Page 102 of Five

I gave him that code. And the database that Cliff handed off to me after we met over the summer. Turns out Cliff Middleton had big dreams of bringing down world corruption as well. He was working with Wen the entire time.

Wen set the code to work in the government systems without anyone knowing it was him. In the past week, more than seven hundred people have been imprisoned in China for being on the Triad take.

It’s just a start. One Triad does not a sweep make.

But it’s more than Wen had before, and he’s hopeful now. He sees Hong Kong’s government as something his people should be able to trust.

I can respect that.

Rory was sick for days afterward, but she’s getting better every day. We took her to a specialist, who came up with the name of the poison—a derivative of ricin, which was thought to be untreatable until a few years ago.

I didn’t want to know any more about that. All I wanted was for my princess to be OK.

Two weeks on and she’s almost back to normal, and all the medical experts Spencer Shrike flew in on the recommendation of my uncle James say she’d be dead by now if that antidote the blonde woman gave her hadn’t worked.

Dead by now.

I want to fucking kill someone just thinking about how close she came.

“Hey,” Rory says, walking up to me and sitting down on the sand.

“Hey yourself,” I say, smiling at her. She’s wearing a pink bikini and white sunglasses. “How’s things?”

This is my code phrase for, How are you feeling today?

She wraps her arm into mine, twining us together. The way it was always meant to be. “I miss her,” Rory says, meaning Tera. “And him too,” she adds. Meaning Cliff.

“I know,” I say, pulling her into a tight hug. “But they’d be happy for you. That you made it out.”

She leans into me and says, “We made it, Five. Together. That’s the way it was always supposed to be.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And I got you to agree to marry me for real.”

She smiles at that. Then her smile falters. “I wish I could tell my sisters. And I wish my parents could be here too.”

“We talked about this, Princess. Uncle James got here to the island in secret. No one knows you’re alive. No one knows I was in Princeton that night. Well, except Chen and he’s dead.”

Motherfucker. That’s what he gets for betraying my grandfather.

That toxicology came back too. Same thing as what they used on Rory in that weird deathtrap down in the Palladium basement. Turns out those mansions were built over some secret tunnels used for the Underground Railroad back in the day.

Lucky for us.

“I’m not complaining,” she says.

“I know that,” I reply. “But it’s OK to be sad, ya know. You can’t ever go home again. Ever. And only Sparrow, Belle, and Kate, and our parents know you’re alive. If they”—and by they I mean whoever the fuck these Palladium people are—“know you’re alive, they’ll find you, Rory. Use you to get to me. So you’re staying here with Uncle James. You’ll have him, and Harper, and the kids.”

“Kids,” she says, wistfully.

“And I’ll be back as often as I can slip away. We won’t be apart forever, ya know. It’s all gonna work out in the end.”

“I know,” she says. But she’s sad.

Which is why now is the perfect time to give her my present.

I pull the small box out of my pocket. It’s wrapped in white paper with a pink satin bow. “What’s this?” she asks, But her smile is big. Bigger than any smile I’ve seen on her face since I came back into her life and fucked it all up.

“Just a little something to make it easier,” I say. “That’s all. Open it.”