Final Fall

by Heather W. Petty

“You did this!” She pointed an accusatory digit at me, and I offered two by way of reply, then shoved the netting aside and plopped down on my cot. “Another one of your escape attempts? Only this time you went too far?”

  “It’s not the girl,” Trent growled. “There wasn’t time for her to kill a man while she was running from me.”

  “Running at you, you mean.” I shouldn’t have opened my mouth.

  “You had blood on your hands!” Alice accused, though her heart wasn’t in it.

  I blew my hair out of my eyes and gazed longingly at the divots I’d scratched into my wall. I hadn’t even fulfilled one of my promises yet. Not one. And tonight felt like a very good night to escape this place forever.

  “Why was she running from you?” Alice shouted next.

  Trent brought his hands up to his head. “It was just sparring.”

  “Which I won.”

  “In the dark? I told you to train her, not let her out of her cage in the pitch black so you can lose track of her.” Alice took a side step away from my bars, which I was pretty sure was subconscious.

  Trent shrugged. “What kind of soldier only gets his training in the light of day?”

  “The kind that has threatened to kill me more than once.”

  Trent glanced at me and I grinned as widely as I could manage with a split lip. He shook his head and shifted so his back was to me again.

  “I have the barn surrounded when we spar. She can’t escape.”

  “She beat you. How long until she breaks through your guards?”

  Trent stood and brushed dust off his jeans. “You said you wanted a sword.” He gestured toward me. “You’re welcome.”

  I heard running steps and sat up just as Stan reached Alice. He whispered something that made her go pale, and she grabbed the bars and stared at me. “Tell me it was you.” When I didn’t answer, she let her hands drop back to her side. “It has to be you.”

  She was terrified, which felt like an overreaction to one dead guard. Something else was wrong.

  “Why?” I asked. I glanced over and saw the guards covering Grady’s body with a tarp.

  “If it’s not you, then the rumors are true, and—”

  The sound of my name cut off the rest of her words, and soon I was surrounded by all three of my brothers and their endless questions.

  “Why is there a net on the floor?”

  “What’s under that tarp over there?”

  “Can’t everyone hear you peeing in here?”

  “When are you going to come live with us at the house?”

  I wanted to answer everything and revel in their visit, but Alice had dragged Trent away from my prison and I needed to hear what she would say to him.

  “You three go hide in the spot I showed you last time. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “I call the flashlight,” Seanie said, running off first. The others followed, jockeying for position, with Michael in the rear, laughing in that new, unfamiliar way he had that tore at my restraint.

  “Stop pretending like I’m the one who needs to calm down!” Alice seemed to have a better handle on herself, despite the yelling. “Do you think this is a coincidence? And now, of all times!”

  I inched forward enough to be able to hear and see both of them. Trent seemed calm, despite the pacing and ranting of his boss.

  “Someone in the village saw him. And if what you say is true, that she couldn’t have done this, then someone from the outside came in and killed one of my men! It has to be him.”

  “One of my men,” Trent countered. “And you need to stop your ranting on. They’ve just lost a mate, and you getting all worked up like you always do isn’t helping.”

  I thought she’d scream in outrage at his cheek, but instead her tone dropped to almost a whisper. “Just because you knew me when I was in there,” she said, whisking her finger around to point right at me, though I doubt she realized it, “doesn’t mean you know me now. It doesn’t mean you ever knew me.”

  Alice stepped forward until she was parallel with Trent, but looked past him. “Question your men. Find out who did this. You have twenty-four hours.”

  She stormed from the barn without looking back. I stared at Trent, knowing I wouldn’t get an explanation, but it looked like he wanted to say something. He stared right back at me for a long time before shaking his head and turning to bark orders at his men. Within the hour, the body and most of the guards were gone, and my brothers had stolen my bedding to turn the little alcove into a blanket-and-pillow fort, where they had promptly fallen asleep.

  I sat in the middle of the cell floor, eyes closed, trying to focus on the quiet around me for a while just as Trent had taught me to do. He said that learning the normal sounds of any environment would help me to discern when something was different, no matter how subtle.

  Evidently, that little trick of his doesn’t work well enough to notice a murder happening right beside you in the dark, Pretend Lock said.

  Listening wasn’t exactly my priority when I was hanging from the barn rafters and being charged by two men.

  Or perhaps nothing was different. Pretend Lock was as infuriatingly clever as Actual Lock. And he was right.

  Perhaps the reason we hadn’t noticed was that nothing was different, or, to be more specific, no one was different. If no one unexpected had entered the barn—if it had been an inside job. . . My eyes blinked open at the thought, only to find Trent sitting outside the bars, watching me.

  “What did you learn?” he asked.

  “That I’m possibly going mad in this place.” I toyed with the idea of telling him that he might have a murderer on his staff, but I wasn’t sure fueling Alice’s paranoia would be to my advantage.

  Trent studied my face for a moment, then let go of whatever question I thought he was going to ask me.

  “Would it concern you to know that I’m starting to hear voices in my head?” Not exactly true. It was only the one voice.

