Her shoulders slumped. She spun on her heel to face me. “She wasn’t here very long.”
“But Drea worked here.” My mind flicked through memories as I attempted to find the right one. “Was there ever a man here named Mel, or Melrose, who played as a horse for someone else?”
Rebecca’s brows furrowed. “I really can’t stay here and discuss this with you. I’m the only one on the floor—”
“Tell me one more thing. Please.” As soon as I saw the hesitation in the flicker of her lashes, I barreled on, “Was Drea hooking up with Trace?”
She sighed, licked her lips, then said, “Yes.”
Trace was a regular here.
This was a trap.
“Now please, I have to leave,” she said, and this time, when she trotted away, I was too frozen to stop her.
Drea was a liar. Those bruises—her cuts and swells, the tremble of her lip—were all real. Trace did beat her, but was it with her permission? Did she love him so hard and fast she was willing to be crushed near-to-death in order to please him? No. I couldn’t envision any woman who would submit to that. She loved him, yes, but his cruelty wouldn’t have come through while she was falling. It was only when he heard his brother was looking for him that he’d switch to that beast inside him, both crafting a plan and submitting to his yearnings at the same time. Drea was a pawn—she had to be. There was no way that girl looked me in the eye, her cheekbones cracked, her brain barely back to its regular size, and deliberately led us here as lambs.
Theo.
I snapped out of it, fumbling for my phone. When I found it, I pressed it to my ear. There was no connection. Theo would have hung up as soon as I yelled out the danger-word. I tried to unlock it with my fingerprint, but either I was too sweaty or trembly or all of the above, because it wasn’t working.
“Shit,” I squeaked, then tore down the hallway, envisioning where the best undisclosed entry would be.
Theo was on his way, and he was going to walk into a slaughter.
Still attempting to unlock my phone, I made the command, “Call Sax.” When my phone brightened, and an icon popped up stating “the definition of “saxophone” is…” I nearly flung it into the wall.
“Call Theo,” I said with as much pronunciation as I possessed.
The speaker replied, “calling Theo,” and I exhaled with so much relief, my back bowed forward.
I pictured Trace, grinning at the stupidity of my farce, when all the while he knew who it was trying to get away, despite my new brunette sheen. Drea would have told him Theo had someone with him, a female. Theo wasn’t known to bring his consorts round-trip. If Trace were also keeping an eye on my activities, much like his younger brother had these past years, then he would have noted my absence and put two and two together. He must also have known that as soon as I stumbled out of the playing room, I’d try to reach Theo.
Trace would have planned for it.
God dammit, how do you stay one step ahead of a cheetah?
“By picking up the fucking phone, that’s how!” I yelled at my cell once Theo’s voicemail clicked through. With one hand bunched in my skirt and the other holding a useless device, I stampeded up the stairs, around the corner, and through the kitchen. Two surprised chefs looked up at my flurry, but I was through the service entry and outside before either of them could say much.
I flew onto the terrace, peering through shadows since those were the only pockets Theo would stray. I couldn’t spot the shape of him, the slope of his shoulders or his broad back, nor his scar, a crack of white against the black. He wasn’t coming through the landscaped trees or the privacy fence, there was no sound of footsteps up the small staircase leading to a perfectly tended vegetable garden. Theo wasn’t here, not where we agreed upon. He wasn’t meeting me at our designated meet-up point, our escape plan scratched.
I spun, glancing up at windows, grazing over clouds, thinking maybe I’d gotten it wrong. This wasn’t where we agreed.
“Think, Scarlet, think.”
Tilting back to the door, I thought maybe there was a side entrance I got mixed up, or another service entrance I’d missed.
Then I heard the gunshot.
21 Stick Shift Emergency
When a certain crack of sound hits the air, the noise too quick to be a car backfiring, cutting off too fast and hard to be considered a firework, the pop so viscerally recognizable, so spine-chillingly accurate, an ancestral instinct deep inside of us immediately recognizes it as danger cutting through the air, target unknown.
Human nature is to run away from it.
I sprinted toward it.
Taking the same route I used to escape this house, I tore through the hallway and burst through the door leading into the poker room, and what greeted me was not what I exited mere minutes ago.
Men were toppled over on chairs, one spread eagled across the felt table. The fatherly one, the only kind man in here, remained prostrate in his seat, but was rubbing his forehead. There was no blood on any of them that I could detect. No bullet wounds. My own throbbed.
Quickly, I tallied the men, one key player missing.
Two, actually, my gut reminded.
Rebecca, the cocktail waitress, cowered in a corner, not quite standing, but not quite sitting, either. I ran over to her.
“What happened?”
“I…” she looked at me like I was shining a light into her eyes, and she flinched. “It was so fast.”
“What did Trace do? Rebecca, look at me. Please. Take a breath and tell me what happened. There’s not much time.”
She swallowed, and I took that moment of her hesitation to reach behind me and grab someone’s drink on the table that somehow remained unspilled. “Here. Gulp deep.”
She accepted the glass and drained the golden liquid.
“Someone was arguing outside the doors,” she began. I nodded my encouragement, outwardly calm. My heart drummed in my throat.
