ELEVEN
THE TAN
Things have cooled down a little, but Kovius basically went berserk. I heard furniture move and crash; glass shattered on the floor. He shouted some stuff in Afrikaans, but I was terrified, and pressed my hands over my ears to block his barking. I didn’t care. Didn’t want to hear.
He seems to be done destroying the living room for now—presumably because he went out: the ruckus ended right after the front door slammed. Isiporho left his chair once to check on the damage. I glimpsed Dominik helping March clean up everything. He must have returned at some point after he got rid of the ice-cream truck. There was something weirdly poignant about seeing March on all fours, in his black fatigues, with a double holster over his turtleneck . . . meticulously picking up each piece of a broken mug, like it mattered if the floor was clean.
Now it’s over, and the low hum of March’s voice echoes through the wooden walls as he discusses something in Afrikaans with Dominik. I strain my ears to listen, grasp at anything that could give me a hint as to my immediate future . . . “Opstyg voor sononder” . . . “steek die grens oor.” Take off before nightfall . . . cross the border. So there’s a plane waiting for us somewhere—as for the border . . . I have no clear sense of time save for the certainty that the sun hasn’t set yet. We didn’t drive that long to reach the lake, and the helicopter must have still been in the general area of Hamina when we jumped. The closest point to cross the Swedish border must be four hundred miles away—Norway is even farther. That’d make it the Russian border then.
I know the puzzle’s pieces are here somehow, scattered before me. But I can’t make sense of any of it. Lying curled up on the bed, I study the knots and veins in the wooden wall. I’m no longer so scared those guys are going to kill me, but now that I feel more focused, I can’t stop thinking about the scar on my neck, the spider on the X-ray. Maybe they’re trying to mess with me. But if it’s real, why would Bentsen have put that inside my head? They called it an implant. Maybe it’s actually a plate, like the one in my wrist? No . . . wires snaking inside one’s brain, I’ve never heard of anything like that. I touch my nape tentatively. I can’t feel anything, only the inch-long vertical scar.
“You won’t feel anything; it’s deep.”
I’d almost forgotten about Isiporho sitting in the chair across the room. I stare at the wall obstinately, ignoring him.
He sighs. “Not in the mood to chat, huh?”
Hardly . . . My thoughts drift to clown Kovius. I’m starting to suspect that this has nothing to do with ransom kidnapping. The way Kovius lost it when I mentioned my father; this is personal. Revenge, maybe? He said something about a guy . . . Anies. Maybe it’s someone my father knows. In my mind, the dots, at last, slowly start to connect. My father did everything he could to isolate—well, insulate—me so I wouldn’t hear about the Poseidon and remember Kovius, who knows him, and knows me too . . . Kovius, who was at the Poseidon at the same time I was and caused my wounds. But my father also let the world believe I’d been killed in the attack—yet another detail he tried to hide from me.
Then there’s March: he doesn’t act like we just met. I can still feel his lips on mine, the moment he ripped the tape. The warmth and the urgency . . . My eyes flutter closed. I don’t know if I want to remember last night’s dream or, on the contrary, wipe it from my memory for good. My rational mind fights the very idea, but every instinct I possess tells me it could really be my night visitor. That would certainly explain why I deleted all mentions of him in my mailbox . . . or did someone else take care of that for me? The Google results Ingolvinlinna’s network were serving me were evidently fake until I hacked the router; how much of what I browsed over the past months was real then?
Goose bumps trail across my skin, carrying in their wake a fear I can’t place, an intuition that once I know the truth, I won’t like it. Ever since I woke up in the hospital and listened to my father’s account of the fall of the Poseidon, I took for granted that I was but one of the many innocent victims of the disaster, but Kovius said he saved me; March and the others act like they know me already . . . Maybe my father wanted to save me too, in his own twisted way. From myself?
I gave you everything I couldn’t give your mother . . .
I jerk to a sitting position. “Where’s Kovius?”
Isiporho blinks as if I just rose from the dead before a warm grin pierces through his beard. “Probably smoking in the shed like he’s sixteen again,” he says with a wink in the direction of the window. Half-buried under a white blanket is a wooden roof I didn’t notice before. “Don’t worry; he’s going to pull himself together.” His lips go tight for a second. “This is a little too fucked-up even for a man like Dries.”
“What? You mean that thing in my neck? Why did he lose it like that? Why did you take me?”
His smug expression returns. “Looks like Dr. Bentsen’s magic cocktail has cleared out of your system . . . That’s more like the girl I know.”
