Page 4 of All Saints Day
Dennis steeples his fingers before his mouth—deep in thought.
“Of course, this means you would have to care more for Loulu than your own career,” Sébastien scoffs unkindly, taking a long drag on his cigarette—maroon eyes smoldering as he pins Dennis with his gaze.
Bristling, but stopping short of a barked outburst, Dennis sets his teacup down a little too loudly.
“I don’t give a fuck about my career,” he snips coldly. “Leaving Louise on that island with…” He pauses, clearly thinking better of insulting all of us while we have him encircled and outnumbered. “All of you—I didn’t do that in order to spare myself any kind of ‘loss’ of position or professional future. The only reason I left Louise’s side once I’d found her again was because it would have been more dangerous for her for me to stay—” Dennis’ voice breaks, and he has to stop and take a sip of tea to regain his composure.
All of us wait in silence as he steadies himself. I’ve never doubted Dennis’ loyalty, so I hadn’t required any convincing—but Sébastien seems at least somewhat satisfied, his gaze softening as he refills Dennis’ teacup.
“Of all the things I thought I had to worry about, I really truly believed that Louise would be safe as long as she was with Frank.”
You could hear a pin drop. None of us able to speak over the deafening roar of our collective shame—for not seeing Frank forwhat he was, for letting him steal away our fated mate like the bunch of fools that we are.
“Well, all of us have committed this sin, eh?” Sébastien scoffs after an untold number of uncomfortable seconds. “The important thing now is to make a plan,non?” Sébastien brings us all back to ourselves.
“We’re getting her back,” Caz confirms, assuring himself just as much as anyone else.
“Let’s start at the very beginning…” I prompt, producing a small notebook and pen from the breast pocket of my jacket.
“A very good place to start,” Dennis agrees, all four of us leaning in.
Chapter 2
Louise
I’ve long since stopped trying to mark the passage of time.
My cell has no windows. Nothing about the climate control or the lighting actually tells me what time of day it is.
No fresh air or ambient environmental factors let me know what the weather or season might be beyond these walls. Everything is artificial—no day or night, no way to tell if I’ve been here for weeks, months, or even years. My mind has long since let go of the task of trying to make sense of it—my sanity, fragile grains of sand slipping through my fingers.
It’s cold and bright in the octagonal pod that has become my prison, my home. Whitewashed concrete walls, a white-tiled floor, just about ten feet wide at its maximum diameter, with a drain at the center.
In one of the octagon’s eight faced panels, stands a door to the outside, a single camera mounted above it, nearly twelve feet up.
On the panel opposite, a stainless steel toilet and basin sink protrude from the wall.
No bed, no chair. If I ‘misbehave’ and try to use the toilet or tiny sink for anything other than their prescribed use, both appliances disappear into the wall; sealed away behind a large sheet metal panel.
I learned this the hard way during my first few hours at the facility.
My captors have been doing their best to disrupt my sleep lately. Likely they do this hoping they will be able to use my exhaustion as an in-road to a potential confession. They’ve dropped the temperature in my modest pod so low that I can actually see the tiny clouds my breath makes under the blinding lights—the tile floor, like ice beneath my bare feet, arms, and legs.
I’ve done my best to tuck my legs and arms into the frayed hospital Johnny I’ve been allowed to cover my body with after my last interrogation and torture session; but the threadbare garment barely covers my core, let alone my curled limbs. What skin is covered by the thin cotton still feels the icy chill of the tile through the fabric.
As miserable as it is with the lights dialed up so bright that they glow bright pinky-orange through my closed eyelids; my toes and fingers aching with cold—it’s better than the sweltering moist darkness of previous attempts to wear me down. The stifling wet heat combined with the close-darkness of the pod drove me and my claustrophobia to a near fever pitch—my panicked brain worried that I would simply cease to draw oxygen from the wet, inky blackness.
Exhaustion has long since set in, but my shivering and chattering teeth keep me awake with the strength of their spasms.
In all of this time alone with my thoughts, I still haven’t been able to figure out exactly what is going on.
I’d assumed that Frank would have given up all of our gathered intelligence about the Zeitnot virus and my parent’s plans once he was safely reinstalled at the Windmill—that I would simply be held captive for the purposes of exploring and developing a cure, a vaccine so that the Windmill could set about their ultimate goal of profiteering from not only the virus, but my parent’s work with designation and fated mate testing as well.
However, from my first interrogations with Lowry and Compton—it became clear that Frank hadn’t been as forthcoming with our findings as I had expected. NeitherLowry nor Compton seemed to know that there had been a definitive cure for the Zeitnot developed in the 90s, that Sébastien had been able to replicate it, nor the consequences of said ‘cure’ flipping the designations of those treated with the medicines derived from my own blood.
Of course, they were still somewhat in the dark about how the cure was found and fashioned.
Considering I haven’t been stuck full of needles and locked away in a laboratory somewhere—I’d say Frank’s failed to share that I am the only known source of the cure with them as well.
