The Pacific Coast Highway was cold and barren at night, no comfort in the tail lights of the cars rushing onward, no magic in the ships' twinkling lights way off toward the dark horizon. Huddled in Charlotte's car doing one-sixty kilometers per hour, I wondered whether the laws that governed the universe were just corrupt enough to get her a speeding ticket.
Sofi had called Charlotte to tell her that Will had been shot in the lower abdomen while cleaning up his old apartment. He'd called nine-one-one before he'd blacked out, and they'd arrived promptly, stabilizing him on the way to hospital where he was receiving a blood transfusion. They weren't sure if any vital organs had been hit. Sofi had dashed to the crime scene, her phone going to voicemail each time Charlotte had tried to contact her since.
"After the blood transfusion he'll be OK. Stable. It can't have hit a vital organ. We'd be told about that. Wouldn't we? He must be stable." My terrified muttering must been driving Charlotte crazy.
Charlotte chewed her lip and ran manic fingers across her pearl necklace as she drove. "We'll be there soon, Zeph. Just try to rest until we see him."
I sat lower in my seat, willing the tail lights of the cars in front to disappear into the bay, so that Charlotte could drive faster to Maria. My mutterings started again, though I was only talking to stop my teeth from chattering in fear. "I didn't want him to go. I've been feeling so sick today. Missing him. I would have gone instead."
I'd been right there in his arms that very morning. He'd called me at dinner. And five hours later we were gonna find him in hospital, again. His body messed up and in pain, again. Was he gonna recover? Was he injured for life?
Charlotte's voice broke into my rising hysteria. "This is my fault. I made him go get Mozhgan's things. You even told me that setting foot in the apartment again would upset him. The burglars must have expected it to be empty. I could have taken Will at the weekend, helped him. We could have used it as a chance to get closer. I was just thinking about lessening my own work, and now he's..."
Rage bubbled up from fuck knew where inside me. "What are you talking about, Charlotte? He didn't get shot by a burglar. Don't you know who you're sitting next to? I put him in danger. Someone from Sigma must have known about us. They were trying to hurt him to punish me. They've probably been watching the apartment for two months, waiting. I did this!"
Charlotte should have been angry, not me. I'd done this to Will, just like he'd warned. How reckless I'd been over the past two months with phonecalls to Miles, and meeting Luke in Arenosa. Hell, Teresa had even sent a police transcript to my witness protection address. I'd compromised myself so many times, against Will's warnings. And he was the one who'd been hurt.
I wanted Charlotte to scream at me then. To rant at me. To hit me. I deserved it all. But Charlotte set her eyes on the road and ran a finger over her fucking pearls. Like a cliché movie billionairess.
"Will made me a necklace. From a shell he found on the beach. Saved himself ten thousand dollars," I said with a bitter laugh. "Is yours some Lyons family heirloom or something?"
Charlotte drove on in silence. I knew that she was breaking apart too, just better at hiding it, probably for my sake. Seemingly aware of how much she'd been touching her pearls, she latched both hands tight onto the steering wheel. "My necklace cost twenty dollars."
I leaned over to the driver's seat and peered at the little white pearls. They were all misshapen and discolored; some were sandy brown, some gray-tinged, some shaped like big grains of rice, some elongated into tear drops.
"There's a pearl farm on the coast, just south of Arenosa. The good pearls go to jewelry designers. The imperfect pearls are sold in their road-side store.
"We were driving by, and Guillermo just...stopped the car and bought me this necklace. It was when we were first...it's a stretch to call it dating. He hadn't quite recovered from Sofi...stalking him. He was still unsure about me. I was terrified that I'd lose the necklace and he'd think that I didn't treasure it. But I did, very much. I've never taken it off.
"I know I'm always touching it. It's an annoying habit. It was just a spontaneous gesture from Guillermo, but...it meant everything to me. I loved him so much, even back then. Or, perhaps it wasn't love in those days. I think...I was obsessed. Like Sofi had been. It took me years to not be afraid of losing him."
I'd never understand the mess that was Charlotte's personal life. But I did know that feeling of delirious joy at receiving a gift, priceless in what it represented, regardless of its cost.
"I'm sorry, Charlotte. I'm just so scared. That he's hurt bad. And that he's never gonna forgive me."
Charlotte's finger snaked up toward her pearls. "We'll see how he's doing, and go from there, OK?"
"I'll stay until he's better. I'm not leaving him to recover alone."
