Page 71 of The Expat Affair

“No, nothing.” I shake my head. “I swear.”

“Did someone come to the penthouse while you were there?”

“Yes. They cut off his finger and strangled him in the shower.”

He grunts. “Besides the killer, I mean.”

“Not that I saw. Xander received a phone call, but that’s it.”

“A phone call from who?” The phone stops its buzzing, then starts right back up again. Lars hikes up on a hip, wrestling a lump from his pocket. “What time?”

“Sometime around midnight, and I don’t know who it was. Xander didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

“You just said it was midnight. Why would someone be calling him that late?” Lars asks, but he doesn’t seem to expect an answer. He’s too engrossed in whatever’s on the phone—myphone—in his hand. I crane my neck to see the name lighting up the screen, but there’s no need, because he flips the phone around.

His eyes narrow into slits. “Why is Willow Prins calling your mobile?”

Part Three

“It’s hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.”

—Dolly Parton

Willow

I drop the phone into my coat pocket and study the building across the street, a four-story monstrosity of sprawling yellow brick dotted with grimy windows that once upon a time, served as a warehouse for Amsterdam’s lumber ports. The address Fleur texted is all the way north in thehouthavens, a miserable spot this time of year, an area pressed up against the IJ River. An icy gale whips up hard enough to almost knock me over. I lean into it and hurry across the deserted street. Somewhere behind those ugly yellow walls, Fleur has Sem.

On the bike ride here, I had almost a half an hour to think about why my sister-in-law would lure me to a sketchy warehouse in an industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of town, in secret. I think of the lies she spun to pick Sem up from school, the lengths she went to bring him here so that I would have to fetch him, her warning not to tell Thomas.

Jan’s words beat through my head.Think who had the most to gain. At least three of them go by the name of Prins.

But what do Sem and I have to do with any of it?

I clomp up the metal stairs and push through the plain door, then take a rickety elevator to the top floor. A bright space of exposed brick and filthy concrete, lit up by giant arched windows along the back wall. The air smells of stale dust and something animal.

There’s only one way for me to go: down a single hallway with a door on either side. The first handle I try doesn’t budge, but thedoor on the left gives way to a bright rectangular room lined with more arched windows, the glass dirty and cracked, the sun lighting up spiderwebs of fissures that stretch up into the building’s eaves. At the far end, a wall of more filthy glass with what looks to be an industrial kitchen on the other side.

And Sem. He sits in his coat at a metal table, head in his hands, staring at a flickering iPad.

And just beyond him: Fleur.

She stands at the stove, pouring steaming water into two mugs and looking like she came straight from work. Dark pants and a slim-cut sweater poking out from her winter coat, a fur-lined Moncler I’ve never seen before. It hangs unzipped despite the temperature in here, as frigid as the air outside. I stare at Sem through the glass—look up look up look up—but his implants are Bluetooth enabled, and whatever he’s watching is keeping his attention on the screen.

At least he doesn’t look frightened. His cheeks are pink from the chill, but he seems otherwise content, engrossed in the winking cartoons.

Fleur turns my way, coming through a door at the end of the glass wall with the two mugs and a bright smile. “You’re fast. Did you come by bike or tram?”

She says it in Dutch and in the same tone she’d use during a Sunday supper, cordial and light, as if this isn’t kidnapping and she called me here for a friendly visit.

“Cut the crap and just tell me what we’re doing here.” My answer is in English, my mind far too flustered to work through a Dutch translation—not that there is a good one forcut the crap. Some of the best English phrases can’t be translated. “Why all the subterfuge?”

“Subterfuge?” Fleur says, matching my English. “Such a fancy word for someone who didn’t go to university.”

It’s a cheap shot, and Fleur knows it. I’ve never actually let on that my lack of education is a sore subject, but my sister-in-law is proficient in sensing another person’s insecurities and tucking them away in a pocket until she can use them as ammunition. I blink at the insult, but that’s my only external reaction.

“I’m educated enough to know that you’re changing the subject.”

She hands me one of the mugs, then fishes the tea bag out of her own cup, dunks it up and down a couple of times, then drops it on the floor with a splat. “Like I told you on the phone, I have something I’d like to discuss, and the old ways of doing things weren’t getting me anywhere.”

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