Honor’s Revenge: Masters’ Admiralty, book 4

by Mari Carr

  “If this…secret society…is running the world, what does that mean?”

  “Mean? It means as much or as little as you want it to. There are, no doubt, upsides to consolidating power. There’s stability in that. People yearn for stability, familiarity.”

  “But the downside,” Sylvia said, “is that the rest of us never really have a chance.”

  “Exactly. The playing field stays tilted. If those who aren’t members, aren’t part of their club, get too much power, get too close to achieving a level of success these people feel ownership over, well, then they either destroy them…or recruit them.”

  “How big is this society?”

  “I’m not precisely sure. Western Europe, parts of the Middle East, have been controlled by these people for a thousand years.”

  Europe. Where Hugo and Lancelot were from.

  She shook off that thought. “If it’s in Europe, and it’s been happening for so long…” Sylvia took a long drink, using the moment to decide what to say next. “This faraway secret society is why you left your job?” That was the piece that didn’t add up. Even if such a society existed, which she could concede was possible, what did it have to do with her old teacher?

  “My dear, I didn’t leave. I had to run.”

  “I don’t understand. Why?”

  “Because I am part of a group of people who’ve dedicated themselves to exposing the injustices caused by this society. I kept my identity secret for a long time, but they recently learned my name. I’ve been in hiding.”

  “Oh, um, okay.”

  “You don’t believe me, and I understand that. I wish I had time to let you process what I’m saying.”

  “Why don’t we have time?”

  Alicia leaned forward. “Because I believe the men you spent the night with are members of that society.”

  Sylvia’s blood ran cold. “What…what are you talking about?”

  Alicia pulled her phone from her purse and tapped the screen. She turned it around, displaying Sylvia’s Instagram post from yesterday—the vague form of a reclining tattooed man in two different positions. Only she knew it was more than that, that it was two different men, both of whom had been her lovers.

  “This man’s tattoo, it’s the tri spiral.” Alicia set down her phone as if it weighed ten pounds. “It’s the symbol of the secret society. The symbol of the Masters’ Admiralty.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You mean…you think…” Sylvia wanted to jump out of her chair and pace, she wanted to walk away, pretend this conversation hadn’t happened. Wasn’t happening. She once again felt sick to her stomach, because she knew what the next thing Alicia would say was going to be.

  “They’re members of the Masters’ Admiralty.”

  Sylvia shook her head. That sick feeling intensified. “No, Hugo was my professor at Northwestern.”

  “And he just happened to show up?” Alicia’s tone was pitying.

  “He’s in Charleston writing a book.”

  “And perhaps that is true. Is he the one with the tattoo?”

  “No, that’s…that’s Lancelot. He’s an investigator.”

  “A political science professor needs an investigator? If he has his PhD, he should be more than capable of doing his own research. And if he did need a research assistant, why isn’t it a grad student?”

  That struck a nerve. Something about Lancelot assisting Hugo hadn’t quite added up. Lancelot was overqualified for what Hugo needed. Then she recalled their interest in Oscar.

  Several times over the course of the past couple of days, Lancelot had tried to convince her to take them to see Oscar. Why?

  The sangria was acid in her stomach, and she was angry with Alicia, angry that she was saying such things. For making Sylvia doubt the things she knew were true. She knew there weren’t ancient, powerful secret societies. She knew Hugo and Lancelot were exactly who they said they were.

  Sure, maybe Lancelot seemed more like a bodyguard than an investigator, but that was because she just didn’t know anything about PIs from England.

  “Breathe, my dear.”

  She felt like she was flying apart. Exhaustion, remnants of caffeine and now red wine were swimming in her bloodstream. The adrenaline her body had pumped into her veins was urging her to move. To do something. Fight. But who? Alicia? The woman she’d known, and trusted, nearly half her life? Flight? Running wouldn’t change what she’d heard.

