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Anyone but her.

Leopold smiles at the initiate’s departure. It’s evidently the reaction he was hoping for.

“He’ll be back,” he tells me grandly. “Now we wait for him to realize the gravity of the situation.”

I fall back on my ass. I will not spend the rest of the day kneeling.

But nothing happens. He doesn’t come back.

Well, not for hours.

We all sit there in the weird little Castaways room, surrounded by weapons and relics on the walls.

A waste of a day. But Leopold is confident.

He will be back.

And then he is.

There’s the sound of a speeding car coming to a quick stop outside. A slam of a car door. Someone bursts into the building.

Fabien.

A scowl on his bloodied face. He doesn’t even look at me when he enters.

“I’ll accept the task,” he snarls at Leopold.

And then he finally turns to me, his dark eyes burning. He points an accusatory finger at me.

“You’re coming with me,” he barks. “Now.”

7

YEARS AGO

FABIEN

The years rolled by after that late-night grilled cheese encounter, each one going past faster and faster.

One year.

Two years.

And things inevitably changed. We grew up.

My friendship with both Baptiste and Clement grew deeper. Stronger.

And Jolie and I continued to email each other every day. Soon, we emailed every second day, and then every third. The messages didn’t have to be long or insightful. They ranged anywhere from a quick update or a random idea or merely a ranting opinion about something that happened that day or something seen on the news. The time between emails may have drifted longer and longer, but we still made each other feel less alone.

And that was all we needed.

But our doubts deepened as well, and so did our guilt. In more and more messages, Jolie worried about Clement finding out about us, and I suspected Baptiste was slowly piecing the clues together. I was in denial that things could fall apart, but Jolie was a true believer that one day the truth would come out.

And then we would have to face Clement’s wrath.

But nothing happened. There was no revelation. No big fight between best friends. We simply got older.

And then we were adults. I was nineteen. She was eighteen.