Page 98 of Exit Strategy

This felt right – the routine, morning tea and proper breakfasts, then working on the cabin, with nips of whiskey here and there, and then coming back to the house for showers. It was almost a contest, who would get back to the house first, the construction crew, or the legal team.

One thing I was certain of, the cabin would be fully rebuilt before the first case went before a judge.

But there was something that didn’t feel right.

Callie was tense, most nights. Sadie was as well, though I wasn’t putting my hands or lips on her. Things in the legal realm weren’t going smashingly, and the women weren’t in the sharing mood.

I let out a sigh.

This wasn’t going to end anytime soon.

28

Callie…

“I just need to use the restroom,” I murmured, deflated. It had been weeks and weeks of this with no forward motion in sight.

It was an endless vicious cycle of testimony and depositions, and I was getting discouraged, disheartened, like you wouldn’t believe. The laws in place to deal with these sorts of situations were an absolute joke when it came to victims, and the more I gave? The less it seemed like anyone at New Eden would suffer any consequences, not only for what was done to me, but to so many others as well.

“You want me to go with you?” Sadie asked me quietly and I shook my head.

Honestly, I just wanted to clean up my makeup and get the two minutes of blissful solitude that was the time it took me to pee.

I missed Kurt with a fierce, aching longing. He hadn’t been able to come today. Something needed to be done at his cabin where his presence was absolutely required and I didn’t know… it was harder and harder to focus on anything other than the next videotaped interview or legal proceeding. I just wanted to get to that grand jury.

They told me that if I testified in front of a grand jury, that was it. Even if New Eden somehow got to me or made me disappear, my grand jury testimony could be used at trial. The prosecution could easily argue my disappearance or murder was to keep me from testifying and that would automatically make my grand jury testimony admissible at any given trial.

I didn’t want it to come to that, obviously, and everyone swore I was as safe as safe could be… but I knew better. Just because Madeline was disillusioned with things, didn’t mean that New Eden would stop, didn’t mean that Arik or the August would ever stop.

Not unless they were locked up, which I was beginning to think would never happen.

I sighed and pushed my way through the restroom door and stopped in front of the mirror, huffing a disgusted laugh at my reflection, at the muddy tracks of makeup running down my cheeks.

That had been one of the things I had been prized for… the fact that, for whatever bizarre reason, the August and Arik both held it in their opinion that I somehow managed to remain pretty when I cried which made absolutely no damn sense to me.

I went in and used the bathroom, stepped out and stopped at the sink again and sighed.

I couldn’t go back out there like this.

I turned on the tap and splashed cold water on my face, scrubbing at it to clear it of the offending mud spackling my looks that’d turned into this crazy Rorschach painting with my tears. I groped for the nearby paper towel dispenser and said “Thank you,” when someone pulled some for me and put them into my hand.

I blotted the water and makeup off my face and glanced in the mirror at my unlikely savior and froze, eyes fixating on the reflection of the very shiny gun barrel of the pistol pointed at my back.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Rex.” Alexander Soren’s mouth was pulled into a line of grim satisfaction, and it made him look like a toad wearing calico horn-rimmed glasses. He always looked so pretentious, too. Always wore a suit, always had his hair parted to the side and slicked down, andalwayshad on a freaking science teacher bowtie. He wasn’t very old, either; maybe forties, but the whole almost-nineteen-fifties getup with its modern flare made him even creepier somehow than he already was. And that was saying something because Alexander Soren was and always had been so very creepy. His very presence made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end.

I stared at his reflection in the women’s room mirror and my own mouth was the one that could catch flies with how it hung open in horror.

“I’ll take this,” he said, reaching out and relieving me of my purse with the hand that wasn’t draped in his suit jacket and wasn’t holding that gun with its gaping maw at my back. I swallowed hard, my mouth so dry from the combination of crying and the new situation at hand, my throat very nearly audibly clicked with the motion.

I stood motionless and just tried to breathe through the soul-crushing panic.

“You are living proof that if a man wants something done right, he must do it himself,” he said and the horror of the implication of his words sank in slowly.God, no, not again…

“Come now. We are going to walk out that door and turn to the left. At the end of the hall, we are going to take the emergency stairs to the first floor. Do you understand?”

I just stared at him frozen in the mirror and his face crumbled into bad mood and impatience.

“Nod, Calanthe, nod that you understand,” he ordered and I nodded a bit too quickly, my head swimming.

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