Liquid Lies (38 page)

So many promises. She prayed she wouldn’t have to pick and choose which ones to keep.

He passed out. An Ofarian lugged him over his shoulder.

They fled the house. Outside, the vans loaded up, circled the drive, and gunned it up the steep hill back to the road. They jumped the curb and swerved around the helicopter, heading north. The sirens and flashing lights approached from the south.

Griffin pulled her up the steep drive, sprinting right into the gale created by the copter. Her calves and thighs burned. Her lungs pressed flat against her ribs. She fell into the helicopter, Griffin following suit half a second later. He yanked the door shut and the craft lifted with a jolt.

Up, up they rose. The sun had set, and the blue and red lights of the Primary police sparkled brightly in the new darkness below. She wondered what they would find in the lake house when they investigated. She wondered what, if anything, they would make of it.

Had the Ofarian soldiers royally screwed up? By coming after her in the way they had, had they compromised themselves?

The copter careened southwest, back toward San Francisco. Back to the only place she’d ever called home. Back to the place she dreaded.
This must be what it feels like,
she thought,
to have your arm ripped off then reattached, only to have your body reject it.

She sensed eyes on her and turned from the window to find Griffin watching her with a dark, guarded expression. What had Reed told him? Where
was
Reed?

Griffin gave her a small but firm shake of the head, echoing what he’d conveyed in the house.
Not here
.

A terrible
BOOM
shook the entire valley. Overtook the deafening buzz of the helicopter. Vibrated in her chest.

“Fuck, what was that?” Griffin screamed, motioning for the pilot to circle and check it out.

The pilot banked sharply to the right. When they came about, a great fireball tumbled upward, smoke and flame unfolding, swallowing every inch of the rocky promontory where the lake house had sat.

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t feel her skin. Couldn’t hear. The helicopter froze in midair.

Another explosion consumed the boathouse. The submarine had been in there. A hideous wail filled the helicopter cabin and she realized, seconds later, that it was hers.

Nora’s final statement. Her fail-safe, should anything go wrong. If returning to Tedra wasn’t going to happen on her terms, it wasn’t going to happen at all.

THIRTY-FIVE

The helicopter touched down on a circular cement pad some-
where on the peninsula. It wasn’t San Francisco International; it didn’t even feel municipal. Another of the Company’s hidden places secured with money bled from Tedran lives.

A huge silver BMW waited at the edge of the pad.

“My dad?” she gasped as the helicopter blades whined to a stop.

Griffin shook his head. “The Chairman is on his way back from Saint Petersburg. A few others have to fly in on red-eyes. The Board’ll gather tomorrow.”

That left her a little speechless. She’d only been “dead” a week and the Board was already back at work? She could understand the others, but her dad? He’d mourned Delia’s exile for weeks. But then, Delia had never been nearly as involved in the Company as Gwen.

As they hurried to the waiting car, Griffin pressed the communication piece in his ear. “That kid’s still out,” he reported to her.

She worried about Genesai. “He may be for a while. Can they get him to me? I should be the first person he sees when he wakes up.”

Griffin eyed her, then nodded before relaying the order. “Who is he?”

“Not a Tedran.”

The fact that Griffin didn’t ask another question said that he knew far more than he was letting on. Everything she needed to say bubbled up inside her, threatening to split her skin. As they tumbled into the waiting BMW, she opened her mouth to let out a barrage of her own questions, but he gave that little shake of his head again and pointed to the ceiling. Company car. Of course it was bugged.

Griffin directed the driver to the fluorescent-lit corner diner the two of them had always turned to in their early twenties when their late-night, alcohol-filled stomachs demanded it. They wedged themselves into a booth, their butts barely touching the vinyl before their voices overlapped.

“What the
hell
is going on, Gwen?”

“What do you know?”

“I can’t believe you’re alive.”

“How did you find me?”

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“Did you talk to Reed? Where is he?”

“Reed.” Griffin leaned back. “You want to start with
him
?”

She swallowed, trying to bring moisture to her dry mouth. “You knew where I was, which means you must have talked to him. Have you seen him? Is he alive?”