"You're safer in Korea if they're targeting your friends."
I was about to protest, but I knew that she was right. The dashboard screen sprang to life with an incoming call. Sofi.
"Your brother is conscious, and talking to one of my officers. The bullet entered through the pelvis, the exit wound is at the back of the thigh. There was major blood loss because he was lying there for a while before he called nine-one-one."
"Do you know who did it?"
"Not yet. The crime scene has been secured and we'll do a more thorough investigation tomorrow once forensics have examined the bodies."
"Bodies?" Charlotte paled, her eyes jerking toward the dash screen as if expecting to see forensic footage there.
"There were two as-yet unidentified bodies in the living room in the apartment. One was clearly the assailant who died at the scene. We don't know the identity of the other individual, who died shortly after arriving in hospital. The attack at your brother's apartment is being treated separately to what's on his charging statement."
"Charging statement?" Charlotte's voice rose an octave. What the fuck was happening? Why was Will being charged when two killers had shot him?
Sofi didn't reply for the longest time, like she wasn't sure whether to tell all, or to let Charlotte squirm on a hook. "He made the statement to one of my officers, so I don't know the details. Your brother just confessed to being an operative in a contraband smuggling incident in early March. I don't know which gang he's in at this point, but I guess that the attack on him is gang-related. He's on morphine so my team probably won't get more information out of him tonight. He might confess to other criminal activities when he's in better shape to be interviewed."
"No, Sofi. There's been some mistake." Charlotte had taken on her flat, calm, D.A. voice. "Will isn't involved in any of that. Zeph's captors in Sigma probably attacked him. The charge of contraband smuggling is an error."
"He's been found injured by two attackers, who are now dead, and he's confessed to contraband smuggling, for which he's been charged. I'm sorry, Charlotte. That's all I know for now." The click of Sofi's phone, and the car was bathed in darkness.
The police had messed up. They'd mixed up patients at the hospital, and had confused Will for some shibal-seki criminal in another hospital bed. Or they'd made Will confess to random crimes while injured and on morphine.
"She's wrong, Charlotte. The hospital made a mistake. We'll fix it when we get there. It's a misunderstanding. Will hates when I talk about gang stuff. He gets so scared. He'd never even know how to-"
"He confessed, Zeph." Charlotte's voice was nothing but a whisper, barely pushed out between gritted teeth.
"He's on morphine. He wasn't talking straight. He gets confused when he's on drugs. There's been a mistake."
But Charlotte had closed down, her eyes dull and blank, focused on the road ahead.
I couldn't fucking believe her. She'd bought everything that Sofi had said. She actually believed that Will was capable of...
It couldn't be true. Will, of all people? He was so shy. He'd not last a second with gang employees. They'd eat him alive. Besides, he'd been in Santa Elena with me for two months. He'd never even gone to Maria during that time. Apart from that time he went to see Mozhgan. And he often worked long hours. Had he been secretly going to Maria all those times? What else could he have done that I didn't know about? Was he even an electrician?
Suddenly nothing felt real. I had no idea what was truth and what was lies. All this time, could I have not known Will at all? Raheem's mantra came back to me then, echoing in my ears, mocking me. The only kind and attractive men who fuck rental assets from criminal organizations are either criminals themselves, or are only interested in sex. Could Will have been both?
No. Never. We were in love. He'd never lie to me. There was no way he was in a gang, and there was no way that the hours we'd spent in each other's arms were for convenience. The music inside him was real. Our love was real.
But Luke had laughed at me, insisting that it was too much of a coincidence that I got pulled out of the fire at Seven by someone so perfect. It was too good to be true. Like Will had somehow known all the things that I'd love about him before I knew it for myself. He must have loved me. If not, what did he want from me?
As we approached Maria's City limits and swung onto the main street in Angel toward the hospital, my insides began to turn in anticipation of the dirty-clean hospital smell. But this time it was way worse, like the smell had entered my bloodstream and was burning my organs.
Was this my return to Maria? Not a triumphant trip to collect my passport and buy souvenirs before I got on a flight home. But to go to the hospital, to see Will, shot half-dead in a gang incident, possibly related to some contraband job he'd done months before.
My thoughts spiraled lower and lower as Charlotte dragged me from the passenger's seat and led me from reception desk to corridor to waiting room to more corridors, stopping occasionally to check if I was OK. But I'd fallen, a sunken wreck at the bottom of the ocean. My heart was the anchor, a great weight inside me, pressing me down into the black waters off the northern gullies of Santa Elena Beach.
