Hard Truths (Kiss Her Goodbye Book 1)

by Rebecca Royce

  I hoped I could sleep better tonight knowing it was locked.

  I grabbed my coat and made my way outside. How did a person know if the ice was thick enough to walk on it? Did I put my foot on it and just see? I buttoned up my coat. How did people get through January or February if it was this cold in March? My coat wasn’t going to get the job done. I must have been really worked up yesterday not to notice.

  That didn’t seem to be the case today. I was fully aware of the temperature outside. Eventually, I reached the water. Or what would be the water if it wasn’t so frozen outside.

  I stared at it. I was a Louisiana girl. We had some colder days in Baton Rouge but never anything like this. Not even in our coldest parts of winter. I don’t think it was this cold when it snowed. I shivered. Okay, maybe I was being dramatic.

  I finally got to the edge. I didn’t know what I’d expected to see, but I didn’t have an aha moment where I suddenly understood if the ice was thick enough or not to walk on. I picked up a rock off the ground, and I threw it at the ice. It didn’t crack. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

  “It’s freezing out here.”

  I jumped as W spoke. I hadn’t heard him approach. How early did these guys get up? I hadn’t slept late and so far at least three of them had been up and out before me.

  “It is.” I agreed. What else was there to say?

  He stepped toward me. “This is not my weather. I was not built for this weather.”

  “Are you from somewhere warm? Like me?”

  He nodded. “I was born in the United States, in Georgia, actually. But I was raised in Saudi Arabia. Well, raised for ten years. Then back to the States. At that point it was southern California. So no, I’m not used to this weather.” He looked past me. “I suppose if I was trying to get away from here I might try to walk on the ice.”

  I sighed. “Don’t act like you read my mind. This is obvious.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “I would never claim to read minds. Although I’ve been trained to understand what people are thinking most of the time. It comes with The Alliance. So if I was going to try to get out of here I would contemplate running on the ice. All I can tell you is what J told me a month ago. The ice may be thin right here on the edge. I wouldn’t risk walking on it. If it cracks under you and you end up in the water you’re dead. I, for one, am not going in after you.”

  I shook my head. “My father will do all that work to get back a dead daughter.”

  “True.”

  “If he got me back at all. I mean, who would fish out my frozen dead body? That would be such an aggravation.” I dramatically rolled my eyes.

  W threw his head back and laughed. “Truth. Come back to the house. It’s cold.”

  “I have nothing to do there.” I’d spoken the words, and I couldn’t take them back. “I can’t imagine that I’m going to sit around here for the next few months and do nothing. What am I supposed to do?”

  He nodded. “You want something to do? That’s not going to be too hard to figure out. We’ll tell T. He is very good at finding things for people to do. I’m sure we can work that right out. Keep you as busy as a bee.”

  I should probably have kept my mouth shut. He nodded in the direction of the house, and I walked toward it. “I just can’t… believe this is happening. I’m not sure I’m processing this. I think I might be in some kind of long-term denial.”

  “I don’t know if twenty-four hours counts as long-term.” He laughed again. I wouldn’t have pinned him as someone who did a lot of that. “I remember when I first found out. Like you, I wasn’t supposed to know.”

  That didn’t make sense. “Why is that? You’re male. I thought that was the trick here. Be born with a penis and get entrance into a secret society to rule the world.”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that. For example, if you were to have a son, he’d have entrance. It doesn’t die with the birth of just girls. The next boy born gets entrance, which can make it complicated in the event that several generations go without a male born.”

  I didn’t want to be fascinated with this, but I was. “How does that work?”

  “There are people in The Alliance who are tasked with handling that. I’ve never personally been to one of those interventions. But it happens.”

  My mind whirled with questions. “What happens if a person is born female, but is transgendered. How does that work?”

  “They get entrance. It’s not that complicated. Men get entrance.”

  I pointed at him. “But you just said you weren’t supposed to know. So clearly there is something else going on here.”

  “I’m the second son. I have an older brother. He was born three years before me. He knew from the time he could understand, usually that’s when a person is twelve, that he was Alliance. Dad trained him for the role. I was never supposed to know anything about it. But go and get yourself killed in a skiing accident and guess what? Second son suddenly has to be Alliance ready.” He shrugged. “That was a great sixteenth birthday present. Both the death and the membership on the same day.”

  Wow. That seemed… intense. I didn’t want to feel for this man. He was one fifth of the team keeping me prisoner. And yet I did. I wasn’t an idiot. It would be useful for me to make him a friend, and I was sure he thought the same. Better to keep me compliant if I believed he gave a shit.

  Still, my stomach did turn over, thinking of the pain he had to still deal with.

  He put a hand on my arm. “Don’t feel too badly for me. I’m rich and powerful. And it was a long time ago. Twenty-two years, actually. Time moved. Fast.”

  Well, that answered another question. He was thirty-eight years old. I’d have placed him right about there in age. “Big plans for your fortieth in two years?”

