Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103620 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Walking through the corridor of this old, Austrian castle, I feel a breeze blowing. Not a literal one. Something else. A chill in the middle of the summer.
Sometime before. Sometime months ago. Maybe a year? Maybe more? I can’t recall for sure, but I remember…
“Why are we here?” I ask Lars. “What are we doing here?”
Ever since the thing that happened with Alec and Eliza, Lars and I have been… closer.
I’ve always kind of felt sorry for Lars. When Danny and I first met Alec, Lars was just a kid. I mean, I guess I was too, but he was an actual kid. Nine, maybe ten? And it was always so apparent to me and Danny how much he looked up to and idolized his big brother. He wanted to be just like him.
Of course, he couldn’t be. Nobody on the planet is like Alec van den Berg. And even though there are however many billion people on the planet and nothing’s actually impossible, I still feel like that’s probably true. But insomuch as Lars could emulate Alec, he tried.
That’s less true now than it used to be. Lars is almost twenty-one. A proper adult. And in this last little while that I’ve gotten to know him better, he’s really grown into his own man.
Precisely what kind of man that is, I’m still not sure. But right now I only need him to be one thing:
Anyone but Alec.
I remember…
He turns back to me just before we enter the castle itself and says, “I need you to not get freaked out,” by way of answer. It annoys me.
It annoys me, one, because he still hasn’t answered my question, and two, because telling someone not to freak out is never helpful. You’ve already set them up to get freaked out just by saying it, and what you really mean is, “You’re going to be freaked out, but don’t show me that you’re freaked out.”
I remember…
“Don’t get freaked out about what?” I ask with a raised eyebrow.
He just nods, gives me a kiss on my cheek, and pushes open the door.
Holy shit.
I remember everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I don’t like how twitchy Alec seems. Alec van den Berg does not twitch. He does not start. He does not sweat. He does not jump. But in the last brief while, I’ve seen him do all of these things. And that make me nervous in a way I don’t get.
It’s not just Alec’s strange behavior, of course. It’s also the fact that Christine is carrying my fucking kid right now that makes me nervous.
And it’s not just Alec’s strange behavior and the fact that Christine is carrying my fucking kid right now. It’s that I feel like I’ve had a premonition, maybe? A dream? About this place? About what we’re walking into?
Screaming. Yelling. Gunfire. Mayhem.
Fuck. Am I a prophet? Or just a person who’s under way more stress than any normal human being who’s not in an active war zone should be under?
But before I have a chance to protest or raise any additional kind of alarm bells (which it’s too late to raise now and wouldn’t matter anyway), Hans turns to us, says, “They are right through here,” and then turns back, opens the door, and we follow him in.
There is a collective, nearly audible gasp when we see what’s waiting for us inside.
The room itself is almost a theater. Or, like, a salon. Like the kind of room where a king or queen or duke or whoever the fuck lived here back in the day might host some kind of event. At the far end of the space is a slightly elevated stage area with kind of like a footlight runner along the lip. The whole castle has clearly been retrofitted at some point because there’s interior lighting throughout and a contemporary electric spotlight is currently shining down from the ceiling into the center of the stage area.
But that’s not what causes us to gasp. What causes us to gasp is what’s sitting on a table illuminated by the spotlight shining down into the center…
The diamond.
The seven-carat diamond that the three of us stole from Alec’s father and that I then stole back and kept in my place above my workshop, and that we took with us to the glass house and that we left in the glass house when we were assaulted and had to escape.
Lars, Alec, Christine, and I were out on the edge of the cliff, but we left the diamond back in the house.
Someone from the team that stormed the house grabbed it up, and now it’s here. Sitting on a stage in a castle in Austria. Lit by a single spotlight. The brushed-metal box with a triangle etched on the top placed right by its side.
And, as if that weren’t gasp-inducing enough, standing just in front of the stage, like a line of sentries, is…