CHAPTER 32 GIGI
GIGI
Helena Thorp’s butler really knew how to keep the coffee flowing.
It was good coffee, too, maybe even too good.
Gigi was caffeinated past the point of no return and had been for hours—but who was counting?
The parlor in which she’d been ensconced had easy bathroom access and a garden view.
It was dark out now, but it hadn’t been when Gigi was brought to the parlor, and the garden had been stunning: a mix of pruned and wildflowers stretching out as far as Gigi had been able to see, dozens of ivy-covered arches marking the garden path.
The door to the garden was locked, but Gigi wasn’t too stressed about that.
The parlor was open to a hallway that led to another corridor that led to the front door.
As far as Gigi had been able to tell, there was nothing stopping her from leaving, aside from the fact that she wasn’t about to call it quits without something to show from her unauthorized field trip to Thorp Land.
Preferably answers.
Nora had left Gigi with nothing but questions—and also maybe a slight complex. Run away, little girl.
“No, thank you,” Gigi said out loud. She leaned back in her doubtlessly antique chair, lifting the front two legs off the floor and looking up at the domed white ceiling for probably the fortieth time.
Gold leaf embellishments marked elaborately carved beams, a match for the parlor’s hand-woven white-and-gold wallpaper.
Allowing the front legs of her chair to thunk back down onto the floor, Gigi got up and made her way back to the only silver item in the room: an antique frame that held a portrait of a woman, a man, and four little boys.
Based on their clothing, Gigi was guessing the portrait was at least sixty years old, maybe closer to seventy.
The woman had to be Helena, which made one of those little boys Severin and another one Orion Thorp’s father.
Gigi reached her hand out to lightly touch the frame, but right before she would have made contact, she felt something: movement behind her, like the faintest breeze. Either that, or she’d had too much coffee. It was hard to tell.
“I know you’re there,” Gigi called out to any Thorps—or maybe Noras—who might be lurking.
“You’re bluffing.”
That voice. Gigi knew that voice. Slate? Gigi’s heart leapt as she whirled around. “You.”
Mattias Slater hugged the shadows. “Me.”
Gigi felt like she’d just downed a glass of champagne or maybe like her blood was champagne, bubbles and all. She wondered if there was such a thing as a caffeine-induced hallucination. “What are you doing here?” she said.
“I could ask you the same thing, sunshine, but seeing as Trouble is your second middle name, I won’t.”
Gigi grinned reflexively. “My first middle name is Aurelia.”
“I know.”
Gigi took a step toward him, drawn like a moth to the flame. “You remember.” She’d only told him her middle name once.
“You’re memorable.” Slate finally left the shadows, crossing to her.
Gigi felt every step he took, and when he stopped a foot-and-a-half away, she felt that, too.
“I’d tell you that I’m getting you the hell out of here,” Slate said, “but I know you well enough to know that you aren’t going anywhere without your sister. ”
“Savannah?” Gigi blinked. “Savannah’s here?” Well, that made more sense than it didn’t. Of course someone had come after her. Gigi wondered if Knox had been physically restrained.
“You didn’t know,” Slate noted.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Gigi replied. “Savannah thinks I need protecting. She doesn’t think I can handle…” Gigi searched for the right word. “Anything.”
Slate snorted. “If you ask me, everyone in this house should be terrified of you.”
Gigi decided to take that as a compliment. “How many of them are there?” she asked, pretty sure he’d know. “People in this house right now?”
“The old woman. A butler. Two maids who come in and out. Rotating guards at the gate. Your sister. You. Me.”
No Nora, Gigi registered, and then she lingered on his last two words. You. Me. Gigi very sternly reminded herself that Code Name Mimosas had his priorities, and she wasn’t one of them.
“Where’s Eve?” Gigi asked. Slate’s employer was not her favorite person.
“About a half a block away, pissed that she’s not sitting where you are right now. And on that note, how did you talk your way past the gates, sunshine? Because Eve tried, told them she had proof that Calla was alive and information about her whereabouts, and it didn’t work.”
It surprised Gigi that Eve had approached Helena Thorp, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Eve was obviously the plotting-and-diabolical-plans type. And plotters gonna plot, Gigi thought.
“Maybe I’m just more convincing than Eve is,” Gigi said. And maybe I also mentioned something about Orion Thorp having a secret love child, just to cover my bases.
“Someone’s coming.” Slate silently drew his knife.
Gigi knew that knife. She knew that leather sheath.
Slate pressed the blade’s handle into her hand. “Take this. Hide it.” Midnight brown eyes executed a rapid appraisal of Gigi’s body, and then Slate reached to pull her shirt upward and touched the small of her back. “Here.”
