A Girl Undone (26 page)

Hours later, my eyes popped open as a hand closed over my mouth, pinning me to my pillow. I tore at the hand, and thrashed, trying to break free.

“Avie! It’s me.”

Deeps?
I relaxed, and he let go.

“Stay down and slide off the bed.”

I dropped my head over the side. Deeps was stretched out on the floor, and he inched back to give me room.

I slid down beside him. It was dark over the ocean and very late. The house was silent, but a hundred yards away, floodlights glared along the compound walls.

“What’s going on?”

“Security breach. The cameras picked up movement on the grounds. I’m taking you down to the safe room.”

Suddenly, I was back in Salvation, watching the agents surround the church and aim their weapons on us. “I’m scared.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you. Just do as I say.”

We crawled on our stomachs out the door, Deeps insisting I go in front. Then we slithered along the hall until we got to the stairs above the main room. Hawkins’ fixation with clean lines meant the windows were uncovered, and every corner of the room below was exposed.

“Keep low, but move fast,” Deeps said. “I’m right behind you.”

The suspended stairs trembled faintly under our weight. I blocked out the pain in my ankle, and focused on moving quickly.

We ducked into the gallery behind the main room, and I realized that the lights that came on automatically had been shut down. The exotic wood that lined the gallery was almost seamless, but Deeps felt along with his fingers, and then pressed. A panel opened, revealing stairs that led to the bottom level, ones I never knew were there. The panel eased shut and Deeps locked it behind us.

Carpet muffled our steps. Deeps stopped me at the bottom of the stairs right before he opened the other door. “Don’t move until I tell you. If there’s gunfire or anything else sounds weird, lock yourself in here.”

I held the door closed, listening so hard I was sure I heard a shot outside the house. My hand slipped, and I grabbed for the handle, afraid to lock it, but even more afraid to try to get to the safe room on my own.

I pressed my ear to the door, praying Deeps would come quickly, while images from Salvation shot through my head. The agents struggling to hold Emmeline, then slitting the goat’s throat. Blood splashing onto the snow. Men and women lining the church windows, their guns ready. Yates pulling me through the narrow escape tunnel, saying, “It smells like a grave in here.”

The smell of cold dirt flooded the stairwell and I put my hand over my nose, trying to block it.

Deeps, where are you? Deeps, come back.

I leaned against the wall and dug into the carpet with my toes.
Feel that. You’re not in that tunnel. You’re in Malibu, and Deeps is coming back for you.

A rapid knock. I released the door. “Come on out,” Deeps whispered. I slipped out and we crept down the hall, going only about ten feet before Deeps flipped up a light switch to reveal a coded entry pad hidden underneath. He tapped in a code, and the wood panel in front of us eased open.

The door was thick steel like a bank vault, and all I saw beyond it was blackness. “Go on, get in,” Deeps said, but I was bolted to the floor, knowing when I stepped inside, my bare feet would touch cold, damp earth.

“Avie.” I turned toward Hawkins’ voice, and he yanked my arm, pulling me in beside him. Deeps shut the heavy door, and the darkness was total except for a faint light coming from the illuminated buttons on the back of the door. Jessop entered in a code, then flicked on a flashlight.

The light reflected off brushed-steel walls. The room was cool, but it was dry, and smelled slightly of metal and plastic.

Hawkins was wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. I shivered and crossed my arms over my breasts, suddenly conscious of my thin cami and bare legs.

“You’re cold,” Hawkins said.

I expected him to offer to “keep me warm,” but instead he went over to a stack of black storage trunks in the corner, pulled out a blanket and handed it to me.

“Thanks.” I wrapped the blanket around me as Hawkins clicked a remote. Overhead lights came on, and a screen in the corner went live. Shots from sixteen surveillance cameras turned it into a shadowy checkerboard.

One glance, and I was back in the control room in Salvation’s church watching a dozen monitors capture the agents positioning for attack. I turned away from the screen.

This isn’t the same thing.

Really? How isn’t it?

“We might as well settle in,” Hawkins said. “We’re probably going to be here for a while.”

I glanced around for a place to sit.

“There’s a cot,” he offered.

I didn’t want anything that looked even a little like a bed in here with us. “No, I’m fine on the floor.”

