Page 50 of The Crimson Lily

“I can shoot?” I interrupt, more curious than troubled.

He sighs instead of giving me confirmation. He halts his march, severely, looking at me with blame. “It broke my heart when you set out to betray the Syndicate.”

I fall silent, unsure of how I should respond to that direct accusation.

He starts walking again. “I know your friends have the Token Man’s list. Well played. But they won’t get far.”

“They’ll get somewhere,” I assure. They’ll get right here. Just a matter of time, William. Just a matter of time.

“Most of those names are already long gone,” he pledges. “The Syndicate is, after all, an international business.”

We arrive back at the chapel’s door, a full revolution of the cloister’s galleries behind us. William opens the door and waves his hand as a motion for me to enter. I hesitate, feeling safer in the garden than in a room with William de Loit.

“Come, Lili,” he directs. “I’ll take you to the dagger before Margaret arrives.”

My heart takes the highest of leaps. I’m going to see it.

Finally, I’m going to face that artifact I discovered with Béatrice somewhere lost in Siberia.

I now realize the expedition was most probably organized by the Syndicate themselves.

Poor Béatrice—I involved her without her even knowing.

I let the ache of remorse sink in my gut, breathing over it, silencing it with my accelerated heartbeat.

William walks ahead of me, silent, and takes me down a set of stairs that leads deep beneath the cloister.

Down the white-painted, concrete stairs is an aluminum door that opens at William’s will. The metallic corridor in front of us reminds me of a horror movie’s hospital, with glass doors along the way that open to dark rooms. I have no idea what they’re supposed to be.

“Spooky,” I let escape.

William chuckles. “Welcome to the Syndicate.”

A man walks out of a room. I cast a furtive glance inside for a fraction of a second. Guns. A lot of them. The man nods at William and disappears behind us.

“And the nuns agree with this?” I scold, pointing at the room full of weapons.

“The cloister is a facade. The nuns are personnel.”

We arrive at a white door wider than William and I next to each other, with two large men, one white, one black, posted on each side. Neither of them smile at me. They let William proceed with opening the door, never laying eyes on us.

We enter a chamber that could come straight out of a script. It looks like a bank’s vault, with white walls and an infinite matrix of drawers. The only thing that’s missing is the pile of money in the middle of the?—

I pause, looking at the pedestal at the center of the room.

I squint, making sure I’m not dreaming.

There it is, the Kinzhal Strastey, made of glass, resting on a purple velvet pillow to make things more theatrical. I approach it slowly, irrationally cautious of what will happen if I get too close.

It’s so transparent, it almost seems invisible.

I’m fascinated, even now, by the perfect smoothness of the even and rounded hilt, a shelter for endless swirls of air blown directly into the glass.

I don’t even know how they made it like that.

The quillon folds like the base petals of a delicate waterlily, and the blade, sharper than a jaguar’s teeth, protects the secret I almost died for.

Encrusted in the glass of the edge is a cipher, the final piece of the puzzle I strived to solve. The one I already solved once before.

“Have you transcribed the code?” I ask, remembering I shared with William how to solve the cipher.

William shakes his head. “Too risky. I’ll give Margaret your algorithm.”

“My algorithm?” I make sure I heard correctly.

He exhales deeply, making me wait before he gives me an answer. “You called it The Crimson Lily. You always named your inventions something artistic. You said that, should the dagger be used in battle, it’d be covered in blood, like a lily turned crimson.”

My heart skips a beat. The Crimson Lily .

That name unlocks something inside me. My eyes open wide.

I feel a push, an urge, the impulse to touch the Kinzhal Strastey.

My fingers go for the blade and caress it, my skin fusing with it.

I tease it until I reach the petals of the quillon, then I take the dagger in my hand.

Click. My mother’s face. My father’s puzzles.

Swoosh. The flames. My parents are dead.

Click. William is seventeen. Swoosh. I’m growing up.

Bang. The abuse. Fuck the Springfields. Click.

William takes me under his wing. Click. Italy, Greece, France, Russia, Germany.

Click. Vacations with William. Bang. I’m shooting a gun.

Bang. Click. I’m off to Columbia, finally free.

Clap. Bachelor. Master. PhD. Swoosh. Béatrice.

Clang. I find the dagger. Ding. The Crimson Lily.

Flash. I can’t keep doing this. Bang. My secret meeting with the Bratva.

