I think about what Allard said in Paris, that Dane is lying to me.
I didn’t believe Allard then and I don’t now, but a small part of me still worries about honesty, especially now that we’re intimate.
I accept that Dane isn’t perfect, but as long as I know what those imperfections are, I can deal with them.
I’ll ask him on the hike, I decide. Whatever it is, we’ll talk about it. We’re solid, and I feel this in my bones as his lips meet mine. It’s only in the quiet of our kiss that I think I hear a car, but when I pull away from Dane, the only sound is birds twittering.