She’d only been gone a week, but Griffin’s eyes seemed much darker than she remembered. He just sat there, staring at her.

“Oh, God.” Her breath hitched. “Just tell me.”

“He’s alive.”

She started to laugh. A hysterical, crazy sort of laughter.

“He’s being held with the Tedrans at the Plant.”

The laughter died. “What?”

Jaw set tight, Griffin ground out, “It was the only way. I had to tell the Board we caught the kidnapper. How would that look if I hadn’t?”

“You captured him?”

“At least I know where he is now.”

“Yeah, but you
captured
him?”

Griffin showed her his palms. “Whoa. I think you need to back up and start from the beginning. I’m flying blind here.”

She twisted the zipper on her sweater. “Can you tell me what he said to you when he called? I’ll fill in the rest.”

He ran a hand through his glossy brown hair. The pieces around his ears and neck curled a bit. Stubble shadowed his cheeks and chin. So unusual for Griffin, who’d always made a point to be styled and shaved.

“I almost didn’t pick up the phone.” He stared at his hands, fingers spread on the table. “The number came through as ‘private,’ but I just had a feeling. I can’t explain it. It was almost a premonition. Like how, even when my back is to the door, I know when you walk into a room.”

Though he said it matter-of-factly, an uncomfortable flush crept up her neck.

“I thought you were dead—we all did—but I knew the phone call had something to do with you. Then I heard this guy’s voice and my stomach dropped. He said there wasn’t time to talk but that you were still alive, being held hostage by the Tedrans. I asked him if he was one of them and he said no. Then he told me I couldn’t go after you until he told me the whole story.
Only
me.

“He said, ‘I don’t care about your fucking war. I’m concerned about Gwen and want her safe, and if you bust in now with guns drawn, she won’t be.’ I remember exactly what he said because of the way he said it, like he had everything to lose. I demanded to know who he was and he told me his name. Then he said he’d contact me again. That was the first time we talked, yesterday morning.”

Her nose tingled. “The first time?”

“Yeah. I waited the whole day to hear from him again. Almost went out of my mind with fear for you. I told myself if I didn’t hear back from him in twenty-four hours, I’d go to the Board. Then last night he called back. He sounded out of breath, shaken. Told me to get up to Tahoe to meet him. Alone.”

She stretched across the table and covered Griffin’s hands with her own.

“I could’ve set a detail on him, could’ve brought the entire security force with me.” He still didn’t meet her eyes.

“But you didn’t.”

He shook his head. “It was the fact that he’d called me and not your father. It was the desperation in his voice. And”—he finally lifted his eyes to hers, and they were haunted—“that I already knew who he was.”

Huh?

“I remembered his name. When you told the Board about the night you first saw the Tedrans, you said the Primary who met with them was named Reed. When he said that was his name, I knew he wasn’t lying because I remembered he’d been talking to you before the Tedrans ever came in. I remembered he was the guy who’d attacked Yoshi.”

She didn’t like the wary look on Griffin’s face. Her hands turned clammy but she didn’t want to let his go.

“So I drove up to Tahoe and met him. Gwen, he told me everything.”

A huge sigh of relief left her body. She knew Reed would have been quick and direct; it wasn’t in his nature to bullshit or skate around the issues. That meant Griffin knew all about the Tedrans and the Plant and
Mendacia
.

But when Griffin’s expression turned rock hard, dread dropped like a stone into her gut. “Wait.” Her voice went hollow. “Everything?”

Griffin withdrew his hands.

A waitress plopped sloshing cups of coffee between them. Gwen regarded them with surprise even though she and Griffin had ordered them the second they’d walked in the diner.

“Gwen, you
slept
with him? The Primary who kidnapped you? The man working for the Tedrans?” The disgust in his voice hardened as ice on her skin. “Please tell me you did it so he’d help you escape. Please tell me you used him.”

Stars, she wanted to. “I can’t.”

He punched hard into the booth cushion, air whooshing out of it. “Do you understand how this sounds? How this makes me feel?”

