Carla Neggers - Betrayals

Mai saw his bloody, skeletal face and screamed.

“It’s all right,” Annette said quietly. What an ending, she thought…but it wasn’t her fault. When people had left her alone, she hadn’t bothered a soul.

Kim jumped lightly from a rock, landing between her and Mai. He said something in Vietnamese to the girl, but she stared at him in mute terror.

“She doesn’t speak Vietnamese,” Annette said. “Let’s not prolong this, Kim. Deal with her as you have Thomas, if you please.” I’ll have to tinker with my story to include their hands being tied, she thought. Even if Kim has a chance to unbind them before the end, there will be signs they were tied.

Mai’s eyes widened at Kim’s approach, and she edged back against the bank of rocks, away from the water.

“Mai,” Thomas yelled, “run!”

She hesitated, not that it would have mattered if she’d bolted: Kim was extraordinarily fast. He seized the girl, and she began kicking and screaming, crying for her father to help her.

Annette couldn’t bear it.

Thomas saw her look of discomfort and grunted. “You’ve never had to be a party to your own handiwork, have you? Stay, Annette. Watch.”

“I don’t have to defend my actions to the likes of you.”

“You won’t get away with this, you know.”

She snorted and made herself laugh. “I already have. You pride yourself on doing what you have to do to protect your family. Allow me that same pride.”

“This isn’t pride, Annette-this is desperation.”

Mai was screaming now, a gutsy thing to do in Kim’s heartless grip, and he smacked her hard across the side of the face and told her to shut up.

Annette had to look away.

“What kind of woman would murder her own granddaughter?” Thomas asked in a low voice.

“I’m protecting my son.”

“No, you’re not. You’re protecting yourself. You think Quentin’s weak, but he’s not. You’re the one who’s weak, Annette. Weak and insecure, frightened. I should have seen that thirty years ago, but my vision of you was always clouded by the misunderstood, unhappy child you’d been. I didn’t want to see the selfish, evil woman you’d become. Annette, think of what you’ve done. And all because you couldn’t admit to being a bored housewife who’d turned to stealing jewels from her friends.”

Annette shuddered. So he knew. The chilly wind and the rain had soaked her to the skin, but she paid no attention, trying to shut out Mai’s screams and Thomas’s smug look.

“You were Le Chat,” Thomas said. “Rebecca knows. I’m sure she’s told Jared by now, Quentin, the police. Annette, don’t compound what you’ve already done by adding more bodies to your conscience.”

“You have no right to judge me. I made a few mistakes-”

Even in his agony, Thomas’s eyes were clear and uncompromising, that riveting Blackburn blue that, Annette knew, would haunt her forever. “Mistakes, Annette? Benjamin, Stephen, Tai, Tam-mistakes? That was murder.”

A monstrous wave crashed ashore, spraying all of them with icy froth as it rushed between the rocks and crevices and almost inundated Thomas. The frigid water swirled four inches deep around him, under him, and he gritted his teeth against the cold, his entire body quaking, until the surf receded.

Kim had finished with Mai and dumped her onto the wet, barnacle-covered rocks beside Thomas.

Annette went over to the sobbing girl and squatted down, stroking her shining, wet hair with one hand. “I’m sad this is the way things have turned out, Mai, but I want you to know I had no choice.”

“Don’t believe her, Mai,” Thomas said calmly. “She could have chosen the truth.”

Mai shook off Annette’s hand, called her a hateful bitch and flapped like a seal, managing to throw the older woman off balance. Annette went sprawling, landing on one knee. The barnacles cut right through her pants. Kim was beside her in an instant and offered to shoot Mai and Thomas both and be done with them.

“No, that’s all right,” Annette said, letting him help her back onto her feet. That was what she got for trying to be nice. “I don’t want any bloodshed while I’m around. Just let the tide do its work. Jean-Paul should be here soon. Do not underestimate him, do you hear?”

“Don’t worry,” Kim said.

She gave him a withering look. “Don’t patronize me. None of us would be here now if you hadn’t underestimated him in the first place. Do your job, Kim. You’ve been paid well enough for it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go.”

And she about-faced, walking fast and never once looking back at the girl and the old man trussed up on the rocks, waiting for the tide.

“Get down.”

Jean-Paul didn’t wait for Rebecca to obey, but shoved her onto the floor of the truck as they came to a stop behind Annette’s Mercedes. The rain was coming in blinding sheets now. Jean-Paul shut the truck off. As it rattled into silence, he warned Rebecca to stay down.

“I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Mai’s safety,” he said. “Annette’s bodyguard is out on the rocks. I’m going to find out what he’s up to. You stay here until I get back, all right?”

“Jean-Paul-” She broke off, grabbing his hand, her eyes huge and strangely bright in the gloom of the early afternoon. “Be careful.”

“I will, ma petite.” He squeezed her hand gently. “And I’ll look after your grandfather if I can. I’ve resented him for many years, but that’s not important now. I can see I was wrong about him. I always thought he knew about me.”

“That you weren’t Le Chat?”

“That,” he said, “and that I’m his son.”

Rebecca stared at him, speechless.

Jean-Paul smiled. “You see why I care about you? Your father and I were brothers.”

Annette reveled in the softness of the grass under her feet after her treacherous climb in the drenching rain back up to the house, and she ducked in through the side door. She grabbed a towel from the bath off the kitchen and went upstairs to peel off her wet clothes before she came down with pneumonia.

You can pull this off-just don’t think about Thomas and Mai. You’re doing what you have to do. Be strong!

As she wrapped the towel around her head, she stood naked in front of her bedroom window and saw a decrepit truck in the driveway. Rebecca’s, she thought with a fresh wave of panic. Before she could get hysterical at the prospect of having to include Rebecca Blackburn in her scheme, Annette saw Jean-Paul’s figure limping across the lawn.

Good…

She tugged open the drawer to her mother’s old tiger maple dresser and took out dry clothes, pulling the towel off her hair and wishing she could take time to blow-dry it. The warmth would feel wonderful after being out on the rocks. A long time ago-even before Le Chat-she had learned never to act out of desperation. That meant always having a contingency plan in case things began to unravel.

France was her contingency plan. Her personal jet was waiting at a private airport.

A feeling of calm came over her, and she began to hum as she got dressed.

The water never receded entirely now, and the cold had penetrated every fiber of Thomas’s being, until he could no longer rely upon his own sense of coherency. It was pure agony. Worse was having Mai next to him, in the same unholy predicament, sobbing for her father.

“Mai,” he said, coughing just to clear his head. “Mai, listen to me. We must use our ingenuity.”

She sniffled and fastened her dark, lovely eyes on him, her terror slicing at his very soul. “The tide’s coming in. We’ll drown.”

“Did you know when it’s training its SEALs the navy does something called drown-proofing?”