A short but muscular boy with dark skin, deep brown eyes, and a quick smile answers the door on the second floor of a light pink building. “Ben? What the hell are you doing here, man?”
He looks curiously at me. I’m still wearing the rumpled jeans and thin black sweater that I threw on just before finding Claire. My eyes must be blank from lack of sleep, and my hair feels limp and flat against my head. I am not as enchanting as I usually am.
It doesn’t matter. All Mike has to think of me is that I’m sweet and innocent. I smile warmly at him and let Ben do the talking.
He introduces me.
“Hey,” Mike says, beckoning us into the living room.
There is a lone couch and a giant flat-screen TV and piles of clothes and trash everywhere. And a smell, like dirty feet. Mike is clearly not concerned with tidiness.
“So?” Mike asks. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or do you want me to guess?”
“We’ve run away, and we need your help,” Ben tells him.
Mike’s smile fades, and he nods, sitting down on his bed. “Start talking.”
Ben tells him that he and I have fallen in love, but he knows his father won’t approve. He says nothing about the drug charges or the fact that I’m probably expelled from Madigan, but he makes our case sound desperate anyway. “I can’t follow my dad’s plans anymore,” he says with vehemence. “I need to take charge of my own life, and my life is with Vivian.”
“So why did you need to leave school to be with her?” Mike asks, his voice measured and even. He’s a rational thinker. He’ll be harder for me to convince than I thought. But he looks at Ben seriously, waiting to hear what he has to say.
“Because we want to, you know, start our lives together, and we want to start now. It’s my eighteenth birthday tomorrow, and we want to get married.”
Mike’s eyebrows shoot up.
Ben turns to me, asking for help with his eyes. “I know you don’t know me,” I say softly to Mike. “I know that getting married must seem like the most ridiculous move for people our age. But the way I feel about Ben, and the way I know he feels about me . . .” I look up at Ben, filling my eyes with admiration and love. As if I can’t believe that someone this amazing is by my side.
When I look back at Mike, he looks a touch more understanding, his eyes crinkling with concern.
“I can’t imagine living without her,” Ben continues, turning to me. I put on my best radiant smile as I meet his eyes. “I don’t want to ever let her go.”
“Can you help us?” I ask, my dreamy gaze skittering away from Ben’s earnest one.
Mike looks from me to him and back again. “Of course. You can stay here.”
“And you won’t tell anyone else we’re here?” Ben looks at him closely.
“No,” Mike replies. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
“Thanks, mate,” Ben says with a wide, easy smile.
“No problem,” Mike answers. “I’m more than happy to put up Romeo and Juliet.”
Ben catches my eye, and we share a small, private smile. But my stomach twists over on itself. I can only hope we don’t end up like Romeo and Juliet.
We spend the night at Mike’s flat. I fret over my plan and keep refreshing my email on Mike’s laptop to see if Mother’s written to me while Ben and Mike play some sort of explosive video game and slap each other’s backs like everything’s normal.
That night, we refuse Mike’s offer of his bed and settle on the couch instead. It’s large and soft and covered in crumbs, but Ben and I don’t mind. We cuddle together under a blanket, and I fall asleep almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, his arms strong and comforting around me.
We are safe. For now.
CHAPTER 32
I wake up twisted in Ben’s arms, my limbs heavy with sleep, and he wakes as I stir. I watch as he struggles to remember where he is, as he remembers everything I’ve led him to. His confusion melts into a sleepy smile. “Good morning,” he says softly, brushing a kiss onto my lips, covering me with his body so that I sink further into the lumpy couch.
“Happy birthday,” I answer, kissing him again, looping my arms around his neck. “What are you going to do today?”
He yawns. “I think I’ll follow Mike around. See what this Oxford life is like.”
I feel a twinge of regret again as I see the excitement in his eyes. He doesn’t understand the urgency, but I can’t tell him to keep hiding out. But with luck, Helper doesn’t know where we are yet.
“That sounds great. While you do that, I’m going to make arrangements for the wedding,” I say, trying to match Ben’s excitement.
He pulls me closer. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
I nod, kissing his cheek and snuggling into him. “I’m sure. I want it all to be a surprise.”
Later that morning, Mike tears Ben away from me to take him out and show him what Oxford life is like. He slings an arm around Ben’s shoulders and pulls him down the cobblestone path, and Ben glances back, meeting my eyes with a smile. I watch them until they round a corner, out of sight, and then I run for the bus station.
There won’t be any wedding planning today. Instead, I get on the bus to London. It’s time for the real plan to begin.
I wrote what I was preparing to do in the note I slipped under Arthur’s door, and I asked him to meet me in London once I got off the ten o’clock bus. Now I can only hope that he decides to show up.
As the bus pulls into the London station, I see him.
Arthur stands on the platform, his muscular arms crossed over his chest. His tall frame and jet-black hair, so different from the traits of the golden boy I left behind in Oxford, make him difficult to miss. As the tires squeal to a halt, his dark eyes study the windows, and when I step off he walks toward me, his hands in the pockets of his black coat.
