The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (29 page)

“Give me your phone,” Jill said.

Annika pulled out her phone, but
hesitated to give it to Jill. Jill snatched it from her hands.

“Why do you need--”

“Because Kim’s more likely to
take a call from you than she is from me,” Jill said.

“We’re gonna call her?”

Jill was already dialing.

“Are you sure this is a good
idea?” Annika said.

“Don’t be scared,” said Jill.
“Kim has this reputation of destroying people who mess with her, but I’ve been
getting the best of her all semester.”

“What are you going to say?
Maybe we should talk about this first.”

A click on the other end of the
line. Kim’s voice, speaking quietly:  “Hello Annika. Do you have a draft of
your message for me yet?”

“What’s up Kim? It’s Jill.”

Silence. Kim was probably
thinking about hanging up. It’s what Jill would do. She needed to keep her on
the line.

“What do you think of all this?”
Jill said. “We go to the Rose Ransom expecting a girl to get called up from the
audience, and instead Renata shows us a picture of Nicky and Ryan. Pretty
crazy, huh?”

More silence.

“Have you figured out the clue
yet?” Jill said. “Because I haven’t.”

She could hear Kim breathing,
but she wasn’t saying anything. Jill could sense Kim’s conflict burning across
the airwaves. On the one hand, Kim had to know that the best thing she could do
was hang up, that Jill wouldn’t have made this call unless it was to her
benefit.

On the other hand, Kim loved to
gloat. Jill could only imagine how badly Kim wanted to put her in her place
after all that had gone down in the past few weeks. Kim wasn’t saying anything
because her mind told her not to, but she wasn’t hanging up because her cold,
black heart was keeping her on the line.

“Do you think they just want to
kill Nicky, and that’s why the clue is so hard?”

That got a chuckle out of Kim,
ever so slight, and then a few words. “I don’t know, Jill. Is that what you
think?”

“Here’s what I think, Kim. Either
you’re the gutsiest girl walking the earth, or the stupidest.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell
me why you think that,” Kim said.

“Only if you want to hear it.”

A second of silence passed, then
Kim said, “Please, enlighten me.”

“You had the gall to threaten
Annika,” Jill said. “You had the nerve to go there when you knew full well that
it would anger me, and that I’m the last person you want to make angry.”

Kim let out a big, phony laugh
at that line. It reminded Jill of Kim’s first encounter with Nicky at the
Masquerade. A hearty, look-how-cocky-I-am laugh that actually betrayed her
insecurity.

“It’s cute when you act tough,
Jill. But we all know that you’re nothing but a lapdog, just like that panting,
decrepit bitch you call mother.”

Jill shook her head. A week ago,
Kim might have gotten a rise out of her with that one, but now, having faced
off with Bernadette Paiz in her own house, Jill saw Kim as a little kid in the
schoolyard spewing little kid insults.

As if to confirm what Jill was
thinking, Kim kept on going, turning her insult into an angry juvenile tirade.

“You are the bastard child of
the most fucked up family I’ve ever met,” Kim said, “and believe me, I’ve met
some fucked up families. When your mother stood on the altar and promised to
honor, cherish, and
obey
, she really meant it. She’s a mindless robot
who
obeys
everything your prick of a father tells her to do, and your
entire family fortune is built on that obedience. You’re a fraud, Jill
Wentworth. You go to Thorndike and play the role of a girl who belongs in high
society, but your family is nothing more than glorified trailer trash, and I
can’t wait for the day when I get to hunt you down and drink you dry.”

“Are you finished?” Jill said.

“Oh, I could go on all night.”

“Before you do, let me remind
you what the score is. You know secrets about me. I know secrets about you. We
talked about this after the Date Auction.”

“I remember our little chat that
night,” Kim said, “and the conversation I had with Annika is an entirely
separate matter. Whatever things you think you know about my family have
nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, they have everything to do
with it,” Jill said. “I don’t think you fully understood me last time, so I’ll
spell it out for you. You don’t get to blackmail me or my friends, ever. Your
daddy bought slaves from Melissa Mayhew for years and I have a chain of emails
to prove it. When we go down, we all go down together.”

