“The suite. It’s going to be freezing up there.”

  Still, she repeats the demand with more vocal force. “Take me to the greenhouse.” She ends at the top of her lungs, spitting, eyes bulging, lips curled over canines.

  “Fine.” I’m calm. Too calm. “Take her to the greenhouse.”

  Sarah’s body goes still, and the look of satisfaction on her face says that despite my best efforts, I’ve met her worst expectations.

  Chapter 29

  Sarah

  At first, I am angry.

  Not just angry but consumed by rage so hot I kick off my one shoe and walk barefooted around the perimeter of the freezing tile floor. Frost grows in the corners of the glass rectangles, and the moonlight reveals the clouds of my every exhalation.

  Dario Lucari is going to pay for his lies.

  The only light from inside is the red eye of the camera. I ignore it.

  I let my skin goose-bump, then go bluish white. The soles of my feet tempt the newly swept floor. My nipples harden to rocks.

  With every step around the perimeter of the greenhouse, I plot my course. I’ll bite his dick off. Slit his throat with a sharpened fingernail. Twist his balls and make him scream. He’ll murder me, but I’ll join my mother in death…

  Except…

  No. Except nothing. He’s lying.

  Except…

  Daddy had confirmed what I hadn’t been told yet. My mother might not be dead. She could be anyone. Anywhere. Walking the earth or buried beneath it.

  Unless Dario’s lying about not knowing where she is.

  Fat raindrops plop on the glass and drip a few inches.

  If my mother’s alive, she’s not Colonia anymore. She’s severed.

  Are You My Mother?

  Am I the little bird, or is my mother?

  Which one of us wanders the earth looking for her place?

  “It’s all a lie,” I voice unintentionally. The words are a habit of denial, but I know they’re hollow. I face the camera. “Why are you lying?”

  Everyone on the other side of that lens knows what I won’t accept.

  The truth.

  Where is my mother?

  When I put my palms on the glass, the sweat on them goes cold. The falling sleet rattles against it in surrender. It’s the rain’s job to fall, to splash, to melt, to drip, to die. By morning, it will all be the mist that shrouds everything past Sixth Avenue.

  Are You My Mother?

  Is she out there somewhere?

  Does she want to see me?

  Am I free to find her now that I’m as good as severed too?

  I’m a prisoner, but I’m free.

  I press my hands on the glass hard enough to feel the sheets of cold rain.

  It’s not vertigo that keeps me from moving, but another kind of spinning. I’ve been looking through a paper towel roll my whole life, thinking what I saw in the little circle was all there was, and now, with the possibility of my mother alive in the world, the cardboard is shredded and I can see what’s around me. The feeling of disorientation is almost physical. I can’t move. If I stay still, it’s about my mother. If I take my hands off the glass, I’ll be overwhelmed by the possibilities.

  The only obstacle is Dario. He won’t trust me. Not yet. But what if he does? Will our marriage always be a prison?

  What if he lets me go? What would that mean?

  I can do things.

  I can go places.

  I can want whatever I want.

  I try to clutch at something before I fall, but the glass is cold and flat, and I slide to the floor, crushed under the burden of freedom.

  Chapter 30

  Dario

  At the closed-circuit monitors, watching Sarah pace the greenhouse, I promise myself she will never get that close to leaving me again.

  I’m not sending her away.

  Not letting her see her family.

  She’s mine.

  She turns into shimmering pixels drained of warmth, getting still as she drops to the floor. She’ll sleep it off. Back away. We’ll take care of it. Nothing to see here, kid. Just dots and dots and dots…

  “Sir?” Oliver’s voice cuts through my fugue. His big eyes are narrowed with concern, but he’s looking at the same screen I am. All I see are frozen pixels.

  I widen my view. She wrestles with the wet dress, peeling it away. Then her bra goes. It’s fucking cold.

  Guilt turns my blood to ice water.

  I push past Oliver and run to her, smacking open the door to the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. My breath explodes into clouds as soon as I burst into the greenhouse. It’s dark and as cold as I expect.

  Sarah’s hunched on the floor, naked, blue in the moonlight, muttering a nonsense song through lips that release the faintest clouds.

  I gather her in my arms. “I have you.”

  From some territory on the wrong side of consciousness, she replies in words that no language will claim.

  I rush down the stairs. Now that I have light, I can see her blue lips, the shiny alabaster of her skin, the dead weight of her head as it bounces in my arms. I hold it steady as I back into the lock bar across the door to the penthouse hall and into the suite, where I should have forced her to go in the first place.

  “You’re going to be all right.” I lay her on her bed and cover her with every blanket I can find. “I swear. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  Against the back of my hand, her nose and cheeks are cold. I won’t dare unwrap the blankets to check the rest of her. I call her by her name for the second time, and I’m ashamed it had to come to this.

  “Sarah, please.” I’m panicked but not surprised when she doesn’t answer. “God damnit.” I jerk up to standing. “This is taking too long!” I slap open the closet door. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I swipe out everything. Stacks of towels. A summer blanket. “Just give me a minute. I’ll fix it.”

  I am a monster.

