False Start Read online

  Logan nods and disappears.

  “She's fine. In U.S. History class, I think. I don’t remember her schedule. But why? What’s going on?”

  “What did Gwennie say that bothered you enough to call me, Tom?” he asks, delaying the inevitable.

  “Lily told her to tell me how excited she was about getting a shipment of orchids. Lily hates orchids. It was just weird enough to make me wonder.”

  Oh, Lily.

  Chills run through my bones. It's not the drug. It's the knowledge that Lily gave Gwennie a code to pass on, somehow, to anyone who could rescue her.

  He's got her, all right.

  But where?

  “What else did Gwennie say?” Silas asks. “Did she say where Romeo was going with Lily?” He rubs his forehead, swallowing hard as he’s forced to reveal that we don’t know.

  I watch it all, my body immobilized by whatever is still in my blood. The dose wasn’t strong enough to kill me. It was just enough to incapacitate me. That was intentional.

  Romeo knows exactly what he's doing.

  Did Lily try to wake me up?

  Did Lily think I was dead?

  Did Lily—I cut off my own thoughts.

  I can’t do this. I can’t think this way. I’m thinking like someone who cares. Which is exactly what I am.

  And if I think that way, I’m going to get Lily killed.

  Chapter 2

  Lily

  I’m about to die.

  Romeo isn’t touching me. In fact, there’s a respectful distance between us here in the back seat. We’re being driven by someone I don’t know. Of course I don’t. But there’s no way he works for Drew Foster.

  The reality of my situation sinks in, and it’s a relief. No, really. It’s a relief because it ends ten months of wondering.

  Since the moment I woke up and saw Romeo standing there behind Duff in my hospital room, I’ve known this day would come. Until this very moment, though, I was in denial.

  That's why this is a relief.

  Denial is one of the most powerful forces on Earth. It even follows the law of physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Isn’t that true when it comes to denying what we know is about to happen?

  Anticipation is as much about the push as it is about the pull. It’s about the tension between excitement and disappointment. Denial is about taking reality and turning it into fantasy.

  For the last ten months—just a little more than the time from conception to birth—I’ve died backwards. I just didn’t know it.

  My mother fought for fourteen months, in a state of utter denial, to keep me alive. My father supported her in her denial for those fourteen months. Maybe he joined her. I don’t know. I’ve tried to talk to them both about the deeper emotional side of what they went through. They won't go there.

  That’s another part of denial that’s so tricky. They didn’t want to talk about the past. They wanted to act as if the present was all that mattered, as if the future rolled out before us in defiance of the past.

  As if you could erase what's already happened by never looking back.

  But the past always leaks forward.

  My fingers dig into the soft leather of the seat that my pelvis sinks into. I drop my shoulders. I let my shoulder blades slide against the back of the seat, supported by the frame beneath. I lower my tongue in my mouth. I let my neck melt as the muscles give as much as they can.

  This isn’t a measure of strength. It’s a measure of surrender. Not to Romeo, but to the idea that there’s any hope of coming out of this alive.

  I surrender to the inevitable.

  It's the only form of compassion left for me.

  Desperation makes us act in ways that don’t allow us to stay aware. I want full awareness until my last breath. Pain or no pain, torture or no torture. The only choice remaining before me is this: how I face my own death.

  I will do it on my terms.

  Not his.

  “You must be wondering where we’re going,” he says to me, breaking the silence between us.

  “No.”

  “No?” His voice goes up at the end of the word, mocking. “You don’t need to put on a brave front, Lily. Where we’re going, no amount of bravery will make a difference.”

  “I know where we’re going,” I tell him.

  “You do? Where?”

  “It’s not the location that matters,” I say. “We’re going to wherever you’re going to kill me.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  I watch him to the point where any normal person would be unnerved. I don’t flinch. I don’t turn away. I don’t quite stare, because staring when you’re this close to someone can diminish the power of whatever emotion you’re trying to send.

  Ironically, I’m not trying to send any emotion to Romeo. I’m not trying to do anything. All that’s left is my truth. Hiding my truth would be an act of self-betrayal.

  “You don’t have to lie anymore, Lily,” he says. It comes out like an order. “There’s no sense in it. I know everything. I know that you know that I shot you.”

  “Of course.”

  He looks at me, measured respect in his eyes. “Good girl. I’m glad you finally see reason. We’ve wasted nine months, then, haven’t we?”

  I turn away at his words, not because they affect me, but because I don’t have a response. Everything in the car feels like each distinct part of my body is on a time delay, and none of them is synchronized with my mind. It’s as if my blood operates according to a different clock. Then my arm. My leg. My mouth. My eyes. Each one is slightly out of sync. I have to wait until they all catch up before I can take in what he’s saying and respond.

  So I don’t.

  “Who else knows, Lily?”

  That makes me smile, because he’s done it. He’s gone and done it.

  He’s found my weakness.

  I can’t tell him who knows. He can guess, of course, but leaving him guessing is the only leverage I have.

  I sit up straight, brushing the hair out of my eyes and looking at him. “No one.”

