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“Look, I have to go. If Father contacts you, tell him I want to meet with him.”
“Tell me where you are.”
His insistence sent a cold prickle over my skin. Something was wrong. I thought uneasily of his note about the coup.
G, Z & R plotting against you? Feeding intel to SI. All or just G?
The cold prickle changed to alarm. “Goodbye.”
“Wait,” he barked, but I pretended not to hear and ended the call.
Ridley eyed me. “Who was that?”
“Mraz.”
She stilled. “Is that usual—for him to answer your father’s calls?”
“Not usual, no. But yeah, he’s done it before.”
“So you trust him.”
I rubbed my unshaven jaw. “Not enough to give him our location.”
Her mouth opened like she wanted to say more, but she closed it again. “Agreed. The less people who know where we are, the better.”
Ridley’s phone vibrated. She pulled it out of her pocket and read the message aloud.
“PK is in New Orleans. Due back Sunday.”
“PK is my dad?”
“Yeah.” She texted an acknowledgment and returned the phone to her pocket.
“Fuck.” It meant we’d have to delay another day. I shoved my hand through my hair. “We might as well go back to the squat.”
Sunday evening I woke up feverish and shaking. Another fucking relapse from the silver poisoning.
I would’ve crawled into Manhattan anyway but Ridley told me not to be ridiculous. “You’re in no shape to face your father.”
I passed out in the midst of arguing with her.
Ridley spent the night by my side, sponging me down. And at some point, she crawled into bed with me and let me drink her blood again.
I closed my eyes sometime after midnight and didn’t open them again until Monday afternoon. I rolled over, weak, but clearheaded. The fever was gone.
Ridley sat on a chair, watching me, her light eyes unreadable. An unopened switchblade hung loose in her hand. “You’re better?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed a hand over my unshaven face. “Thanks for the blood. Again.”
She lifted a shoulder, let it drop. “I need you to be at your best.”
My gratitude evaporated. “My bad. I forgot I’m just a tool.”
“I would’ve done it anyway, okay?” Her face had that naked, unguarded look to it again. “For the record, I’m sorry. About all of this.”
Beneath the leather wristbands, my wrists itched and burned. I slid my right thumb beneath the left band and rubbed the raised scar left behind by the silver cuffs.
I huffed a laugh. “For what? Blindly following orders? Believing me and my brothers are monsters without any evidence? Helping another fucking syndicate kidnap me?”