  When I come back out of the closet, she’s unwrapped herself, murmuring things I can’t understand. She strong, and cold, and resistant.

  “Sarah? Oliver said you—” a woman’s voice echoes from the hall. “What are you doing?!” It’s Dafne.

  “Blankets!” I shout.

  Without hesitation, she pulls a wicker basket out of the closet. It’s stacked with blankets. Obviously. Why would I know where the blankets go? That’s a woman’s business.

  “Where?” Sarah grips my arm, wide-eyed, then drops into lifelessness.

  “Good,” Dafne says with relief. “That’s good.”

  “What’s good about this?”

  “She won’t throw these off.” She tosses me a blanket. We layer them one after the other, until it seems the weight will crush her.

  “What now?” I am not in charge. I am a child in over his head with adult matters.

  “I’ll heat up some broth.”

  Dafne goes to the kitchen. I should go to the control suite and see if there’s any word from the Colonia or the DiLustros. I don’t need this many enemies when she’s sick. I need to make calls. Send someone somewhere to do something.

  There’s no way in hell I’m leaving her.

  I do something I haven’t done my entire life—I pray.

  But there’s a reason I’ve never asked God for any favors. He doesn’t deliver, and prayer is boring when I have everything I need to answer my own damn prayers.

  I curl up behind my wife to warm her body with mine. I feel the snowflake ring on her finger. The metal is cold. It slides off easily.

  Her teeth chatter. I bend to see her face. Her lips quiver, then the color returns to them.

  Or the other way around, because though my body is where it should be, my thoughts are thrust backward in time. Under a wood chipper, with a naked, freezing woman between my brother and me. I’m an ignorant boy again, convinced I’m not giving her my warmth but stealing hers for myself.

  “No,” I mutter through gritted teeth. “That’s not how it works.”

  But it is. I am incapable of giving or healing. I can only take and wreck.

  “Sarah.”

  She shivers in response, her body trying to replace the heat I’m robbing.

  “I’m sorry.”

  As I pull away from her, she sucks in a breath, and as I stand, I hear something that could be an exhale, or it could be a word. I lean in so close to her face I could kiss it if I dared. Her lips are moving, and when a word comes out, I jump back.

  “Yes!” She agrees with such shocking lucidity I assume she’s awake, but her eyes are still closed. “The bunny’s in training, and it’s not a mother. It’s Father Falcone.”

  As if that makes perfect sense. I get out of the bed.

  “What is he going to do to my fingers with that knife?” she continues with a childlike animation that only serves to accentuate the emotional flatness of her voice.

  “Dafne!” I call with all the authority I’ve earned. “Get in here!”

  “You are not a father,” Sarah says as Dafne rushes in. “You are not a teacher. You are not boss of me.”

  “It’s the hypothermia,” Dafne says. “Keep her warm and—”

  Sarah throws off the blankets and sits up, eyes still completely closed. “You are not a cock or a cunt or a sneeze.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Cover her!” Dafne gets the blankets up, and I grab my wife and lay her down.

  “You are a snort.” Sarah struggles against us. Her skin is still cold to the touch, but warm enough for her nerves to work. She fights to get my hands off her.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Just—”

  She thrashes, elbowing her teacher in the face and straightening her leg suddenly, which lands her heel in my balls. I grunt and curl. Sarah jumps up and stands naked on the bedroom rug, her hair a nest and her eyes bloodshot, just as Connor walks in.

  “Crikey.”

  “What?!”

  He’s looking at her naked body without a speck of desire, and lucky for him, because I’m in the mood to throat-punch a guy.

  “Just checking in, so…” He jerks his thumb in the general direction of anyplace that’s not here.

  “You are a snort!” Sarah screams at me. “You are a snort!”

  “Get out!” I roar at Connor, who doesn’t need to be told twice.

  “Where am I?” Sarah cries from someplace in her head. “I want to go home!”

  “She’s delirious.” Dafne reads the doubts in my mind. “Normal with hypothermia. She needs to be under the covers.”

  “Okay.” I turn to my wife. “Sarah, listen—”

  “You are not a cow or a car or a pig or a staffa or a chicken…”

  Sarah goes on and on, sometimes limp, sometimes struggling, but Dafne and I wrestle her down. After a moment, as if she’s forgotten why she was fighting in the first place, she lets us wrap her up again.

  “You are a snort,” my wife sobs. “And you are my mother.”

  I’ve pulled one of two matching chairs close to the bed and perched myself on the edge in case I need to leap off it to protect Sarah from the demons in her mind.

  The only way I’ll leave her side is if they burn down this entire fucking building. I don’t care about the Colonia right now. Revenge doesn’t need me to rescue it or watch its sleep turn restful.

  The thermometer beeps.

  “Ninety-six point three,” Dafne says. “When she wakes up, she won’t remember anything.”

  “I should send her home like she asked.”

  Dafne tsks and shakes her head.

  “Delirium’s normal for hypothermia.” She puts her hand on Sarah’s head. “So’s stripping down… Increased blood flow to the extremities creates a hot flash. Some people, in the final stages, they dig and burrow.”

  “I’m sorry?” What she’s said activates a file in my mind, but I can’t open it.

