Queen (The Blackcoat Rebellion #3)(24)
Driving through the streets and seeing the gradual shift from poverty-stricken and hungry to rich and well fed was even more striking now that I’d spent so much time in Elsewhere. Knox and I were both silent as we took it all in, and at last he pulled up to the side of the street in one of the most affluent areas of D.C., only blocks from Somerset.
“Here.” He handed me a black knit hat and sunglasses. “It isn’t the best disguise, but we only need to get into that alleyway.”
“Your face is just as familiar as mine is,” I pointed out as I put them on. He shrugged.
“I’ll pull my hood up. We’ll be fine.”
That was about as ominous as he could get, but the entrance into the tunnel that led underneath Somerset wasn’t far. Fifty feet at the most, buried in the alleyway behind a rusted door no self-respecting V or VI would have ever touched. As far as I knew, there were no cameras in the alleyway—there couldn’t possibly be, not when that tunnel had gone undiscovered for so long.
We piled out of the car into a misting rain, and when he offered me his elbow, I took it. This wasn’t entirely unlike the first time we’d wandered the city together, shortly after a bombing had put the Hart family into lockdown. Rather than behave, we’d snuck out for a night at a club—or at least that was what I’d thought. Instead, Knox had tried to negotiate a weapons acquisition, and that had been the first time I’d noticed there was much more tohim than the facade of a spoiled Minister’s son he showed the world.
We made it to the door without incident. Knox pulled the rusting handle, and I could sense his relief when it opened to reveal a dark descending stairway. “Ladies first.”
“You just want me to take the bullet for you,” I said, but I ducked inside anyway. I remembered exactly how many steps it took to reach the bottom, and I counted in my head as Knox pulled the door shut, leaving us in complete darkness.
“Someone took the flashlight,” he said, his heavy footsteps following mine.
“We don’t need it. It’s a straight shot.” Once we reached Somerset, there would be enough ambient light for us to make it through to Knox’s old suite, where a trapdoor opened up into his closet. In the meantime, I ran my hand along the dirt wall, smooth from I didn’t know how many years of use. Someone had built this tunnel at some point, but until Knox had revealed it to me, he and Lila had been the only two living people to know about it. Not so much anymore.
“I can’t believe they left this unguarded,” I said a few hundred feet later. It was eerie, walking through pitch blackness, not knowing for sure where it would end. Against my better judgment, I reached back and grabbed the first part of Knox I could find: his sleeve.
“We’ll find out once we reach Somerset,” he muttered, prying my grip from his jacket and taking my hand instead. His skin was warm and rough, and despite the tension in his voice, he wrapped his fingers around mine gently. “Ifthey’re smart, they’ll have guards stationed at that entrance, and they’ll know we’re coming. If the Shields tried to infiltrate this way, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
“Why would you want to shoot fish in a barrel?” I said. “That metaphor makes no sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” he argued. “It’s not about why you’d do it. It’s about how easy it would be if you did—”
He stopped suddenly, tugging me back when I tried to keep going. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I said. “If there’s someone at the end of the tunnel, we’ll tell them who we are, and—”
“No need, Kitty.” A woman’s voice sounded only a foot away from me, and I heard the click of a gun behind me. “I know exactly who you are.”
VI
Sacrifice
It had been months since I’d seen her face-to-face, but I would have recognized Celia Hart’s voice anywhere. Even underground in a black tunnel, with my heart pounding and adrenaline rushing through my body like I was in a race, I could picture her in my mind, clear as anything. Dark hair so unlike her daughter’s, blue eyes, the porcelain Hart skin; tall and athletic, with a strong jaw, a beauty mark below her left eye, and a look of disdain for anyone who dared to get in her way.
“Is this really necessary?” said Knox calmly.
“Yes, it is. And get your hand off your weapon,” she said. “There’s another soldier behind you, ready to pull the trigger if you so much as unholster it.”
She must have been wearing night vision goggles, I realized. No wonder she’d been able to sneak up on us without either of us figuring it out. Now that I knew she was here, I could smell her shampoo and sense the heat of her body in the cool air.
“We’re not the enemy, Celia,” said Knox. “There’s no reason for this.”
“There’s every reason for it when I’ve gone to the trouble of stabbing my fake brother in the heart and hanging him up by his neck, only to discover it wasn’t my fake brother after all.” She nudged the small of my back with her gun. “Start walking, Kitty.”
I stumbled forward in the darkness, not letting go of Knox’s hand. “You think we’re Masked?”
“If you really are who you say you are, you didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said. “You gave no indication you had any desire to visit D.C. And considering we have a strong family tradition of forcing other people to look like us for money, rank, or so-called patriotism, yes, I think it’s a strong possibility that the impostor would have gone to this sort of trouble.”