“Of course I do.” Only the truth would help them now. Sort of like breaking a bone again to set it right. “It’s more than the Allure. Maybe it started out as Allure, but sometime in the past week it shifted.”

His hands started to shake, and he tried to hide them under the table. “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

“I think you have to.” He cringed. “It’ll help you make some sense of this mess. I knew someday I’d have to tell you. It won’t be easy to hear. Hell, I can’t even believe it happened.”

So she told Griffin about Reed. The whole story. She started with the scene in the alley and described their conversation in Manny’s. Everything she hadn’t told the Board. Everything she’d kept to herself.

She went through all their interactions at the lake house, everything but the erotic details. Griffin had to know that her and Reed’s relationship wasn’t just circumstantial, that you couldn’t have thrown a different kidnapper at her and gotten the same outcome. That it had started out as the Allure and ended up someplace else entirely.

Through it all, Griffin stared at his smeared reflection in the metal napkin dispenser.

When she finished, ending with Xavier’s admission that he hadn’t killed Reed, she opened her arms. “There. Now you know everything I do.”

He pulled out a napkin and started to pick it to pieces. “Not true. I know something you don’t.”

Her heartbeat stuttered. Something about the Plant or her father or the Board. Something that would render the slaves’ rescue impossible. Something that would prevent her from going after Reed…

“What is it?”

Griffin laughed without any bit of humor. “You know, at first I thought I was imagining it, that I was reading too much into it. I thought you were dead. I was still grieving and my thoughts weren’t exactly straight. Then all of a sudden here was the very guy who’d taken you, talking to me about someone who I considered to be a ghost. He couldn’t possibly be for real, I thought. He couldn’t possibly know you as well as it seemed.”

The napkin disintegrated in his fingers. He cupped his jaw in the crook of his hand. He still wouldn’t look at her.

“I tried to talk myself out of believing it, but it was pretty damn persistent. I saw it in his eyes. It came through in the tension in his voice, how he told me your story.” Griffin ducked his chin. “Reed doesn’t give a flying fuck about Ofarians or Tedrans. It’s all for you.”

She could only sit there as Griffin’s word tsunami bore down on her. At last he met her eyes.

“He’s in love with you, Gwen.”

This, from the man the Board wanted her to marry.

“I…I don’t think so. We’ve known each other a week.”

“Took me less time than that to fall in love with you. The first hint from the Board about our match, and bam, it just hit me. So I know what it looks like, to love you. I saw it in him.”

She pressed her forehead to the Formica table, which smelled of eggs and coffee.

“Do you love him?”

Her fingers found Reed’s watch, still hiding in her sweater pocket. She pictured him lying back on that low bed in the attic cell, one big arm draped behind his head, tattooed mysteries wrapping themselves around his hard chest. She heard his voice in her head, telling her about his drive to learn and his life’s regrets, about what was written on his body. She saw that slash of a dimple, meant only for her.

“I don’t know,” she said to the table. “Maybe.”

But as she raised her head and met Griffin’s expectant gaze, they both knew she was lying.

The coffee between them was getting cold but she clenched the mug, dying for it to give her warmth and strength. As she shook her head, greasy strands of hair brushed her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry to do this to you.”

Griffin looked like a deflated balloon. Boneless, resigned, and brokenhearted. He slid out of the booth.

She panicked. “Where are you going?”

A thumb jutted toward the back. “The bathroom. Give me a minute.”

She watched the bathroom door with a twisted stomach. When he shuffled back, his hairline was damp. For a moment he stood motionless at the end of the table, and she worried he was deciding whether or not to sit back down. She needed him. What they had to do was much, much bigger than their personal relationship, even if she had made some wrong choices.

“I won’t pretend to understand what’s happened between you two,” he said, finally flopping back onto the cushioned bench.

A sick feeling rolled through her. “Is that why you took Reed?”

His pause lasted forever. “No.” Then his head twisted and he sneered at his reflection in the window. “Maybe partly. I don’t know. When I walked away after first meeting him, I was so confused. I was angry at the Board, at our ancestors. Angry at you and Reed…”