Pagano glanced at me in the mirror. “I’m not supposed to...”
I clutched the arm of my chair as we accelerated onto the highway. “If they’re going to make me forget anyway, why does it matter if you tell me?”
“Because there are rules. If I break them, I lose my job.”
I squinted as the glare from the setting sun caught my eye. “Who’s going to tell, if I can’t remember?”
He scowled at me in the mirror. “Delilah...”
“Fine.” I thought in silence for a few more miles, while the sun slipped below the horizon, then I took another shot. “If they don’t mess around in my head until we get back to the Spectacle, then I must know what happened immediately after an engagement, right? When I get back in the van?”
“Yes.” Pagano accelerated to pass a slow moving truck. “But you never talk about it when you come out, and I never ask. But I can tell you that you always ask these same questions. You’re nervous every time you go in.”
“And when I come out?” I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out. “How do I look? Am I crying?” Am I hurt?
“Delilah, you don’t want to do this. Just get it over with and let them take the memory. You’re always better after that.”
Horror washed over me, and suddenly the van seemed to be closing in around me. “So, you send me in and let them take whatever they want, then you drive me back and let Vandekamp steal the memory? Why? To keep me functional? If you cut out the rot, the fruit stays fresh longer?”
His gaze met mine in the mirror again, and it wasn’t unsympathetic, but his voice carried thick threads of warning. “This is the way it works.”
“I’m going to be sick.” They hadn’t gotten all the rot. I could feel it growing inside me, and if I didn’t get rid of it, it would infect the baby. And maybe thefuriae.
“No, you’re not.” Oncoming headlights painted the inside of the van with bright light. “Take a deep breath.”
My stomach heaved. Bile burned in the back of my throat. “Stop the car. I’m going to vomit.”
“Just take a deep breath and lean back. You’ll be fine. You always are.”
Maybe. But only because afterward they would open me up and scrape out all the parts that weren’t good anymore.
Why would Vandekamp erase the memory, but leave me with the living, growing proof of what had happened? Did the father know? Did he want the child? Was he paying the Spectacle to keep the baby healthy? Surely Vandekamp wouldn’t protect my pregnancy unless he could somehow profit from it.
Unless the baby was his...
* * *
After a nearly silent hour-and-a-half-long drive, according to the dashboard clock, we drove into a neighborhood full of large houses seated back from the road on sprawling lawns. Pagano turned the van onto a long brick driveway, then drove past the huge lawn, an elaborate circular drive and a massive house strategically lit by garden and floodlights. He parked behind the house, next to a black sedan.
Pagano uncuffed me, and my heart thumped harder as we climbed the back porch steps. A man in a black suit opened the door and ushered us into a huge kitchen that smelled like sugar cookies but looked as if it had never been used.
Paralyzing pressure built around my lungs as I eyed the man, trying to determine what kind of person he was based on the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw, but I couldn’t catch his gaze.
Pagano turned me toward the door we’d just come through and pointed at the top of the frame, where I found a device clipped to the wood, steadily blinking red. “If you go more than two hundred feet from this sensor or my remote control you’ll be paralyzed and in a great deal of pain.”
Before I could respond, a woman in understated but expensive clothes stepped into the room, followed by a second woman in her fifties wearing the very same housekeeper’s uniform I wore. Minus the scarf.
My confusion mounted. I’d assumed I’d been engaged by the man of the house, and that his wife would not be home.
“This is the temp girl?” The well-dressed woman’s gaze swept over me, lingering nowhere but my eyes, where she seemed to be looking for something specific.
“Yes, ma’am,” Pagano said, and still the woman’s gaze held mine.
“I’m going out. You are to dust all the second-floor bedrooms.” With that, the woman marched out the back door and down the steps, followed by the man in the suit, who was evidently her driver.
Confused, I glanced at Pagano, but he only shrugged and headed out the door after them to wait in the van. Leaving me alone in the house with the real housekeeper.
“Here.”