  “Why yes.” He nodded. “I plan to be celebrating my one year anniversary of taking control of the world.”

  And there it was. The Alliance was a new concept to me. But it was real. I could never forget for a second, even if they all turned out to be laughers with sad stories, they had an objective, and it was to rule the world.

  I answered his statement from earlier, even if it didn’t require a response. “I can’t get my head around it to be honest. I’m not sure I can really deal with the idea that the five of you walk around ruling things.”

  “The ruling council does, actually. We’re members. We play important roles but for now we are not in charge.” He smiled. “Very soon we will be.”

  We’d arrived back at the house. W leaned forward, and he opened the door. He brushed by me, smelling like Giorgio Armani cologne. I knew the scent well. It was one of my favorites on a guy. If I came across it in a bar, I took a second look to see who was wearing it. It was expensive, so guys who wore it were few and far between. But this man was older, rich, and even if his face wouldn’t grace the cover of magazines there was something about him that screamed sex.

  In other circumstances, I’d never have shoved him out of my bed.

  I walked through the door and nearly collided with T.

  “Just the man I wanted to see.” W pulled me out of the way before I could hit him. He set me to the side.

  T smiled but there was no joy in his eyes. “Do you have a problem?”

  He didn’t like the idea that there was a problem. That I could tell from the way he used that word.

  W shook his head. “Not like that.”

  “Okay.” He shifted his stance slightly. “What’s up?”

  W put his arm around me, which was really odd. I stiffened. “Girl needs something to do.”

  T blinked. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, she’s going to be here for months. And wandering the island all day every day isn’t going to work for very long.”

  T pointed at the library. “Books. We have books upon books. Go read.”

  “Go read?” I had to answer. “That’s what I’m going to do for months? Read?” Actually, that sounded like heaven. Of course, it depe
nded on the book.

  “I’ll find something.”

  Why did I talk before I thought? Twice now I’d really stuck my foot in it.

  Chapter 5

  T, who once again was in an entirely black outfit, told me to sit myself down, and since it didn’t seem like I should be arguing right at that moment, I did as instructed. He left the room without a word, leaving me alone in the dining room. Marco walked out of the kitchen and stared at me for a moment before he continued on silently. I almost signed to him. I really didn’t like not telling him I understood him. It seemed sort of like lying by omission.

  But then I remembered I was in a spider web. I was twisting and turning, trying to get out, not get pulled in deeper.

  K was the chattiest so far, although W had been pretty talkative down by the water. He hadn’t glared at me, so maybe I had to take glaring eyes away from what I knew about him. K—the man who didn’t want to be accused of not liking women. W—the man who had become a member of The Alliance at 16 when his brother died. J—who signed to his deaf employee and had my room fixed. T—who was once again wearing black and who was apparently going to find me something to do. D—with his man bun maybe shooting at ice somewhere.

  The Letters held me prisoner because of some kind of internal trouble in The Alliance. An organization I hadn’t even known existed until yesterday. Tears swarmed my eyes, and I blinked them away. I wouldn’t cry where they could see me. I’d spare myself that kind of humiliation.

  T returned, pausing in the doorway. I sat back in my chair. “Do you always wear black?”

  He nodded. “Most of the time. I prefer it, always have.”

  “Are you some kind of vampire?”

  He held a manila folder in his hand and scooted down the table next to me. “That would be sort of obvious for a vampire, wouldn’t it?”

  “Like it would be obvious for members of The Alliance to be famous people like presidents or prime ministers.”

  His smile was slow. “Exactly. You can’t be what you need to be if everyone notices it. Not unless you want to be a celebrity. As for the presidents and the prime ministers? They work for The Alliance, even when they don’t know it.”

  I sighed. “And you just run things? From here? In J’s dining room.”

  “Not from the dining room, no.” He set down the folder. “You wanted something to do. Here is something for you to do.”

  He opened up the folder and I stared inside. There was a stack of papers in it. When I looked closer, a stack of resumes stared back up at me.

  “Hiring someone for the kidnapping business?”

  A corner of T’s mouth lifted in amusement. “I didn’t kidnap you. I mean, I suppose I did. I was part of the decision to take you, but the actual kidnapping was D’s job. And I guess to answer your question, no, I am not hiring someone to kidnap people. I am hiring someone, yes. I want you to go through this. There are, I believe, five hundred resumes here. I want you to put them in a yes pile and a no pile. Just divide them. Yes. No.”

  I stared at him for a second. “I’ve never hired anyone for anything in my life. I’ve practically gotten on my knees and begged for summer internships. I’ve never… been on the other side.”

  “Now see?” He made a tsking sound in his mouth. “Never beg. Never beg anyone for anything, Everly. For the rest of your life, you will remember that you are Alliance. Oh, maybe just on the outside, but you’ll know it. And your attitude will be different because of it.” He leaned forward just a bit. “They’ll be begging you to work for them.”

  I waved my hand in the air. This was ridiculous. “Because I had the pleasure of being kidnapped by the five of you?”

