MasukCeline's POVThe panic room was cold, filled with the scent of concrete and recycled air and that unique stillness that envelops a sealed cell.It was four minutes after the power went out that I had the children inside and the door locked behind us. I’d rehearsed this enough in my head over the years that the steps came instinctively, as things did when you had practiced them past effortful consciousness. Grace had arrived unasked, escorting Victor by the hand. Hope had paused at her bedroom door for exactly one second and then came inside.The monitors were on a separate battery system, four screens providing different views of the compound exterior. I watched them as I dialed the emergency line and counted the figures merging from the treeline on the north side.Ten at minimum. In a non-improvised manner.The emergency line went through on attempt number two. A voice, male, professional."This is Agent Torres. What is your emergency?"I delivered it in less than thirty seconds. Loc
Caelum's POVIn October Montana was cold, dark by five o’clock in the afternoon and the compound nestled between both; on three sides there were trees pressing on inwards, behind that mountains, the kind of landscape that swallowed everything up but did not give anything back.I had purchased it seven years ago and never wanted to use it.Hope stood in the main room with her arms crossed and the expression she wore when she decided that that what was being done to her was unreasonable and then resolved to make that position known to everybody there."I have finals," she said. “I have a college interview at Northwestern in three weeks. I have prom committee on Thursday and if I do not go they will give my chair to someone else and I have been working on that event for four months.”“If you listen to me, you’re going to have a life and be able to go to those things,” I said.“You can’t just take us out of school and take us to Montana just because somebody left a toy on Grace’s bed.”"H
Celine's POVThe kitchen was noisy in the way it always was on school mornings.Victor was eating cereal with the particular energy of an eight year old who had concluded that breakfast was a performance and thus not a meal, talking to Grace about something that involved many sound effects. Grace was ignoring him with the dull patience of a fourteen year old who had been ignoring her brother his whole life and became expert at it. She had her sketchbook set against the fruit bowl and was drawing without looking up, which meant that she had either finished eating or forgotten that she was eating, either of which was equally possible with her.I was standing at the counter with my second coffee, going through the foundation schedule on my phone and listening to all of it — in that specific way a mother of three listens, by now years into learning that full attention is a resource worth deploying selectively.Hope was not down yet.That was not unusual in itself. Hope at seventeen functi
Caelum's POVHope asked why Celine could not get up.I told her it three times over the first week, in different iterations, adjusted each time to what she appeared to digest and where she dropped the thread. The baby required close supervision right now, I told her. Mama was doing the most important work there was, and that work demanded she not move. She processed this information each time with the focused seriousness she applied to things that were vexing her, and each time come back to the same conclusion.She would carefully climb onto the bed and sit next to Celine, telling her she was doing a good job.The first time this happened Celine looked over Hope’s head at me with the kind of expression I didn’t have a word for. Something so close to being undone but on the right side of it.I had been managing the household for years in the operational sense, the logistics of safety and movement and security, but the daily texture of it, the meals and the laundry and getting Hope dres
Celine's POVI stared at the bonds for a long time and said nothing.Paper and numbers. The physical evidence of fifty million dollars that had once been Vivienne’s money, then become Victor’s dupery, now reached here as the attempt for something that a dead man could not name cleanly. Caelum sat opposite me with his hands flat on the table and his jaw set in that way it got when he’d already made his mind up about something.“I want to destroy it,” he told the committee."All of it.""All of it. I do not want his money. I do not want his amends. I do not want his any version in our life including the financial version.”I understood that. I experienced the gravity of that and I did not ignore it. But I looked at those bonds and thought of Hope sleeping in the next room, and the child I had been carrying silently for three weeks, which we hadn’t told anyone about yet."It is for Hope," I said. "That is what he said. It is not for you or for me. It is for her future."“His blood money
Caelum's POVI covered Celine as the third shot came through what was left of the front window and reaped a chunk out of the wall behind where we had been standing.It was loud with it, glass and plaster and the particular brand of chaos that belonged to the experience of being inside a building while under fire, how sound reverberated off hard surfaces and took on a plastic-wrapped quality that made it difficult to use as navigation. I flattened Celine behind the couch with my finger on my own weapon and made a quick assessment of the angles.Victor was at the secret stash, moving with an efficiency and speed that did not belong to a man who had spent twenty five years living quietly in a suburb but I opened for just a second the question of what those twenty five years had actually consisted of and then I closed it shut again because this was not the time."Expecting what exactly," I said."This." He found the window, opened it a crack and gazed out in the measured way of someone wh
CAELUM'S POVThe first sensation I experienced, when awareness hauled me back into the land of the living was pain. Intense, searing pain that swept through my ribs as fire. My skull pounded with a low ache that somehow even seemed to make thinking more of an effort. I attempted to shift and insta
Celine's POVThe morgue was cold. Sterile. And deeply disturbing.I waited in the hall while Kent stepped inside with forms which I really didn’t need to hear about. False documents. Bribes. At least it would be two bodies that had belonged to people who died with no next of kin.Two men whose deat
Caelum's POVVivienne was attempting to disconnect me. Change public opinion, make Celine seem like an innocent victim. If I died in the “rescue” of her from my wicked clutches, no one would think twice about it. She'd be a hero. I'd be a monster.It was brilliant strategy. Exactly the type of mane
Celine's POVThe helicopter started up, and my stomach fell.It was chaos down there, the prison yard. Running guards, smoke from the explosions I'd caused. Police cars converging, sirens wailing. We climbed higher, and the scene shrank, and I couldn’t stop watching.I had just helped someone break