“You’re bluffing, Jill. You know
it, I know it, and Annika knows it.”

“Really? Annika knows it? You
think you know what’s in Annika’s head? Maybe we should just ask her.”

Jill pulled the phone away from
her ear and put it on speaker. “Say hi, Annika.”

“Hello, Kim,” Annika said in a
flat voice.

“So Kim, Annika heard what I
just said to you, but for the benefit of both of you, I’ll repeat it. Galen
Renwick has filled his muckraking business with slaves who were born on the
Farm and illegally sold to him. The immortals would love to know the truth
about Renwick Consulting, and I have emails in my possession I could turn over
to them at any time.”

“Annika, those emails implicate
Jill’s parents in the same scheme,” said Kim. “She will never turn them over to
the clan.”

“Maybe I would, maybe I
wouldn’t,” said Jill. “Doesn’t matter. Annika’s just heard the truth from both
our mouths. She can’t unhear it. If you tell the clan about Shannon, they will
come to Annika and look in her mind, and when they do, they’ll learn the truth
about all of us.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,
Annika,” Kim said. “Jill would see all of us go down. I’m offering you a
lifeline.”

“She doesn’t need a lifeline,
Kim. You’re not breathing a word about Shannon to anyone.”

“Don’t act like you know what
I’m going to do. Don’t act like what’s happening at school doesn’t have you
scared shitless, Jill. Renata abducted a girl wearing black for the first time
in the 70-year history of the Rose Ransom, and the first clue she gave us is
impossible to solve. You said it yourself, Jill. The clan wants her dead. The
Rose Ransom is the most convenient way to kill her. The clues are impossible,
no one finds her, and then we all watch her die at the year-end party.”

“I think we’re done here, Kim.”

“Annika! Nicky is finished!
Support me now and all is forgiven! Turn your back on me and I’ll crush you.
You hear me? I will crush you!”

Jill ended the call.

“Wow,” Annika said. “What the
hell just happened?”

“We sprung you loose from the
secret Kim was holding over your head, that’s what happened.”

“That was really something. The
way you talked to Kim. I had no idea you had that in you.”

“I didn’t either, not until
recently, anyway. That’s not the first time Kim and I have shared words.”

“I can tell. What were you guys
saying about a chat after the Date Auction?”

“It’s nothing you need to worry
about,” said Jill. “Other than what we already told you. My dad and Kim’s dad
have done some rotten things. We’re holding secrets over each other’s heads.
Kind of a mutually assured destruction thing. Sorry you have to be a part of
it.”

“No apologies necessary.
But….what do we do now?”

It was a good question. Even
before Annika arrived with news that Kim was trying to blackmail her, Jill
didn’t know what they did next. She had solved the problem of Kim, but hadn’t
solved the many other problems that were locking her in place.

Fortunately, she had a
convenient rule to tell her what to do when she didn’t know how to proceed.

I choose to do what’s right.

She didn’t know how to make the
right choice regarding the Rose Ransom clue, or the silence from the Network,
or her mother, who, as Kim so eloquently reminded her, was stuck in a horrible
situation and needed help.

But she did know the right thing
to do with the girl sitting in her bedroom. Annika Fleming was getting buried
deeper and deeper in the darkness that surrounded Jill. She had to act before
the darkness swallowed her up, just like it had swallowed Nicky and Ryan.

“Here’s what we do now,” Jill
said, “We talk about getting a passport made for Shannon, and we start planning
your escape.”

“My escape? Where am I going?”

It was interesting to hear
Annika speak this way. For so long, their relationship had been one where
Annika was the leader and Jill just another of her followers. All of that had
changed. Annika’s face and tone of voice were those of a student looking for
guidance. She would do whatever Jill told her to do.

“Wherever you and Shannon want
to spend the rest of your lives, that’s where,” Jill said.

“I can’t leave now. My trust
fund.”

