Take the Key and Lock Her Up (Embassy Row #3)(33)

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” Noah says.

“I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s impossible,” Megan says, throwing up her hands. Noah’s starting to fire back when Alexei laughs. It’s a cruel, cold sound.

“What is it?” Megan asks him.

“People don’t get sent to Binevale because they’re dangerous. They get sent because they’re the kind of people no one is going to come looking for.”

As this settles over us, that a woman’s own son would say such a thing, Rosie nods thoughtfully. Then she asks, “So explosion? Or helicopter. Because—”

“We don’t have to break her out,” I say.

“But we could,” Rosie says.

“We have to talk to her,” I say. “I have to talk to her.”

“Grace, I don’t think they’re going to let you walk up to the gates and schedule a meeting,” Megan points out.

“No.” I turn to the boy beside me. “But they might let her son do it.”

“She no longer has a son.”

He’s out the door before I can catch him.

Sometimes, when I was a kid, Dad would go away. We wouldn’t know where. We wouldn’t know for how long. We just knew that—if we were lucky—he’d come back eventually.

And, eventually, he always did.

Sometimes, in the days or weeks after, I’d wake up to the sight of light flickering in the hallway. I’d crawl out of bed to find my dad sprawled on the living room couch, some show on the TV that he wasn’t really watching.

“I’m too tired to sleep, Gracie,” he’d say. He’d be bruised, scarred, and alert at all hours of the night. He was home, but his mind was still off in some faraway war zone, struggling to stay alive.

That’s what it feels like now. My body knows that it should rest, but my head just won’t let it. I trust Megan when she says this house is secret and secure. I’m sure that we’re as safe here as we are anywhere. But that isn’t saying much.

Finally, I close my eyes, and my mind drifts. I hear my mother’s voice. I see her sitting on the stairs. The beautiful box is on her lap.

“See, Gracie, it’s a puzzle box,” she says.

“Open it for me,” I tell her.

But Mom only laughs. “That would be cheating, sweetheart. Besides”—she runs her hand along the wood—“I don’t know how. Yet.”

I sit upright in bed. Sleep, I know, will never come. So I ease out from beside a snoring, kicking Rosie and start toward the main room.

The box is sitting on the table, atop the pile of papers and photos from Mom’s shop. It’s cool and smooth as I run my hands across the surface.

“What’s that?”

Megan’s voice makes me jump. I whirl and take in her form standing in the shadows. Slowly, she comes forward.

I look back at the box. There’s a single light on in the kitchen, a bare fluorescent bulb that burns low, casting the box in its yellow light.

“It was my mom’s,” I say. “I think it was a puzzle box.”

All Megan really needs to hear is puzzle, and then she’s standing beside me, fully intrigued.

“Do you know how to open it?” she asks as she leans down and eyes it at table level.

“No.”

Megan has never turned away from a challenge. “Do you mind if I try?”

I hold my hands out, as if to say, Go ahead.

For a moment, she just looks at it, studying the different pieces of wood that blend together in a gorgeous mix of light and dark.

Then, carefully, she reaches for it, running a fingertip along the strips of wood.

“I saw this once,” I tell her. “When I was a little girl. Mom told me that I’d figure out how to open it when I needed to.”

“I don’t see anything,” Megan tells me, standing upright again. “But it’s beautiful. Do you mind if I work on it for a while?”

“Go ahead,” I say. But I’m not optimistic.





This is a mistake.”

I’ve seen Alexei cocky and scared and worried, but nervous is a whole new look on him. I’m not sure if it’s the Soviet-era institution that scares him or the woman we hope to find inside.

No, I realize then. I do know. And I can’t blame him for what he’s feeling.

The morning air is cold, and a heavy frost lies on the ground around us. The night was long and winter is coming, and I want to get out of here before we all start to freeze. But it’s too late for the boy beside me. His heart froze over ages ago.

I try to make light of it. “I know this whole plan seems a little crazy. But crazy is kind of normal for us these days, isn’t it?”

“We should leave her in there,” Alexei says.

“We are going to leave her in there. We’re just going to talk to her—find out what happened.”

“We should leave her in there. Alone.”

I’ve known love, and I’ve known hate. But I’ve never seen how easily one can morph into the other. Alexei’s mother left him. She didn’t just hurt him; she changed him. And I know the boy beside me is proof of what happens when you grow up knowing you’re the kind of person who can be left behind.