Gigi didn’t argue. She also forgot how to breathe.
The hand on her back was warm, and Mattias Slater didn’t stop touching her until she’d slid his knife into her waistband, after which Slate righted her shirt, scanned her body with military precision, then moved her back to the chair she’d been sitting in earlier and pressed her lightly down into it.
Gigi recovered the ability to speak. “What does Eve want?” she whispered. There was no time for an interrogation like the present.
“To matter.” Slate caught Gigi’s chin lightly in his hand. “We don’t have long, so let’s get one thing straight, sunshine: You never pull a weapon unless you’re willing and able to use it. If you’re going to hesitate, don’t.”
Don’t hesitate? Or don’t pull the knife? Before Gigi could ask, Slate was gone. Gigi heard incoming footsteps, took a deep breath, and gave herself a pep talk: Be smooth. Act natural. And whatever you do, don’t think about the knife in your pants!
Two more deep breaths later, Savannah stepped into the room. Gigi popped out of her seat the second she saw her sister. “Savannah!”
“Gigi.” Savannah managed to cram a lengthy lecture into that one word.
“Fancy meeting you here?” Gigi tried with a smile.
“What were you thinking, coming here alone?” Savannah crossed the room toward her.
“Lots of things,” Gigi replied brightly. “Would you like an alphabetized list?”
“We’re leaving.”
No. We’re not. Gigi gestured toward the silver tea set on a nearby table. “Coffee?” she offered.
“Oh dear lord,” Savannah muttered.
“If it’s any consolation,” Gigi told her, lowering her voice to a whisper, “I’m armed.”
“Not a consolation,” Savannah replied. “Did they take your phone?”
“Indeed they did! But butler-man said I’d get it back. He stashed me here in the parlor. Where’d they put you?”
“Great hall,” Savannah replied. “It took me forever to pick the lock.” Gigi tried not to be insulted that no one had bothered to lock her in. Always the bridesmaid, never the assumed-formidable bride.
“We’re leaving,” Savannah said again.
“Why would we do that,” Gigi replied, cocking her head to the side, “when someone wearing heels is finally making their way down the hall right now?” She sat back down in her chair, delicately remedied a knife-wedgie, and nodded to the chair next to her.
Savannah was not happy, but she sat. Deep breath, Gigi told herself, and then a very old woman joined them in the parlor.
“Sisters.” That was the word that Helena Thorp greeted them with. She looked from Gigi to Savannah, as if searching for any resemblance whatsoever between the two of them.
Good luck with that, Gigi thought.
“There was a time I dreamed of raising daughters, plural,” the old woman continued, taking a seat herself. “My husband, of course, wanted sons. I gave him four.”
The woman had to have been in her nineties, but she seemed pretty spry to Gigi.
“Four sons,” Gigi replied. “But no daughters.”
“So it would seem.” The Thorp matriarch had violet eyes—there was no other word for that shade—and she didn’t even try to mask the way she was assessing the two of them.
“You seem to believe you know something about my family,” she told Gigi.
“And you…” Violet eyes locked on to Savannah’s silvery gray ones.
“You have something that belongs to me.”
Gigi’s gaze went to the chain around Savannah’s neck. “Calla’s necklace.” Gigi’s mind went to the way Brady had analyzed the Thorp fleur-de-lis, to Nora’s sharp assertion that the symbol in question had no place in this town.
“Pour celui á qui il a été promis,” Savannah said, calmly pouring herself a teacup of coffee. “Pour la fille qui serait reine.”
“Flawless,” Helena commented. “And not just your French. You’re poised, my dear.
Bone structure is exquisite. Excellent posture.
Intelligent, too, I dare say, and yet, you’ve never quite fit in, have you?
” Now it was Helena’s turn to pour herself coffee without ever looking down.
“People find you intimidating, perhaps even cold.”
The Thorp matriarch swung her gaze back toward Gigi.
“And you,” Helena said. “Your posture is atrocious. That hair has a mind of its own, and your face gives away absolutely everything. Still, you don’t mind being underestimated, and there is a power in that.”
Gigi felt like a frog that had just been dissected in biology class, but that didn’t stop her from smiling at her new, elderly, merciless BFF. “I am a cuddly, over-caffeinated wrecking ball in human form. Let’s discuss your grandson Orion’s secret love child.”
Gigi knew she was taking some creative liberties with that description, but she had a stubborn song in her heart and a knife in her pants, so oh well.
“Let’s not.” Helena took a sip of her coffee.