Читать книгу The Mistress - Tiffany Reisz - Страница 20

Laila pulled her knees to her chest on the sofa and shivered. Why was it so cold in here? Was it cold? Somewhere over her head one man spoke to another man. Although she spoke English almost as well as her native Danish, their words did not register with her. She heard static, white noise, and could only stare with fixed eyes at the doorway.

“What’s your name?” a gentle male voice asked in English. “Can you tell me your name?”

Finally the words cut through the static.

“Laila,” she whispered.

“Laila. That’s a pretty name. I’m Wes.”

“Hi, Wes.” She blinked and looked at him. Her eyes finally started to focus and she at last saw the person who’d carried her into the house. Before he’d just been a presence, male and tall. Now she saw him. He had shaggy blond hair and warm brown eyes and easily the most handsome face she’d ever seen on a man in her life. Man? Maybe not. He didn’t look that much older than her. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe.

“Are you hurt anywhere?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think so.”

“Your face is bleeding a little. It looks like you scraped it on the concrete. We’ll clean it up and you’ll be okay.”

“Okay.”

He spoke with such quiet confidence that Laila believed him immediately even if he meant only the cut on her face would be okay.

He took her hand in hers and she clung to it, desperate for comfort from this stranger. He didn’t feel like a stranger to her, though. He didn’t ask her questions about what had happened to her, how she’d gotten here. He knew somehow. He was part of this. They were part of this together.

“Laila?” A familiar voice cut through the haze and she sat up immediately, throwing herself in her uncle’s arms. The one moment of peace she’d felt looking in Wes’s eyes disappeared as the floodgate broke. She sobbed against his shoulder as he gathered her to him on the sofa. In between her choking sobs, she told him the story. She’d come to surprise him. She’d gone into the rectory. She thought no one was home. She heard footsteps … something covered her head. She fought, she struggled, but no amount of thrashing would get her free. They’d taken her somewhere in the trunk of a car. It felt like days in the car but probably only a few hours. When the car stopped, someone pulled her out and when they yanked the blindfold off, she saw …

“I saw Tante Elle. They have her,” she said, switching to English. Other people had come into the room while she was speaking—a beautiful woman with red hair and freckles and a man with dark hair, olive skin and dangerous eyes. They looked as scared as her uncle, as scared as her.

“Who?” Wes asked, over Laila’s shoulder.

“Eleanor,” Søren explained, kissing Laila on top of her head. “Laila and her sister consider Eleanor their aunt. Go on, Laila.”

“She was there on the floor.”

“Was she hurt?” Wes asked.

Laila shook her head. “She has some bruises on her arms, on her face. There was another woman there and a man with a gun.”

“What did the woman look like?” asked the man with shoulder-length dark hair. He spoke in a French accent. Kingsley, that was his name. Her aunt had told her about the handsome Frenchman who she called the bane of her existence. From her tante Elle it had sounded like a compliment.

She stared at him.

“She looked a little like you.” The man shook his head and he swore under his breath. He turned his back to the room. “But older,” Laila continued. “And angry. She was smiling but she looked very angry.”

“What did she say?” Her uncle brushed the hair off her face.

“She said awful things …” Laila returned to her Danish, not wanting anyone else to hear. She told her uncle everything the woman had said, everything her aunt said in defiance. And she told him about the choice they had to make. Laila buried her head against his chest when she confessed what her aunt had done and how powerless she’d been to stop her.

“Søren?” The redheaded woman with the freckles came closer. “What did she say?”

Laila only listened as her uncle recited her tale in English. He left out the part about the woman calling her tante Elle a “whore.”

“Marie-Laure made them choose,” he said, his voice low but steady. “She told Eleanor and Laila that one of them could leave and deliver a message to me. The other one had to stay behind as … entertainment. Eleanor …”

He paused to clear his throat and Laila began to cry again, sobbing silently against his chest.

“What?” Wes asked. “What happened?”

“Eleanor covered Laila’s mouth so she couldn’t volunteer. So Laila was allowed to leave with her message.”

He fell silent and no one in the room spoke. The confession of her aunt’s sacrifice had made mutes of them all.

“Dammit, Nora …” Wes was the first to speak. She winced at his words, felt her own failure to speak in time, felt more than anything shame over how relieved she was that she’d been allowed to go free.

“She gave me a note to give you.” Laila dug in her jeans pocket and pulled out the paper. “She said to tell you that she gave you her death as a gift and now she was taking her gift back. She said God had a message for you, too.”

Kingsley exhaled noisily and with great and very French disgust.

“And what does God have to tell us?” he demanded.

“She said that God says no more sinning. Time for atonement.”

No one said anything as Laila held out the note to her uncle. Without any show of emotion he read the words before handing it to Kingsley. Kingsley took it from his hand and opened the note.

“What does it say?” Wes demanded. Laila was grateful he’d asked. She hadn’t gotten to read it. “Is it a ransom note? I’ll pay whatever they ask.”

“Not a ransom.” Kingsley balled up the note. “And it doesn’t matter what it says because we’re not going to let her play us.”

“It does matter what it says.” Wes stood up and walked over to Kingsley. “I’ll play any game I have to if it means getting Nora back.”

