I take out my phone and quickly message Sauvage. The Frenchman calls me a moment later.
'You have news?' he asks.
'Maybe,' I reply. 'Marcus's girlfriend says she heard Joseph Banderville talking about a guy named Heath.'
'And what does this mean?' the Frenchman asks impatiently.
'It could beThe Heath. It's the clinic where Daisy was in England. It could be that the Bandervilles had her taken back there.'
'D’accord.My plane can be ready in an hour, but I cannot go with you.' He snarls something else in French that I don't catch. 'Find her and bring her back.'
I scowl at the phone. 'Of course we're gonna find her and bring her back,' I snarl. 'But not for you, Sauvage.'
The Frenchman snorts and the line goes dead.
‘French prick,' I mutter. 'Let's go.'
We go upstairs immediately and pack some essentials, not knowing how long we're going to be across the pond for. Blake’s movements are frenzied as he stuffs his duffel bag.
‘We’re gonna find her,’ he’s muttering to himself like a madman. ‘Gonna find her.’
I put my hand on his shoulder and he tenses.
‘Wearegoing to find her,’ I say, hoping that I sound more positive than I feel.
What if this is just a wild goose chase that costs us time when we should be looking somewhere else?
But he closes his eyes and nods, muscles relaxing under my hand.
‘Yeah,’ he breathes.
'No guns,' I remind him, eyeing the spare magazine on his bed.
'Yeah, I know,' he sneers. 'I’m not bringing it. I probably know more about England than you do.'
I roll my eyes at him as I look at my phone and see a message from Sauvage telling us which airport his jet will be waiting for us at.
We’re ready within ten minutes, and we leave the KIP house quickly and quietly. I give some orders to a couple of the juniors, letting them know that we'll be back soon and tohold the fort while we're gone. I don't tell them where we’re going or why, and I hope my father is too busy to keep tabs on me right now, too. With any luck, I’ll be back before he has any idea that I was ever gone. I haven't seen him in days anyway. He's been on another business trip, this time somewhere in South America.
I realize that he hasn’t even mentioned Daisy’s disappearance to me once in the past week, and I get a sinking feeling that he might know exactly where she is. Maybe he even had her kidnapped.
I drive the truck, mostly because Blake looks jittery as hell— I'm wondering if he's been self-medicating a little— and Mav seems so lost in his own head that I wouldn’t trust him to drive a golf cart right now.
'Why would they have taken her back to England?' he mutters as we drive through the darkness, patches of fog glowing in the headlights.
'I don't understand. Joe was going to marry her, but they sent her back there. They couldn't have known that we...’ He trails off and shakes his head. ‘No, whoever it was couldn’t have known that he was dead yet. They must have been going to take her anyway. Why?’
‘Keep her under wraps?’ I say out loud. ‘Put where they could find her? She was at The Heath for ten years without escaping. Maybe the Bandervilles or my father figured that was a better place to keep her until the wedding. It was the first time she’d been out in the open for weeks. Maybe they saw their chance and took it before she could go underground again.'
Mav shakes his head a little. Blake just stares out of the window and doesn't say anything in response.
I drive as fast as I can while still keeping to the speedlimit. The last thing we need is to get stopped by the cops and delayed even more.
'If she’s there, what are they doing to her?' I hear Blake mutter. 'What are they doing to our girl?'
I side-eye him, my face grim.
Like him, I can't stop thinking about what we know about that place. There's not much, but what we are aware of isn’t great. I sort of wish I had let Blake bring his gun because there's no way the people who have her are the good guys.
