he just place a kiss in my hair?
“Don’t ever eat or drink anything in her presence,” he said, somewhat mechanically, as if reciting something he’d learned a while ago.
“Do you think she is searching for us right now?” I threw a cautious glance at the door window.
“Most definitely,” he replied absentmindedly, seemingly lost in thought. “Listen, how did you get into her building?”
As little as I still knew about Zeph, he must know even less about me with all his memories of our first meeting now lost.
“Have you ever heard the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’? Well, that could be said about me.” I smiled gloomily. “I went to see Madame’s show. She displays for money all the things and animals that the bracks collect for her from Nerifir. Instead of leaving afterwards, I snuck back in, to see the VIP act I couldn’t afford. The VIP act turned out to be you.” I sighed. “You know she charges an exorbitant amount of money to see you? Even after the expense of running the show, she must have collected a pretty good sum by now, exploiting you all this time.”
And she kept him drugged.
I bitterly regretted ever thinking that Zeph would be in any kind of partnership with Madame.
“Did they catch you?” Zeph asked. “Is that how you ended up there?”
I nodded.
“Radax caught me. She ordered him to kill me, but he didn’t. So, she punished him and put me in a cage.”
“A cage?” He frowned.
“That’s where I spent the last two months or so. Not sure what day it is today, but it should be November, according to my calculations. Radax broke my phone. And Madame, of course, never gave me a watch or a calendar. I’ve counted the days.”
“Did she display you for money, too?”
“Me? No,” I snorted a laugh. “There is nothing exciting about a human. Nothing worth paying ten grand to see. She kept me in the cage. The bracks let me out to clean under their supervision. She is expanding the show, it seems. There were some new arrivals, but I never got to see the contents of some of the crates.”
“More Fae, you think?”
“I don’t know for sure, but some of them were meant for new VIP acts. Something or someone worth paying big money to see.”
We sat in silence for a moment. Zeph was probably considering what I’d told him. And I kept wondering about him.
I thought about how Zeph had killed the two bracks in the basement. He was quick and strong and obviously had the skills and tools to fight and murder. Catching him couldn’t have been easy.
Trez’s words about trapping men in Paris came to mind again. Could Zeph be the one he spoke about? The part about the girl in a wig made no sense to me, though.
“How did they take you?” I asked him, leaning my head on his shoulder.
“I don’t know.” He tilted his head to mine, his voice sounded sleepy. “I don’t remember. I don’t seem to recall anything past my school years. Everything is blank until the time in the water tank.”
He was quiet for another minute or two, and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep, feeling the exhaustion starting to pull me under, too.
“You said we’ve met before?” he asked suddenly, prompting me to open my eyes again. “Did we part? Or were you there when I was taken?”
“No, I wasn’t there. We had a d—” I cut myself short, thinking back to that day when he didn’t show up at the café. If he didn’t come to meet me that day because he had chosen not to, I didn’t want to impart my memories or my feelings on him now that he couldn’t remember that day himself. I decided not to mention the romantic aspect of our meeting, at least for now. “We agreed to meet in a café, a few days before I was supposed to leave Paris and fly back home to Toronto. You didn’t come. I left France, and hadn’t see you again until two months ago, in Madame’s water tank.”
“Was I taken that day, then?” he asked.
“No, you couldn’t have...” I let my voice trail off.
Could that have really happened? Could Zeph have been kidnapped that day?
Once again, I went over every moment of our parting at the Metro station in my head.
There was a reason why Zeph standing me up hurt so much. It was because when we parted at the Metro station, I had no doubts he