“You’re not the one she wants to play with, Wesley,” Søren said, and Laila looked up at him. “Kingsley and I are the ones she’s angry with, the ones she’s trying to hurt.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” Wes faced her uncle with fury in his eyes. She’d never seen anyone look at her uncle like that.

“Whatever I have to.” Her uncle said the words simply and without a trace of fear. For some reason his lack of fear and the quiet determination in his voice scared her more than her own kidnapping had.

“And then what?” Wes asked.

“I get her out,” Kingsley said.

“You get her out?” Wes turned to Kingsley. “You and what army?”

“I don’t need an army.”

“What? Are you the French James Bond or something?”

“Of course not. James Bond is vanilla.”

“I feel so much better now,” Wes said as he scraped his fingers through his hair. “Kinky James Bond is going to rescue Nora. Thanks but maybe it’s time we get the cops involved.”

“Call the police if you want her dead. By all means, call them. They love to blare their sirens so the whole world knows they’re coming. Do you know how easy it is to kill someone like …” Kingsley raised his hand and snapped his fingers loudly in Wesley’s ear, so loudly Wesley flinched. “Like that. The speed of sound is 342 meters per second. The speed of a bullet is four times that. She’ll be dead before they can even knock on the door. I promise you, she’s guarded. Every minute of every hour someone with a gun is within shooting distance of her. One wrong step equals one bullet.”

“We have to do something. We don’t even know where she is,” Wes said.

“I do.” Laila sat up and wiped her face. “I know where she is.”

“Where?” Wes looked down at her and she saw hope in his eyes.

Laila reached up and unclasped her necklace. She flipped open the locket and passed it to her uncle.

“That room.”

“What room?” The redheaded woman leaned over her uncle’s shoulder and stared at the picture. Laila didn’t have to look. She’d worn the silver heirloom locket for most of her life, knew the photographs in it better than she knew her own face. On one side of the locket was a picture of her grandmother holding her mother as a newborn baby. On the other side of the locket was a photograph of her grandmother holding her uncle Søren as a newborn. Her grandmother had kept a box of photographs that she looked at from time to time. They all seemed to be taken in the same room—a library with a fireplace. Gold walls, green curtains. She’d asked her grandmother about it once and her grandmother had said she would rather not talk about her time living in America. All that mattered, her grandmother said with a sad smile, was that she gave birth to her son while in that country. He made up for everything.

“Are you sure?” her uncle asked.

She nodded. “I saw the pictures in Mormor’s box. There was one where she sat by a fireplace holding you. She wasn’t smiling. But it was that room in my locket, the one Tante Elle is in. I know it was.”

“Søren?” Wes’s voice prompted her uncle to look up from the locket.

“Eleanor’s at my half sister’s house. She’s at Elizabeth’s.”

“Your sister’s house?” Wes asked. “Is she involved in this, too?”

Søren shook his head. “No, I told Elizabeth to leave the country and travel, to stay on the move. I’d been afraid something like this would happen. She and her sons left last week. She’s not home. She’s not part of this.”

“We’re sure she’s at your sister’s?” Kingsley asked.

“Yes.” Søren looked at Kingsley, who nodded as if Søren had given him some kind of telepathic message.

“We’ll go, then,” Kingsley said. “I’ll call him right now.”

“Call who?” Wes asked. “Go where?”

“We have a friend who lives near his sister’s,” Kingsley explained as he pulled a phone out of his trouser pocket. “Only ten miles away. I’ll be able to plan better if I’m closer. I may have to come and go several times. I need a base. His house is perfect.”

“A friend of yours? Can we trust this guy?” Wes stared aggressively at both Kingsley and her uncle. For the first time she wondered who he was, what he was to her aunt that made him so deeply a part of this nightmare.

“We can trust him. He owes me. He owes him, too.” Kingsley nodded at Søren as he scrolled through the numbers on his phone. “And he owes our missing Maîtresse most of all.”

Laila sensed excitement in the air. Not excitement, no. More like anticipation and even a measure of relief. They knew something now, something more than they did before. And even more, they knew something the woman who had her aunt didn’t know they knew. They knew where to find her.

“He doesn’t owe you anything,” her uncle said with obvious exasperation.

“He kicked me out of my own bedroom. He owes me.”

“Who is he? Nora’s life is on the line here. If you won’t even let me call the police—”

“He’s on our side, I promise,” Kingsley said. “Trust me, you’ll like him. He’s nice and dull. Married, a family man. He’s even … honorable.” Kingsley said the last word like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

“A nice and honorable family man?” Wes repeated, sounding utterly shocked Kingsley would associate with such a person. “Then why are you friends with him?”

“Because he’s kinky as hell, and I used to fuck his first wife.”

“Kingsley, please,” Søren said, scowling.

“This is why no children are allowed in my house.” Kingsley winked at Laila. “You turn everyone vanilla.”

“I’m eighteen now,” Laila protested.

“I was talking about him.” Kingsley pointed at Wes with his phone. Laila smiled at Wes, who rolled his eyes.

Kingsley raised the phone to his ear. Someone on the other end answered as Kingsley grinned like the devil himself.

“Wake up, Daniel. I’m calling in that favor you owe us.”