A tired and pale Sofi was stood outside the hospital room talking to the police officer guard in hushed whispers. She lifted a coffee cup in a grim toast to her newest arrest as we neared her along the corridor.
"I take it you weren't aware that your brother was in Sigma," she said, gloating less than I'd have expected, but I put that down to exhaustion on her part. "I heard the recording of the charging interview. It was a shoot-out. Forensics identified the body of the assailant as Angus McAllister from Zeph's descriptions of him. He was killed by an individual identified by your brother as Arturo Torrente, an operative from El Nube. We hadn't been aware of him."
Cal. Cal had tried to hurt Will. And now Cal was dead. It couldn't be. It was all too much.
"Your brother claims not to know what he smuggled two months ago, only that Sigma led the project. He was told later that they were 3G biometric passports," she turned to me, "probably counterfeits from Zeph's original."
She appeared to be looking for rage or disbelief or...something...in my face.
But I wasn't in the corridor with them. I was taking in Sofi's news as if I was at the bottom of the North Pacific, her voice filtering through kilometers of water.
"Zeph?"
Until now I'd held onto the possibility that Sofi had messed everything up, or that Will had been delirious with pain, and had somehow confessed to someone else's crime by mistake. But it wasn't a mistake. He was in Sigma. He'd been involved in the copying of my passport. He'd been involved in trafficking the counterfeits.
"Zeph?"
How high up was he? Had he ordered Noah to take me? Ana Maria to ransom me? Ollie to steal my DNA? Cal to make me a rental asset?
"Zeph." Charlotte shook my shoulders.
I blinked through the ripples of ocean water obscuring my sight.
Sofi loomed into my peripheral vision. "I'm glad you came, Zeph. We can arrange a safe-house for you tonight and another guarant-"
"He's staying with me, and I'll arrange him a guarantor," Charlotte growled. "Somewhere in Arenosa County. Not here."
Sofi clicked her tongue. "There's a conflict of interest. You're the sister of the detainee."
"I'm the Arenosa County D.A.. I will arrange guarantors for non-residents in my County."
"The moment you pay your brother's bail and lawyer fees, you're no longer acting as Arenosa County D.A."
Shoulders hunched, I pressed myself against the corridor, bedding into the quiet sand of the seabed while Charlotte and Sofi's battle of protocol raged in the air above.
I didn't know how I'd break the news to Eomma. I'd been so stupid, again. Twice, by the same gang, in the same way. Thirsty, mindless, chasing dick like a gullible fool. If Eomma had forgiven me once, she wouldn't twice. But she'd been taken in by Will too. We all had. Maybe she'd feel the betrayal as personally as I did. Charlotte too. Will had fucked us all over.
"Fine, Charlotte. Less work for me. You'd better get in there. He's been asking for you for the past three hours." Sofi pressed something into my hand. "He asked me to give this back to you, Zeph."
I looked down into my palm, at a necklace of looped black cord surrounding a beautiful little shell. I shoved it into my jeans like it was a handful of quarters. Sofi turned and began murmuring to the guarding officer again.
Charlotte leaned close to my ear. "Sofi's leaving. Do you want to talk to Will before I do?"
I looked up at her, confused. "Why do I need to talk to him?"
"Shh," she continued in an urgent whisper. "You need an explanation. You can't just go to Korea without talking to him. Without getting an explanation for why he..." From my quiet place on the seabed, I felt Charlotte's fingertips across my palm. "Please."
I swatted Charlotte's hand away. "I don't wanna see him."
My voice disturbed Sofi, who broke away from the guard to study Charlotte and me closely, as if our twin heartbreak was written across our faces.
Sofi's eyes widened, and she advanced on us, terror contorting her face. "What did he do, Zeph?"
I watched her lips move, but couldn't understand the words over the swell of the ocean. I shook my head to banish the noise of the black waves crashing way above me.
She grabbed my arm and led me away from Charlotte, clapping shaky hands on my shoulders. "Did he hurt you? Did he threaten you? You can tell me."
Charlotte began to weep. From my secret place on the sea floor I watched her sucking in dry rasping breaths through rippling ocean-water.
Sofi's fingers tightened over my shoulders. "Did he hit you, Zeph?"
Suddenly, like a rusted shipwreck, I was raised forcefully out of my ocean hiding place, brine-soaked and freezing, my senses no longer dulled by the thrashing waves overhead.
