by JA Huss
Chapter Thirty-Three - Five
I can hear people yelling down a dark hallway.
Then footsteps behind me. I look over my shoulder, pull the pistol from my pocket and aim—
“It’s just me!” Chen says.
I lower the pistol as he walks up, looking warily round for enemies.
“They’re down here,” I say, surprised at how calm my voice is. “They’ve got Rory. Middleton told me just before he died.”
“I saw his body,” Chen whispers. “What did he say?”
“Nothing,” I lie.
“Nothing?” Chen asks as we stalk forward. We’ve both got our guns ready, our backs pressing against a wall as we come to another hallway.
I don’t hear anything, but I stay flat against the wall as I peek around.
No one.
I slip to the right, down the new hallway and continue forward. The yelling is getting louder and I can barely make out a sliver of light.
Suddenly there’s more gunfire behind us. Chen and I both look at each other, then back the way we came.
“They’re coming in after us,” I say. “We gotta do this now, man. Fuck everything, we gotta do this now.”
Chen looks uncertain. He glances back at the commotion, and that’s when I take off for the door.
I expect it to be locked when I turn the long metal handle, so when it’s not, I almost hesitate.
Rory.
That’s the only thing I care about right now.
I do not hesitate. I throw the door open and stand there, gun pointing at the chest of Jack Joseph.
I knew that fuck was behind this. I knew it.
“Five!” Jack bellows in his fake magnanimous greeting. “You’re right on time.”
A blonde woman is on the floor with my princess, who does not look good. She’s pale and there’s foam coming out of her mouth.
“What the fuck,” I growl—so low, so dangerous—“did you do to my wife?”
“Your wife?”
I glance over to where the voice came from, find Frank Fulbright smiling at me.
He opens his mouth to continue with some smartass remark, but I shoot him in the chest before he even utters another word.
That’s when a gun is pressed to my back and Chen, the one man my father trusted—never should have trusted—is behind me.
“Put the gun down, Five.”
“You,” I say, my gun trained on the woman now—I don’t know why I think she’s the one in charge here, but she is, I know it—“killed my grandfather.”
Chen huffs a laugh. “And you’re about to lose your precious princess too. Unless. You. Drop. That gun.”
I drop it. It clanks loudly to the hard, concrete floor.
“Good boy,” the woman says, nodding her head to some big guy, who picks up the gun and backs away into the shadows with it. “Now listen carefully, Mr. Aston. Princess Shrike here has taken upon herself to end her life tonight. But I can stop this reaction.” She holds up a syringe. “We use the poison wafer to scare people, really. It’s a tactic, you understand, right?”
Her eyes dart over my shoulder. To Chen, I realize.
“So this is how you did it?” I ask, looking at the woman, but talking to my father’s most trusted advisor. “This is how you betrayed him?”
“We don’t have time for small talk, Mr. Aston,” she says in an overly calm manner. “Aurora will be dead in less than three minutes if we don’t give her this antidote. But I can’t give it to her. I can’t save her life unless you agree to be one of us.”
“Fine,” I say. It’s an automatic response. I don’t even think about what her offer means. I don’t even care at this point. “Fine,” I say again when she makes no move to push those drugs into Rory. “Do it!” I yell. “I said fine. I agreed. Now save her fucking life or I will take down every single one of you.”
The woman smiles. Confident. “Every one of us?” She actually laughs. My eyes fall to Rory lying helpless on the ground. Her body is shaking, like the beginning of a seizure, and she’s moaning. Is that a good sign? Or a bad one?
“Save her,” I say, calm now, my threats gone. “Just do it. I don’t give a fuck what I have to do for you people after this, just save her.”
“Now that’s what we like to hear.”
But still… she makes no move to plunge that antidote into my dying princess.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” I ask. “Do it!”
But there’s a squeaky noise behind me. That big guy has wheeled in a stretcher.
It’s not for saving Rory. It’s not for transporting her to a waiting ambulance, and then to a hospital.
It’s for an escape.
He lifts Rory up off the ground. She’s seizing up, her arms folded, but stiff, on her chest. Her head falling back, the saliva pooling in her mouth until some reflex takes over and she begins to choke.
I rush forward to help her, but Chen grabs me from behind. I elbow him in the kidneys, making him falter. Big guy is still holding Rory, so he’s no help. Jack is clumsily pulling a gun from his jacket pocket, but I shoot him. Not in the chest. Fuck that shit. I shoot him in the face.
All of a sudden the lights come on. I blink, then cover my eyes, trying to adjust to the brightness. The woman and her bodyguard have Rory on the stretcher, and the big guy’s arm is moving, lifting a shotgun at me when—
Wen’s men appear—finally—from the door I came through with Chen.
They shoot Jack in a spectacular show of power. They spray him with bullets. The walls are made of mirrors and I watch, transfixed by his jerking body until it’s pinned to the cracked slivers of silver.
The next thing I know, the entire room is up in flames and the woman and her bodyguard are gone.
So is Rory.
But she left something behind.
The syringe.
And it’s empty. That bitch lied.