Jessop sat, leaving space for me to sit next to him, but I pretended not to notice and picked a spot on the opposite wall. I heard a faint whirr, and then air blew in through a vent near the ceiling.

My chest tightened, remembering how I’d watched the agents destroy the windmills that powered Salvation. “What if they cut the electricity?”

“We have backup generators.”

This bare steel box with a couple of storage bins didn’t look equipped for a long stay. “And water? What if we run out?”

“We’ve got a thousand-gallon tank.” Jessop rapped the wall behind him. “Sink and toilet behind this door.”

“What if whoever’s out there sets the house on fire?”

“We’ve got a sprinkler system and immediate dispatch from the fire department.”

“How about guns?” I said, looking at the black storage boxes. “Do we have any?”

“You wouldn’t want to shoot a gun in here. The risk of a bullet ricocheting off a steel wall is too great.”

I nodded and pulled my hands and feet inside the blanket.

Jessop peered at me. “Salvation left its mark on you.”

“Yeah, you try being held captive in a church that armed government agents are firing on, and see if you don’t come out a little paranoid.”

Hawkins switched his attention to the screen up in the corner. “You saw that Yates Sandell was released from prison today.”

Ho must have told him how he caught Sig and me watching his press conference. “Yes. Thank you for helping him.” Hawkins looked at me expectantly. “Jessop,” I added.

“I gave you my word I would.”

I knew Hawkins wanted more, a gushing, teary thank you, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“He’s wrong about you.”

I sat up straighter.
Don’t. Don’t you dare talk about Yates to me.

“You’re no one’s lapdog, and he’s a fool to call you that. He doesn’t deserve you.”

Stop. Just stop. I know you hate that I still love him.

Hawkins gave me a look like he knew what I was thinking. I looked away, and we sat in an uncomfortable silence for a minute or two, before I broke it, saying, “I hope Deeps is okay.”

“He’ll be fine,” Hawkins said. “He’s trained for this.” Hawkins watched the security monitor, his arms crossed limply over his knees, occasionally clicking the remote to change the screens.

“Why aren’t you nervous?” I said.

Hawkins flicked his hand. “I’m a politician and that by its very nature makes me a target. The key,” he said, nodding at the locked door, “is to be prepared.”

He looked almost average right then with his uncombed hair and rumpled pajamas. I got that he wanted to run the state, but I didn’t get the rest. “Why are you a Paternalist?”

He smirked. “Why’d you ask that?”

“The way you talk about Jouvert and Senator Fletcher. You don’t like them. I don’t think you even respect them very much. And you don’t agree with everything they say. Like this morning you said Amendment Twenty-eight was a suicide mission.”

Hawkins tilted his head at me. “I became a Paternalist because that’s where the votes are. You saw how quickly the movement took over. Scarpanol left this country traumatized and the Paternalists were the first to realize that if they promised a man that they’d keep his daughter safe, he’d do whatever they asked.”

“So you don’t really believe everything you’ve said about women staying home and obeying their husbands and not going to college or having their own money?”

“My mother was a brilliant, supremely capable woman who could have run this state if she’d wanted to.”

“Then I don’t get it. I don’t understand how you can play with people’s lives—with my life—like this when you don’t believe in what the Paternalists are doing.”

“Because you can’t steer the ship until you’re the captain. Movements change. People realize what they don’t want and they vote out the people they voted in. Jouvert and people like him won’t last … Why are you shaking your head?”

“Jouvert’s going to be the next president, and we helped put him there by promising not to release the tape of him and Sparrow.”

“I doubt he’ll be president.”

Hawkins was so arrogant, so sure of his own infallible brilliance, he couldn’t see the power Jouvert had. Didn’t he realize Jouvert had probably sent whoever was out there?

“We should call the police,” I said.

“Deeps will call for backup if he thinks it’s necessary.”

“But what if someone kills him first?”

“That’s unlikely. I hired Deeps because he pulled terrorist insurgents out of caves along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He can handle whoever’s stumbling around my backyard.”

“Stumbling around? You think the person who’s out there isn’t dangerous?”

“It could be anyone—a paparazzo trying to sneak a shot, a thief who saw your bracelet in
People,
a stalker, some nut who went off his meds—”

“Yeah, maybe, but I’ve seen what Fletcher and Jouvert do when they feel threatened, and if one of them thinks that two perfectly aimed bullets will solve their problems, they’ll get someone to do it.”

