Played: An Altered Saga Novella (4 page)

There were two Branch agents at the back of the house, and two more at the front. Through a gap in the curtain, I counted four more agents, and the Rook counted an additional three. His source had said there’d be at least eighteen agents present, plus Riley and my brother, Lukas, and three other business associates. That was a lot of people, and Riley was notorious for slipping through the cracks in the middle of a fight.

But he wasn’t getting away this time.

“You ready?” the Rook whispered.

I nodded.

“Double-check the setup,” he ordered.

I sighed, but drew my thumbs inside my shirtsleeves, feeling for the two buttons sewn to the cuffs. “Check,” I said.

“Good.” He leaned closer and pressed his lips to my ear. “Any sign of trouble, you get out of there ASAP.”

“Copy that,” I said through gritted teeth. This was exactly why I hated team sports. The coach always drove me crazy.

“You’re a go,” Sasha said through my earpiece. “Team is in place.”

“Copy that,” the Rook said. He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Be careful. Think clearly.”

“You think just because my brother’s in there I’ll lose focus? Getting to Riley has always been my mission. I won’t let it go now.”

He smiled and laughed low. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

With a grumble, I slipped through the trees, keeping my steps light, silent. Although I meant to be captured, I still had to pretend I’d tried for stealth.

When I broke from the trees, I pulled my gun from the borrowed holster at my side and shot the Branch agent on my right. He dropped where he stood, rustling the bushes as he rolled out of them and to the ground.

I swung around, aiming for the agent to my left. He’d already pulled his gun and had it pointed at me. I went flat on the ground as a bullet whizzed by overhead. I fired another shot, purposefully missing.

The agent barreled toward me and I leapt to my feet, raising the gun to eye level. He clocked me across the jaw with one hand as the other disarmed me.

In less than two seconds, I was lying on the dew-soaked grass, looking up at the darkening sky.

The man peered down at me, my own gun pointed at my face. The man blinked, and his eyebrows drew together as realization set in. He recognized me. We’d hoped for that.

Riley had a lot of enemies, but only a few worthy of concern. Nick and his group were high on the list, and I suspected I ranked pretty close to the top, too. Which meant most of Riley’s men probably knew us—knew me—by face.

A surprised laugh escaped him, painting the darkness with a cloud of glittering breath. “Well, look who it is,” he said. With a flick of his wrist, a zip tie appeared and was quickly tightened around my wrists.

I played at wriggling beneath his hold, grunting and cussing as he hoisted me to my feet.

“Riley will be pleased to see you,” the man said as he hauled me toward the back door.

And just like that, I was in.

I was dragged in through a massive kitchen, down a hallway, and into a library on the south side of the house. I was confident the Rook and Sasha were tracking my movement through the house and knew exactly where I was.

“Look who I found outside,” the agent behind me said as he shoved me to the floor. With my hands tied behind my back, I had nothing to brace my fall and slammed against the Oriental rug shoulder first. Pain jolted through me.

“Get her up,” Riley said.

The agent grumbled, but hoisted me back to my feet. Now I had a chance to scan the faces in the room. There were three men in business suits near the wet bar, and three agents holding defensive positions near Riley and his associates.

And four paces to Riley’s right was my brother.

I nearly choked on a breath at the sight of his face. Part of me had worried it had been some kind of nightmare, seeing his face beside Riley’s on the Rook’s computer screen. That I had imagined it. A flash of a memory came rushing back, of my brother shoving me out the car window as the East River swallowed him up, and for the first time in a long time the burning of tears swelled in my eyes.

My brother really was alive.

He’d obviously aged since I’d seen him last, but like a lot of Branch pawns, it hadn’t happened at a normal rate. And that realization registered another fact: the Branch had used Lukas in one of their programs. That was the only reason he would have been given the anti-aging alteration.

What else did they do to him?, I wondered. Was the Rook right? Was Lukas no longer the brother I knew and loved?

He wore loose black jeans, a white T-shirt, and a quilted black leather jacket. The Lukas I’d known had always been more of a polo-shirts-and-designer-jeans type of guy. He hated leather.

