He nodded, slowly. “I know. We came and got you. I’m sorry, Layla. So sorry.” He picked me up like he would carry me. Where were we going? I didn’t know. It was like all language was confusing now. Even the one I knew.
“I want to go home.” I didn’t have one, but I wanted to go anyway.
“We are.”
He carried me outside. Men in black stood everywhere, talking to each other, speaking to Michael. It was English. That much I knew.
And then I saw the lights. Flashes. Cameras. Why were there cameras here? Oh, that was right. There were cameras everywhere. Every phone was a weapon to use against me. I hid my face against Michael. I hated cameras. I never wanted to see one again. Not ever.
There was a doctor on the plane. “We’re going to take care of you.”
I thought I saw my father, but he only stared at me for a second before heading to the back, leaving me in the care of the doctor whose name I didn’t know. But Hope was there, and so was Bridget. They held me. I’d stopped crying, but now they were.
“We’ve got you, Layla.” Hope pressed her cheek against mine. “It’s over.”
A lot of things were over. “I’m not good for anything, Hope.”
“That’s nonsense. You’re just upset and rightly so. You are too good for things. That’s the truth.”
“It’s true.” Bridget stroked my head. “We love you.”
I believed them. They weren’t perfect, none of us were. But they were my sisters. We were triplets. Three of us in the womb, we were always meant to be together. I didn’t know who I was without them, and trying to be someone else had ended in disaster, literally.
I shrunk down into the seat as the doctor put an IV in my arm. “This will help.”
Help with what? I didn’t need any help, that I could tell. “I hate airplanes.”
“In a minute, you won’t even know you’re going to be flying.” He winked at me.
Why? I didn’t want to sleep. Why were they doing this? “Hope? Bridget?”
They looked at each other and then the doctor. “Why does she have to be sedated?”
“Because your father doesn’t want her to be hysterical on the plane. She’ll be fine, and then we’ll be in New York.”
Bridget started to yell at him, but I was getting woozy, and it was hard to think. I looked at Hope through bleary eyes. “Zeke didn’t love me.”
She furrowed her brow. “Layla?”
“He didn’t love me, and then they kidnapped me and killed two men.” I took her hand. “And I really hate airplanes.”
She squeezed my fingers. “They didn’t die. Neither of them. The Russians didn’t kill them. They were both saved. I promise you. And Zeke…”
I never did hear what she said.
The very rich can get better from nervous breakdowns and lots of other things in private hospitals all over the place. I’d been kidnapped, but I guessed I was considered the same kind of liability. Either that, or they wanted me away from the press where anyone could see. The Hamptons must be entirely booked up, because I found myself in the lap of luxury for mental health disorders in the middle of the Upper East Side.
I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. The air conditioner blew at me, and I shivered. Without my hair, my head was always cold. One of the nurses had brought me a cap, and I put it on. I pulled a blanket over myself and turned on the television.
For the first couple days that I’d been here, the news had shown me myself all the time. Curled against Michael, looking like death warmed over. Poor little rich girl gets kidnapped by Russian mobsters because her father couldn’t make good on a deal with them.
Things could be worse. Kit would never come home from Bali. They’d found him on the beach with his throat slit. His father had been gunned down outside their apartment, and Laura was missing. No one knew if she was dead or in hiding.
My father must have just mildly annoyed them, or they’d have taken me out too. Or maybe one of them had liked the look of me. I closed my eyes at that thought. They’d laughed at me a lot. Had they been playing with their food before eating it?
I might never know.
I stared at the TV. Today, they were showing restaurant critiques. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t hungry. I might never be again.
Chapter Twenty
I lay on the bed, this time with my sisters on either side of me. We all stared at the ceiling together. There was nothing good on television. I’d had my morning therapy, where we’d talked about my inner turmoil that had caused me to run out on my fiancé. Funny she was focusing on that. I was kidnapped, lady. Kit was a douchebag. A dead douchebag, but a douchebag, nonetheless.
That felt like a million years ago, and if I really listed all the ways I’d either been fucked or fucked up in my life, I couldn’t say that I was ranking running out on Kit as being that important. Maybe that made me a bad person.
“Dad has fled the country,” Bridget announced, and Hope and I both sat up to look at her, colliding elbows in the process. Bridget sat up slowly.
Hope had fallen silent, so it fell to me to ask the obvious question. “What? Why?”
“The FBI wanted to talk to him for obvious reasons. As of this morning, he’s a fugitive in another country. Some place that doesn’t extradite to the US.”
Hope blinked. “France maybe? Don’t they not extradite?”
I shook my head. “They do. It’s only French citizens they won’t. Dad, they would send back. Roman Polanski has a French citizenship.”
Why did I know that? I was full of random information sometimes.
“Does Russia?” Hope asked me, and I shook my head. They didn’t. But Dad wouldn’t go there, right? I mean, I’d been kidnapped by some Russians. It would probably be a very bad idea for him to head there.
“I hate him.” Bridget sighed. “I know that’s a terrible thing, and all of our years of various schools taught us to not use it like we’re allergic to it. To be more articulate. You’d be more articulate, Layla. But I don’t want to do the ‘when Dad behaves this way, then I feel’ thing right now. Well, maybe I do. When Dad flees the country after getting my beloved sister kidnapped by Russian mobsters, that makes me feel like I knew I already felt, which is that I hate him.”
Hope and I both stared at her. That was actually quite a lot said for Bridget. “He was going to marry me off to Kit to seal a deal with the mob.” It wasn’t funny, but I started to giggle. “And I was dumped five minutes before I got kidnapped. It’s all…ridiculous.”
Bridget rubbed my back. “You know, if you’re going to have a nervous breakdown, this is a great place to have it, Lulu.”
I almost startled at the nickname. No one had called me that for so long. Our nanny when I was six had given it to me, and I’d loved it because it was something a mother might do. A gentle nickname. It had lasted for a little while with my sisters.
Hearing it was…nice.
I asked the question that plagued me whenever I thought about it. “Why didn’t they kill me? They’ve killed Kit and his family. Why not me? What were their plans for me?”