Epilogue - Five
Two weeks later
Corruption kills everything.
It’s something my grandfather said often when we were together. And I always wondered what he meant, since he was, after all, one of the most corrupt people I’ve ever known.
Societies rise through trust and they fall by corruption.
Lies.
I’m not trying to say he was a good guy, but he did redeem himself in the end.
At least that’s how I see it.
Wen’s people got us out of Princeton that night two weeks ago. Damian Li had made a deal to end his reign by taking down his own people. He made a database of names. Every corrupt official in the local Hong Kong government. He sent me to Fort Collins that day I met with Jack Joseph to retrieve a code I had written years before to help him infiltrate the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau in Hong Kong. He was going to team up with Wen to bring it all down. And after his death, Wen came to me. To give me a chance to get out and set things right at the same time.
I gave him that code. And the database that Cliff handed off to me after we met over the summer. Turns out Cliff Middleton had big dreams of bringing down world corruption as well. He was working with Wen the entire time.
Wen set the code to work in the government systems without anyone knowing it was him. In the past week, more than seven hundred people have been imprisoned in China for being on the Triad take.
It’s just a start. One Triad does not a sweep make.
But it’s more than Wen had before, and he’s hopeful now. He sees Hong Kong’s government as something his people should be able to trust.
I can respect that.
Rory was sick for days afterward, but she’s getting better every day. We took her to a specialist, who came up with the name of the poison—a derivative of ricin, which was thought to be untreatable until a few years ago.
I didn’t want to know any more about that. All I wanted was for my princess to be OK.
Two weeks on and she’s almost back to normal, and all the medical experts Spencer Shrike flew in on the recommendation of my uncle James say she’d be dead by now if that antidote the blonde woman gave her hadn’t worked.
Dead by now.
I want to fucking kill someone just thinking about how close she came.
“Hey,” Rory says, walking up to me and sitting down on the sand.
“Hey yourself,” I say, smiling at her. She’s wearing a pink bikini and white sunglasses. “How’s things?”
This is my code phrase for, How are you feeling today?
She wraps her arm into mine, twining us together. The way it was always meant to be. “I miss her,” Rory says, meaning Tera. “And him too,” she adds. Meaning Cliff.
“I know,” I say, pulling her into a tight hug. “But they’d be happy for you. That you made it out.”
She leans into me and says, “We made it, Five. Together. That’s the way it was always supposed to be.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I got you to agree to marry me for real.”
She smiles at that. Then her smile falters. “I wish I could tell my sisters. And I wish my parents could be here too.”
“We talked about this, Princess. Uncle James got here to the island in secret. No one knows you’re alive. No one knows I was in Princeton that night. Well, except Chen and he’s dead.”
Motherfucker. That’s what he gets for betraying my grandfather.
That toxicology came back too. Same thing as what they used on Rory in that weird deathtrap down in the Palladium basement. Turns out those mansions were built over some secret tunnels used for the Underground Railroad back in the day.
Lucky for us.
“I’m not complaining,” she says.
“I know that,” I reply. “But it’s OK to be sad, ya know. You can’t ever go home again. Ever. And only Sparrow, Belle, and Kate, and our parents know you’re alive. If they”—and by they I mean whoever the fuck these Palladium people are—“know you’re alive, they’ll find you, Rory. Use you to get to me. So you’re staying here with Uncle James. You’ll have him, and Harper, and the kids.”
“Kids,” she says, wistfully.
“And I’ll be back as often as I can slip away. We won’t be apart forever, ya know. It’s all gonna work out in the end.”
“I know,” she says. But she’s sad.
Which is why now is the perfect time to give her my present.
I pull the small box out of my pocket. It’s wrapped in white paper with a pink satin bow. “What’s this?” she asks, But her smile is big. Bigger than any smile I’ve seen on her face since I came back into her life and fucked it all up.
“Just a little something to make it easier,” I say. “That’s all. Open it.”
“Five Aston,” she says. “What did you do now?” But her fingers are already pulling on the bow. It slips off and falls into the sand beside her. When she rips the white paper off the box and opens it up, she frowns. “A flash drive,” she says dryly. “Thanks. I’ll treasure it always.”
“Don’t be a silly princess,” I say. And then I hand her my phone and say, “Plug it in.”
She does, and the phone comes to life as the code in the drive activates.
I watch her watch the screen, and then the little icon appears.
“Dead Notes.” She makes a funny face. “What the hell is this?”
“I made the first version of this app back when I was a kid. It’s… kinda morbid and it never took off the way I thought it would. But it makes people feel better.”
“What’s it do?” she asks.
“It’s a messaging system. For loved ones who’ve passed away. You call the cell phone of the person you lost and they pick up. Their voicemail greeting. So people can leave you a message. It’s only one-way, of course. The dead can’t reply. But it makes those left behind feel better. Feel like they can talk to you. And since you’re not really dead, it’ll make you feel better too. Your sisters can call. And you can keep up with them.”
She starts to cry.
I pull her into my lap and let her.
It’s hard to walk away from your life and live in secret. She’s allowed to grieve for her loss, even though neither of us died.
She’s losing everything right now, and I want to make it better.
“Your parents will come,” I say, dragging a piece of hair out of her wet and teary eyes to tuck it behind her ear. “Every year, during their Disney trip so no one suspects anything. And my parents will come too. Kate can come. And Sparrow and Belle. Maybe eventually… one day… we’ll be safe again. We’ll know we won and we’ll leave this place and rejoin the world. But in the meantime, Princess, we’re gonna live our happily ever after right here.”
Safe.
Together.
Till death do us part.
It’s not much, but it’s all I can offer for now.
One day she’ll get the real happily ever after. She’ll get the real wedding. But until then, we’re not gonna give up or stop living.
So I stand up and pull her off the sand so she’s standing with me.
There’s a postcard-perfect sunset tonight. And a cool breeze to go with it.
And I whisper in her ear the only other thing I can think of that might make her smile again.
“Let’s make babies while we wait.”