On his face, I was sad to see not a thread of recognition. He was staring right at me as if I were a stranger.

“Gentlemen,” Riley said, “allow me to introduce you to one of our runaway test subjects.”

The business-suit-clad men appraised me. Riley motioned to an agent for a gun.

“This one here can’t die,” Riley said, and shot me in the shoulder.

A cry of pain escaped me, and I staggered back, falling to one knee. I sucked in a breath and glanced at my brother. He hadn’t even flinched.

“Interesting,” one of the men said. “Is that alteration available?”

Riley curled his upper lip. “Unfortunately, no. This one and her friends killed the doctor responsible for the science behind it.”

“Pity,” another man said. “The things we could do with something like that.”

“Can we see her up close?” the third man asked.

“Of course.” Riley motioned them forward, and my brother followed.

The men, and the agents in the room, closed in. My brother hung back, but as the men inspected me, I caught his eye over Riley’s shoulder.

Over his years with the Branch, he’d grown into his face, the baby fat disappearing to reveal a hard jawline, and hollow cheekbones. His eyes were the same, though, the same as our mother’s—caramel colored and fringed in long lashes.

The girls must love him.

“
Now
, Chloe,” the Rook said through my earpiece.

My heart leapt in my chest, not from fear, but from heady anticipation and the thrill of getting exactly what I came here to get.

I drew my thumbs inside my shirtsleeves.

I noticed Lukas take a step back as the library plunged into a murky darkness. The power lines had been severed by a member of the Rook’s team.

Riley shouted orders.

I hit the buttons sewn into my sleeves and the bitter smell of sleeping gas filled the room as two clouds of white smoke hissed from the thick soles of my boots.

Everyone immediately started coughing.

My vision teetered and the rapid beating of my heart slowed to a dull drum in my head. My body felt sluggish, like it was weighed down with bricks. Moving one foot felt like moving a mountain.

Somehow, though, I stepped through my arms, bringing my tied-off hands in front of me, and swung. The double-fisted punch caught Riley at the temple and he backpedaled, bumping into a coffee table and slamming to the floor.

Somewhere far off, a window shattered.

“Welcome to the party,” I said to Riley as I slumped next to him. Everything went black.

The world came back to me in broken sounds. Shouting. Silence. Gunfire. Silence. I took a breath and felt the hot press of it fall back against my face.

There was something heavy and dark covering my head. My eyes took considerable effort just to open.

Gas mask, I realized, and dragged myself to an upright position. The zip ties on my wrists had been cut. Through the cloudy lenses of the gas mask, flashes of light lit the darkened room. People fighting. The spark of gunfire.

I felt along the floor next to me but didn’t find Riley.

His absence brought me to my feet.

I teetered, unsteady, for a second, but the world quickly righted itself.

I needed to find a gun. I needed to find Riley.

“I’m up,” I said, hoping the Rook heard me. “Riley’s gone.”

No answer.

I started for the hallway when something hit me from behind. I dropped to the floor again, rolled to my back, and swept a leg out, catching the guy off guard. He fell and I climbed on top of him, landing a punch to his temple. It would have connected better had the guy not been wearing a gas mask, too.

Only Rook’s team had gas masks.

The guy hooked his long leg around my midsection and pushed me backward, rolling with the move to give him the dominant position. A knife gleamed in his hand.

I reached up and tore the mask from his face.

“Lukas?” I said. I pulled my own mask off. “Stop! It’s me! Chloe. Your sister. Do you remember?”

The knife came down. I blocked him with both my arms, but he was far stronger than me. The blade came uncomfortably close to my neck.

“Lukas, please. Listen to me.”

He gritted his teeth. The veins in his forearms bulged with the strain.

“Your name is Lukas Monroe Tacktor. Your parents were Margaret and John. You had a sister once, named Chloe, remember? We lived in a white house on Cherry Hill Drive and we always fought over the bathroom every morning and you hated the smell of my hair spray and the sound of my laugh but you loved my grilled cheeses.”

