Chapter 303 I will bring her back

Konstantin left an hour later. He had to see the men on the coast. He kissed her on the forehead, a dry, careful kiss, and she did not pull away. At the door he stopped.

"I will bring her back," he said. She did not answer. He went out, and the key turned in the lock.

But he did not go empty-handed. A few minutes before, he had set the small black tablet on the table beside her tea. He had not said why. He only pushed it toward her with two fingers.

"Watch if you wish," he said. "It might comfort you."

She had not touched it. She waited until the footsteps died away, and then she waited another ten minutes, counting.

Then she picked it up. It was locked to a single screen with no menus or settings. No way out. It showed only a live picture, and the picture was a dim, clean room with white walls.

A man lay on a narrow bed.

He was thin. His face was pale and still, with deep hollows under the cheekbones. A tube ran into his arm. Wires crossed his chest and disappeared under a blue blanket, and a soft green line ran across a small monitor beside him, rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm.

He had Don’s face. But it was not Don’s. The mouth was gentler. The brow was softer. Even asleep, even half dead, there was a kind of ease in it, the ease of a man who had never been hungry for anything.

Kontino. The word came up through her like a prayer.

She sat with the tablet in her lap and stared at the screen. She did not weep. She had no strength left for it. She only looked, and looked, as if she could drink him through the glass. His chest rose. It fell. A small light blinked on the monitor.

Alive. Both of them. Both alive.

She had thought Don might be lying about the tablet. That it might be a clever recording, an old video, a trick of light. She watched for ten minutes, twenty. A nurse came in at the edge of the screen and checked a line. The time in the corner moved. The picture was live.

It was real. She pressed the back of her hand against her lips. Then she did the thing she had been planning since the moment he left.

She looked for a crack.

The Don was clever, but he was an old man, and old men trusted the walls they had built. He had given her a tablet locked to a single feed. He had not thought to ask what the feed was running on.

She had spent twenty years listening at doors. She knew the sound of a machine thinking.

She held the tablet very still and watched the little circle that spun in the corner of the screen, round and round, whenever the picture shifted. She tapped the edge of it twice, quickly. She held her thumb against the corner. A small gray window flickered at the bottom, no bigger than a fingernail, and vanished.

It was a signal line. Every live feed had one. A narrow channel where the picture and the sound traveled, with a place in it for notes and numbers and small, ordinary messages that nobody ever read.

She typed. It took her a long time. She wrote slowly, one letter at a time, with her eyes on the door. She did not use her name. She sent it to one account, and only one person could ever open it. The invisible hacker.

Katty. I know you are alive. I do not know where you are. I am locked in. He has Kontino. Be safe, and I hope you got the answers you were looking for from the files.

She read it three times. She pressed send.

The little window blinked, and closed, and was gone. The picture of the sleeping man did not change. She set the tablet down on her knees and let out a long, shaking breath.

Please, she thought. Please, please read it. The Don came back that evening.

He looked tired. His face was gray, and his eyes were red-rimmed. He crossed the room slowly and sat in the chair opposite her, and for a while neither of them spoke.

His eyes moved to the tablet on the table. "You watched."

"Yes."

"Then you know."

"I know what you showed me." He said nothing. His hand rubbed the edge of his sling. "Wake him up," Helena said.

She said it quietly. It was not a plea. It was almost a request, polite and cold, the way you ask a clerk to pass a pen.

"Wake him. Let me speak to him." The Don did not look at her. "I cannot."

"You said you could. You said, any time I want."

"I know what I said." His voice was tired, and flat. "I can. But not now. Not yet."

"Why?"

"Because I need something from you first." The room went still.

Helena did not move. She sat with her hands on her knees and her back very straight, and she looked at him across the small, dim space between their chairs.

She had known it would come to this. She had known it since he first said the word brother. Every kindness he had shown, every careful lie, every tender, bleeding confession, had been leading here, to one quiet sentence.

"What do you want?" she said. The Don lifted his eyes. They were old and tired, and there was no softness in them at all.

"You know," he said. "I will give you everything," Helena said. She had not planned to say it. The words came out on their own, low and steady, across the dim little room.

"The trust fund. The one you want so badly. All of it. I will open it myself." She held his eyes. "Just wake him up."