Hawkins clenched his hand into a fist. “Stop being dramatic,” he snapped. “We’re fine.”

That was all it took to shut me up. Hawkins watched the screens, and I laid my head on my knees and pretended to doze. He had hit me before, and I didn’t want to risk making him angry.

Deeps came for us at 5:50. “I found fresh deer tracks near the fence where the sensors tripped. A doe probably wandered down from the mountains, and got startled and jumped the fence. No sign of it now.”

“See,” Hawkins said to me. “It was nothing.” He held out his hand, and I let him help me to my feet.

Deeps walked me back upstairs, and I waited until we were far enough away from Jessop that he couldn’t hear me say, “Really? A deer tripped the alarm? I don’t believe that for a minute.”

Deeps looked me right in the eyes. “You want me to show you the tracks? Grab a jacket. Let’s go.”

Showing me tracks wouldn’t prove a thing. “Forget it.”

I wasn’t being paranoid, I thought as I scuffed back to my bedroom. Jessop and I had blackmailed the vice president of the United States. We had targets on our backs even though he and, apparently, Deeps wanted to pretend we didn’t.

It wasn’t dawn yet, but I drew the curtains so my room became a cocoon. If I hadn’t been so tired, I don’t think I would have slept.

36

Music went off around two. “Wake up, Hummingbird.” Deeps’ voice came over the intercom. “Time to hit the PR trail. You’re leaving for the orphan ranch in one hour.”

It was my debut as Aveline soon-to-be-Hawkins, Defender of Orphans and complete fraud. I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing there was a way out of this photo op and Q&A with three dozen reporters and celebrity bloggers. By using those tapes to save myself, I was helping keep the Paternalist orphan scam in business.

But there wasn’t a way out, and Deeps made sure I was up, dressed, and in the car on time.

We drove down the freeway, me in back with Hawkins, my fingers rubbing circles on the skirt of my dress. The fabric was like shaved fur, the short hairs the color of graphite mixed with black that shifted direction unexpectedly. Leather trim shaped like black daggers radiated from around my neck. Sig wanted the cameras to fix on me, but the last thing I wanted was to be seen, especially by Yates.

“Where’s Sigmund Rath?” Hawkins asked Ho. Hawkins was wearing the smoky lavender shirt Sig had sent over.

“With a client in San Diego. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Deeps looked at me in the rearview mirror, and I caught a flicker of something in his eyes that made me wonder if he knew Sig had lied.

Sig was in San Antonio for Jouvert’s speech at Texas A&M. Jouvert had two more appearances outside D.C. where we thought Luke might show up in the next week, and prayed he wouldn’t.

Ho’s phone pinged. “It’s Jouvert’s director of scheduling. The VP’s coming to your Signing.”

“So Sigmund was right.” Jessop tapped his thigh. “I’d never have believed it.”

Me, neither. Jouvert and his Secret Service agents were the last people I wanted to be anywhere near, and I had no idea why Sig had insisted he be invited. Sig had ducked the question when I’d asked.

“We’ll need to increase security for the Signing, won’t we?” Hawkins said.

“The Secret Service will probably send a security detail in advance to assess the compound,” Deeps said. “They’ll want full access including blueprints.”

“Wait, Jouvert’s people are going to go through our house?” I said. “Aren’t you at all worried they might leave listening devices behind or maybe a bomb?”

“I’ll be with the agents the entire time, and do a sweep after they leave,” Deeps said. “I’m trained in what to look for.”

Hawkins smiled.

“Did I say something funny?”

“You called it ‘our house.’”

I twisted the Love bracelet on my wrist, feeling a little sick. I can’t believe this. Look at me. I’m turning into Hawkins’ wife.

The orphan ranch came into view, the buildings spread out along the cement-lined L.A. River on the other side of the freeway.

I’d passed the L.A. Orphan Ranch every Tuesday for six years when my bodyguard Roik would drive me to the cemetery to visit Mom, and I’d never really thought about the girls and boys who lived there. But that was before I met Splendor and Sirocco in Vegas. They’d both come from ORs, and gone to work for Maggie. Everyone who worked for Maggie seemed to have survived something.