Page 109 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
Go somewhere new? Morocco? South America? Australia?
Associates?
Who does she know?
Who does she TRUST?
Alex turned slowly, following the pieces of red string that stretched across a wall of maps, past high-tech monitors, blinking with lines of code.
The room had changed, but it was also exactly the same because his father’s work had been slowly papered over with a new search for a new subject.
And, in the middle of it all, there was a new photograph.
Alex remembered the moment when he’d taken it. She was wearing the top to a pair of old pajamas, and she was trying to flip a pancake in the air, but, it turns out, it’s easier to kill a man with a shoelace than it is to flip a pancake, and the result was batter all over the ceiling and dripping down onto her hair.
She was staring straight at the camera. And she was laughing. She was happy. She was his.
“You were gone,” she heard him whisper. “I had to find you. I know why you left, and I know why you didn’t come back, but... I had to find you.”
Suddenly, it all made sense. The bottles and the broken things. Even the beard. He’d spent the last year looking and worrying and trying not to become his father. “Michael...”
“Where were you, Alex? Just tell me. Where were you?”
“You said not to come back.” She didn’t want to have this conversation—because it wouldn’t be a conversation. It would be a fight. No. It would bethefight. They’d been avoiding it for days because they didn’t have the time and Alex didn’t have the bandwidth.
They had to find the ring.
They had to find Nikolai.
They had to figure out why the world was chasing them, because that was the only way they could stop running. Alex needed to stop running, because she’d been running for a year...
From him.
“Alex...”
“You said to leave, so I left.”
“Where were you?” King roared, but then he pulled himself back. “Never mind.” He was backing away. He was the one leaving this time and she couldn’t find the words to stop him. “I’m going to go find something to eat. Stay. Go. Do whatever you want.”
He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. He was—she looked around the room—exactly what he’d been afraid he’d turn into. Alex wanted to hold the ten-year-old boy who had lost his mother to a bomb and his father to a mystery. She wanted to turn back time.
***
Alex didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at the walls covered with King’s theories and guesses and leads.
He hadn’t even been close.
There was a time when nothing could have made Alex prouder. She’d outsmarted and outrun the Great Michael Kingsley, but all Alex felt was lonely.
She wasn’t mad at herself for running, but for the first time, she wondered what life might have been like if she hadn’t done it quite so well.
The phone number of the service she and Zoe used was scrawled on a piece of paper and tacked to the center of the wall, which made sense. That number would have been King’s best clue for how to reach her.
Maybe it was the sight of the number... or being back inside the castle walls... or maybe she was just feeling Big Feelings andshe didn’t like them and didn’t understand them, but Alex suddenly needed to talk to an expert.
It had been a year since she’d heard her sister’s voice, so Alex picked up the phone and dialed, not really expecting to hear—
“You have seventeen new messages.”
