Arranged Abduction

Chapter 3

The gala started at eight and by eight forty-five, Wren had spoken to eleven people she did not want to speak to and accepted three glasses of champagne she did not want to drink, and she was standing near the far windows looking for the fastest route to the terrace when she saw him.

He was hard to miss, which was strange, because nothing about him or his actions tried to be noticed. He was standing near one of the tall round tables, not sitting or really hovering either, holding a glass of something that she was certain wasn't champagne and watching the room the way someone watches a chess board they haven't decided to play yet.

He was wearing new clothes. She could tell because the jacket sat slightly too correctly, the way clothes do when they haven't been worn before, not softened by a single hour of movement. Perfectly fitted and clearly expensive. The kind of thing a man arranges overnight when the alternative is arriving at a black-tie gala in yesterday's linen. The question that flooded her mind was: Who really is Kasimir Hale?

She felt the specific, dropping sensation of realizing something before she wanted to. She didn’t know what made her cross the room and he, of course, saw her coming halfway across it and did nothing, just waited, the same way she'd waited for his knock that morning.

"Your jacket is new," Wren cursed herself for what she had just said and mostly for not taking communication classes seriously. Her sister, Charlotte, would’ve burst out laughing heinously at her awful conversation starter.

"It is."

"Because of last night."

"Because of last night." His voice sounded more confirmatory than she had ever heard.

She closed her eyes briefly, praying for a much less awkward interaction than last time. "I'm so sorry. I don't know what else to say that covers it."

"Nothing covers it. But the apology is noted." His eyes swept down her dress taking a quick assessment, nothing inappropriate, like someone checking a fact. "That's not what you wore this morning."

"I changed before I came down."

"Into that."

"Into this." She smoothed the front of the dress, which she'd grabbed from his suitcase last night before she'd known it was his suitcase. A shirt, actually, dark green, belted at the waist and styled into a dress because she'd found it and put it on at midnight before checking the rest of the suitcase properly and by then it had already been on her body for twenty minutes, and she'd decided it was fine. The fashion design course she had taken years earlier had come in handy.

"I found it last night," she answered, before he could ask. "Before I realized. I was going to return it, but then I thought it would be strange to return a shirt you'd already worn, so I just—" She stopped. "I'm wearing your shirt to the gala." The silent revolt she was holding against Celeste was definitely making the interaction more awkward. She was already regretting the decision not to wear the dress Celeste had picked for the gala.

"You are."

"I'll replace it."

"Keep it." He said this the way he said most things, like the decision had already been made somewhere earlier, and he was just reporting it now. He took a small drink of his glass. "You should find your fiancé. He'd probably be looking for you."

The last part made her legs freeze to the spot. "How do you know who my fiancé is?"

"Desmond Achterberg. Everyone in this room knows." He kept a brief pause before continuing. "I know better than most."

She glanced at him, and he did the same as her mind went back to the elevator, about how she'd told a total stranger she didn't want to get married, how he'd said nothing back, how he'd just watched her with that flat, patient expression, and she wondered, for the first time, whether the silence had not been contempt so much as listening.

"You have a problem with Desmond," Her statement sounded more like a guess.

"I have a history with Desmond. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

] "A problem implies I'm still losing."

She couldn’t unglue her eyes from him. "What is it you actually do, Mr. Hale?"

"Same thing Achterberg does." His eyes briefly tracked something over her shoulder, before coming back to her. "Shipping. Cargo. The movement of things from one place to another." He slowly took a sip from his glass while maintaining eye contact. "He took something from me three years ago. I've been waiting for the right moment to respond."

"And the right moment is my wedding?"

"The right moment," the brief pause he kept made Wren more eager to hear him, "is whatever breaks the merger."

She knew she should have walked away at that. She knew this was the way you know a stove is hot before you touch it. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to go. Instead, she stayed where she was with her champagne going warm in her hand, and said: "What if I told you I was already looking for a way out."

He gazed at her properly then, the full attention of her with nothing held back. It was different from the way Desmond looked at her, different from the way anyone in this room looked at her. This was not the look of a man calculating what she was worth to him. It was the appearance of a man recalculating everything at once.

"I'd say," he voiced slowly with a brief twirl of his glass, "that we might be useful to each other."

They found a quieter corner near the terrace, away from the string quartet and the cluster of people around her father. She explained what she wanted to him: out of the wedding, clean and no scandal she'd have to live with for the next decade. A disappearance without something no one could trace back to her.

He listened without interrupting, with a gaze that made her more uncomfortable than she’d imagined.

"A staged abduction," he added in conclusion when she had finished

"If that's what it takes."

"It is." He was already thinking past her. She could tell he was turning the pieces over like the control freak he was. "You'd need to be somewhere without cameras. And you'd need a reason to be there alone, at a specific time, that no one would question."

"An evening walk. I take them. Everyone knows I do."

"When?"

"The night before the wedding. I go out at ten. There's a stretch of the east road that the estate security cameras don't cover. I've walked it a hundred times."

He went quiet for a moment, processing what Wren had just told him. "And after. Where do you want to go?"

"Anywhere that isn't that wedding."

"I'll need more specifics than that eventually."

"Eventually," she agreed. She already had a couple of places she had mapped out to relocate to, with Switzerland being the best option out of them. From the half-baked research she had conducted, the country seemed peaceful, beautiful and was far away from her family.

He set his glass down carefully even though he wasn’t looking and reached into his jacket, producing a card before handing it out. The card looked almost empty and plain with just a number. "Contact me Monday. We'll plan the details."

She collected the card before reaching into her clutch to find one of her own; a task that was harder due to her horribly arranged bag and Kasimir Hale’s intense gaze. She finally pulled out a card; plainer still, and handed it over. He glanced at it once before putting it in his pocket.

"The shirt," she started with a bit of nervousness. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

She didn't bother to continue asking before she slipped his card into her clutch, next to the champagne flute she no longer needed, and went to find Desmond.