It never had the antidote in it at all.
Chapter Thirty-Four - Rory
I realize I’m on a stretcher.
It didn’t fucking work! I want to cry right now. I wanted to go out a hero, saving Five from their trap, and it didn’t fucking work!
I begin to choke, and then Blondie’s face is right up next to mine. She’s running alongside me. “You’re fine, dear. We can’t afford to lose you,” she coos in my ear. “So I saved your life. Your man did show up, but he’s burning back there.”
Smoke is filling this… this tunnel we’re running down.
“What did you do?” I croak.
“Took care of things, dear. That’s all. Now be still. We’re almost to the car and you’ll be fine when I get you back to headquarters. I gave you the antidote. You don’t get to die unless we say so.”
So I’ve heard.
I struggle. If you can call it that. My whole body is weak from whatever it was I swallowed along with that wafer. I’m tied down, anyway, my wrists and legs strapped to the gurney they’re pushing me on.
I hear gunfire behind me. Bullets ping off the walls, cracking the concrete blocks and sending up a spray of dust.
“Hurry!” Blondie barks to the bodyguard.
“Five!” I say, sobbing. “Five!” I scream it louder. “I’m here!”
Her hand clamps down on my mouth, covering my nose. She’s gonna fucking smother me!
I bite. My teeth find her flesh and she pulls back, screaming. A hard slap hits my cheek with such force, I see blinking lights in the darkness that threatens to take over again.
The smoke is so thick now, the one gasp of air I manage before she clamps her hand down again is nothing but soot.
I struggle again. The binding on my right wrist is loose enough to slip my hand through, and one hand is all I need.
I grab that bitch’s hair and pull. The gurney slips to the side when she falters, and falls to the ground.
We stop, gunfire still pinging off the ceiling.
Five is back there. He’s firing to miss. To slow us down
. To give me a chance to fight back.
I reach over, fumble with my other wrist binding, just as the woman starts shooting back.
She’s not aiming for the walls or the ceiling. She’s aiming for Five.
I sit up, desperate to save him. She will not kill him. I will never allow that to happen. I grab for her gun as she shoots, knock it loose from her grip, but it falls into my lap, and she’s there, reaching for it.
We struggle, her hands in my hair—she’s fighting like a goddamned girl.
I don’t fight like a girl. I fight like a Shrike.
I grab her head the same way I did Frank and smash her face into my knee.
She falls over, blood gushing out of her mouth and nose.
The bodyguard grabs me, but I have that gun. And I’ve shot a gun with my daddy so many times before this night, my fingers know just what to do.
I pull that motherfucking trigger and take his face off.
Everything stops in that moment. There’s an echo of my gunshot. There’s thick, black smoke billowing up from behind me. And then… nothing but silence.
Fuck.
I snap out of my daze and reach down for the bindings on my legs.
“Rory!” Five calls from down the tunnel.
“Five!” I yell. But I choke on the smoke.
The heat is intense now too.
“Five!” I try again.
There’s a thundering behind me as I get the last binding loose and fall over to the side of the gurney. My legs give out, weak from the poison I swallowed. And I collapse to the hard ground.
The thundering turns into a barrage of boots running towards me.
“Five,” I call again.
“Rory!” he calls back. “Where are you?”
“I’m here,” I say, but it’s so weak, I know he can’t hear me. He can’t see me either.
I look for the woman, expecting her to be right beside me, but she’s gone.
A set of red taillights appears through the thick, haze of smoke up ahead.
She’s getting away!
I begin to crawl towards her car.
“Rory!” Five bellows.
“She’s getting away!” I scream it as loud as I can. “Don’t let her get away!”
I’m still crawling toward her receding headlights when Five finds me.
He wraps me up in his arms, kisses me over and over and over. On the head, on the cheek.
Someone says, “We need to get out of here. The House is gone. We’re underneath the neighborhood now, and the whole block is about to go up in flames.”
I’m picked up. Carried at a run by Five.
And I have never tasted anything sweeter than his kiss on my lips and the fresh, clear air when we finally make it outside.
Epilogue - Five
Two weeks later
Corruption kills everything.
It’s something my grandfather said often when we were together. And I always wondered what he meant, since he was, after all, one of the most corrupt people I’ve ever known.
Societies rise through trust and they fall by corruption.
Lies.
I’m not trying to say he was a good guy, but he did redeem himself in the end.
At least that’s how I see it.
Wen’s people got us out of Princeton that night two weeks ago. Damian Li had made a deal to end his reign by taking down his own people. He made a database of names. Every corrupt official in the local Hong Kong government. He sent me to Fort Collins that day I met with Jack Joseph to retrieve a code I had written years before to help him infiltrate the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau in Hong Kong. He was going to team up with Wen to bring it all down. And after his death, Wen came to me. To give me a chance to get out and set things right at the same time.
I gave him that code. And the database that Cliff handed off to me after we met over the summer. Turns out Cliff Middleton had big dreams of bringing down world corruption as well. He was working with Wen the entire time.