  The lie feels good. In fact, the lie feels great.

  Oh, the slimy smile I get in return. It’s the grin someone gives you when they know they’re about to hurt you.

  The slap makes my cheekbone slam against the cold window. The glass is immutable. My flesh is not. It’s the same cheekbone that hit the concrete when I fell after he shot me. My teeth crack down, biting on instinct. I don’t have the ability to stop. Part of my inner lip is between my canines, and I bite through it, clean through. The blood tastes bitter.

  He acts as if it’s my fault he had to hit me.

  “You want to do this the hard way, do you?”

  His words ring in my ears. I say nothing.

  Duff, I think to myself. No–Sean. Where are you?

  The car takes a sharp left, then a sharp right, turning onto an on-ramp that routes us along a familiar path. I’ve been here before, the road creepily familiar.

  Why do I know this place?

  Methodically, Romeo reaches into a small case by his feet. He takes out what looks like a pillbox, the kind you use to organize a month’s worth of pills, with a four-by-seven grid, twenty-eight compartments.

  Except when he opens the box, there’s nothing like that. Instead, there’s a bottle, a hypodermic needle, and some gauze.

  “Shhhh, Lily.”

  Suddenly, I’m flat on my back, the soft leather giving way as the pressure of his hand is over my mouth, the gauze stuck to my tongue, my nostrils fighting for air.

  And then that’s it.

  I realize where we are, just before blackness descends.

  It’s the house where we met the president.

  We’re at The Grove.

  Harry Bosworth’s private home.

  Duff

  “This goes all the way to the fucking top,” I insist.

  As the drug wears off, an electric rage races through my veins. It’s the clos
est damn thing to panic I’ve felt since I was a little kid. I’ve driven reactivity out of me. It’s a professional hazard. It serves no utilitarian purpose, and yet here it is, obviously coming out of dormancy in the wake of what’s happened to Lily.

  “You can’t know that,” Silas says. “We have no idea if Harry Bosworth is involved in this.”

  “Look at the note. It says The president wants to see me.”

  “Yes, she wrote that,” Silas argues. “She wrote it because Romeo told her to. He could have told her to write The moon is made of green cheese, but he didn’t.”

  I know Silas is right, but I also know that I’m more right. The chance that Harry Bosworth is not involved in this is slim. Something about him has bugged me the entire time I’ve been around him.

  As Silas barks into his phone, talking to someone who very clearly is not giving him information that he wants to hear, I stand up and start pacing. Grabbing a giant jug of water, I guzzle it. I know that my kidneys and liver have to work double time to get this shit out of my system. That’s how drugs work. The faster you metabolize them, the faster you excrete them.

  And the faster you can function properly.

  I have no idea what they put in that milk, but I know that I’ll do whatever I need to do to get it out of me.

  “I’m going for a run,” I inform Silas.

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? You’re going nowhere.”

  “I need to get this poison out of me. I need to move. You know the protocol. You know how this works. We have to move. We have to drink. We have to process. Get the kidneys and liver working overtime to flush this agent out.”

  “You can do all that here.”

  “In this shithole apartment? Are you crazy?”

  “Jog in place.”

  His words have a finality to them that makes me do some quick calculations. I can expend energy going toe to toe with his decisions, energy that I need to find Lily.

  Or I can do what he says.

  I start running in place.

  Sweat is one of the better ways to get anything out of the body. I go into the bathroom, turn the shower on to the hottest setting, close the door, and jog in place on the thin bathroom rug. It starts to work, my sweat prickling underneath my clothes until it sprouts on my face, all of my pores deciding to relent at the same time.

  The room bobbles up and down. My head throbs. One eye is clearly experiencing some kind of ocular migraine. There’s a giant hole in my vision. When I look in the mirror, my face is a Picasso painting.

  And not just because of the scars.

  Tracing back every minute I was with her before we went to bed, I try to find the thread that explains what’s just happened to Lily. There’s no mystery to it.

  We’ve been outsmarted by Romeo.

  How do I untangle it?

  I could let my ego spend time and energy twisting itself into a pretzel, trying to justify all the ways that I didn’t screw this up, but again–that’s energy I would be wasting.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  “What?” I grunt out.

  Silas opens the door.

  “Close it, fast!” I bark at him.

  “Why?”

  “Keep the heat in.”

  Rolling his eyes, he does as asked and looks at me. “You’re nuts.”

  “That’s why you came in here to talk to me? To tell me I’m crazy?”

  “No. I came in here to tell you we’ve had a sighting.”

  “Of Lily?”

  “No. Of Romeo and the SUV they were in.”

  “Where?”

  I can tell from his pause that he doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say.

  I can tell from his pause that he has to admit I was right.

  “The SUV went straight to The Grove.”

  “Goddammit!” I snap, slamming the heel of my hand against the glass shower door. It doesn't break. I'm oddly grateful for the resistance. The pain centers me. It radiates up my elbow into my shoulder, hurting my neck in a way that feels good.

  Pain can shake you out of balance, but the right kind of pain can bring you back to where you need to be.

