They didn’t know the van was a Trojan horse.
I kissed Nicole’s temple as we rounded the corner and whispered, “Look. You made it.”
Vengeance lying in wait.
Chapter Thirty-Four
By the time they opened the back doors, I had my hood on, my hands back inside the knotted loop of rope, except this time, the knot was loose, not biting. Rough hands grabbed me, pulling me upright, and yanked off the hood.
“You awake?” The Lieutenant’s pale-blue eyes stared, his blond mustache twitching.
“Fuck you,” I said, and he smiled.
“Awake, but no less stupid.” He wrestled me out of the van. Up close, the Hilltop was somehow larger than it had looked from the road. Its pale stone walls rose so high I had to lean back to see the top of them. There were flowers everywhere: neatly arranged in flower beds around the perimeter, in boxes hanging from the windows. Aster, verbena, and goldenrod, Clem’s favorite.
The Disciple grunted and heaved Nicole’s body over his shoulder.
“Why did you take my hood off?” I asked, feeling coldness wash through me. Why would they let me see the Hilltop?
The Lieutenant only smiled and shoved me forward. In we went.
The place was even more of a castle inside. The ceilings soared, stone walls punctuated with vast windows. The Lieutenant pushed me by the shoulders, making me move quickly, following the Disciple, Nicole’s waterfall of red hair hanging over his shoulder. I twisted my head in every direction, absorbing as much as I could, trying to commit the details to memory as much as look for clues.
Massive paintings framed in gold hung on the walls, dark scenes from old-world masters. I tried to pause to catch details, but the Lieutenant shoved me. “Keep moving,” he barked. “This isn’t a tour.”
Was this the home Don would’ve chosen if he’d managed to build an empire? It seemed like his taste, but I couldn’t be sure. We rounded a corner, passed a door to another vast room, and I stopped in my tracks, Lieutenant be damned.
Weapons hung on foreboding red walls: mounted swords, crossbows, sinister daggers, ancient toothed devices to torture infidels and witches. In the corner sat a cannon.
The Lieutenant seized my throat, growling, “I said no stopping.” But I didn’t care. A weight lifted from my shoulders, my chest filling with light.
Sometimes, you just know. Sometimes, when you have a feeling deep in your gut, you have to trust your instincts. No matter the red herrings, the people trying to dissuade you, life beating you down. I’d been right all along: this red room could only belong to Don Rockwell.
I let the Lieutenant swing open a door at the end of the hallway and shove me down a set of stairs, thinking all the while, It’s him.
We stepped into a dim, cavernous basement. I wasn’t surprised to see more weapons on the walls, and gardening equipment, shovels, trowels, a watering can scattered over a long, low table near a single door.
All of it so familiar.
The Disciple dumped Nicole’s body beside the long table, and the Lieutenant shoved me into a wooden chair so hard the chair and I tipped backward. He tugged the rope around my wrists, feeling its looseness. “Is this what had you feeling so chipper?”
He made quick work of retying the knot, until the rope dug into my wrists, but I didn’t care. My eyes were fixed on the stairs. “Is Rachel coming?”
The Lieutenant lumbered into the corner, next to the Disciple. “My advice is to shut up and enjoy these last moments. Say your prayers to God.”
“Don will come, too, right?” I remained glued to the stairs. “He has to.”
The Lieutenant said nothing, and in the silence, I heard it: creaking footsteps. She was coming. I sat up straighter, nerves sparking, breath shallow.