Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 100493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 502(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
It’s as good a time as any, since Atlas has killed my Macallan. The fact that he chose my most expensive bottle tells me he wanted to make this my problem too. At least he’s reached the quiet, philosophical stage of drunk, which in Atlas means depressed and useless. One less person I’d have to punch through if I do decide to go rogue.
“Move the handoff to relay three,” Amélie says, not looking up.
“Relay three is burned,” my mother answers from the other end of the table. “You know it’s burned.”
“He torched four relays, Elea. Three still has the secondary node—”
“Which he’s had forty-eight hours to find. You’re sending Punk into a graveyard.”
“I’m sending her into a network I built.” Amélie’s la conseillère role crawls out through her exhaustion. “Trust my architecture or find another Monét. There are so many of us to choose from.”
Elea’s jaw tightens.
Leon doesn’t look up when I drop into the chair across from him. He’s on his fourth gun. Slide, spring, barrel, oil, reassemble, repeat. The rhythm is the only calm thing in this house.
“You’re going to wear the finish off,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“Keeps my hands busy.” Click. “You should try it. You’ve been pacing since six.”
He means pacing like a caged animal, and he’s right. My leg won’t stop bouncing. My fingers drum the table, and every ninety seconds I check my phone even though it’s been dead silent for two days.
Two mother-fucking days.
She’s alive. I know she’s alive. There’s no point in going through everything he has just to kill her, even if he did order the hit on her in the first place.
“Punk.” Amélie sits back from her keyboard. Guns stop clicking as Atlas lifts his head off the couch. “Run the node scan again. From the top.”
“I’ve run it nine times.”
“Run it again. The last pass came back wrong.”
Punk’s hands stop moving. “Wrong how?”
“Fast.” Amélie turns the monitor, and I get up, crossing the room before I’ve decided to. Lines of code scroll past. I don’t read code, but I read Amélie Monét, and she’s gone very still. “Every time we probe his perimeter, it closes before we touch it. That response time isn’t automated.”
“It’s a person,” Elea says.
“It’s not a person.” Amélie looks up at me, and the thing I’ve been refusing to say out loud for two days is sitting right there in her eyes. “No Cipher alive is that fast. It knows how I think. It knows how Punk thinks.”
“Is she alive?” The words barely make it out.
Amélie nods once. “She’s alive.”
Khloe drops her head back against the wall and lets out a breath she’s clearly been holding since she came in with Ivy’s phone. “Okay. Okay, so then what’s the play? Because I don’t get what he gains here. Ivy’s not a nut case. She’s not going to walk into a room and blow us all up because Daddy asked nicely.”
“Ivy’s not, no.” Luce says it quietly, and every head turns.
She’s got her knees pulled up in the armchair, sleeves stretched over her hands, and she looks at Khloe almost gently. “Mariée de la mort is. That’s the whole point of her. I’ve seen the notes Nonna kept. He didn’t teach Ivy to kill. He built a second person underneath the first one and gave her the same face. The second one doesn’t get scared or tired, and she’ll look straight through us like we’re strangers.”
Leon sets his rag down. “Emeric spent eleven years layering it in during dissociative states. It’s woven all the way through her, down in the wiring. If he has in fact managed to get his hands on her, she could love you in the morning and put a round in your eye at noon, and the girl at noon wouldn’t remember the girl at breakfast existed.”
I lean forward with my elbows on my knees, because I’ve been waiting two days to say this to somebody’s face.
“For the record, this is exactly why the fuck I didn’t want shit blowing up too early.”
Khloe’s head snaps around. “Tell that to your dick. I took her out for one drink, Ash. One. And by the time I got her home you’d fucked her into a brand-new bullet wound.”
Atlas chokes on nothing.
Jord makes a sound that dies halfway.
“That’s not—“
“It’s exactly what happened.”
Amélie clears her throat, and the room shuts up. “You’re both wasting breath arguing about timing.” She closes the laptop halfway, and the screen light goes out of her face. “Emeric doesn’t have a plan. He has an appetite. Everything he’s built for years exists to feed one thing, and it isn’t power.”
“Revenge,” my mother says.
“Revenge on me,” Amélie corrects. “You should understand what she is to him, so I’m going to start here. I didn’t know I was pregnant.”
Punk’s hands come off the keyboard.