  “Because you had the luck of having the wool taken off your eyes so that you could know the truth of the world.”

  I should just shut up but that wasn’t my way. “While I get to live here taking threats to my life?”

  He ignored me. “Go through these. Yes pile. No pile.”

  I guessed my total ineptitude at this was not dissuading him. “What is the job for?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  My head hurt. “You can’t seriously expect me to hire someone from a pile of resumes if I don’t know what the person is expected to do.”

  “Sure I can. Work it out. Read their qualifications. Decide who you’d hire to do something for you.”

  I grabbed his arm when he would have gotten up. He stared at it for a second, before he hardened his gaze, as if daring me to keep holding on. I didn’t stop. Respect with these guys would be hard won. If I was truly to be stuck here, I wasn’t going to be a wilting flower.

  “This is bullshit right? Something you made up to give me something to do? I’m going to spend hours looking at resumes, and at the end you’ll throw them in the air and say something like aww, did you think that was real, how ridiculous.”

  He paused before answering. “Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. But you’ll do the task because you want to. You’re intrigued. Can you figure out what I need to hire for a job you can’t know about? Or you can go in the other room and see if J has anything to read that won’t bore you to death. He really, really likes ancient Roman history. I know that you’re bright and intellectual. That we saw on your resume. You might like a week or two of pottery. But you’re always going to wonder what you would have found in here.”

  Damn him for being right. “What do you do when you’re not holding people hostage to get their fathers to do something for you?”

  He grinned. “I’m a teacher, Everly, but that won’t tell you anything about this job I’m hiring for. Good try though.”

  I hadn’t been trying to manipulate that information. I wished I had been that smart. I was really not doing well with this sneaky thing.

  “You hate me right now. I can see it in your eyes. You have very expressive eyes.” I rolled those eyes right in his face, and he grabbed my chin, forcing me to look at him. What did he want to see? I’d give him the complete opposite. T abruptly dropped my face and stormed from the table.

  I breathed hard like I’d been through a race. That was very… odd.

  A noise caught my attention before D strode into the room. He was in jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt. Strapped to his back was a deer. A dead, still bleeding deer with a head wound. I jumped, pulling my feet up against me on the chair. He didn’t look up at me, just continued to carry his dead deer through the room, the blood coating the floor as he walked through the dining room with his kill.

  I tried to swallow. Well, I guessed that answered a question I hadn’t asked. Did D ever kill anything when he shot his gun or was it just an ice filled lake taking his bullets? Yes, he did. I really did have to be careful. He’d been the one to kidnap me. I didn’t want to end up being the next thing strapped to his back, bleeding on the fucking floor.

  I shivered and grabbed the resumes. Even if it was bullshit, I’d do it. Anything to not think about this mess I’d landed in for no other reason than the circumstances of my birth.

  I studied the resumes for hours before I started trying to sort them into anything. The problem was that there wasn’t anything the same about any of them. I had expected some sort of sameness that would indicate what the job was. Like if everyone studied psychology, maybe it had to do with that.

  But there was nothing so easy to help me determine what I was supposed to do.

  The people had no names. They were numbers on top of a page. Sometimes I could determine if they were male or female. If someone listed they had once been the beauty pageant queen of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that gave me a pretty good indication they’d been a woman at least when they’d won that pageant. But it wasn’t like there were a lot of those indicators. No names. Just schools and job history. Nothing to create a trail.

  I finally had to give up on that. I started reading the resumes and asking myself if there was something about that person I’d find interesting to have around. If they’d done something that was quirky or interesting, they
went into the yes pile. If they seemed very mundane and hadn’t really presented an interesting picture, they went into the no. Of course, I could have been missing the best-qualified person in the world since I didn’t know what the fuck the job was.

  And there was the nagging problem of wondering if anyone would actually want to work for T if they knew who he was to begin with. Maybe everyone should be in the no pile.

  It took me another few hours to go through them and then to move through the piles once again just to be sure I was comfortable with my totally ridiculous assessment in the first place. When I was done, I went looking for T. None of them had told me where to find them and not since D and the deer episode—a problem Marco had been scrubbing off the floor ever since—had I seen any of them.

  The house was quiet. So they were either all in their rooms or in some secret location—like the basement—together.

  When they weren’t in the library, something that looked like a study, or the living room, I gave up trying to find them. At some point maybe I’d need to know whose bedroom was whose, but today was not going to be that day.

  I found Constance in the kitchen. She was chopping onions. Immediately, my eyes started to water.

  “Hi, I’m so sorry to bother you. But I need to find T. Do you know where he is?”

  She didn’t look up. “I’m not his keeper. They don’t tell me where they’re going, and I don’t ask.”

  Well, that was no help at all. “I’m not feeling well. He left me with a project. I have to get it to him.”

  Marco, who must have come in the room without me noticing, knocked on the table to get my attention. I turned toward him. He motioned me forward, and I followed him. Constance sighed before she signed to him, letting him know the smartest thing he could do was not get involved in this mess.