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)
CHRISTINE
Riding in dead silence, sitting beside someone you don’t have a lot to talk about with, isn’t fun. It’s not awful or anything—there are fifteen worse experiences I could rattle off the top of my head—but it’s not a good time. Both Eliza and I are deep in our own thoughts. And what I realize abruptly is that we’re in our own thoughts kind of about the same thing.
Eliza is, no doubt, thinking about her child and her brother—in that order—and I’m thinking about my pregnancy and Alec and Danny—probably in reverse order. Neither one of us is thinking about ourselves, I don’t imagine. That’s love. That’s, I’m pretty sure, true love. When your thoughts and concerns gravitate automatically to someone else, or several others else, instead of yourself.
If I’m thinking about me at all in this instant, it’s only to wonder what might happen to Danny and Alec if something were to go wrong and I were to lose this pregnancy as well. Or, perhaps even more gloomily, what would happen to them if something happened to me. By which I mean me winding up dead. Let’s just call it what it is.
We’ve come too far and been through too much to have it all ripped away now. I really hope we survive. Danny, Alec, Andra, Eliza, her brother, everybody. I notice that I don’t include myself in that line of thought. I don’t know if that makes me selfless or reckless. Maybe both. I’ve been reckless before. It wouldn’t be unlike me.
Usually it comes with that all-powerful feeling of having a plan and knowing how to execute it to perfection. But I suppose then it isn’t really recklessness. It’s maybe hubris or bravado. This, now, having no certainty or plan whatsoever but still charging headlong into the unknown… that’s reckless. Probably. Honestly, I don’t really care. I just know that my priority today is keeping everyone else safe.
And if that’s being reckless, well then, reckless I shall fucking be.
DANNY
“Where the fuck are we going?” That’s me asking Hans, directly behind whom I’m sitting and whose throat I could reach out and strangle any time I feel like it. There’s no glass or barrier of any other kind separating the front and back seats. Why would there be? They (whoever “they” are) know they have all the power and that us killing any one of them would get us no closer to getting Andra back.
I ask the question now because we’ve just entered onto the Autobahn and I had assumed Vienna would be our final stop. But we’re now being hauled to another location? I don’t like this. Which is not to say I liked it before. I didn’t. But I continue not to. More and more.
“It is just a few hours’ drive south. We shall be there soon.”
“Where is ‘there?’ Where the fuck are we going?” I hate repeating myself, but my first question was never answered. Alec continues staring out of the window on his side of the car and I know that he’s resisting the urge to chastise me for asking too many questions. Fuck him. I know he has the same ones I do, so I’m asking for the both of us. I’m done playing fucking games.
“As I say, Mr. Fortnight, we shall be there soon.”
Maybe I will just choke this fucking guy out. What’s the worst that could happen?
A lot. A lot of bad shit is the worst that could happen. So, I don’t choke anybody. Even though it would release a fair amount of tension.
The driver is a big guy. Dark skin. He hasn’t spoken at all, so I can’t tell if he’s also Austrian or if this is, in fact, some multinational coalition of assholes that we’re dealing with. The plates on this car, just like the one we were given in Belfast, are Russian diplomatic ones. Hans is definitely Austrian, according to Alec’s well-attuned-to-dialects ear. Nigel and Nigel the Second were clearly Brits. Since we now know that Brasil wasn’t behind keeping Alec and Lars penned up in that English estate, it makes more sense why the guards there were apparently South African rather than Irish. But then who…? Fuck. It makes my head hurt.
I ask the driver, “What’s your name, bro?” in an attempt to get him to speak and maybe give me a hint as to what he’s all about, but he remains predictably silent. Unless I hear him say something, I can’t guess where the fuck this dick might hail from. Dude could be from fuckin’… I dunno… Pensacola for all I know. It doesn’t make that much of a difference really, but the only thing I can surmise with any degree of certainty right now is that whoever these jokers are, they have extremely deep pockets, a wide reach, and a particular affinity for keeping motherfuckers in suspense.