Chapter Twenty-Four
I get the call when I’m thirty thousand feet in the air. My cell phone rings, and I fumble through my backpack. Damon doesn’t even look away from the window, ignoring the phone call. Ignoring me.
He’s hardly spoken to me at all except to tell me when the car would be arriving to take us to the airport. From there we boarded a private jet. Hiro sits in the back of the plane, her eyes closed, her body still. I might believe she’s sleeping except that I sense a deep wariness around her.
Avery’s face smiles up at me from the phone screen, and my heart skips a beat. I took that picture my first year at Smith when we met up for dinner. I cropped her face in the square, so you can’t see Gabriel in the background. It’s impossible to forget his expression, though—the mixture of tenderness and ferocity.
“Hello?” I ask cautiously.
A small sigh. “Penny. It’s so good to hear your voice.”
My heart beats wildly in my chest. “God. It really is you. Are you okay? Are you safe?”
She hesitates. “Now I am. Gabriel is here with me. He told me you helped find me.”
“What about…?” It’s hard to even say his name, impossible to imagine him doing the things he did to me to Avery. I sprang up from between bricks, an unlikely weed. Being crushed beneath his boot wasn’t pleasant, but it was the life that I was made for. Avery has delicate petals and beautiful color.
“Jonathan Scott,” she says.
“Did he hurt you?”
“He hurt a lot of people.” Her voice cracks. “Maybe you most of all. I’m sorry that I let him live. I thought it was the right thing to do, the noble thing, but I was wrong.”
“Shhh.” I wish I were with her right now to give her a hug. But if Jonathan Scott has had his hands on her, she might not want a hug from me. “Don’t worry about that now.”
“I am worried about it, because I think Gabriel’s going to leave me.”
“What?” If Gabriel leaves my friend for having been violated, for being a victim, I’m going to personally shoot him. Or at least tell him he’s the worst kind of bastard.
“He’s going to go back there. To kill Jonathan Scott in revenge, but he doesn’t understand.”
“What doesn’t he understand?”
“Jonathan Scott did more than escape the asylum. He took it over. He had the nurses…” A loud sob escapes, before she steadies her breathing. “He had the nurses locked up in the rooms, naked. The inmates he could control worked for him as guards. The ones he couldn’t, he killed.”
My throat tightens. “Oh God.”
“This is why Damon was so intent on killing him. He knew that he couldn’t be locked up.”
I glance at Damon, who’s watching me with an intent expression, his dark eyes unfathomable. “Are you at the asylum?”
“We flew to Chicago. I’m actually in the hospital now, but I’m fine. A few bruises, that’s all. Gabriel insisted on having a doctor look at me…before he flies back there. I don’t want him to leave me. Even with a guard—”
“Of course he should stay with you.”
“Jonathan Scott had these terrible games he would play with the inmates.” She pauses, her voice thick. “That he would play with me. He thought they were too broken to fight back, and they almost were. I had to convince them that we could break free. That we could do it together.”
Shock sinks into me. “You mean you escaped by yourself?”
“No,” she says reasonably. “We all did.”
Of course she would frame it that way. It’s so like Avery—to lead a revolution and give credit to those she led. “When did Gabriel get there?”
“We went to the nearest town and walked into the police station like that, thirty women and men with only blankets and dirty feet. Gabriel had already landed at the airport and was driving to the asylum when I called him from the station.”
“My God, Avery.”
Her tone is grim. “I know. The FBI showed up and said they would handle Jonathan Scott, and I want to believe them, but look what he did to the mental hospital.”
“Listen, Avery. Whatever he did to you…” I trail off, because I don’t know how to comfort her. It doesn’t matter. But it does matter. It means everything to be violated. Everything and nothing.
“Don’t worry,” she murmurs. “He did mess with my head, but not that way. He said I was his daughter. That he wanted to get the family back together.”
And now Damon is on a plane headed toward him. That’s exactly what Jonathan Scott knew would happen. He’s pulling everyone’s strings. “I’m sorry.”
She gives a sad laugh. “Family. That’s how he lured me out of the room, did you know that? Had this lookalike of my mother along the hillside in the moonlight. It was one of the inmates, but she looked so much like her.”
“I had no idea. I woke up alone and so confused, Avery. So scared for you.”
“I think part of me assumed I was dreaming, seeing her like that, following her through the wet grass. It felt like a dream. At least until I woke up in a padded cell.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Yes,” she says soberly. “Are you still in Tanglewood? We’re going there tomorrow. I want to see you.”
“Actually we’re on our way to the asylum.”
“What? No. Turn around.”
“I’m not sure the pilot can turn around in midair.” I glance at Damon, whose expression has turned hard. “And I’m not sure we’d tell him to if we could. I think Damon needs to finish this.”
A deep breath comes over the line. “Maybe that’s true. I don’t trust the FBI any more than I trust the people who ran that asylum. That man has some kind of hold over people. He gets into their heads.”
I’m familiar with that particular sensation. The sense that he can see inside me. The feeling of invisible fingers combing through my worries and fears.
“That doesn’t mean you need to go,” she adds. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near that place. Jonathan Scott is still there and very much alive. And he has the other inmates with him.”
Nothing about padded walls and creepy asylums appeals to me. That would always be true, but doubly so because that’s where Jonathan Scott hurt me three years ago, in an old abandoned mental hospital in the city. He feels at home there, which makes them the worst possible place to keep him. Where he’s strongest.
“No,” I say softly, because I have no intention of leaving Damon’s side. “I’m going.”
“Penny, no. You can’t.”
“I need to see this through. We all have our strengths, Avery. Yours got you out of that place. And mine… well, mine sent me there. That’s the difference between us.”