Page 74 of The Expat Affair

Friendmight be overstating things, but I don’t really have a good alternative. She’s someone I talked to a couple of times, who poured me full of wine and warned me of dangers she didn’t quite define, though as it turns out, she wasn’t wrong. I really wish she’d been faster getting me that gun.

“She called you”—he taps a finger to the screen—“three times in a row. Seems like she wants more than just to talk.”

The phone buzzes in his hand, not with another call but a voicemail hitting the system. He taps Play and puts it on speaker, and Willow’s voice fills the room and my head.

Hey, Rayna, I really wish you’d pick up the phone because I need help, and I’m counting on you to get this on time. I’m standing outside a warehouse near the station, where Fleur is holding Sem. She picked him upfrom school and then brought him here, and she won’t tell me why. I have no idea what I’m about to walk in to, only that I’m going in there to get him back. If you don’t hear from me in the next twenty minutes or so, call your detective friend and give him this address: VanDiemenstraat408. Tell him a child’s life is in danger and to hurry.

There’s so much to latch on to here. First of all, Fleur took Sem. She kidnapped her own nephew.

Lars leans over and grabs my sneaker from the floor, then tosses it at my head. “Let’s go.”

I don’t have to ask where we’re going, but I can’t imagine what Lars thinks we’ll find when we get there. Three members of the Prins family, sure, but what’s he going to do, hold them for ransom in exchange for the missing diamonds? Like I tried to tell him last night, whoever has those stones is long gone.

I wriggle my sneaker onto my foot. “Okay, but can I at least pee first? And I wouldn’t say no to a slice of toast.”

Lars sighs, gesturing to the hall with his gun. “Toilet, but hurry.”

In the bathroom, I empty my bladder and look around for anything I can use as a weapon, but toilets in this country are the size of a coat closet and there’s not much here. A container of liquid hand soap, a grimy toilet brush in a plastic stand, a perpetual calendar Ingrid uses to keep track of birthdays hanging from a nail in the wall. I stash the calendar behind the toilet, then wriggle the nail from the plaster. It’s two centimeters long at best, but I press the end to a finger pad and it’s sharp enough to draw blood.

Lars raps on the door with the gun, two hard and metallic pops against wood that make me jump a good inch off the floor. “What’s taking so long?”

“Okay, okay.” I flush and drop the nail into my pocket, pushing it with a finger all the way to the bottom where it’s level with the seam. “I’m coming.”

I open the door to find two bodies, Lars and a stony-faced Ingrid, waiting for me in the hall.

“You.” I stab a finger at her face. “You put all those trackers in my stuff, didn’t you? Of course you did. You had plenty of access.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She makes sure to hold my gaze when she says it, but I see all the other signs. The way she curls her hands into fists to pop her thumbs, the way her voice drifts higher than usual. Barry used to have the same tells whenever he was lying. Ingrid put those trackers in my things. She worked with Xander. Though I still don’t see what my role is in their plan.

And Lars?

“So what, the two of you are working together now?”

Ingrid makes a throaty sound that says,not a chance.

Lars shakes his head.

“Then how did you know she was working with Xander?”

“It’s my business to know everything about my targets.” He grabs me by the arm and shoves me in the direction of the door. “Here’s what’s going to happen. The three of us are going to walk calmly and quietly down the stairs and out the front door. If you talk to anybody on the way, I’ll shoot you. If you signal them or even look at them funny, I’ll shoot you. Do you see where I’m going with this? One of you does anything other than walk and look straight ahead, you’re both dead. Understood?”

Ingrid and I exchange a look, then bob our heads in a simultaneous nod.

“What about the reporters?” I say.

He wags my phone in the air. “You just tweeted a picture of yourself standing in line at the Rijks.”

The picture was from a couple of weeks ago, and all it would take is for one of the reporters to zoom in on the tickets in my hand, and they’ll see the date and time. One detail-oriented journalist tofigure out they’ve been sent on a wild goose chase. Let’s just pray one of them is smart enough to check.

“Let’s go,” he says, gesturing to the door with the gun. “My car is parked around the corner.”

Silently, Ingrid and I file out the door and start the long trek down the stairs.

About halfway down, a door pops open at the end of the stairwell, an elderly neighbor grabbing the mail someone had dropped by his door. He greets us in Dutch, and it sounds friendly enough, but there’s still a gun pointed at our backs so Ingrid and I don’t look his way. We stare straight ahead and keep moving. The neighbor picks up his mail and goes back inside, closing the door with a click.

“Good girls,” Lars says, sticking close to our heels.

The reporters are long gone by the time we step outside and follow Lars’s directions to the left. His car is just where he said it would be, wedged between a dusty van and a tree on the next street. It’s also surprisingly nice for someone who introduced himself as a starving artist, a four-door Tesla, but then again, Lars has been lying to me since the beginning.

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