Tears blurred my vision. I blinked, felt the trace of wetness down into my hairline.

“Lukas.”

The point of the knife grazed my skin.

“Lukas!”

The strain in his face faded, replaced by a deep-rooted frown and an expelled breath. He pulled away and tossed the knife to the side.

“You’re… my sister?” he said right before the Rook appeared out of the murky darkness and whacked my brother on the back of the head.

Lukas slumped over, his eyelids fluttering closed.

“Why did you do that?” I shouted.

The Rook knelt beside my brother and secured his hands behind his back. “We have Riley,” he said, his mouth twisted into a smile so wide, I worried it’d eat his face. “We have what we came for, Chloe. Time to move out.”

Two more men appeared out of the haze and hoisted my brother up between them.

The Rook offered me his hand. “Come on. Time to get your brother back.”

I took his hand and let him lead me out the door.

The Rook and his team retreated to the warehouse. It was well after midnight when we arrived, and the streets were dead. Riley and what remained of his team were locked inside windowless rooms on the second floor of the warehouse. My brother was among them.

“I don’t understand why he has to be locked away,” I said to the Rook as we watched my brother through a two-way mirror in the door. Overhead, the lighting was dim, while my brother’s room was brightly lit to allow us to remain unseen on our side. It gave the hallway a hushed feel.

“Because we don’t know how much he remembers, or who he’s loyal to. This is just a precaution until we can clear his head.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. My entire body was one massive ache inside another massive ache, but I was anxious to do something other than stand here.

“Something dislodged inside his head,” I said. “He could have killed me. He didn’t. And I think he remembers that I’m his sister.”

The Rook frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. All things considered, he’d escaped the mission pretty much unscathed. There was a fresh cut, a crescent swipe of the blade, across his forehead, and blood from the wound had dried along the side of his face. A few bruises were blooming along his jaw, and on his knuckles.

At least he hadn’t been shot. Thankfully, my bullet wound was already healing.

“Just give him the night, okay?” the Rook said. “Let him rest. Let me talk to him first. And then, tomorrow, you can start poking at him.”

“I hate it when people give me orders.”

He laughed and ran a hand through my hair, messing it up. “I know you do. It’s why I do it.”

With an exaggerated salute, he disappeared from the hall. I walked three doors down and peered into the two-way mirror of another cell.

Riley sat on a bed, his elbows propped on his knees, his hands folded on the back of his bowed head.

Riley had been captured. Damn, it was a good feeling.

The Rook hadn’t said what would happen to Riley, but I hoped someone somewhere along the line would put a bullet in him.

My stomach grumbled, forcing me to give up my post outside my brother’s room for an hour or so. I found pizza, beer, and a cake in a conference room. Pounding rock music vibrated through me.

I guess if there was anything worth celebrating, this was definitely it.

I grabbed a piece of pizza and parked myself in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows as the rest of the Rook’s team reveled behind me. Outside, the city glittered in winks of light. The moon hung half full in the sky.

As the party raged on, I watched the Rook’s team down beer after beer, pizza slice after pizza slice, and wished I could join in the fun. Usually, I was the consummate party girl, but how could I party now, when my brother had risen from the dead only to have any memory of his family wiped clean from his skull?

After my second slice, and a lot of stewing in my own frustrated juices, I grabbed a third slice and a beer and slipped from the party.

I headed back to where my brother was being kept, intent on spending as much time with him as I could. I’d make him remember, goddamn it.

But as I rounded the corner into the hallway and saw the three guards lying facedown on the floor, a cold sweep of dread ran down my spine.

I tossed the pizza and the can of beer aside and raced to Riley’s cell. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, the door still locked from the outside.

I heaved a relieved breath.

If it hadn’t been Riley…

A thousand thoughts raced through my head as I ran for my brother’s room. But if my brother was loyal to Riley, why would he escape without him? And if my brother had started to remember me, why escape at all?

At his door, I peered inside to find the place empty. I yanked the door open and stepped in, my boots crunching on something metal. I bent down and found two twisted paper clips.