There’s an awkward pause. “So let’s go find Collingsworth’s house, then,” Arthur says finally. I nod and follow him silently through the bus station to the Underground stop.
My palms are sweating as we pass through the crowds, and I try to take deep breaths in the stale, polluted air. But everything looks so strange and different to me now. The world has tipped over on its axis, and nothing is the same. I am not the same.
I know I can’t trust Mother. Not when I know she could kill both Ben and me with barely a thought. She’s not who I thought she was. She’s not the poor, damaged woman crying in front of the fire, someone to be pitied and protected. She’s the woman who planned to kill an innocent girl to get me into Madigan. The woman who had her own mother murdered. The woman who used my best friend as my whipping boy and slit the throats of kittens in front of my eyes and kept me imprisoned in that cold and terrifying house.
I owe her nothing. At least I try to tell myself that, though some strange tendril of guilt still twists through me. She was the woman who taught me everything I know, who put a roof over my head, who made sure I had everything I needed. But not anymore. Now she’s my enemy.
That word, “enemy,” flashes in my head like a strobe light, altering all of my memories. I see past her lies now, her manipulations. I see Mother for the puppet master she always was, and I see the strings that she pulled to make me dance. I have to cut them off. Even if the sudden loss frightens me.
I’ve put all of my faith in Arthur, the only one who has told me the truth, the only one who has ever escaped her, and I can only hope he doesn’t betray me again.
There are so many people tripping over each other at the Underground stop, and everything is dirty, nauseating. I hold my breath as we push through the crowd. The trains are tiny and packed, and Arthur and I are smooshed together by the door for several stops. With my ear pressed against his chest, I can almost hear his heartbeat, and for a moment, that relaxes me. The rush, the noise, the strangeness of this all melts away,
as if I’m fourteen again and hiding behind the guesthouse with him, escaping from the world around us.
When a seat opens up, though, Arthur gestures me to it.
We get out at Sloane Square and step out into a bustling, traffic-filled street. A grassy area with a few tall trees rests in the middle of the streams of cars, but everything else about this square is urban and commercial, with shops and banks everywhere I look. I have to keep close to Arthur, practically on his heels, as we maneuver through the crowds.
A few blocks over, we enter a stretch of stately townhomes and smartly dressed people. In my jeans and thin black sweater, I don’t stand out too much, but I still draw stares with the layers of black eye shadow and dark red lipstick that I put on this morning for Ben’s benefit. I realize, with an unnerving jolt, that I want to be invisible, after so many years of engineering my appearance for these second glances. I run a finger over my lips, smudging off most of the lipstick, and tuck my hair under my sweater, hoping that will help.
Arthur has given me his map with Ben’s address circled, and we find our way to a neighborhood of almost blinding-white townhouses arranged in crescent circles, gleaming in the morning sun. Arthur stops me as we get closer to Ben’s street.
“You ring the doorbell,” he tells me. “I’ll wait here. People won’t be as suspicious of a girl on someone’s front stoop.”
“What do I do if someone answers?” I ask.
He smiles. “I’m sure you can figure that out.”
I don’t know if I’m supposed to be flattered or insulted by that comment, so I let it go.
Ben’s street is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen: a block of white houses bordering a park of almost astonishing green. The trees grow wide and tall, cutting off the view of what must be a garden inside, surrounded by black bars to keep the unprivileged out. Flowers spill out from the window ledges around us, creating beautiful tapestries all the way up the four-story buildings. I find Ben’s number painted on a white column, take a deep breath, and walk up the stairs to the sun-dappled front door.
I can hear the faint echo of the doorbell chiming through the house when I press the button, but nothing else. I press it again thirty seconds later and knock on the door, but still no one comes to answer it. Collingsworth must be at the office, and I know from Ben that a maid only comes on weekends when he’s away at school. The house is empty and ours for the taking.
I see a few people on the sidewalk as I shrug and walk back down the steps, but no one’s looking at me.
Arthur and I duck behind the row of houses without a word, then creep through an alleyway of private garages until we get to the back of the third house. We sneak down a side path and find a solid wood back door. No one on the street can see us as Arthur jiggles the lock.
“There’s no way they don’t have a security system,” I whisper to him.
“You didn’t get your boyfriend to give you the code?” Arthur sneers.
I sneer right back. “That would have been a bit suspicious.”
“Don’t worry.” He takes a long, thin file and slides it deftly into the crack between the door and the frame. “Have you forgotten I’m my father’s son?” he asks with a bit of a half smile that takes my breath away.
He gets the door open and runs inside before I can respond. I find him at a control panel on the wall, fiddling with wires inside. His father clearly did teach him the tricks of the trade.
I take a moment to absorb the details of the house where Ben grew up. We’ve entered into a kitchen and breakfast room, and everything is modern and clean and sterile, all startling white and stainless steel. Pots gleam from their cabinets, and a gigantic stove fit for a chef takes up most of the center island.
Arthur stops fiddling with the wires, closes the control panel, and turns to me, a proud smile on his face. “Now we just need to find—”
There’s a flash of white from the panel, so quick I almost miss it.
