Spiders in the Grove (In the Company of Killers #7)(39)
You mean he gave it all up for love. Any woman would be lucky to find a man like that…
Joaquin grabs Naeva by her hair and pulls her to her feet; the crowd watches attentively; and not one of them seem uncomfortable, further proving this is a Den of Devils. No, wait—I was wrong; there are two people in the crowd whose faces and body language indicate they’re very much uncomfortable, further confirming in my mind they might not be who they’re pretending to be.
Dante rubs the palms of his hands nervously against the legs of his pants; he wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist; it appears he’s practicing some kind of breathing technique, his shoulders rising and falling to the rhythm of his mouth as it forms an O and breath is expelled in two-second intervals.
And Frances Lockhart—now I know for a fact that woman is no more a buyer of slaves than I am. She stands up as Joaquin shoves a gun underneath Naeva’s chin, and she shouts, with her hands out in front of her: “Stop! I-I want to buy her; I-I’ll outbid everyone in this room!” She wants to buy her to save her, just like she did those thirteen girls sitting around her, huddled close to her, just as Sabine is to me. It all becomes so clear now—and my job here just became that much more difficult. I don’t know who those two are, Frances and Dante, but in some ways they’re just like me. Unfortunately, they’re nothing like me when it comes to knowing what the hell they’re doing, and how deep the pile of burning shit they stepped into.
“Sit down, Miss Lockhart,” Joaquin kindly tells her. “This one is not for sale.”
Please sit down, Frances…if you don’t, if you continue letting your real-self bleed through that brittle fa?ade, you’re going to give yourself away, and you won’t make it out of here alive. Please. Sit. Down. I bite my lip.
Slowly, Frances takes her seat, and relief floods my body; she sits with both hands on the table in front of her, her face devoid of that spoiled little brat she came here as, and I just hope everything else that is happening can distract everyone—especially Joaquin and Cesara—from her glaring mistakes.
Naeva’s body trembles in Joaquin’s hands; tears rush down her cheeks—I don’t know what to do; maybe this is my moment, the most difficult test I’ll ever have to face being what I am now; maybe this is my one chance to prove—to myself, not to anyone else—that I can do this kind of work for the rest of my short life. I have to stay in character; I’m so close to unearthing Vonnegut—I feel it—and I can’t let anyone or anything get in my way. Not Dante or Frances or Sabine or any of the other innocent girls here, and not even Naeva. This is The Sacrifice, the moment when I must choose to let innocent people die, so I can kill one of the sources that feeds all this injustice—the death of a few for the lives of many.
I take a deep breath, and I choose. I choose to do the unthinkable. I choose to become…Victor Faust.
Joaquin forces Naeva closer to the edge of the stage; he wants to display her for all to see; still, no one other than Dante and Frances Lockhart appear distressed by what everyone in this room knows is going to happen soon.
“Let me tell you all a story,” Joaquin begins, his voice sharp through the speakers in the ceiling for all to hear, “of a girl who was to be sold years ago, to a private bidder ready to pay an inconceivable amount of money”—(everybody in the room looks right at Iosif Veselov)—“No, no,” Joaquin laughs, “it wasn’t Mr. Veselov—anyway, before the girl could be transferred, she escaped.”
Whispers rise over the crowd, and then die-out once Joaquin continues.
“Oh, you’re all going to love this—I should charge an extra attendance fee for tonight.” Joaquin smiles, playfully considering it. “But you won’t believe who helped her out of Mexico.”
“Who helped her?” a woman shouts from the crowd.
Joaquin pauses, his smile growing ever so darkly, and he sweeps his free hand in front of him and says, “El Segador, Leo Moreno himself!”
Gasps and whispers fill the theatre; stunned faces and heads turn to one another in shock; it all makes me feel like I’m wading numbly through a sea of devastation—everyone knows who this man is, and they probably all know the story, too.
“Leo Moreno?” the woman behind me says to the other. “Wow…so that’s the girl…just wow.”
“I knew Moreno was alive!” the man to my left says to the other. “If that’s really the woman he loved, somebody’s going to die in this place tonight, and I doubt it’ll be her!”
“So, that has to mean Leo is here. Right now. In this building,” another woman says to someone, her voice dripping with exhilaration; her eyes bounce all over the room in search of him.
“You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen!” Joaquin announces—challenges. “You’re looking at the one and only, Naeva Brun! And somewhere in this mansion is the once famous, thought-to-be-dead underground fighter who ruined his life for her!”
Now I’m the one turning my head, following the heads of the crowd, searching for this man who has yet to reveal himself.
“Come out of your hole, Moreno!” Joaquin says into his mic. “You have ten seconds to show yourself, and to surrender, or she dies!”
Everyone looks, in every corner, every shadow; voices rise and fall; in the midst of it all I set my sights on Iosif from across the room. He is the only one not looking; he is the only one who doesn’t care. He reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a cell phone, sets it on the table in front of him. I can’t tell what he’s doing with it, and I wish I could get closer. He gestures at one of his guards, and says something to him. The guard then gestures at a server carrying a tray lined with drinks, and the server rushes over to the table. Iosif takes a glass of whiskey, then a drink, and sets it upon the table near his phone. He couldn’t care less about everything else going on; he is too important; he might even be irritated by the disruption of the only thing he came here for—I don’t know, because he remains unreadable.