I decide not to probe where he knows me from: I’ve got enough thugs in my contact list for now. I stand up from the bed and look at the door. My hands are shaking again. I ball my fists. “I don’t understand any of this,” I eventually say. “I want to talk to Kovius. I—”
The door handle moving nearly sends me hiding under the bed, until I remember that I need to man up—or so to speak. I’ll never get answers otherwise. So when March enters the room, I don’t chicken out; I square my shoulders and give him a level stare.
“I need to understand,” I say simply.
“Isiporho, can you please leave us?” March asks.
A silent question flickers in my warden’s eyes, but he complies nonetheless, casting me one final glance before the door closes behind him.
As if prompted by the doorknob’s final click, March moves closer. I stand still as a mouse, trying to appraise his mood. Unlike Kovius, whatever manic rage might simmer inside him he conceals under a perfectly calm façade. Yet in his silence, in the faint lines around his eyes, his mouth, I sense a weary sadness. It’s that side of him that scares me. Dries and Isiporho I can deal with. The secrets they’re hiding make my stomach churn, but I think the walls inside me are strong enough for me to face them. I won’t let them get under my skin.
But March . . . everything about him feels personal, intimate—possibly is, for all I know. As he stands before me, studying me with equal interest, I struggle to keep my expression blank. My brain is working in a frenzy though, filing each detail to compare with whatever shreds of memory might still be lying around. His hair—I suspect he keeps it that short because it curls when it grows—the mesmerizing pattern in his blue irises, that faint bump on his nose: broken in the past?
I try to cross my arms so I won’t fidget, but I end up wrapping them around myself. I hope that looking away from his face will help, but I find myself just as taken with the rest of him. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his black turtleneck in perfectly flat and even folds. I perform a meticulous scan of the corded muscles, the veins running under his skin. I’m practically counting each hair on his forearms when I pause in my examination to glance at my own wrist and the chalk-white skin there. His is a dark shade of gold, almost coppery in places, on his hands, the bridge of his nose. There’s a band of paler skin peeking from under the black bracelet of his watch.
“Looks like you’re back from a vacation . . .” I mumble. I’m well aware that it’s a disastrous start the moment the words leave my mouth, but I’m desperate to ease the tension building between us.
Dumb as it may be, the question seems to shake him a lot more than it should. One of his hands jerks, rises to touch me, but he hesitates, and it drops back to his side instead. I hold back a sigh of relief. When he finally answers, his voice is low, tight. “Island, I’ve been looking for you. Everywhere. I spent months following cold trails, until I managed to track down one of Anies’s men in Rio. He was part of the team who transferred you to Ingolvinlinna. I questioned him.” I notice the way his jaw works silently before he adds, “He spoke.”
I’m not sure where the certainty comes from, but I know, without a doubt, that this man tortured someone to get here. To find me. To take me. I exhale slowly, inching away from him. “Who’s that Anies guy? Does he have something to do with my father and Kovius?”
He tips his head to the bed. “Let’s sit down.”
“No. Answer me.” Also, I’m not getting on a bed with him, but that’s another matter . . .
“Anies is the man you call Aidan Keasler.”
Kovius’s angry accusation rings in my head. Anies took you. I saved you. I hate to prove March right, but my knees are wobbling, and I feel physically overwhelmed; I stagger back and sit on the bed. “Okay. So, you know him under that . . . code name.”
“Yes,” he answers, dragging the chair toward the bed to sit in front of me. He plunges his gaze into mine, and I can’t look away, can’t shut him out. I feel naked. “Island . . .”
Somewhere in the black hole that is my brain, a spark lights up in the darkness. My chest constricts like I’m standing on top of a cliff. I know what’s coming next, as if I’d dreamt that very moment before. I’m not ready.
“He’s not your father,” March says quietly.
Part of me doesn’t want it to be true. If it is, then I’ve truly lost everything; I’m just an empty shell with no past, no self. My friends, my real family—do I even have one?—I’m dead to them. I want to believe March is lying, but I can’t fight this; already my mind is reorganizing itself around this new evidence.
Like something I’d remember after having forgotten it.
I breathe fast through my nose to hold back the tears I can feel building in my eyes. March extends a hand to wipe them. I push it away and do it myself, with my sweater sleeve.
“He said my mother was dead. Is that true?”
It’s weird that once again, like a premonition, I already know—or rather sense—the truth. March nods once, and I feel my heart physically break over a loss I can’t even remember, something abstract.
“Go on,” I say, my voice cracking.
“Let’s do this another way,” he offers. “What do you need to know first?”
My mouth twitches bitterly. “You know, you can just say ‘I have no idea where to start.’ That works too.”