Something’s wrong; I can see it in Arthur’s eyes.
“What is it?” I whisper, looking around, wondering if someone is going to come attack me.
“Silent alarm,” Arthur says, his voice strained and quick. “His system’s more advanced than I’m used to. We don’t have much time before the cops get here.”
We separate, running through the house in a whirlwind. I find myself in a den with leather sofas in front of a ridiculously large television and a portrait of Ben as a young boy on the mantelpiece. I glance at it for only a second, but I recognize those hazel eyes in his younger, rounder face.
Whatever we’re looking for, it won’t be in such a routinely used room. I run up the stairs two at a time, hunting for the largest bedroom of the house. The second floor is all small bedrooms and an office, where I find Arthur going through the drawers of a large desk.
I run up the stairs to the third floor, and finally I find a large room with a sitting area and a king-size bed. I rifle through the small desk there, but its drawers are empty.
Among the photos of Ben at various ages sitting atop the desk, though, there’s a photo of someone else I recognize. I pick it up and stare at the girl with long black hair. She’s the one who drew the picture of the tree that Ms. Elling had me look up in the yearbook. The student from the same year as Mother whose husband had been shot.
A boy stands beside her, and they both beam out at the camera, pressed closely together. That must be her husband.
I unclasp the back of the frame with fumbling fingers, and the photo falls on the desk, revealing the writing on the back that I hoped to find. Rose and Adam Travers.
A wail shatters the silence outside, and it’s growing louder. I stuff the photo in my bag and run for the stairs, Arthur meeting me at the bottom before we burst outside.
CHAPTER 33
We bound out the back door and run through the alleyway. Once we hit the sidewalk, I pull Arthur into a walk and stuff the files he carries into the bag I took from Mike’s flat. I grab his hand as a police car speeds toward us, turning my head and smiling innocently at him. His eyes are still panicked, but he sends a quirk of a smile back. The car whisks right by us.
I drop his hand and quickly direct us to Hyde Park, where we lose ourselves in clusters of trees and crowds of people sitting on the lawns, soaking up the rare sunshine that makes the day warmer than it’s been in months. Only then do I breathe a sigh of relief.
Arthur sighs, too, and glances down at the bag I carry. “I don’t think I got anything good. The files are just tax returns from the first years of Collingsworth International, but I doubt he’d put anything useful in them about how he developed the avatar. And if he realizes that’s what we took—”
“He’ll know what we’re looking for,” I finish for him. “We have to figure it out quickly, then.”
“What’d you find?” he asks.
“A photo.”
He looks at me with raised eyebrows but says nothing.
I sit down on the nearest open bench, its wooden slats warmed by the sun. It rests along a wide dirt path with dozens of people strolling past, and it has a view of a large lake in the distance. “You look through the tax files,” I tell him, taking them out of my bag.
He nods, sitting beside me.
I take the photo delicately, looking down at the two people Collingsworth wanted to display on his desk. The only other people besides his son.
It was a stupid thing to grab, I think as I examine the two smiling faces. Maybe Collingsworth was friends with Adam and wanted to remember him. Maybe I only took this photo because I was drawn to their expressions, these two people clinging to each other as if the other was the only thing they would ever need in this world. Adam has hair almost as black as Rose’s. His face is round and his eyes are small, but the way he holds on to her and the way he grins out at the camera—there’s something beautiful about it.
I look over at Arthur, who sighs as he shuffles through the tax forms on his lap. He’s a study in concentration, his brow furrowed, his dark brown eyes narrowed and piercing. He doesn’t even notice me looking at him.
I remind myself that he has great reason to be focused, and if I don’t focus myself, my life could very well be in danger.
I glance back at the photograph, shifting away from Arthur. He feels too close.
And then my focus shifts. I don’t see Rose and Adam anymore. I see what’s behind them. Because there, just visible in the background, is something else I recognize: the house in Loworth that so enchanted me on my first visit to the village. That narrow, foreboding house looks more polished in this photo. There is no sign of the unkempt yard or the creeping vines slithering up the walls. This is the house in a happier time.
I flip the photo back over. Rose and Adam Travers. Adam. The name of the male avatar.
“I’ve got a clue,” I tell Arthur, drawing his eyes from the tax forms. “We need to go to Loworth.”
“Loworth? You’re sure?” he asks, glancing at the photo in my hands as I stand up.
I nod. “How do we get there?”
He stands up as well. “A train to York and a bus from there would be the fastest option,” he says, leading me out of the park. “How much money do you have?”
We take another foul-smelling, crowded subway ride to King’s Cross, where everyone seems in even more of a hurry than we are. We spend the bulk of my cash on two economy tickets to York and rush onto the three o’clock train.
CHAPTER 34
The two hours it takes to travel back up the country make me want to stick needles up my fingernails just to give me something else to focus on. I can’t sit still. I pace up and down the aisles, earning the curious glances of the other passengers and the glare of the ticket collector.
I Am Her Revenge Page 18