  “The Masters’ Admiralty are looking for me,” Alicia said quietly. “And this man, Lancelot, is without a doubt a member. If your professor Hugo isn’t himself a member, he’s complicit. He’s providing cover for Lancelot while the man hunts me.”

  “But they’re…”

  “They’re what, Sylvia? Kind? Good lovers?”

  They’re mine. They wouldn’t lie to me.

  Or would they?

  “Actually,” Alicia said, “I rather expected them to find some excuse to come with you. I’m guessing that you’re their best lead. I had to admit I debated calling you, but once I saw the picture, I knew your association with me had put you in danger. I needed to get you away from them, even if it meant risking my own safety.”

  “You can’t possibly think that…I mean, they wouldn’t hurt…”

  Alicia’s mouth turned down. “I wish I could have spared you this knowledge. But now that they’ve found you, now that they’re using you, I’m afraid there is no going back. We cannot unring this bell.”

  Alicia started to gather her things.

  Sylvia was stuck, unable to move, despite the surge of feelings inside her. This was all happening too fast. It was too wild, too outlandish.

  And yet…and yet it made a sort of sense. And it made no sense at all.

  Alicia pushed to her feet. “We leave now.”

  “Leave?” Sylvia shook her head slowly, still caught in a moment of shock that rendered her paralyzed.

  “I’m sorry that being my friend has dragged you into a fight you should never have been a part of.” Alicia grabbed Sylvia’s hand, urging her to stand. “I told you, I was ready in case you walked in with them. I have a way out of here.”

  “I can’t just…run away,” Sylvia stammered, and yet when Alicia tugged on her hand, she stood. “If I can just talk to them, maybe we can make sense of this. I can’t believe they—”

  “I know you have questions, and I will answer them, but right now, I need you to trust me.” Alicia cupped Sylvia’s face in her hands. “My dear, can you do that?”

  If she could just get a few minutes to stop and think. If she didn’t feel so panicked, so…betrayed.

  “Yes, I trust you.” Sylvia blinked as she said it. The truth was, she’d always trusted Alicia. But tonight…

  A tear slid down one cheek.

  “Come with me.” Alicia took her hand and led her off the patio, down the outside steps, and into the dark.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was two a.m. and they’d just passed Jacksonville, Florida. In another hour, they’d be in Palm Coast. The tracker on her car indicated that she’d stopped driving nearly an hour ago. Mercifully, they had her address. Hugo had tried to call her a couple times, but it was still going straight to voice mail.

  He and Hugo had spent the first hour of the trip discussing what Alicia could have said to get Sylvia to drive to Florida. The conversation ended when they each started thinking about why her mentor might want to see her.

  The investigation had been painstakingly slow for days, but now the shit had hit the fan. He needed to stay focused on his mission—find and apprehend Alicia.

  He repeated that over and over, a way to remind himself that the reason they were chasing after Sylvia was because she’d made contact with the target. This was a manhunt, not a mission to rescue Sylvia.

  The timing was too coincidental—they were in Charleston for days and nothing happened. But not long after they made contact with Sylvia, Alicia called her.

  Hugo picked up his cell phone.

&n
bsp; “She’s not going to answer,” Lancelot said, his eyes still on the road.

  “I know.” Hugo shrugged. “I was just…” His words faded as he twisted in his seat toward Lancelot. His sudden movement had Lancelot jerking as well.

  “What is it?”

  “Merde. I know why Alicia called her.”

  “What? Why?” That question had plagued both of them since they’d started this race to Florida.

  Hugo turned the phone toward Lancelot, allowing him to see a sketch that Sylvia had posted on her Instagram. It took him a couple glances, his eyes traveling from the phone to the road, then back to the phone. “Is that—”

  “Poetry without words,” Hugo said, reading the words Sylvia had used to describe her drawing. “I saw this sketch in Sylvia’s room. Yesterday morning. She must have drawn it during the night. I didn’t think anything more of it. Didn’t realize she’d shared it.”

  “When did she post it?”