Wen set the code to work in the government systems without anyone knowing it was him. In the past week, more than seven hundred people have been imprisoned in China for being on the Triad take.
It’s just a start. One Triad does not a sweep make.
But it’s more than Wen had before, and he’s hopeful now. He sees Hong Kong’s government as something his people should be able to trust.
I can respect that.
Rory was sick for days afterward, but she’s getting better every day. We took her to a specialist, who came up with the name of the poison—a derivative of ricin, which was thought to be untreatable until a few years ago.
I didn’t want to know any more about that. All I wanted was for my princess to be OK.
Two weeks on and she’s almost back to normal, and all the medical experts Spencer Shrike flew in on the recommendation of my uncle James say she’d be dead by now if that antidote the blonde woman gave her hadn’t worked.
Dead by now.
I want to fucking kill someone just thinking about how close she came.
“Hey,” Rory says, walking up to me and sitting down on the sand.
“Hey yourself,” I say, smiling at her. She’s wearing a pink bikini and white sunglasses. “How’s things?”
This is my code phrase for, How are you feeling today?
She wraps her arm into mine, twining us together. The way it was always meant to be. “I miss her,” Rory says, meaning Tera. “And him too,” she adds. Meaning Cliff.
“I know,” I say, pulling her into a tight hug. “But they’d be happy for you. That you made it out.”
She leans into me and says, “We made it, Five. Together. That’s the way it was always supposed to be.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I got you to agree to marry me for real.”
She smiles at that. Then her smile falters. “I wish I could tell my sisters. And I wish my parents could be here too.”
“We talked about this, Princess. Uncle James got here to the island in secret. No one knows you’re alive. No one knows I was in Princeton that night. Well, except Chen and he’s dead.”
Motherfucker. That’s what he gets for betraying my grandfather.
That toxicology came back too. Same thing as what they used on Rory in that weird deathtrap down in the Palladium basement. Turns out those mansions were built over some secret tunnels used for the Underground Railroad back in the day.
Lucky for us.
“I’m not complaining,” she says.
“I know that,” I reply. “But it’s OK to be sad, ya know. You can’t ever go home again. Ever. And only Sparrow, Belle, and Kate, and our parents know you’re alive. If they”—and by they I mean whoever the fuck these Palladium people are—“know you’re alive, they’ll find you, Rory. Use you to get to me. So you’re staying here with Uncle James. You’ll have him, and Harper, and the kids.”
“Kids,” she says, wistfully.
“And I’ll be back as often as I can slip away. We won’t be apart forever, ya know. It’s all gonna work out in the end.”
“I know,” she says. But she’s sad.
Which is why now is the perfect time to give her my present.
I pull the small box out of my pocket. It’s wrapped in white paper with a pink satin bow. “What’s this?” she asks, But her smile is big. Bigger than any smile I’ve seen on her face since I came back into her life and fucked it all up.
“Just a little something to make it easier,” I say. “That’s all. Open it.”
“Five Aston,” she says. “What did you do now?” But her fingers are already pulling on the bow. It slips off and falls into the sand beside her. When she rips the white paper off the box and opens it up, she frowns. “A flash drive,” she says dryly. “Thanks. I’ll treasure it always.”
“Don’t be a silly princess,” I say. And then I hand her my phone and say, “Plug it in.”
She does, and the phone comes to life as the code in the drive activates.
I watch her watch the screen, and then the little icon appears.
“Dead Notes.” She makes a funny face. “What the hell is this?”
“I made the first version of this app back when I was a kid. It’s… kinda morbid and it never took off the way I thought it would. But it makes people feel better.”
“What’s it do?” she asks.
“It’s a messaging system. For loved ones who’ve passed away. You call the cell phone of the person you lost and they pick up. Their voicemail greeting. So people can leave you a message. It’s only one-way, of course. The dead can’t reply. But it makes those left behind feel better. Feel like they can talk to you. And since you’re not really dead, it’ll make you feel better too. Your sisters can call. And you can keep up with them.”
She starts to cry.
I pull her into my lap and let her.
It’s hard to walk away from your life and live in secret. She’s allowed to grieve for her loss, even though neither of us died.
She’s losing everything right now, and I want to make it better.
“Your parents will come,” I say, dragging a piece of hair out of her wet and teary eyes to tuck it behind her ear. “Every year, during their Disney trip so no one suspects anything. And my parents will come too. Kate can come. And Sparrow and Belle. Maybe eventually… one day… we’ll be safe again. We’ll know we won and we’ll leave this place and rejoin the world. But in the meantime, Princess, we’re gonna live our happily ever after right here.”
Safe.
Together.
Till death do us part.
It’s not much, but it’s all I can offer for now.
One day she’ll get the real happily ever after. She’ll get the real wedding. But until then, we’re not gonna give up or stop living.
So I stand up and pull her off the sand so she’s standing with me.
There’s a postcard-perfect sunset tonight. And a cool breeze to go with it.
And I whisper in her ear the only other thing I can think of that might make her smile again.
“Let’s make babies while we wait.”
END OF BOOK SHIT