  “They take their clothes off and dig a hole or hide under something.”

  “Like what?” The file’s opened, but I can’t bring the information into focus.

  “Some just hide under the bed. It’s really quite bizarre.” She stands. “We’re lucky our charge here didn’t get that far.”

  “Yes.” I bend, leaning my elbows on my knees, and run my fingers through my hair.

  “You seem to be having doubts.” She sits behind me in the matching chair.

  “I’m not a monster.”

  “No. You’re not.” Fabric rustles. Dafne could have a gun to my head, but I can’t take my eyes off Sarah. “You don’t trade girls into sexual slavery. You don’t tell them it’s legal or threaten their families if they don’t comply. You don’t break their minds before you—”

  “Enough,” I whisper, and she falls silent.

  “What you’re doing,” she finally says. “It needs to be done. You’re the only one who can stop them. They won’t make the same mistakes twice. No outsider’s going to get this close ever again. You have her.” The chair’s springs squeak. She’s leaning forward. “You can’t give up.”

  Leaving my elbows bent on my thighs, I look at her. “Dafne.”

  “Sir.” She sits back, remembering her place in my pecking order.

  “She didn’t beg to be rescued the way you did.”

  “And I’m grateful.” She crosses her legs and plants her hands in her lap. “She will be too.”

  “You can’t free someone by force.”

  “I disagree.”

  Turning away from her, I unbend, sliding down the chair. I can see her silhouette in the dresser mirror.

  “You’re not even free of it. You begged me to get you out, and there’s still a part of you that wants to go back. You’re still one of them in your blood. It’s going to take you the rest of your life to shake them. How long is it going to take her? After the way I did it? She’s never going to be free. Ever.”

  “She will.” Dafne smooths her palms over her thighs and stands. “And when she’s ready, you’re going to free her so all of us can be free.”

  It’s too dark to see the details of her face, but we make eye contact in the mirror.

  “You’re dismissed,” I say.

  She leaves without argument.

  The night passes in silence as I struggle to connect the dots of my present with the lines of my past.

  Chapter 31

  Sarah

  My husband strokes my hair, kneeling by the side of the bed.

  Who is this man with the tender voice, and why does he look like the animal who stole me and starved me?

  I squeeze my eyes shut to clear them because something isn’t right. When they open, it’s still Dario.

  “What happened?” I break rule number one.

  “You were soaking wet. It was a chilly night. And I left you there to punish you. I knew better, but I did it anyway.”

  I don’t ask him why because I’m not allowed to ask questions. But more than that, this man who looks like my husband already has regret written all over his face.

  “You became hypothermic.” He shakes his head and sits on a chair that’s set close to the edge of the bed.

  “Then what?”

  I’ll ask questions until he stops allowing it.

  “I brought you down here.”

  “How did I get naked?”

  “I’ve made a lot of mistakes with you.”

  “You mean bringing me to Armistice Night dressed like a whore in a collar?”

  He smiles ruefully, leaning forward with his elbows on spread knees. “That’s the least of it.”

  “I thought you did that so my family would reject me.”

  “I did.” He clenches and unclenches his fist, cracking the crusted blood on his knuckles.

  “Well, it worked.”

  “Not the way I wanted.” He straightens up. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything I can.” He stands. “There’s a lot, and some things are secrets for a reason. But I won’t lie.”

  “And I have to believe you.” I sit up and squint at him, but I can’t get this man into focus.

  “I’m not forcing you to do anything anymore.”

  He says it as if it doesn’t matter. I can believe him or not. My choice—and one I didn’t ask for. At least when he was torturing me, I knew where I stood even if I didn’t know anything else.

  But the bread is baked. Its life as dough, as flour, as wheat and seed, is long gone. Once the nourishment’s taken, hunger will return.

  “When does it stop?” I get out of the bed and stand before him.

  His thumb and knuckle play with the bottom of my fourth finger. I look at it. My wedding ring is gone. It must have slipped off.

  “I’ll make it stop. Soon.”

  “You’re going to ask me to believe things today and how many tomorrow? What happens when I believe you so much I forget who I am?”

  “I’ll remind you.” He locks our eyes and hands.

  “No.” I pull away. He’s in focus now. My husband and purpose, pulling me into an unknown life I wasn’t raised to live. He says I have a choice, but I don’t. “It’s too much, too soon. Please. Give me a minute.”

  He obeys as if I could ever set out the rules.

  It’s not until I finish my shower that I realize I woke up believing Dario.

  It sinks in as I get dressed in the things from Dafne’s pink bags.

  I believe my mother ran away, or was cast out, because I remember her clearly.

  She was trouble. She raised her voice when she defended my drawings to Daddy. She read books to us that sent Grandma into a rage. She embroidered me a steam shovel. She cried when she wasn’t supposed to, and she refused to cover up her tears for my father or anyone else.

  She said no one ever left the Colonia, but Dafne is here, and I was thrown away.

  My father’s half-truths are only half his sins.

  I assumed I’d been told everything worth knowing. Willful ignorance has been my sin.

  You’ll always have us, Sarah.

  We are yours, and you are ours.

 

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