Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
“Maybe.” I steal another taste. “Maybe I just have a refined palate.”
“Your palate thinks Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are a food group.”
“They are a food group. It’s called joy.”
Knox laughs, a real laugh, and Liam’s outrage melts into warmth.
We set the table like civilized people. There’s a tablecloth in one of the drawers—white linen—and we lay out cloth napkins and the nice dishes and even light candles. The flames flicker alongside the fairy lights, and the whole scene looks like a magazine spread about holiday entertaining.
And that’s exactly the point.
Because Marlena is watching. We know she’s watching. And the best thing three captives with a plan can do is look like three captives without one. So we give her a show. Happy prisoners enjoying their gilded cage, grateful for the gourmet kitchen and the fancy linens, too comfortable and too broken to cause any trouble. Every laugh is real, but it’s also a performance. Every candle we light is us saying, Look how tame we are. Look how we’ve accepted this. Don’t worry about us at all.
If she’s buying it, good. If she’s not, at least we’re eating well while the clock runs down.
“Should we say grace?” Knox asks, completely deadpan.
Liam folds his hands, equally serious. “Blessed be this meal we’re about to eat in our luxury prison. May our captor choke on her caviar. Amen.”
I snort wine up my nose, which hurts like hell and is completely worth it.
Dinner is incredible. The chicken is perfectly crispy on the outside, tender and juicy inside. The vegetables are caramelized and sweet. The gravy is rich and savory and I want to bathe in it. We eat until we’re stuffed, then eat more because it’s that good.
And we talk. Really talk. Not about the diamond or Marlena or the countdown clock ticking toward whatever nightmare she has planned. We talk about other things. Normal things. Things three people who aren’t being held hostage might discuss over dinner.
“Worst first date. Go.” Liam points his fork at Knox.
Knox considers. “High school. Took a girl to a nice restaurant, ordered oysters to be sophisticated. Turns out I’m allergic. My face swelled up like a balloon, and I spent the rest of the night in the ER. She never spoke to me again.”
“Oh my god.” I’m crying with laughter. “Please tell me there are pictures.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I will find them.”
“You will fail.”
“I’ve broken into bank vaults. Your high school yearbook archive is nothing.”
Liam raises his glass. “I’ve seen the pictures. They’re magnificent.”
Knox’s head whips toward him. “How?”
“Remember Porter? From Kandahar?”
“That son of a bitch.”
“He keeps a folder. Labeled ‘Knox’s Oyster Incident.’ Very organized.”
Knox drops his head into his hands, and Liam and I laugh until our stomachs hurt.
My turn. I tell them about the date who took me to an escape room and got so competitive he started screaming at the teenage employees for hints. Liam confesses to accidentally setting a girl’s hair on fire with a candle at a fancy restaurant. “The waiter threw water on her head, it was a whole thing.” Knox admits he once forgot a date’s name and called her “sport” for three hours until she called him on it.
“Sport?” I wheeze. “You called a grown woman sport?”
“I panicked!”
“What happened after she called you out?”
“I pretended I had food poisoning and Ubered home.”
“Knox Bishop, you absolute disaster.”
“I was twenty-two. We all did stupid things at twenty-two.”
“At twenty-two, I was stealing diamonds,” Liam says thoughtfully. “Still less embarrassing than sport.”
We move through topics like we have all the time in the world. Favorite movies—Knox loves action, Liam loves documentaries, I have a weakness for horror that makes them both question my sanity. Places we want to travel—Liam wants to see Japan, Knox wants to go back to Scotland, I want somewhere warm with no extradition treaty, which makes them both give me looks.
Knox tells a story about a mission in Kandahar that went sideways, but the way he tells it turns disaster into comedy. The interpreter who accidentally propositioned a village elder. The goat that ate their radio. The sergeant who got lost despite having GPS and a map and three people giving him directions.
“He walked in a circle for forty-five minutes,” Knox says. “We could see him from the ridge. Just . . . circling. One of the guys started taking bets on how long before he figured it out.”
“Did he figure it out?”
“No. The goat found him.”
“The same goat that ate the radio?”
“Different goat. This one was angrier.”
Liam does impressions of their old commanding officer, a colonel with a thick Boston accent. Knox nearly chokes on his wine. I’ve never seen him this relaxed, this unguarded. The vigilance softened by food and wine and company.
I tell them about my grandmother. The woman who raised me after my parents split, who taught me to pick locks for fun on rainy Sundays, who always said rules were just suggestions for people without imagination. She would have loved this, I think. Drinking wine in a decorated cabin with two beautiful men, making the best of a bad situation with style and humor.