Page 38 of Our Last Resort

I leaned a bit farther back in the chair, never taking my eyes off him. If I did, a spell would be broken.

There was something else. It was in Émile’s thin, tapered fingers, dancing in the air around him, marking the cadence of his words. In his gaze on me, like being knighted.

“I can see that you want to learn more,” he said, both elbows on his desk, hands clasped. “I can teach you.”

Me?

Émile kept a circle of mothers around himself, but he had never chosen a kid.

I swallowed.

He seemed so tall, even in his desk chair. Not a god, maybe, but a man like a star, his brain like galaxies.

And still, so silly. Leaving the door to his office unlocked, his money in a box. Émile craved a world where he didn’t have to be careful. Where he could lean across his desk and look into the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl and see that in this moment, he was everything.

“That would be,” I said, “unbelievable.”

Émile raised an eyebrow. Amused. Tickled. He liked it, I realized. Having a project. A young mind to shape.

“Yes,” I repeated. “Yes.”

Émile smiled.

“We’ll meet in the mornings,” he said, “before Assembly. I will teach you—”

I stopped listening.

Who cared what he planned on teaching me?

I was safe. I had money.

Nothing else mattered.

14Escalante, Utah

The Fifth Day

I open one eye.

“Gabriel?”

I’m in our suite. The curtains are drawn; the AC is whooshing softly.

What time is it?

I check my phone: seven in the evening.

“Gabriel?”

He’s not here.

Not again.

I call him. He picks up on the second ring.

“Where are you?” I ask.

There’s ambient noise behind him, people talking over smooth jazz.

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