  “I knew Harry Bosworth was part of all this,” I spit out.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Why are you arguing with me? Why are you defending him?”

  “Because he’s the president of the United States. Do you realize the implications of what you’re saying, Duff? Do you understand that these accusations alone could -- ?”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck.”

  “Well, I do,” he says, one hand on his hip as he reaches for his jacket lapel and starts flapping it, cooling himself off. “I care a hell of a lot.”

  “You only care because you’re living with the president’s daughter.”

  “That’s not the only reason I care.”

  “Then why? Why are you ignoring the obvious?”

  “I’m not ignoring anything. Drew’s out there working every contact he has, trying to figure out where Lily is.”

  “You just told me you know where Lily is. Romeo took her to The Grove.”

  More silence.

  Oh, shit. What’s coming now?

  “All we know is this: The SUV went into the private hangar, and a plane is headed for Washington right now. There’s no way to prove that Lily is on that plane.”

  “You’ve got camera footage. You’ve got all kinds of surveillance video. You can tap into that.”

  He snorts. “You think that Drew can just call up the president’s private residence and say to his security guys, ‘Hey there, Secret Service! We just want to take a little peek at some of your video.’ Are you out of your fu—I have to stop asking that,” he says. “I have to stop asking you if you’re insane, Duff, because it’s obvious that you are.”

  “Wouldn’t you be? Weren’t you?” I stop jogging in place and grab the guy’s shoulder. “When you woke up in that janitor’s closet in the club, half dead and locked inside that tiny space, your first thought was, ‘Where is Jane? Is Jane okay?’ Right?”

  “Right.”

  “What do you think I’m going through, Silas? I want you to remember how that felt. Because the minute I woke up in that bed and rolled over, found a note from her and the same kind of goddamn spider that Romeo used to try to poison her when she was immobile in a hospital bed—”

  I cut my own words off. My pulse is coming out of my eyeballs as I look at him. His expression changes, softening and hardening at the same time. It’s the look of a guy who understands, but who also has limitations around what he can do about what he understands.

  “I’m sure you appreciate how delicate this is,” he says in a whisper.

  “D.C., huh?” is all I say. “Get me on a plane.”

  “D.C.’s a big city, Duff. What do you think you’re gonna do out there? There are a million places that Romeo could take her. And we don’t even know if he did take her. Maybe she’s still back at The Grove. Maybe she’s not on that plane. Maybe this is all a decoy. Maybe Harry Bosworth knows nothing about this.”

  “Occam's razor.”

  I peer at him to see if he gets it. He does.

  “You think it’s that simple? The most obvious explanation is the one that applies?”

  “I think that if Romeo or Harry Bosworth is hiding Lily at The Grove, one of Drew’s guys will figure it out damn fast. And if that happens when I’m halfway to D.C. on a plane, then you guys are gonna have to save her. But that’s not what my gut says.”

  “You know as well as I do,” he says, “that gut instinct isn’t always enough.”

  “I know. I know, Silas. But right now, it’s all I’ve got.”

  Chapter 3

  Lily

  Everything smells like wine and sweat.

  I’m on my back on a pad. No, a mattress. My fingers move across my thigh and onto some sort of fabric. It’s soft. My eyes are still closed. I can’t find the strength to open them. Instead, I use my hand to start to
understand where I am.

  I move my hand further away from me on the fabric. It’s cold and makes my palm feel like it’s skimming ice. Except fabric doesn’t feel like ice. Each breath I take smells like fermented grape. Like wine. Like salt.

  Or is it the scent of beer?

  I can’t feel my heart. I move my hand to my chest. There it is. It’s pounding, slow and dull, as if it has no sense of time or space.

  Like me.

  I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to open my mouth. My belly curls in, navel trying to touch my spine. One of my ankles throbs, and my toes are so cold.

  If I open my eyes, I’ll know where I am, even if I’m lost.

  If I open my eyes, then I’ll know this is real.

  Behind closed eyes, the world is nothing more than jagged electric volts. Lightning sparks and shimmers across my field of vision. But is it vision if your eyes are closed?

  I see something. My brain tries to interpret the dark behind my own skin. That’s all eyelids are, right? A built-in hiding mechanism. When we shut our eyes, we shut out the world.

  But the world doesn’t shut us out.

  I swallow, my throat so dry, my tongue peeking out between my lips before I can stop it. I use my belly to breathe, remembering the training I received from my physical therapists. You can control portions of your nervous system through volition, they taught me. Deep belly breaths don’t just bring in oxygen.

  They normalize the nerves.

  Stretching the diaphragm doesn’t just give you more air. It signals to the rest of the body that you have the luxury of taking your time, of filling the space, of not being chased by a predator.

  But what if the predator already has you? What good does belly breathing do then?

  I can tell, even behind closed eyes, that he’s not in the room. Because he’s not in the room, I allow myself to roll to the right. No pain stands out, which means no one’s beaten me. Nothing feels violated or crushed. No part of me has been entered other than my mind, my psyche, my sense of safety.

  I’d almost rather wake up to gashes and blood, to broken bones and bruised hips.

  Almost.