  Hugo checked the time. “One day ago. Right after…”

  “That solves that mystery. Alicia obviously saw it, saw my tattoo, and started putting the pieces together.”

  “If this is true, then…” Hugo didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t need to. If Alicia knew they were in the Masters’ Admiralty, knew they were using Sylvia to find her, then Sylvia was in even more danger than they’d feared.

  They’d stuffed up this investigation right from the beginning. Telling Sylvia his whole name had been an epic mistake on his part. Anyone with knowledge of the Masters’ Admiralty would immediately know that someone with the name “Lancelot Knight” was most likely a knight for the territory of England. He wasn’t even sure why he’d done it. It wasn’t like Lancelot was his true moniker or had any special meaning to him.

  It was just…her. The ways she’d talked about his family tree and the giants. When she’d offered to call her poem “Lance and the Giants,” he’d wanted to offer her the better alternative.

  It had been stupid. A miscalculation. If the fleet admiral had been there, he probably would have pulled out a gun and shot him on the spot, just to put both of them out of their misery.

  This trip was turning out to be far from simple. And they certainly hadn’t been circumspect. They’d let their attraction to Sylvia—and each other—override their common sense. Sleeping with one of the Trinity Masters’ recruits was a violation of their agreement with the American secret society, though perhaps they could claim they didn’t know who Sylvia was. It would depend on Juliette Adams’s willingness to believe in coincidence. If the situation were reversed, Lancelot knew the Masters’ Admiralty leadership would be less than willing to accept that explanation.

  With a burst of violence, Hugo hit his fist against the dashboard. “We should never have gone to Sylvia. She is innocent, and now, because of us, she is in danger.”

  If Sylvia told her former teacher about the two foreigners she’d met, one of whom had an oh-so-distinctive name, it would confirm Alicia’s suspicions as to who he and Hugo really were—agents of the Masters’ Admiralty sent to hunt her down.

  “We should have warned her that Alicia was dangerous,” Hugo continued.

  “How?” Hugo was being emotional, not logical. “How could we tell her that without revealing our motives for being with her?”

  Hugo ran his hand through his hair. “She doesn’t know what Alicia is capable of. If Alicia thinks Sylvia’s betrayed her… Derrick Fredrick’s death was a terrible, cruel thing.”

  Lancelot had read the reports about the murder of the Spartan Guard. Alicia killed Derrick in a sex club with a modified electric collar. It seemed like Hugo had more firsthand information. “How do you know it was cruel?”

  Hugo hesitated for a moment. “An acquaintance was there. Was a witness.”

  Lancelot let that information sink in. There was clearly more to the French professor than met the eye. “Who?”

  Hugo stared out the windshield at the road ahead. “I can’t tell you.”

  Lancelot had been part of the crew who’d helped cover up the murder, keeping Derrick’s body out of the hands of the Scotland Yard. Three people had been there that night, and Lancelot was left to wonder which of the three Hugo knew well enough to have heard such a story from.

  “What did they see?” Lancelot had only read the report, not spoken to anyone involved.

  “Alicia had Derrick bound in a similar manner to the one Sylvia described Alicia using for her husband. That night, Alicia left the room, and when Derrick started to talk about the mastermind, Alicia killed him. My friend said…said it was a hard thing to watch. Seeing him twitch, his eyes roll back in his head. A woman who could do that…”

  “Deserves exactly what she’s going to get when we catch her.”

  “If she’s hurt Sylvia…” Hugo began.

  “She’ll answer to me,” Lancelot finished.

  Hugo shook his head. “She’ll answer to us.”

  That vow hovered in the air as Lancelot accelerated even more. The last hour of the trip was spent in silence, both of them considering what happened next.

  The closer they got, the less he could deny that his first objective was to extract Sylvia safely. It should be to capture Alicia, but he needed Sylvia safe.

  After that…well…Lancelot—no, in this case, Charlie—was very good at his job.

