He leans back, puts his hands under his pillow. His thoughts drift to Ben and one of the nights that changed all their lives.…
“Have you seen Annie?” Nico asks Jenna. She’s washing dishes finishing her chores, which are on the schedule Mr. Brood tacks up on a bulletin board every Friday to ruin their weekends.
Jenna shakes her head, suds crawling up her arms from dinner duty for the younger kids.
Nico thought he’d blown it with Annie after the park incident. Watching a guy get a beatdown isn’t exactly catnip for the ladies. But afterward she told Nico that he’d been brave, kissed him on the cheek. And she’s wearing the necklace he’d bought for her from the street vendor. He hopes it won’t turn her neck green.
Today, at lunch, he won twenty bucks playing dice behind the portable classrooms in the back of the school, so in science class he passed Annie a note and asked if she wanted to go to the movies—
his treat. He waited eagerly as she read the note, tucked a strand of hair behind an ear, and glanced back at him. The note made its way down the assembly line of kids and when he opened it his heart tripped: “Only if it’s a date.”
So he picked wildflowers in the abandoned lot, washed his best jeans and T-shirt, showered, even though it wasn’t his assigned day, and waited for her to come downstairs. When she never did, he checked her room, the bathroom, the kitchen. He’s feeling anxious. Marta never came back. But he
just saw Annie at school. And Ned Flanders told Arty that the foster care people said they’d found Marta, placed her in a new home. But maybe the foster care people are lying, covering for Mr. Brood because his brother runs this town. Nico needs to shake it off, he’s being paranoid. He needs to get it together.
He pushes open the door to Donnie’s room and finds him jamming like a madman on his guitar, his eyes closed, headphones over his ears since Mr. Brood has forbidden him playing through the amp, a rule Donnie breaches whenever possible. Donnie’s eyes pop open. He stops strumming and yanks off the headset with a smile.
“Look at you, Handsome.” Donnie loves nicknames. Eyeing the flowers, he says, “Holy crap, you clean up nice. You finally got the nerve to ask, huh?”
Nico nods. “Have you seen her? The movie starts in twenty minutes.” It takes fifteen to walk there.
“She got a call and hurried out. I thought she was goin’ to see you,” Donnie says. “Hey, I got something for you.” He stands, the guitar dangling by its strap as he trudges over to his footlocker. He opens it and starts digging around. “Benny got this for me when I went out with Amber that time.” It’s a small bottle of cologne, likely swiped from Rite Aid. Donnie approaches, opens his eyes wide, like he’s asking for permission.
Nico half smiles, nods, and feels a spritz of CK One settle around him.
“She’s probably out front.” Donnie smiles, waggling his brows. “Don’t do anything I would do.
…”
On the porch, Nico finds Ben and Arty huddled, talking in whispers. Ben wears a devastated expression when he gets a look at Nico holding the flowers.
“Hey, have you seen Annie?” asks Nico.
Ben and Arty lock eyes, then turn their gazes to Nico.
“What?” Nico asks.
“I’m sorry, man,” Arty says, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“Sorry about what?”
Then Ben says it: “It’s happened again.”
Nico remembers the tears rolling down his cheeks.
“She’s gone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
JENNA
Jenna is tied to a chair, a black bag over her head.
As expected.
She listens closely. The men speak in whispers, but she can tell that someone new is in the room.
Based on the short distance they dragged her, the chirp of crickets, the smell of oil, she thinks it’s a shed or garage. The voice says, “Okay, let’s get a look at her.”
The hood is yanked off.
Yep, she’s in a garage. A huge space that houses a fleet of vintage cars and several motorcycles.
The chair she’s strapped to is on top of a large sheet of plastic, never a good sign. An aluminum table
—it looks like something you’d see in an operating room—stands nearby with what appear to be instruments of torture neatly aligned upon it.
It’s then that she sees the man’s cocksure smile. The same smile as when they first met nearly a decade ago. They’d been assigned to play an American couple on vacation in Berlin—to bring about the demise of a banker with a long history of working with individuals on terrorist blacklists. All their kissing and canoodling went from acting to authentic somewhere along the way. They spent five years pretending it could work between them. She’d wanted to take it to the next level—wanted a normal life, to get out of The Corporation. Get married, have kids. That wasn’t who he is, he’d told her. Yet here he is with a wife and two kids.
He walks up to her, crouches to eye level, his lips near hers. “You coming to kill me?”
She stares at him a long moment. “Are you dead?”
He smiles. Steps back. “I miss that confidence. And I know you’re not here for me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’ve been expecting you.”
“Sabine called you?”
He releases a small laugh. Shakes his head. “No. How is the old bird?”
Jenna doesn’t answer.
He lets out a sigh. “It’s pretty obvious why you’re here. You’ll remember, I’m one of the few people who’s read your file. I know where you’re from. Know about your foster family…”
She shakes her head like she hasn’t the foggiest. She doesn’t.
Michael scrutinizes her for a minute. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
Michael looks at the two men standing at attention near the doors.
“Give us the room.”
The men disappear.
Jenna jostles her arms, gives an annoyed look at the zip ties securing her wrists. Michael’s men restrained her either as a matter of protocol or because they didn’t know who she is. Michael picks up a scalpel from the aluminum table and approaches. He slips the razor-sharp blade under the zip tie, popping it off. He turns the scalpel, holding the blade now, offering her the haft. She takes it, cuts off the tie on her other wrist, then the ones on her ankles.
He knows what she can do with a blade. If he wanted her dead, he would’ve never given it to her, confirming again that it’s not The Corporation out to kill her.
“I take it you haven’t caught the news lately?” he says.
“I’ve been a little preoccupied—running for my life. Protecting my family.”
He nods. “Yes, and what a lovely little family you’ve adopted.”
“Can you quit with the games. What’s going on?”
Michael smiles again, as if admiring her cutting through the shit. Like she used to. “Cable news has been on a tear about a certain federal judge who was murdered; a rock star who fell off a cruise ship; a TV producer in a blown-up mine; and the pièce de résistance, an assassination attempt on Artemis Templeton.”
She processes this. Ben became a federal judge, Donnie a rock star. She’d even seen Nico on an advertisement for some cable TV show. It can all mean only one thing: Someone is targeting the kids from Savior House. The same someone who extorted her into taking a shot at Artemis.