“I’m not going to tell you how
to live your life, Annika. If you want to stay here and risk it so you and
Shannon can get the money that’s coming to you, that’s your choice. But I want
to make sure you’re ready to bolt in a moment’s notice.”

“Why would I need to bolt? I
thought we just took care of my problem. Didn’t we?”

“Yes, we’ve neutralized Kim for
now, but something else is bound to come up before we’re done here. If Kim
knows about Shannon, that means her parents do as well. The Renwicks hired
someone to go to Rio and spy on Shannon. Whoever that person was knows about
her too. And what if another person developed this picture? And what if someone
in Shannon’s hotel saw that she was being photographed. And what if someone
other than the Renwicks saw those wire transfers you made?”

Annika sat on Jill’s bed,
looking stunned. “Mercy,” she whispered. “I hadn’t thought about all that.”

Jill sat at her laptop, brought
up the encryption code to anonymize her session, then hopped on the Internet.

“Grab a piece of paper from the
printer,” she said. “And there’s a pen in my desk drawer.”

“What am I writing down?”

“Whatever notes you need to take
on all the things I’m about to show you.”

For the next hour, Jill taught
Annika how to move about on the web in a way that no spying eyes could see her.
She gave her the addresses for chat rooms and message boards for the
underground sections of the web. She taught Annika the code words to use when
she introduced herself to these people, and the etiquette required when she was
talking to them. She didn’t tell Annika that the people on these boards were
subversives, who had either run afoul of the clan or were actively fighting
against them. She didn’t need to. There was an unspoken understanding between
them. Jill didn’t tell Annika anything more than what she absolutely needed to
know, and Annika didn’t ask questions.

“Find some time this weekend
when you know you’ll be alone,” Jill told her. “Go to the message board and
find someone who can make you a Brazilian passport, and an American one.
They’ll tell you exactly where to go and what to do, all the way down to what
clothing to wear. Follow their instructions exactly. If you give them any
reason not to trust you, you won’t get a thing from them.”

“So I’m going to make two
passports for Shannon, one from Brazil and one from America.”

“You’re going to make two for
Shannon, and two for you. You’re going to make up new names for both of you.
You’re going to get out of America using an alias, and once you’re gone, you’re
never going to be Annika Fleming again.”

“Got it,” Annika said, her voice
quivering.

Next, Jill showed Annika how to
open a bank account in Switzerland.

“You’ll need two accounts,” she
said. “You’ll open one under your real name, and one under your alias. These
accounts will not be the final parking place for your money. They’re just to
hide your tracks.”

Annika filled her page with
notes on front and back. Jill grabbed her another sheet of paper.

“Now we need to talk about your
phone. I’ve already secured it so you can talk to Shannon. But we need to lock it
down in a way that you can disappear entirely.”

She had Annika write down a
sequence of steps, starting in the settings section of her phone, then
continuing through a download of an illegal software patch on her computer.

“You need to do this on Shannon’s
phone as well, then the two of you need to make a pact that you will only speak
on the phone when you know the other party has a secure connection. Once you’re
on the run, the clan will add the sound of your voice to its database, and its
software will listen for you throughout the world.”

“God, that’s sounds awful,”
Annika said.

“It doesn’t have to be,” said
Jill. “There are people who can help you stay hidden. There are things you can
do, tools you can use, to live a normal life. Let me show you.”

Now Jill took Annika on a tour
of the most secret places on the Internet, places where the Network roamed. She
taught Annika how to introduce herself, how to describe her situation.

“Once you make contact with
these people, you are part of the Network,” Jill said.

“The Network,” Annika whispered.

Annika was looking right at
Jill, her mouth falling open, recognition dawning in her eyes.

“Being in the Network doesn’t
mean you’re actively engaged in the war against the clan,” Jill said, “but it
does mean you are part of the cause. They will ask you to make your home
available as a safe house for agents on assignment. They will ask if you want
to do more to help. You can do as much or as little as you choose.”

“Nicky,” Annika said quietly.
“You and Nicky. The Coronation contest.”

“I’ve never said anything about
me and Nicky being in the Network, Annika. Do you understand?”