Aimee Carter - Pawn

“I’ll take her back inside,” said Knox, and he touched my elbow. I stood my ground, refusing to let go of the frozen rail.

“What do you want from me before I’m not your prisoner anymore?”

“My dear,” said Daxton, his eyes wide with mock concern. “You’re not my prisoner. If you really wish to go, we won’t keep you here, but do understand that there will be consequences if you choose to leave.”

Like a bullet with my name on it. “Yeah, I know.”

Knox cleared his throat. “Sir, I believe she means how long she’s stuck here until she can take over for Lila.”

Daxton’s lips curled upward into a leering smile. “Have you decided not to fight us after all? What pleasant news. Mother will be thrilled to hear it.”

I dug my nails into the steel railing. “I’m not going to fight you. Tell me what I need to do to get out of this place, and I’ll do it.”

Daxton cupped my cheek, his hand like fire in the icy wind. “I am so very happy to hear that, darling. I understand how difficult this must be for you, and we are all here to help you. I will have Knox and Celia begin working with you tomorrow. Only your progress will dictate how long it will take. I am hoping for a few weeks, but it will last as long as it must.”

Unless I was hopeless. Then I had no doubt it would be easy enough to replace me.

“When we’re certain you will pass muster, you will meet Mother,” he continued. “She will be the final judge.”

I tightened my grip on the railing and tried not to sway. Nina called Augusta Hart the Bitch Queen, and with good reason. There hadn’t been a single photograph taken of her since before I was born that showed her smiling, and she was notoriously unforgiving with both the people and her own family. It was common gossip that her husband, Edward, had just been a figurehead while she ruled the country with an iron fist, and apparently the same was true for Daxton.

Knox helped me into my chair, and I struggled to hold back the horror building inside me. Pretending to be a VII was one thing, but I would’ve had an easier time making an elephant tap dance than gaining Augusta’s approval. Any hope I had at outsmarting them faded, and the only thing I had left was staying alive long enough to make sure they didn’t hurt Benjy.

Lila was right-handed.

Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but even though I barely knew the shapes of the cursive letters that formed my name, I could draw. I’d been holding markers and crayons since I was big enough to steal them from the supply cabinets in the group home, and everything I’d ever done had been with my left hand.

It wasn’t just learning how to mimic the curves that formed Lila’s signature. I had to learn to eat with my right hand as well, and the Harts seemed to have an endless stream of rules I had to follow in the dining room alone. Sit up straight, use the correct fork without hesitation, hold my pinkie up as I took a sip of water—everything Lila did instinctively, I had to learn from the ground up. It was a well-rehearsed show, as if Celia and Knox expected the cameras to be on me constantly, and I couldn’t ignore the possibility that they were right. I would have no second chance.

“Get the basics down, and you’ll be fine,” said Knox on the first day of my training. “The trick isn’t to convince them you’re Lila—it’s not to do anything to make them question it.”

That probably held some special distinction for Knox that was supposed to make it easier on me, but I didn’t know enough about Lila to mimic her. Everything I did, from the way I walked to the way I spoke, was different. I had an accent she didn’t. I’d never worn a pair of heels before, and those were all Lila seemed to wear. The foods she ate were ones I hated, which made maintaining her slight weight easy enough, but it also made the urge to sneak into the kitchens for a real meal gnaw at me unbearably.

I didn’t, though, and not just because I could barely find a bathroom in the Stronghold, let alone the kitchens. If I were caught, or if they had any reason to suspect I wasn’t going along with their plan, I had no idea what they would do to me. Knox at least seemed to pretend he was on my side, but Celia—she never looked me in the eye. Not that I could blame her, but it did little to make me feel like any less of a pariah. To her credit, she didn’t seem to take it out on me. She grew more and more distant as the days passed, but she was never cruel. She was as stuck as I was, and the most either of us could do was pretend not to hurt as much as we did.

The one problem that wasn’t going to be solved anytime soon was the fact that I couldn’t read. Lila had loved books, and according to Celia, she had an entire library to herself in their New York home. She had constantly carried an old-fashioned paperback around with her to read in her spare moments, and many of the speeches she gave were read off glass screens in the middle of the crowd. Teleprompters, Celia said. Knox called them cheat sheets.

That wouldn’t work for me, though. I had to learn how to repeat a speech fed to me through an earpiece, which I quickly discovered was much harder than it sounded. I tried again and again, but it never got easier. Worse, Lila sounded exactly like Celia, her voice rich and much more adult than mine. Some sort of technology had been implanted in my voice box to copy hers, but it wasn’t really the sound of her voice that tripped me up. It was the way she talked and formed sentences. After a week, I still didn’t have it down. When she spoke, she sounded like she had the answers to everything, and there was something about her that made even me want to follow her off a cliff. I couldn’t mimic that no matter how hard I tried.

Celia also made the mistake of trying to teach me how to read, even though I insisted it was useless. It wasn’t that I was stupid or wasn’t trying. Letters strung together had simply never made sense to me. I knew what words meant, and because Benjy had read to me every night, I knew my favorite stories by heart. But while I had a talent for remembering what I’d heard, something about reading didn’t work in my head. Celia tried to keep her cool, but eventually she gave up.

“I’ll record your speeches for you,” she said after a disastrous lesson using one of Lila’s favorite childhood books. “You can memorize them instead.”

This worked for me, and once we figured it out, things gradually grew easier. Whether I liked it or not, I was slowly turning into Lila Hart.

It took me eleven days to learn everything I needed to fool the casual observer into thinking I was Lila. Every moment I wasn’t sleeping or receiving lessons from Knox and Celia, I watched recordings of her. Speech after speech after speech, public appearances, family recordings from when she was an infant onward—by the time those eleven days were over, if there was something to know about Lila, I knew it. She didn’t eat red meat; she preferred music so old that the songs were sung by people, not by digitally created voices; her eyes never crinkled when she smiled; and according to Knox, she’d gotten that butterfly tattoo only months before she died. It had been an act of rebellion that she’d purposely revealed during a formal dinner between her uncle, her grandmother, and the leaders of foreign nations I’d never heard of. Even Celia, who stared blankly at her hands while the speeches were playing, managed a smile at the memory.

But those were only snapshots. Glimpses of who she was. Facts. In a way, it felt like the more I learned, the less I knew her. And I was no closer to having a conversation with her than I had been before Daxton had found me.