“It was a man, and he was angry. He and Edgar got into it. I…” She paused, thought. “Edgar didn’t win.”
Theo, I thought.
“So the man busted through the doors, and he asked”—She met my eyes quizzically— “He wanted to know where ‘Scarlet’ was.”
Yes, definitely Theo.
“He was so demanding. Frightening, just like … he looked exactly like Trace.”
“I know,” I said quietly.
“They saw each other,” she said, louder now. “They saw each other, and Trace grinned like—like something evil, and next thing I know, his lookalike was on top of him. Literally. They fought, the other players tried to intervene, but then Trace pulled out a gun and shot at the ceiling…”
Ah. The one area I hadn’t scanned. I followed her gaze and noted the small black hole in the molded fleur de lis pattern above.
“Everyone froze,” Rebecca continued. “Trace said he had Scarlet, that if this man wanted to see her again, he had to go with Trace. He did.”
“Did what? He went with Trace?”
“Yes. I told you it happened fast.”
I rescanned the room while I straightened, the men mumbling to themselves or smoothing out their shirts. Only a rivalry of the Saxon brotherhood would cause such a brief, potent scuffle, so much so that I doubted these men knew what to do with themselves during the aftermath.
“You all have to leave.”
Henry regained authority and stood from his curled up position under the table. “I’ll call the police if you don’t. This night is finished.”
Everyone here knew Henry wouldn’t call the cops if Trace were holding a knife to his throat and threatening to take all the cash. To involve the police would mean shutting down the lucrative House income he gained through these clandestine games.
I indiscriminately slipped through the hidden door, but not before digging my hands in the toppled-over lockbox on the floor and stuffing the bills in my cleavage. You never know when you need extra cash, and I’d have to pay Rada back someho
w.
Plodding my way a third time through the servant’s quarters, I ended up in the backyard. At this point, I should have thought of something. A bell inside my brain should’ve rang, informing me exactly where Trace had taken Theo and why Trace used me as bait to lead Theo elsewhere.
Instead, my mind was unusually, traitorously silent.
I thought of going back to Rada’s, but that held too much risk. Trace was aware of Theo’s and my plans, that we were together, and our intentions of ambushing Trace. It was up to Theo how to stuff Trace in a plane and to their father. My job was to be the lure, and after that, after getting the two of them in the same room, I was to…
The FBI.
Now was the time to press the necklace. My deal had not only come into fruition but graduated to necessary. Theo’s life was at stake. I had to find them. Now.
Theo.
My breaths hitched, though I wasn’t running. The mere thought of what Trace could be doing to Theo—what had already been done, Theo’s face—tore into my mind with such warp speed that there was no room for anything else. But there had to be. I had to get it together enough to stop standing in a stranger’s garden panicking and instead figure out where—
My brain clicked back into action.
Drea. She was the reason everything had gone to shit, which meant Trace knew where Drea was. And now that he had Theo, Trace had one more person to collect.
“You bastard,” I spat out, and kicked off my heels. I ran through the lawn, out of the property and over the hill, my old scar screaming at the sudden impact and skin-stretching I was usually so careful to control. “You’re not going to take Theo out of my life a second time.”
Theo’s car was idling, spare keys magnetized to the inside of the front bumper. I reached over the wheel, found the keys, got in, and whipped the car into gear.
It had been a while since I’d driven, but if Theo and I ever had a second chance, it was up to this stick shift to get me to where I needed to be.
Before we’d never have another moment together again.
* * *
By the time I figured out the navigation on my phone, gotten used to driving on the other side of the road, and re-mastered the stick-shift from my days of sharing an olive green Camry with my sister in Westchester, I knew it was too late.
I screamed at the wheel, my eyes threatening to spill saltwater all over my cheeks, and my face burned with the effort of containing the storm of emotion boiling its lava through my vocal cords.
I’d made it to where Drea was being treated, the place where Theo and I had taken steps a lifetime ago, in an old part of London, the stone moldings and uneven cobblestones made more Gothic and surreal in nightscape. The street was deserted, and though I knew the place where Drea was staying would be, too, I had to keep retracing steps. If I didn’t, it meant I’d failed, and I couldn’t accept that Theo had been so completely and successfully ripped away from me. Again.
Somehow, escaping the FBI’s radar and his family’s clutches seemed a possibility. That of all the fairytales, Theo and I deserved a happily ever after.
I’d been so immersed in losing Theo all those years ago, so determined to forget him and what we were, that I missed the very real advantage that at least he was alive. Out there, somewhere.
Now? He could already be dead.
That realization wrenched me out of the car and had me stumbling to the peeling, wooden door with a tiny rectangle of a window that Theo had knocked on yesterday.
This was the only option left. My palms landed on the wood, again and again, the slams communicating into the once-silent night that this was all I had. After this house, there was nothing to go on, nobody to go to, except to the very people who wanted Theo as badly as I did. And they wouldn’t want to save him, like me. They’d want him boxed in, handcuffed. Held captive.
To which did Theo deserve to go to? The devil’s dungeon to claim his soul, or the people’s jail cell to repent with his life?