  “There.” Hugo pointed to the turnoff. Lancelot forced himself not to run every red light as they drove through Palm Coast toward the location of Sylvia’s car.

  They both released a sigh of relief when they spotted the car in the parking lot.

  “She’s still here,” Hugo breathed.

  Lancelot pulled up to the entrance, handed the keys to the sleepy-looking valet, then grabbed his knapsack from the back seat. It contained two guns and the Bowie knife. “Let’s go save our woman.”

  * * *

  IT WAS three a.m. Sylvia dampened a scratchy brown paper towel from the all-night diner’s bathroom and used it to wipe her face. The cold water felt good, a wake-up that her system needed. She hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night, and now she was on the run with her former high school teacher.

  Sylvia abandoned the paper towel, bent over, and splashed handfuls of water directly onto her face like she was in some facial cleanser commercial. Dripping and sputtering, she straightened and once more looked in the mirror, shivering as water ran down her neck.

  This was crazy. The whole thing was crazy.

  Worse, Alicia was crazy.

  And she was a fool for not seeing it back at the resort.

  Behind her, the bathroom door opened. “Sylvia dear, we must go.”

  Sylvia grabbed a fresh paper towel, blotted at herself, then turned. Her steps slowed as they walked through the almost-deserted dining room. She should stop and ask the waitress where the closest big hospital was.

  Because that’s what they needed. A hospital.

  If the waitress had looked up, Sylvia might have stopped, but she didn’t. Not sure what to do, she walked outside and climbed back into the passenger seat of the rental car.

  Sylvia waited until they’d pulled out, back onto the nearly deserted highway. “Alicia,” she said tentatively, “why don’t we go to the police?”

  “You’re starting to doubt the truth of what I’ve told you.”

  “It’s not that…” It was exactly that. Since getting into the car an hour ago, Alicia had been telling her all about this secret society, and the more she talked, the more insane it got. “But this secret society—”

  “The Masters’ Admiralty.”

  “—who were, at one point the Illuminati—”

  “Yes.”

  “—have their headquarters in an ancient castle—”

  “They have several strongholds throughout Europe.”

  “—and force women into arranged marriages—”

  “Another case of men dictating and controlling the human body.”

  “—it all seems a little…farfetche
d.” Sylvia tried to keep her tone gentle.

  In the past hour, two things had become painfully clear. The first was that Alicia absolutely believed everything she said. That was clear from her tone and body language. The second was that Alicia, her brilliant mentor and friend, was butt-fuck crazy.

  And here she was, in the car with a crazy person.

  A crazy person who had taken Sylvia’s cell phone back when they were at the resort and chucked it into a lagoon.

  She wasn’t without a way of communicating, but she really, really didn’t want to use it. If she admitted she believed Alicia’s ranting, she would never hear the end of it from her family. Maybe she was naive. Maybe it had been a combination of a lack of sleep and habitual obedience to Alicia, who had been an important authority figure in her life.

  Or maybe she’d gotten so flustered by the idea that Hugo and Lancelot had been using her that she hadn’t been thinking, too caught up in a moment of emotional anguish.

  Whatever her reason—and once she got out of this, she was going to have to come up with a very good reason or never hear the end of it—the fact was, now she needed to help Alicia through this. She needed to get her to a hospital with good psychiatric care. The poor woman must have suffered a severe mental break.

  “Alicia, look. We’re coming up on a big town. Why don’t we get off the highway?”

  “We just stopped, dear. We’re not stopping again.”

  Sylvia sighed. “We need to get to a hospital.”

  Alicia glanced over sharply. “Did they embed a subcutaneous tracker into you?”

  “Did they…uh, no. Alicia, I’m so sorry, but you need help. Medical help.”

  “What…oh, I see. You think I’m suffering from a mental illness.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Alicia reached into the pocket on the driver’s-side door for something. “You’re such a kind person,” she said, pulling her left hand out. “Why don’t you get some rest?”

  “I’m fine, you’re the one who—”