"What the fuck are you talking about, Sofi?" I squirmed under her grip.
"It's called witness-tampering. The court will take it extremely seriously, I promise. Did he ask you anything about the case?"
Sofi glared at Charlotte, as if she'd be a better witness to my own behavior than me. Charlotte's sobs stopped abruptly, her face frozen at the new horror.
"No. He never asked me about the case." I was sure. Yet it was so strange that he hadn't.
If he'd been in Sigma all along, why had he fled to work at the start of each of my interviews with Teresa and Sofi? Why had he never asked me about the case, other than about the dark shit that my bros and me endured as assets? He'd not even asked about the failed ransom, other than to check that Nuna and Eomma were OK.
He must have been so confident that the information I'd given to the police wouldn't incriminate him that he'd never bothered to ask about the case. Or, he'd simply accepted the fact that he'd eventually go to jail. I found that hard to believe, given his responsibilities to Mozhgan. How could he have been in Sigma while caring for Mozhgan? I found it all so hard to believe.
"Not a single conversation about the case?" Sofi pressed.
What had we talked about every night on the beach, every afternoon at the piano, and, lately, every morning in his bed? It had always been warm comfortable silence between us, or an easy back-and-forth about music. Besides, we hadn't needed to talk to understand each other. The whirlpools and eddies of Will's thoughts had always been displayed right there on his face, in his eyebrows, and his smile. Hadn't they? Was he that good at faking it all? My throat suddenly ran dry, and I swallowed down thorny bitterness.
"We just talked about music and...us."
"What?" Sofi's expression darkened. "You two were..?" She spun around to face Charlotte, fists clenched. "Why can't your family keep their hands to themselves?"
Sofi clamped her palms around my shoulders again, as if desperate to squeeze information out of my body by force. I yelped, and she softened her grip, attempting a gentle whisper, but the mania in her eyes gave her away. Her star witness had been sleeping with a target. My witness testimony was completely compromised. I'd be shark-food for defence attorneys representing Sigma.
"Zeph, you're safe now. He can't hurt you. Just tell me what he made you do. Did he imply that bad things would happen if you didn't-"
"What the fuck, Sofi?" I shrugged out of Sofi's iron grasp, retreating to hide behind Charlotte. "Of course he didn't."
"I need to know that he wasn't making you..."
I could have lied. I could have told Sofi right then that I was innocent, and that Will had persuaded me into his bed somehow. But he hadn't.
"We both wanted to do it, Sofi. And he wasn't witness-tampering me, or whatever the fuck else you think he did to me."
Deep down, had I known all along what Will was? Had I chosen to ignore that he'd been lying to me, hoodwinking me, betraying me, just like Noah had done, but so much more subtly and completely? No. There was no way. I'd always thought him naive, innocent, trapped in a closed world that consisted of just him and Mozhgan. But Luke had been right; I'd been dumb to think that Will had dragged me out of Seven by pure accident. He'd been too perfect to be real. I should have known.
I slumped against the wall, willing myself not to just fucking curl up into a ball. "I don't wanna see him, Charlotte. I wanna go home."
Sofi retreated toward the guarding officer. "Zeph wouldn't have been able to see the detainee alone anyways, Charlotte. Besides the potential for witness-tampering, William Graz could be dangerous."
"He's got a bullet wound in his hip! He's in a hospital bed on a morphine drip! He's not dangerous!" So, Charlotte had already forgiven Will.
"I can't let Zeph see the detainee alone, Charlotte. It's just rules." For all the delight Sofi must have been getting out of seeing Charlotte in pain, she was right.
"Zeph, even if there are police officers in the room, this is your last chance to say what you want to Will before you go to Korea." Charlotte's eyes were wide and begging.
"I'm not going in there."
Charlotte reached for my hand again. "Then please just stand in there while I talk to him. I'll only be five minutes to give him a lawyer's number, and to arrange bail for him. You don't have to talk."
Charlotte choked on her words as a flush of new tears rolled down her face, the horror of her baby brother's fall finally hitting her, hard. I took her hand in mine. Did she wish she'd never contacted him? Did she regret sending Sabrina and Emilia into his arms?
If Will was on morphine, he'd probably not even notice me in the room. "Five minutes. And I'm not gonna talk to him."
That was enough for Charlotte, and she stepped forward. Sofi pulled her pink notebook from a flowery handbag, and we followed her into the dark hospital room.