“We’re on watch here.” A blonde, slightly built guy lifted his chin. “You’re supposed to be at the ceremony.”
Sethi shrugged. “Sage sent us.”
A tense moment passed before the man standing closest to us cocked his head—an anaemic-looking man in his seventies with hair thinning over his age-spotted scalp. “Checks out. Brother Harrington thought he saw something on the infra-red. Brother Sage might want more security.”
A chill sped through me. This man was probably some kid’s grandfather. A serial killer who looked like any harmless and slightly unwell old guy you’d see in the street.
“No way,” the blond scoffed. “He’s a looney. The knock to the head wouldn’t be helping.”
The third man viewed us coolly, his eyes dead, ice cold, a scar running the length of one side of his face. “I don’t know who these two are. Did we get new Saviours? We never do that just before the challenges.”
The blond guy studied us curiously. “Take off your hoods.”
Sethi acted quickly, pulling the older guy towards him and hooking his arm around his body. With his free arm, Sethi held a knife to the man’s throat. “Do what we say, or we’ll kill him.”
A moment of shock lapsed into a sneer on the face of the man with the scar. “Who the fuck are you, and how did you get onto the island?”
“You’ve got one second,” said Sethi.
In response, the two Saviours took out guns from their pockets.
Sethi sliced his knife across the old man’s throat and let him drop to the floor.
The Saviours barely reacted.
“Your deaths won’t be that quick.” The guy with the scar gestured at us with his gun, telling us to walk back down the ramp.
I turned and walked with Sethi.
They weren’t going to shoot us in the back. Whatever was coming next was worse. They forced us off the scaffolding to a desk against a wall, where they picked up two sets of handcuffs.
A set of three monitoring screens on the desk displayed live scenes, constantly flipping from the island to the halls inside the monastery to the prisoners chained to the wall.
The blonde man picked up a fixed phone.
“What are you doing, Lewis?” the other man hissed.
“Calling Brother Sage,” Lewis answered, nonplussed.
“We’ll have some fun with them first.” The scarred man stepped around us, snatching back our hoods. “I can tell you they’re not undercover police.”
“What if they are?” A nervous energy charged Lewis’s voice. “And if they are, someone needs to deal with this and shut it down.”
One of the monitors swapped to showing an area of the monastery in which a huge number of Saviours were gathered. Hundreds of them. My bowels went ice cold. We’d had no chance from the second we’d stepped foot here. Another monitor swapped to a view of the prisoners. Different prisoners to the ones I’d seen before, on the other side of the half wall.
Then I saw her.
My wife.
Her head down, dark hair in tangles.
I knew it was her before she raised her face, staring ahead in numb confusion.
I lost sight of her just as quickly as the display switched to a view of the hall outside the cellar.
“Evie! Evie!” I roared her name, charging away, ignoring the guns that were suddenly raised and pointed my way.
72. Constance
JENNIFER DIDN’T ATTEMPT TO HIDE HER shock as she stared from James to me. My husband—the head of an insane cult. I guessed that Jennifer was calculating the same things that I was. If I’d suspected James, I could have had him tracked, had his computers logged and eavesdropped on him.
But I hadn’t done any of those things because I never had an inkling.
Why didn’t I know?
Terror pierced my body with sharp, ice-cold pins.
Kara.
My daughter had been in the hands of a monster. And I’d put her there.
“I need to see her,” I pleaded. “Just let me see her.”
James merely made a tutting sound at my anguished face. “She’s elsewhere in the monastery, and she’s told me she has no interest in ever seeing you again.”
His words socked me in the centre of my chest. “I want her to tell me that in person.”
“I’m sorry, Constance,” came the reply. “But it’s out of the question.”
He was no longer my husband. He was an unknowable stranger. A mass murderer. The hands that had touched me in intimate ways had done terrible things to other human beings. “Who are you people?”