  Trent waved off my completely valid concerns, but he didn’t leave.

  After a few seconds I asked, “She’s actually leaving the boys here? Without a chaperone?”

  “She thinks they’ll be safer in there with you.”

  “She’s right. Though we could all be safer if you’d open the door and let us go.”

  Trent grunted his agreement, though he made no move to act. Of course he didn’t. I still hadn’t discovered what Alice had on him, much less how to free him from the hold she had over him. I hadn’t even figured out whether or not he’d help us at all.

  “What is she afraid of?” I asked.

  Trent didn’t answer.

  “Why safer in here?”

  “Someone killed a man right next to us while we fought. Doesn’t that frighten you at all?”

  “Are you frightened?”

  Trent studied my face, then shook his head. “I sometimes forget what you are.”

  He walked away before I could think of how to answer that, leaving me in my cage for the night. A cold draft filtered through the bars, and then the barn doors shut, and the lock clanked as it fell into place—my nightly reminder of my predicament. I could escape Trent. I could beat him. But none of that granted me my freedom. The barn was still my prison and Alice my warden—until she slipped up, that is.

  And I was very sure she’d slip up eventually. She wouldn’t be able to hold me forever.

  • • •

  In fact, it took Alice exactly seven more days to screw up. Three to make her first mistake, and it all started with her shouting entrance into the barn.

  “There’ll be no missteps tonight, gentlemen! Don’t forget what’s at stake here.”

  I heard Lucas’s voice, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying or how Alice responded, even when I stood as close to them as my cell would allow. But I did hear her say something like, “You’ll get your payment in full at the end of the week.” I mightn’t have learned anything else, but Alice couldn’t help but come over to comment o
n my continued imprisonment.

  “You’re being quiet. Should I be concerned?”

  “When I come for you, it won’t be quiet.”

  Alice chuckled. “Still acting out? And here I am about to give you a present.”

  “Letting me go?”

  She laughed again. “Better! I’m sending your brothers to stay the night with you.”

  The second time in three days, and the last time she’d sent them to me to keep them safe. I had to know what was going on. I moved closer to the bars to study her expression when I asked, “Why?”

  “Must I have a reason?” She was too good at masking herself in careless amusement for me to see anything useful. But I supposed knowing it was only a mask was something.

  “Yes. You always have a reason for everything.”

  “I’m having a visitor, and I want the house to myself.”

  She spoke in this flirty way that was supposed to make me think she was going on a date, but I didn’t buy it. I suspected the first half of what she said was true, but she shifted her eyes away when she said the second half. “Maybe if you tell me what’s really going on, I can help.”

  She seemed to consider that. “Would you help me?”

  “I’d help my brothers.”

  Alice stepped closer, but not near enough so I could reach her. She was very careful about that. “If you really cared for your brothers as much as you say you do, you’d join me.  You’ll never find anyone who loves them more than me.”

  I entertained an image of me pulling Alice up against the bars and explaining that I would never leave my brothers’ care to a manipulative, psychopathic bitch like her. But until we escaped, she had power over them, over how often I got to see them, and I couldn’t risk making her too angry. Not yet.

  “When will my brothers be here?”

  “Soon,” Alice said, donning her most chipper facade. “Think about what I said.”

  Had I wounded her? Perhaps I had. But did she really think she could convince someone to follow her by locking them up in a prison cell? Was that what had happened to her?

  Chapter 6

  This time when the boys arrived, Nurse Olivia was ushering them inside my cage. She bowed her head to me in some kind of formal greeting, and I tried my best not to laugh at that. Over the last few months, I’d learned that Liv, as she wanted me to call her, had grown up in Piddinghoe and used to spend her summers on the farm, circling in orbit around the five-years-older Alice as if she were a mysterious American sun.

  The mystique of Alice had lingered throughout the years, increasing when she would be gone for longer and longer periods, coming home with a variety of new friends, hair colors, and hush-hush identities. Which was how Liv had met my mum. She’d known me as well from way back then, though I was too young to remember. Still, we’d become fast friends, and it had been especially entertaining to watch her loyalties shift from Alice to me as she became more and more appalled at my “auntie’s” behavior.

  From the moment she’d agreed to help me escape, she’d put on a show for Alice—all formalities and professionalism—a facade that quickly faded whenever we were alone.

  “She’s not here,” I said over the noise of my brothers trying to decide where best to set up their sleeping bags. “Though she told me the boys would be coming. Just not why.”

  Liv nodded. “Something’s happened, but I couldn’t figure out what before she sent us here. I did manage to bring this.”

  We sat on the cot, and she glanced around to check for spying eyes before passing me a brochure. I double-checked that Lucas still had his back to us, then arranged a blanket on my lap so I could open the booklet under the cover.

  The Whittington International Academy was a boys-only boarding school in the States. Despite its posh name, the school itself seemed to mix high academics with actual playtime and lots of focus on the arts. There was even a special-needs program for Michael and a garden the kids could work in if they wanted.

  “Michael’s healthy enough to travel?”

  Liv nodded.