He sighs. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“Why?” It’s the only word I can force out. All encompassing. Why would my fath—Anies—do this? Why me? To what end?
March’s gaze drops to his lap. He’s searching his words. “First, you should also know that Anies is not a businessman. Well, certainly not in the conventional sense.”
I nod, waiting for the rest with clenched fists.
“Does the word Lions ring any bell?” When I shake my head, he goes on. “They’re a brotherhood of assassins and mercenaries. They’ve been around since antiquity, but today they’re primarily—”
“South African,” I complete, stating the obvious. I leaf through my recent memories. “They’re . . . forgotten warriors. People history must not remember. He’s one of them, Anies?”
“Yes, their commander, in fact. So he told you about them?”
“Not really . . . Sometimes he’d say things I wondered about. He keeps a lot of antiquities too. Old paintings, swords, that sort of stuff. That’s what made me think of it.”
March’s eyebrows knit in an expression of disdain. “He probably helped himself to the temples . . .”
“The temples?”
“I can tell you about those later if you’d like.”
“Okay . . .” I make a mental note to add antiquities looting to the dreadful résumé of a man I called father until last night, feeling sick to my stomach. “So, the investments, the industrial projects . . . it’s all bullshit?”
“Not entirely,” March explains. “Things have changed lately. The Lions have been branching into many sectors over the past decade, some legal, most not.”
“They’re growing,” I conclude, thinking of the shipments. “My—he told me about his factory . . . in Ecuador. He’s building something there.” As I say this, I feel the butterfly still resting above my breasts under my sweater, strangely heavy. My fingers are itching to tear it off.
“I’m not surprised. Dries used to operate a few industrial ventures too. Biltong and rusks, mostly.”
As soon as I hear Kovius’s first name, I know what my next question is. “What happened at the Poseidon? Was I there . . . with Kovius?” And you?
In March’s eyes, the nascent light instantly dies, and the lines around the corners of his mouth seem suddenly a little deeper. “You and I were there with Dries. We were trying to stop a man a named Lucca Gerone. He’s the one who destroyed the dome.”
I frown. “Not Kovius?”
“No. Anies framed Dries for flight DL504 and the Poseidon, to get rid of him.”
I’m not sure why I didn’t pick up on this before, but hearing both names in the same sentence, I see my father’s face, Kovius’s, the hazel eyes . . . almost golden when the light is right. The same eyes. It’s like a drop of water hit the surface of a very quiet, very deep lake, and in the void of my mind, the ripples are spreading, growing into waves. He’s not just a weird and violent ice-cream man with anger-management issues and a heavy rap sheet. I can’t work the idea into words yet—I can barely breathe as it is—but I know I’m gonna have to turn that particular stone, and I’m scared of what I’ll find underneath.
“Why would Anies do that? Why did he want to get rid of . . . Dries?”
“For power,” March says. “Dries used to be the Lions’ vice commander. They had different visions, and there was an old feud between them.”
Anies on top. Dries second in command. Anies. Dries. The golden eyes and the sharp features. There it is, the stone I wish I could ignore. “They look like each other.”
“Anies is Dries’s elder brother,” he replies, each word laced with sorrow.
“I understand.” Do I? I can’t fully process the implications of this news. I don’t want to . . . I look away and focus on the window. The sky is turning pink. It must be 3:00 p.m., and I gather we’ll be moving soon. I return my attention March. “So . . . you’re a Lion too? And Isiporho and Dominik?”
“I used to be. Dries trained me—he trained the three of us. I left the brotherhood eleven years ago. Isiporho and Dominik were forced to . . . retire eight months ago when Anies turned on Dries and purged all his disciples.”
“But you’re an assassin. You can’t stop.” It hurts to say it. I’m not sure why, but I can feel the words rasping my throat.
“No.” He sighs. “I suppose I can’t stop.”
“Why did you leave the Lions then?”
“Because I met you.”
I welcome his admission with stunned silence. You’re where my tape starts. The words I remembered during my last session with Bentsen suddenly take a new meaning. The room seems to be spinning around me, and I feel . . . I don’t know exactly. It’s like looking through a frosted glass door. Deep down, I already know what I’ll find on the other side, but for now, it’s nothing but blurry, distorted shapes.
When I remain voiceless, March gets up from the chair and takes a tentative step forward, his hand reaching for my arm, as if he can’t help himself. I freeze. “Island,” he asks. “Do you remember—”
“Who am I to you?” My voice breaks before I can even finish my sentence.
I look at his lips, see him swallow. “You were—you are my girlfriend.”