Swoosh. Maksim, before the accident. He surveils me.

He thinks I don’t see him, but I know he’s there.

Bang. William almost kills me. Flash. I’m back here, in the Syndicate’s lair.

As if the Kinzhal Strastey is my own memento, the memories, all of them, come rushing back like a tidal wave. I lose my balance. William has to catch me so I won’t fall. He takes the dagger out of my hand and places it back on the velvet cushion.

“You should get ready,” William soothes in my ear. “Margaret Rose will be here any minute now.”

I blink to recover my senses. The thoughts are racing, colliding with one another like high-speed particles.

They explode like atom bombs. Echoes, shrieks, murmurs surging into the cacophony of my identity.

Broken shards of my past reconstructing and solidifying behind my eyes.

I remember everything, from my parents to the accident, and it gives me the worst migraine I’ve ever had.

Crimson. That’s the color of the dress handpicked by William de Loit. He brings me black pumps later on, like those I wore in Paris at the artists’ reception. What a memory.

Who needs recovered-memory therapy when they have a Syndicate baron for a big cousin and a dagger of glass?

I sit on the closed toilet seat, doing nothing, the heels of my palms pressed against my eyes.

I clench the piece of paper I used to dissect the algorithm into comprehensive steps.

I’ll give that paper to Margaret Rose in about ten minutes.

I should feel a shred of shame for doing the Syndicate’s work after all, for putting the fate of the world in the Syndicate’s hands, but I’m using my sheet of numbness to disconnect myself and focus on something else. Something simpler.

I was never Liliana Springfield, nor Liliana de Loit. Maybe Liliana Miles. I remember little of my father, John Miles, but we did puzzles together. Simple ones, really. Riddles a four-year-old could appreciate.

I walk out of my room, into the darkness of a countryside evening.

The nuns seem to have vanished. The hallway is barely lit, but there is a bright light inside the chapel’s nave.

The door is open, and the golden light emanating from inside makes it look like Heaven’s door.

I can hear voices—William’s, and maybe two or three other men.

When I enter, I spot my big cousin in a black suit, ambling like a vain penguin toward me.

“Just in time,” he says and takes my hand.

The front door opens, and a tall, middle-aged woman with black hair lacquered into a bouffant enters the room, head held high.

She wears a light-blue business dress, fang-white heels, and a long sapphire shawl that droops from her shoulders.

Honestly, she looks like the Queen of England with her royal allure as she marches toward William de Loit.

“Here we are, Baron, good evening,” she chants her greeting with a melodious English accent.

She’s followed by six men, who are armed and wearing silver Volto masks. How dramatic.

William walks to her and signs to one of his own men to approach—a woman, actually, who carries a Plexiglas box with a dagger in it.

Margaret scrutinizes me with her strident Medusa gaze. “Is that the rogue de Loit girl?” she ridicules. “Why didn’t you get rid of her?”

My cousin takes Margaret’s hand to ease the mood. “She’s not a worry anymore,” he reassures. “But if it comforts you, I’ll take full responsibility if something happens.”

“I’m sure you will,” she sings. “Now, the algorithm.”

William makes me come closer. I arrive within an arm’s reach of Margaret Rose and hand her the paper, the key they’ve all been waiting for. She welcomes it, inspects it, scans through my scribbles without understanding a thing.

“I hope for your sake that this is correct, de Loit girl,” she threatens.

“It is,” I declare, flat but harsh.

I see a flash of light from the corner of my eye, by the chapel’s entrance, beyond the windows that look on to a road.

William sees it too, and he frowns at me with a furious glare.

I don’t know what’s going on. Margaret spins on her heels and sinks to her knees, seeking cover between benches.

The woman holding the box with the dagger does the same.

I don’t move. I don’t see what William saw. I don’t get why he looks so angry.

Everything happens so fast, yet the world moves in slow motion before my eyes.

The chapel’s doors are rammed open by a swarm of men dressed in black armored vests and camo suits.

“ Carabinieri! ” they shout in unison, aiming weapons at everyone inside.

Then come the shots, and bullets rain down. My instincts take over. I follow Margaret and tear the paper out of her hands, then I push the woman with the glass box so she falls to the floor. I grip the handle of the box, ditch my pumps to the side, and run to the altar to take cover.

“Carabinieri! Carabinieri!”

More armed men.