  I’d looked at a dozen of these brochures that Liv had snuck in to me either herself or through the boys. I’d looked at this one several times before, but this time the pictures sent a pang through my chest, because the boys’ acceptance letter to the school was tucked inside. “Only a few weeks,” I whispered. “We’ll only be apart for a little while.”

  Liv rested her hand on my shoulder in that way she had that was somehow reassuring and warm, but nonintrusive. “You’re doing what’s best for them. You’re removing them from an impossible situation and keeping them safe.” She paused, but I could feel the unspoken question that lingered in the air.

  “I can’t go with them,” I said. “I have to make sure no one comes looking for them ever again. I have to make it safe.”

  Liv nodded and sat up a little straighter. “Payment has been sent. Their acceptance is secured.”

  “You found the money, then?”

  “It was right where you said.”

  I smiled at that and said a silent thank-you to Alice, our unknowing benefactor. Liv was one of the few people allowed to come and go from the farm as she pleased, which meant she was also the perfect person to clear out the cash from Alice and my mum’s hiding spot by St. John’s Church.

  “I took exactly half like you said. There may be more there than you think.”

  “More?”

  “Much more than you said would be there. I saw the stack you told me about, with the plastic wrapped around it. But there was another stack on top and a third to the side. And there were gold coins and jewelry in a sack.”

  “Of course.” It was all so clear the moment she described it. Obviously Alice had consolidated her wealth in the best hiding place she knew. “She’s getting ready to leave. I should have known.”

  “I took the entire stack and half of another. I left the gold and jewels alone, though. Did I take too much?”

  “No. And you can have as much of our half as you’d like. I only need to set up the boys and put some away for when I can join them. Just to get us started.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “You’re saving our lives. I’m trusting you with theirs. The very least I can give you is money.”

  “I’ve taken enough to live quite nicely for a year in the States, and set aside plenty for when you come to relieve me. The rest I’ll take to my cousin. He said he can put it into a trust for you and the boys in London. You can transfer funds as you need overseas within what the law will allow.”

  “You’ve paid him as well, for all the legal advice?”

  Liv nodded and started to smile, but paused a moment to study my face, like it was the last time she’d ever see it. “I wasn’t sure, you know. That night when you attacked Miss Alice the way you did. I thought maybe those boys had no one in the world to care for them. I’m glad I was wrong.”

  I closed the brochure and reluctantly passed it back to Liv. “I think I heard her say we’re leaving for America at the end of the week.”

  “Very well. I’ll have the boys’ things packed and ready.”

  “Four days,” I said. “Four days to figure out how to escape clean and give you a head start.”

  “Are you sure you want to do it this way? It might be easier to run away once we’re all in America. She wouldn’t know where to find us.”

  I shook my head. “Alice and I have business to attend to here. Neither of us are crossing that ocean. I have to come up with a way that lets you leave without us.”

  “Couldn’t you use the extra money to pay off the guards?”

  “I could try, but I don’t know how much Alice has promised them, and Trent isn’t in it for the money.. . .”

  Saying his name evoked the memory of my begging him to help that night in the garden and his refusal. He’d said she promised the guards double their pay if they got all of us on the plane to America. I knew then that they’d never get those bonuses, because I wasn’t
getting on that plane. But what if she couldn’t pay?

  I stared at Liv. “I need you to go back and take all the money. All of it. The jewels and gold, too. There can’t be a note left in that hiding space.”

  “Why?”

  I grinned. “I think I’ve figured out the first half of my escape plan.”

  The barn door opened, and Liv stood quickly, pretending to check on my brothers. Alice walked in, the very picture of poise. She was even dolled up as though she were going on an actual date. For the slimmest of seconds, I almost believed her story, but I knew it couldn’t be true.

  “You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to free you of this cage soon.”

  “Are you sure I’m all fixed the way you’d like? I understand it took the last girl in this cage more than two hundred twenty-three days.”

  Alice glanced from Liv to me.

  “Oh, sorry. Did you not want her to know?” I stepped toward the bars and stage-whispered, “Was it Mummy or Daddy who kept you in here? Were they doing it for your own good?”

  Alice smirked and whispered back. “Did you ever consider that it was all a farce? That I marked up that door on the off chance that there was enough humanity left in you to feel pity for me?”

  I smiled. “Pity for my captor?”

  Alice didn’t smile. “For your protector. For your guardian. For your friend.”

  The audacity of her words sent heat through my chest. “My friend?”

  “I’d like to be.” She’d tried this tactic with me before, but this time she actually seemed earnest. Desperate. Something definitely had changed.

  I gestured around me. “Is this how you treat your friends?”

  “I wouldn’t have to if you’d drop the attitude and realize how much I’ve done for you. We’re about to leave for a strange country. You’re going to need as many friends as you can get.”

  “My last friend was left strangled under a tree. Are you sure you want to make that offer?”

  “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “No. But what did you call it? My sin?”

  Alice’s look of sincerity dropped to nothing.

  I tilted my head and studied her face before I said, “Do you really think I want to be friends with someone like you?”