“Me?”
She laughs. “Yes, you. Oh, believe me, nothing would please me more than to let him think you’ve abandoned him. Six months or a year, I think, after he’s fully vented his rage on your precious people… Then I would send him the tape, show him what I have done to you. Let him see that your love was true and you begged for him to the end. Oh, and you will beg. I will have to satisfy myself with eviscerating you after I’ve killed him and pried that damned armor off his corpse.”
I press my throbbing lips shut.
She keeps talking.
“Once he’s gone and I have the suit, the Americans think it will be theirs… And I will give them one, an older model, while I ramp up the production line under the mountain. With both brothers dead and the suit under my control, the castle will be mine. My resistance will don those suits and spread out in every direction like a steel tide, rolling over every foe. Solkovia will be first. I will put every man and woman and child to the sword, for your sake. I will kill the girl children first. I think this will please you.”
“You’re insane.”
She laughs softly, and mirthlessly, to herself. “So you think, I am sure. What is insane is to wield power such as that and not use it. Dear Kristoff argued with me for hours and hours, oh no we mustn’t, oh one man cannot rule all the world, oh if we try we will be utterly destroyed and my people will suffer for it. He has a kind heart, in his way. It’s a shame that defect did not pass over the heir and to the second son. Had Kristien been born first, the world would bow under a black iron yoke and I would be its queen. I will finish what their fathers started. I will ensure you are alive to see it before you beg me for death.”
Oh my God.
She’s fucking nuts.
I can hear the seat creak as she sits back. “We need only to make the proper arrangements.”
I swallow. “Arrangements?”
“You’ll see. I have something very, very special in mind for you. A prince needs a grand exit from the stage, don’t you think?”
She turns and barks an order in Kosztylan.
I don’t know what to do. I’m not a spy or a secret agent. Maybe I should be paying attention to the turns or trying to count the stoplights, get some handle on where I am.
Not that it would help. I’ve been here exactly once and we didn’t get out of the car. Manhattan is not, as they say, my jam.
Oh God, I’m going to die.
Painfully, apparently.
The best thing I can do for now is sit quietly, I think. Listen, think, and pray. I pray hard, as if it’ll do me any good. I pinch my eyes shut and plead.
The ride takes a long time. An hour, more. When we finally stop and the van door slides open (my spy skills have improved to the point where I can tell it’s a van, because it has a sliding door), the smell of rust and stale air rushes through the burlap, flavored by the crusty iron stink of blood. I’m not sure if it’s soaked into the sack, or just in the air.
“Don’t move, or we’ll break your arms,” she says, standing in front of me. “That will make this vastly more unpleasant for you.”
I go halfway limp, sagging a little as they unbind my arms, only to close handcuffs around my wrists…and force them over my head. I hear a metallic scraping sound, and then a great mechanical noise, some kind of engine revving up.
Oh God.
Something pulls at the chain binding my wrists, and the cuffs click tighter, cutting off circulation to my hands. My fingers begin to tingle as my toes come up off the floor. I hang there and she gives me a little push, amusing herself by swinging me forward and back.
Then it lifts me up. The cuffs dig into the flesh of my wrists, and I have no choice but to hang there and whimper as the pain grows, and grows, and grows. I feel the world swinging past under my feet, until I finally come to a stop, instinctively trying to put my feet down.
She’s behind me, I can feel her.
The sack comes off. She yanked it over my head. I’m hanging over a void between two ends of a retracted walkway, something beneath me. There’s a camera aimed at me, held by one of her men.
“Look down,” she says.
I glance back. Cassandra bears a faint resemblance to the blonde-haired guard. They might be kin. She’s taller and leaner, her hair knotted back severely behind her head. Her eyes are green and hard.
I swallow, hard, and tilt my head down. It’s agony with my arms forced over my head. It feels like they’re going to pull out of their sockets.
When my gaze falls to the floor beneath I see… a machine. Rows and rows of wheels, with big studs jutting out that form interlocking metal teeth.
“It’s an industrial shredder,” Cassandra says, stroking my hair. “The shape of the blades gives it an amusing nickname: They call it the muffin monster.”