Page 58 of Retribution

The next thing I know, I’m on the couch. My body hurts everywhere.

He’s close. I can feel his breath on my face.

‘Watching them zap you at The Heath were some of my favorite parts of the videos we were sent of you,’ he whispers, and I feel him laugh silently. ‘Used to watch them over and over. But this was even better.’

He gets up and moves away from me while my head lolls and I think I drool on myself.

‘I’m very happy with the voltage,’ I hear Joe saying more loudly from somewhere far away. ‘It’s perfect for keeping her in line. I’m confident she’ll do what she’s told now.’

‘What now?’ I hear Nasty Nurse purring. ‘Maybe we can…’

There’s a pause.

‘Jacob, take my disobedient fiancé home, would you?’

My limp form is picked up a moment later and swung over Jacob’s shoulder easily.

‘Get on your knees,’ I hear Joe say, and there’s the sound of a zipper as Jacob takes me out of the room. We go through the house and out the front door. The Banderville butler doesn’t seem at all perturbed, closing the front door gently behind us as we leave. Jacob puts me in the car, laying medown on the back seat. He pulls my dress down and doesn’t touch me except when he has to.

At least there’s that.

The car starts moving and I slowly come back to myself. The GED is tight around my leg, the straps around my waist feel like they’re cutting into my skin.

When I can, I sit up, staring straight ahead.

Jacob looks back at me, something on his face that I haven’t seen before. I don’t know what it is though, and I don’t care.

‘Just do what he says, okay?’ Jacob says softly.

I don’t look at him and I don’t answer.

MAV

It’s not working. I’ve followed the formula exactly. I watched Daisy make batches and batches of Envy, and yet, every time I try to create it, following her exact steps, it isn’t right.

Why isn’t it right?

Not for the first time, I wonder if Daisy’s gift of the formula at Christmas is lacking something. Maybe she doesn’t trust us as much as she pretended.

I rub my eyes. Maybe she’s right not to trust us. She’s stuck in the Novelle house and none of us have come up with a viable plan to get her out. Blake wants to just kill pretty much everyone, and I’d love for him to do just that, but there’s no way he’d get away with it. Getting rid of low-level scumbags no one cares about is not the same as taking out an old-money heir and the heads of house in two of the oldest families in Richmond.

At least at the Novelle estate, she’s safe. It probably sucks being stuck in there, and I know she hates it, but at least she’snot in any real danger. John wants the marriage to happen. Surely, he’ll make sure she’s okay.

God, I miss her, though. Those nights in the club with her and my best friends seem like distant memories now, despite the fact that it’s only been about a month since Christmas.

I glance at Sauvage’s guy. He’s been sent in to watch me but, as far as I can tell, he’s no chemist. He doesn’t know this batch is bad, like the four others I’ve made before it.

Shit! Why is this happening?

I’m getting desperate and I think it’s starting to show.

I stand up and stretch, yawning. ‘This one’s going to be a few more hours,’ I say to the guy who doesn’t ever talk back.

He just looks at me.

‘I’m gonna go…’

I sidle past him and out of the lab Sauvage has built down in the bowels of his sleek Richmond hotel. You’d never know it was here, but it must have been put in relatively recently. It’s new and gleaming and state of the art. I have no idea why the French gangster has a lab in the lowest levels of his hotel, and I haven’t asked. But it’s clear that it’s never been used before either. I had to take the factory plastic off everything the first time I was down here.