The King(160)
Stalking to the colonial’s front door, the faint glow in the sky made his skin prickle with warning and his eyes water—which ended as he burst into the house.
To a scene of abject debauchery.
The only thing that would have made it more complete would have been the presence of females. As it was, the air was spiced thick with rum and gin, crowded with hearty laughter, heavy with the kind of male aggression that surged after victory.
“You return!” Zypher called out. “He returns!”
The bellowing would have been loud enough to rouse the neighbors, if there had been any. As it was, it filled the house.
“And we have news,” Throe said with satisfaction mildly tinted with drunkenness. “The induction ceremony is at midnight this coming eve. In Ichan’s library hall. We have been invited, of course.”
The temptation to tell them to go in his stead appealed. But he kept his voice quiet. With naught but a nod, he disappeared upstairs.
Fortunately, his soldiers were used to him retreating into his own counsel—and let him go.
As he shut the bedroom door, the noise below was dimmed, not extinguished; however, he was accustomed to tuning out that group of males.
Going over to the bed, which was a mess of sheets and tangled blankets, he sat down, disarmed, and took out his cell. Cradling it in his hands, he stared at the screen.
There was no way to dial her: Whatever phone she’d used had a scrambled account.#p#分页标题#e#
Lying back and looking up at the ceiling, he knew an emptiness that was a revelation.
The idea that she could be dead and he didn’t know it hit him so deeply, he felt as if his personality had split in two.
Never to be united again.
FORTY-SEVEN
Where was he?
As Sola loitered in Assail’s kitchen, fussing over the few things she’d repacked from upstairs, she kept looking over her shoulder, expecting to find him coming around the corner to try to persuade her to stay.
But he’d already done that, hadn’t he.
In the shower.
Man, for once, memories of being with him didn’t get her juiced. They made her want to cry.
“I no understand why we leave so early,” her grandmother announced as she came up from the basement. “It is not even dawn.”
Her grandmother was dressed in the yellow version of her house frock, but she was ready for the trip, her good shoes on, her matching handbag hanging off her wrist from its fake leather strap. Behind her, Assail’s matched set of guards each had a suitcase—and they did not look happy. Although, come on, they hardly had faces built for the jollies.
“It’s a twenty-three-hour drive, vovó. We need to get started.”
“We are no stopping?”
“No.” She couldn’t take the risk with her grandmother in tow. “You can drive in the middle during the day. You love to drive.”
Her grandmother let out a sound that for anybody else would have been an F-bomb. “We should stay here. Is nice here. I like the kitchen.”
It was not the kitchen the woman was fond of. Hell, her grandmother could cook over a Coleman without blinking an eye—and had.
He’s not Catholic, Sola wanted to say. He’s actually an atheist drug dealer. Soon to be wholesaler—
What if she was pregnant? she wondered. Because she hadn’t taken her pill for two days. Wouldn’t that be …
Nucking futs, as they say.
Shaking herself out of la-la land, Sola zipped the rolling suitcase shut and just stood there.
“Well?” her grandmother taunted. “We go? Or no?”
As if she knew exactly what Sola was waiting for.
Or who, as the case was.
Sola didn’t have enough pride left to try to be cool as she looked around again, searching the entry from the dining area, the archway that was used when you came from upstairs or the office, the shallow hall at the head of the basement steps. All empty. And there were no footsteps coming at a dead run, no thumping from overhead as somebody rushed to pull on a shirt and get to the lower level.
Shower time aside, how could he not see her off …
At that moment, her grandmother took a deep breath and the flat yellow gold cross she always wore around her neck caught the overhead light.
“We go,” Sola heard herself say.
With that, she picked up her suitcase and headed for the back door. Outside, a totally lose-it-in-a-crowd Ford was parked close to the house, the rental agreement in the name of Sola’s emergency identity.
The one nobody in Caldwell knew she had. And in the glove box, there was another set of documents and IDs for her grandmother.
Using the remote, she triggered the locks to disengage, and opened the trunk. Assail’s men, meanwhile, were handling her grandmother with kid gloves, helping her down the stairs, carrying her luggage, and her coat, which she had obviously refused to put on in protest.