I’m not waiting around for Isabella. They were in this together, and this piece of shit knows where she is. I want to hear it from his own mouth. I want the green light to go ahead and destroy him, piece by tiny piece, while he pleads for his life like the fucking coward he is.
A strangled sound reaches me through the rubber covering his mouth.
I move my ear closer. “I can’t hear you.”
It sounds like ‘affoo’, but I realize what he’s saying when his knees buckle, and he raises an arm towards the bathroom.
“She’s here?” I shake my head. She can’t be. I would’ve known if she was still in the Titan.
“What the fuck!” Bash releases George, who crumples in a heap on the floor clutching at his throat, the mask still clinging to one side of his face.
Then, a guard comes out of the bathroom holding a heap of smoldering, blackened cloth and dripping water onto the carpet. “No one hurt.”
Remy isn’t with him.
I feel myself deflating as though someone stuck a pin in my chest and let out all the air. “Have you checked all the rooms?”
“All clear.”
Terry comes along behind him holding a pair of shoes in his hand. I recognize them instantly. They’re the shoes that Remy was wearing when she came to the Titan with me.
22
REMY
It takesme a while and too much effort to locate the tiny flicker of the carbon monoxide alarm in the bathroom. When I eventually find it, my neck is aching from staring at the ceiling, my arm is trembling from holding a candle aloft, and I’ve almost set fire to the bathmat three times.
The tealights burn through too quickly. My fingertips are scorched and sore. But I can hear George muttering in the other room, and the thought of him unlocking the door and dragging me out of this room is all the incentive I need to keep going.
I didn’t think this through. Bathrooms don’t have smoke detectors because of the amount of steam produced by hot running water, so the carbon monoxide alarm will have to do. Science wasn’t my best subject at school, but I do know that flames in areas with poor ventilation will produce the level required to trigger the alarm.
Moving methodically around the room, I locate the ventilation grill on the outside wall near the window and block it with a towel. I place more towels around the window frame even though there isn’t a draft. Then I search for a hiding place.
My dad is a plumber. He sometimes took my sister and I to work with him when we were younger and they couldn’t get a sitter. Danielle would hand tools to him from his box and measure things with his retractable tape measure, but I was always more interested in exploring the homes he worked in. I was fascinated by the stuff other people collected.
I was even more curious about hotel rooms.
Hotel rooms offered endless places in which to hide, and I always knew that Danielle would come looking for me when she got bored with listening to dad talk about copper pipes and risers and insulation. I didn’t get scared even in the dark. My dad was close by, and the constant hot water made the hidey holes warm and cozy. I knew how to get into them too. It was easy once my dad showed me how to apply pressure to the panels in the right places.
I remember him winking at me. “Your sister will never find you in there.”
The free-standing tub in the Titan’s bathroom has gold claw feet and gold-clad pipes that run from the faucets into the floor. I crawl behind the tub and feel my way around the concealed wall panels beside the tub. It doesn’t budge. I keep shuffling on my knees, telling myself that it must be here somewhere, because even grand hotels like the Titan need access for the maintenance team.
When it finally shifts, I lean back against the tub, breathing heavily, my entire body trembling with relief and pain and crashing sugar levels. I’ve no idea how long I’ve been here. The last thing I ate was a hot dog from a street vendor, and the thought of mustard and ketchup on crunchy sausage makes me feel queasy.
But there’s no time to sit here and think about food.
I pile all the candles into the tub and light them. The wax starts to melt almost immediately, and panic sets in when I try to guess the distance between the tiny flames and the alarm set into the ceiling. They’ll burn out before anything happens. I need to make it bigger. I don’t want to set the entire building on fire; I only want someone to come to the room and take George away.
The Titan will have fire safety equipment. Cash probably has a direct link to the fire department. And the cops. He can afford to redecorate one smoke-damaged bathroom.
Maybe I’m not thinking clearly with the throbbing pain in my jaw and the dull thudding headache. My mind is completely blank when I place a hand towel gently over the pile of candles and wait for the flames to catch hold.
When scorch marks crawl like ink through the fluffy white, and smoke tendrils curl towards the ceiling, I climb into the hole behind the wall panel, pull it back into place, and hug my knees to my chest.
Then I wait for the alarm to sound.
Any moment now, I tell myself when I get the first whiff of smoke.
