Until the Day I Die(84)
“Tell me, Lach. What’s your sister got on you?”
He grabs my shirt and, swinging me around, slams me against a tree. He pushes his face inches from mine, and I suck in a breath. He pulls me toward him and slams me against the trunk once more. I cry out at the pain that shoots down my back into both legs. Lach pushes my face sideways into the trunk, and the sharp bark digs into my skin. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Antonia knows where my kid is.” His voice is devoid of emotion. “So she offered me a deal. I do three of these jobs for her; she tells me where he is. So I can get my boy back.”
“You don’t need her. Listen—”
“No,” he barks, holding me against the tree. “You listen to me. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Who you’re dealing with. When my sister was six, I gave her a gecko for her birthday. The next morning? Thing was dead. She’d stayed up all night, pinching off its legs, one by one, with a pair of pliers.
“When she was eleven, she stabbed our stepmother in the left eye with a pencil. There was a new stepmother after that, two months later. Then, when she was fifteen, she put a cigarette lighter to her boyfriend’s dick. Third-degree burns. He was too scared to report her.”
He releases me, and I stumble a few feet away. Out of arm’s reach.
“She’s psychotic,” he says. “A fucking nutcase. The only thing my father could do with her was stick her out in the middle of nowhere before she either killed all of us or got herself locked up. She’ll kill my son if I don’t do her dirty work.”
I fold my arms. “So why the hell are we still talking? Why haven’t you killed me?”
He doesn’t answer me, but his icy eyes look flat. Determined.
And then I see it, clear as the crystal Caribbean sea. “You double-crossed her, didn’t you? You said if she didn’t tell you where your son was, you were going to let me go. I’m the asset.”
He doesn’t answer, just lunges forward and grabs my arm. As he pulls me down the path, I can’t help but suppress a small smile. I’m right, I know it. Lach finally got enough of Antonia, and he’s turned the tables on her. He’s going to set me free.
Free.
I try to keep my breathing steady. This is good news. Excellent news, in fact. No matter how things go down. Lach is negotiating with Antonia, and negotiations take time and involve emotion. Which can be a weakness, if that emotion is manipulated correctly. Even if everything goes sideways, there will be a million more opportunities to worm my way out of this situation.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Shut up,” he snaps.
I let him drag me along, my mind clicking away a mile a minute. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can’t give up hope. Lach’s decision to go rogue is good. And I still have his phone. This is the very best thing. Because it means I still have a connection to Shorie.
47
SHORIE
When we get off the ferry in Ile Saint Sigo, Arch says he wants to eat before we get a taxi and set off for Hidden Sands. They gave us oatmeal, yogurt, and fruit on the plane, and Arch had a couple of Bloody Marys, so this strikes me as suspicious. Like maybe he’s stalling or something. And that fills me with a whole bunch of extremely negative feelings.
Foreboding, helplessness, pure fright . . .
At this point, I have no real data—no idea why my grandfather came with me, what his plan is, or if he’ll hurt me if I get in his way. All I know is this: I think he and Sabine may have sent my mother down here to die.
But I will die before I let that happen.
For now, though, I need to act like I have no idea what’s going on. And let him take the lead. There’s a restaurant right next door to the ferry terminal, and we duck in. Every wall is painted a different color of the rainbow, and the ceiling is hung with silver Christmas tree garland. It’s hot, only about a degree or two cooler than the air outside. We choose a table near the back, and when Arch excuses himself to go to the bathroom, I whip out my phone.
Banana Crepes—US$3.50, Jax is recommending cheerily. Coffee—US$1.00
I open my messages. There’s nothing from Mom, only that same request I saw earlier from that guy I’d never heard of, Lachlan Erdman. I’d have to approve his request to read the message, but that’s not going to happen. I don’t read messages from people I don’t know. “Lach,” if that’s even his real name, says he’s from Connecticut and has his arm draped around a kid. Bot account, probably.
I put my phone facedown on the table and peruse the menu. Of course, since Jax mentioned banana crepes, that’s all I can think of, so I decide on that with a mango-strawberry smoothie. I drum my fingers on the table and sip the tepid water the server leaves.
My brain feels on the verge of exploding. It feels like I’m in a computer program, and all these hidden processes—previously unknown to me—have been running in the background all along and now they’re shooting out notifications, and I don’t know how to find the original function.
But I should be able to figure this out. At its heart, a program is nothing but a story. And a story is simply a problem to be solved. A progression of if-then-else in programmingspeak. So everything I know thus far—that Sabine and Arch are having an affair, that she’s stealing from Jax’s users, and Mom messed up her plans with her announcement that she wanted to sell the company—that’s the if part.