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Everyone here knew Henry wouldn’t call the cops if Trace were holding a knife to his throat and threatening to take all the cash. To involve the police would mean shutting down the lucrative House income he gained through these clandestine games.
I indiscriminately slipped through the hidden door, but not before digging my hands in the toppled-over lockbox on the floor and stuffing the bills in my cleavage. You never know when you need extra cash, and I’d have to pay Rada back somehow.
Plodding my way a third time through the servant’s quarters, I ended up in the backyard. At this point, I should have thought of something. A bell inside my brain should’ve rang, informing me exactly where Trace had taken Theo and why Trace used me as bait to lead Theo elsewhere.
Instead, my mind was unusually, traitorously silent.
I thought of going back to Rada’s, but that held too much risk. Trace was aware of Theo’s and my plans, that we were together, and our intentions of ambushing Trace. It was up to Theo how to stuff Trace in a plane and to their father. My job was to be the lure, and after that, after getting the two of them in the same room, I was to…
The FBI.
Now was the time to press the necklace. My deal had not only come into fruition but graduated to necessary. Theo’s life was at stake. I had to find them. Now.
Theo.
My breaths hitched, though I wasn’t running. The mere thought of what Trace could be doing to Theo—what had already been done, Theo’sface—tore into my mind with such warp speed that there was no room for anything else. But there had to be. Ihadto get it together enough to stop standing in a stranger’s garden panicking and instead figure out where—
My brain clicked back into action.
Drea.Shewas the reason everything had gone to shit, which meant Trace knew where Drea was. And now that he had Theo, Trace had one more person to collect.
“You bastard,” I spat out, and kicked off my heels. I ran through the lawn, out of the property and over the hill, my old scar screaming at the sudden impact and skin-stretching I was usually so careful to control. “You’re not going to take Theo out of my life a second time.”
Theo’s car was idling, spare keys magnetized to the inside of the front bumper. I reached over the wheel, found the keys, got in, and whipped the car into gear.
It had been a while since I’d driven, but if Theo and I ever had a second chance, it was up to this stick shift to get me to where I needed to be.
Before we’d never have another moment together again.
* * *
By the timeI figured out the navigation on my phone, gotten used to driving on the other side of the road, and re-mastered the stick-shift from my days of sharing an olive green Camry with my sister in Westchester, I knew it was too late.
I screamed at the wheel, my eyes threatening to spill saltwater all over my cheeks, and my face burned with the effort of containing the storm of emotion boiling its lava through my vocal cords.
I’d made it to where Drea was being treated, the place where Theo and I had taken steps a lifetime ago, in an old part of London, the stone moldings and uneven cobblestones made more Gothic and surreal in nightscape. The street was deserted, and though I knew the place where Drea was staying would be, too, I had to keep retracing steps. If I didn’t, it meant I’d failed, and I couldn’t accept that Theo had been so completely and successfully ripped away from me. Again.
Somehow, escaping the FBI’s radar and his family’s clutches seemed a possibility. That of all the fairytales, Theo and I deserved a happily ever after.
I’d been so immersed in losing Theo all those years ago, so determined to forget him and what we were, that I missed the very real advantage that at least he was alive. Out there, somewhere.
Now? He could already be dead.
That realization wrenched me out of the car and had me stumbling to the peeling, wooden door with a tiny rectangle of a window that Theo had knocked on yesterday.
This was the only option left. My palms landed on the wood, again and again, the slams communicating into the once-silent night that this was all I had. After this house, there was nothing to go on, nobody to goto, except to the very people who wanted Theo as badly as I did. And they wouldn’t want to save him, like me. They’d want him boxed in, handcuffed. Held captive.
To which did Theo deserve to go to? The devil’s dungeon to claim his soul, or the people’s jail cell to repent with his life?
I palmed my necklace, neck bowed, and turned, my back smacking against the door that remained still, locked and impenetrable. No footsteps sounded on the other end. I slid down, allowing the tears to fall, too.
“What have I done?” I whispered into the street. “Who have I become?”
A couture gown that wasn’t mine encased my body. I was in a foreign country, unfamiliar with both the accents and the land. My stellar poker ability was moot. Everything I’d worked for, the life I’d crafted after last seeing Theo, had been reduced to null. Losing my sister was a tattoo on my soul, the needle shearing through delicate skin, becoming a permanent mark on what once was flawless, but I’d reduced her life to nothing, because my survival didn’t matter.
Ididn’t matter.
Trace couldn’t be stopped. Theo couldn’t be saved. Kai wouldn’t be redeemed. In five simple moments, life was overturned.
