Page 14 of All Saints Day
“Like I said—she won’t consider it. I gave her the White Knight on a silver platter—promised her she could take his own life if she wanted!” Lowry exclaims in disbelief, tossing her hands into the air.
My eyes search Lowry’s face. Does she cry for Louise? For the girl she might have loved as a daughter?
“Hypothetically—would the Windmill be open to making her an offer involving her mates?” I tread carefully here. I don’t want Lowry to think that I’m worried about the wellbeing of my Saints.
Well, Louise’s Saints—they aren’t mine anymore.
“Absolutely not,” Lowry snorts a dismissive laugh, fixing me with a disappointed glare.
She doesn’t know about the fated mates markers shared by Louise, the Saints, the dearly departed Michael Duboze, and myself. She doesn’t know that Sébastien Bouaziz has had access to the Penny’s detailed research, to their formulation of the cure and the vaccine. None of the Windmill knows the price the cure requires one to pay—the change of your designation. I’ve done my best to keep him from squeezing the information out of me, passing it on to Lowry and the wretched higher-ups who are itching to turn out their augmented Zeitnot virus on the public before they’ve formulated a cure or a prophylactic.
“If we don’t get her to cooperate soon, the higher-ups are going to lose their patience,” Susan reiterates, her fingernails lifting anxiously to her mouth as she frets.
“I’ll do my very best to soften her up,” I assure Lowry as Michael stares me down with his disapproving glare.
“Just remember—if you fail, it’s not just your ass on the line,” Susan snips, clacking on her high heels back toward my front door.
I give her a solemn nod, but Susan leans in—close enough to whisper.
“Don’t be an ungrateful brat. Remember where you were when I found you? What your life might have been like if I hadn’t stepped in.” Her words are soft, sweet—as if her threats were comforts.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to touch the door to those thoughts right now. Not when I’m trying to stay strong, to keep my shit together so that Louise only has to deal with me in that interrogation room, not him—not Rook.
“I remember.” I bow my head. “She’ll break soon—I can feel it. I just need time.”
My gaze lifts, and I pin Susan with my stormy glare in the best show of defiance I can muster.
“You think you know Louise Penny, but I have known her in a way that few others will understand.” The cruel grin curls the corners of my mouth as I step slowly toward her. All false bravado, but it’s my best course of action to play for time until I can figure out how to get her safely the fuck out of here.
With or without me.
At my words, something like disgust, or maybe jealousy, flickers across Susan’s face—her eyes widening ever so slightly, her lips pressing tighter together, her throat bobbing as she makes a bid to swallow.
“You better. Or we’re all going to be fucked,” Susan bites out—slamming the door behind her as she makes her dramatic exit from my quarters.
Chapter 7
Cazimer
The motel in Alexandria is packed with school tours and other visitors looking forward to making the most of cherry blossom season in Washington DC, so we blend in with the crowd—but I can’t help that gnawing feeling that keeps me looking over my shoulder. Every tiny noise makes me jump, and I haven’t slept more than four hours a night in months.
I can’t keep going on like this. Between the sleeplessness, the constant churn of fight-or-flight level anxiety, the visceral pain and panic I experience each time we glimpse Louise being tortured down the bond—I just won’t last.
Thankfully, we’re closing in on an actual plan to free Louise from the clutches of the Windmill, to bring her back home to us.
With the help of Dennis, I was able to get access to Ed Compton’s phone and work laptop. From there—it is only a matter of following the breadcrumbs until I find what I am after.
While it is hardly a matter of finding the address for an evil cabal in a memo or his search history—location data is a powerful thing, in conjunction with photo and video taken in and around the Windmill facilities and the magic of photogrammetry—I am able to narrow down the possible locations where Louise is being held.
Ultimately, we are able to narrow the possibilities down to a compound in the Rockies or rural WestVirginia. With the help of some cheap camera drones, we gather enough visuals to make the assessment that Louise is almost certainly being held at the latter. A cursory top-down of the facility didn’t yield any information, and each time one of us gets close to getting a hold of someone that might actually have access or working knowledge of the inner workings of the facility—the trail suddenly goes cold.
We are left with a decision: attempt to break into the facility using brute force, or make a bid to enter by taking Ed Compton as our prisoner and bargaining chip.
Of course, after our experience with Louise—to my great shame—I am freshly aware of how little weight human lives seem to have in these kinds of conflicts. So, rather than relying on the Windmill wanting to preserve the life of Ed Compton—we will employ Ed’s will to keep himself alive; forcing him to bend to our will, lest he get a bullet to the brain.
The entire plan will have the potential to fall apart if Compton values his loyalty to the Windmill over his own life. If Dennis puts a gun to Compton’s head and the old man tells Dennis to go screw, he’s given up his cover. He’ll have to plug Compton or let old Eddie boy off the hook just to out Dennis to his cronies at both the Windmill and the FBI. A similar outcome washes out from Dennis snuffing Compton—truly some worst-case scenarios.
We don’t have many options.