I palmed my necklace, neck bowed, and turned, my back smacking against the door that remained still, locked and impenetrable. No footsteps sounded on the other end. I slid down, allowing the tears to fall, too.
“What have I done?” I whispered into the street. “Who have I become?”
A couture gown that wasn’t mine encased my body. I was in a foreign country, unfamiliar with both the accents and the land. My stellar poker ability was moot. Everything I’d worked for, the life I’d crafted after last seeing Theo, had been reduced to null. Losing my sister was a tattoo on my soul, the needle shearing through delicate skin, becoming a permanent mark on what once was flawless, but I’d reduced her life to nothing, because my survival didn’t matter.
I didn’t matter.
Trace couldn’t be stopped. Theo couldn’t be saved. Kai wouldn’t be redeemed. In five simple moments, life was overturned.
But that was how it worked, wasn’t it? One moment, and your sister’s dead. Two moments, and the man you love has walked out for good. Three, and you lose your best friend. Four, and the FBI comes in, barrels raised, but there’s nothing to shoot, because the deal you made no longer counts. There’s no Trace, and there certainly isn’t Theo. Five, and you’re in jail.
My head hit air, then smacked onto sudden ground.
It was so quick I didn’t have time to voice pain upon impact but raised my hands in an effort to find delayed balance.
“What the—”
“Bo?” I asked the upside-down face. “You’re here?” Hope spiked like a lightning bolt. “You’re here! Someone’s here!”
“Lady, you need to find another stoop to sleep this off.”
I scrambled to a sit, then tottered to a stand. “I thought this place was cleaned out. That there’d be no one left.”
“Just me. Oh, it’s you. What’s with the new hair?”
“Where’s Drea? Have you seen Theo? Trace—”
“Whoa. Slow down.”
“I can’t. This is an emergency. Theo could be hurt, or worse, and I don’t know where to start. Except for coming here. I thought you’d know where they took Drea, or if Trace found her and took her somewhere with Theo. If he’s holding them both hostage…” I trailed off, frustrated my thought process wasn’t working properly. “What could Trace need from Theo to convince their father he shouldn’t come home?”
“Huh?”
“Trace took Theo. Why?”
Bo took his time asking his next question. “Do you need to come in?”
“Yes.” I nearly knocked his shoulder off when I barreled forward.
I tracked the hallway, then the bathroom, then the main room before coming to a stop in the middle of the creaky wooden floors. Bo acted as spectator for the entire process, his back resting against the main wall, arms folded.
“Satisfied?” he asked when it was clear I was done mentally ransacking the place.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. And I mean it,” he said when I opened my mouth to argue. “Drea left here on her own. Voluntarily. She finished her tea, went to bed, and when I woke up, her room was empty.”
“She was gone as of this morning?”
“Yep.”
I shook my head, attempting to make sense of the revelation. “But she was so injured when we saw her … God, was it yesterday? How could she have…” My brows smoothed out the longer I studied Bo’s face. “She was faking it.”
“Not all of it.” Bo shrugged. “Her bruises and cuts were obvious. But as for anything on the inside…”
“But how did she manage to convince so many people? A doctor? If all she had was superficial cuts and bruises … Sax said he was getting updates from a doctor. A trusted family one who they used when in this country. Shit.” Another realization-bomb hit me between the eyes. “The doctor could have been on Trace’s payroll. Not Sax’s.”
“Don’t look at me. I just work here.”
“And you reported Drea missing to Theo when … this morning?”
At last, there was hesitation in Bo’s features. I stepped forward. “Bo, what aren’t you telling me? Need I remind you that Sax, your boss, could be somewhere under duress, and when he gets out, he’ll be mighty pissed. At you. Especially if you’re in any way responsible for his temporary incapacitation.”
“Look, I don’t get involved in their family business.”
“I’m not asking you to. I only want the facts of exactly what happened today and your role in it.”
Bo uncrossed his arms. “I’m not sure if I should get you involved in their family business, either.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?”
“I know what happened to you. A few years ago, when you got between the brothers back then. What’d you think will go on this time?”
“Yeah? Then you saw how I was. Naive, lost, grieving. Drawn to a world where sinners were favored over saints. I didn’t consider myself a saint then, and I don’t today, but I can assure you, my demons are smarter now.” My voice broke. “Thinking of Theo with Trace, knowing he’s only there because Trace used me as bait—again—I can’t just leave it at that. I need to get him out of there.”
Bo made a gargling sound in the back of his throat sounding suspiciously like scorn. “With what army?”
Oh, if only you knew. “The Saxons appreciate subtlety. So I’m doing this the best I can before involving anyone else.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. Where are they, Bo?”
He shook his head, his eyes taking on a careful gleam. “You’re too late, anyway.”
“Too late for what?”
“They’re long gone, honey. Probably in the air by now, flying back to New York City.”
I lifted my chin and said quietly. “So you’re on Trace’s payroll, too.”
“For a gifted poker player, you sure took a lot of events these past few days at face value.”
Because you were distracted, Letty. Your feelings for Theo overrode anything else. Even your own safety.
WIN THE GAME Page 17
