Author's Note: Hey, guys! Sorry about the long delay- my computer got a nasty virus, and it took a while to kill it off. But, anyway, here's chapter four! =D
She arrives at Giordano's at seven-fifteen, confirms her reservation, and settles in at the Italian restaurant's little bar. She has no idea whether he'll come or not—she never asked him, and he never made any indication that he had even solved the maze and its hidden message. That didn't necessarily mean anything. He was good at hiding his thoughts and feelings when he so desired. She had learned that the hard way, after losing a month's worth of babysitting money to him in an impromptu poker game (she had been the unchallenged champion until he had come along).
And yet, the other half of her was close to an anxiety attack. Questions rushed through her head, far faster than her optimistic side could answer them. What if he didn't come? What then? Was it stupid of her to have asked him out so soon? Several weeks weren't very long, after all… he probably did want to get to know her a little better before committing to anything! Or worse, what if she had completely misread everything and he did only like her as a friend?
At seven-twenty, she orders a ginger ale from the barkeeper to soothe her queasy stomach.
She wakes up with a violent jolt several agonizing seconds later after finally succumbing to death by blood loss. She has to take several steadying breaths before finding her voice.
"What the hell?"
"I warned you!" the burly man laughs, once again yanking the needle out of her wrist and putting it back in the silver suitcase. "Lemme know if you need me to put her under again," he says, winking, to the overweight, older man, before leaving the room.
She surveys the older man, calculating her chances in a fistfight against him. He must outweigh her by at least two to one, but she's young and fit, and he's, well,
not. She's trying to think of the best way to launch her attack when he speaks.
"I find it quite hard to believe you won't help us."
"Excuse me?" she says, astonished. "You've killed me twice now in dreams. Which are private things. That you shouldn't be in."
"We were only trying to help you help us. It's not our fault you were being, ah, uncooperative."
She says nothing, too stunned for words that he can even think she'd be willing to help him after drugging, kidnapping, and imprisoning her, and then performed the aforementioned offenses.
"We thought you would be rather willing to help apprehend a thief such as him," the older man continues. At that, she finally finds her voice.
"Arthur, a thief? Are we talking about the same person?" she exclaims. There is no way her prim, polished, polite ex-boyfriend is a criminal, much less a petty thief. "The guy who spent a week tracking down the woman at the grocery store so he could return the twenty-dollar bill she dropped? No way!" she scoffs. It's true that he himself admitted he had mostly done it for the challenge, but still!
The old man gives a low laugh. "Oh, he's worse than the person who steals money." He gets up and sits down closer to her, now that she's so enraptured by what he's saying that she's completely forgotten about fighting her way out of the room. "He steals people's secrets. People like our client."
She fidgets and checks her watch again. Seven twenty-eight. She casts a hopeful glance to the entrance, but there's no familiar head with the well-groomed crop of black hair. She looks down at her drink again and resists the temptation to look at the time again, five seconds after the last time she checked. There's still time, he could still be coming…
"Quick, gimme a kiss," a low voice whispers in her ear, and before she can process the situation, a hand is gently turning her cheek, and warm lips are pressed softly to hers. Then, much too soon, the lips are gone, replaced by a frustratingly calm, unfazed face (though his twinkling eyes ruined the guise).
"What…?" she begins, but before she can finish the question, he's already answering.
"That ignoramus over there has had his eyes glued to your butt since I walked in," he says smoothly, tilting his head over to the offending party. Surely enough, a physically imposing jock in a letterman's jacket glares at him before returning his gaze to the food. "Oh, there we go. Now, I believe we have a reservation at seven-thirty to catch?" He slides off of the bar stool and extends a hand to her.
"And hello to you, too," she says wryly, but she grins and happily takes his hand.
"What?" is her first reaction. "No!" is her second. "How?" is her third.
"It's a lot easier to get information when the keeper of it is asleep. The untrained subconscious is not very good about guarding such things. A trained thief—an extractor, it's called—can share a dream with the victim and locate and steal his or her secrets," the older man says evenly, with the tone of one of the lectors at her university.
"And Arthur is one of these… extractors?" she breathes, horrified. She can't believe it.
"Indeed. He got into our client's mind and stole quite a bit. He then encountered our client in the dream, and the client was accidentally killed in the ensuing fight. As you know," the older man said, nodding in a way that was supposed to be kindly to her, "when you die in a dream, you wake up. The client woke up first, saw himself hooked up to the silver suitcase, saw your Arthur still asleep hooked to the same machine, and recognized him. Unfortunately, the thief had a partner to man the machine, and said partner hit him in the head with something and knocked him out. They were gone by the time he regained consciousness."
She gaped, open-mouthed, for several seconds following this. "How do I know you're not just making all this up?" She finally demands, challenging him, unwilling to accept news like this so easily. She doesn't want to believe that it's true about her Arthur. How did he turn from her perfect, wonderful young man to this evil villain who preys on people when they're most vulnerable? It can't be possible. It can't.
"Well, all of this would be rather difficult to falsify," the older man says, a bit smugly, gesturing to the silver suitcase. She's not sure what to say—he has a point about that. "And, here, a picture from the train station's security camera, before they all boarded the train where our client was attacked," he says, procuring a photo from the inside of his suit jacket. She takes it hastily. It's him, a few years older than the last time she saw him, but unmistakably him. He's bent low with another man whose face is away from the camera and pointing to a third man. A silver suitcase, nearly identical to the one in front of her, is clutched in his hand. Suddenly, the picture blurs. She realizes that she's crying. She feels a pang of hatred for the man in the picture in front of her. A liar. A thief. A no-good, two-faced criminal.
"Our client never saw what secrets he took. We need to know what he stole and who he's working for, and we can't do that until we've found him. Are you ready to help us, Ariadne?" the older man says, his eyes searching for hers. She swallows and nods, blinking back tears. She wants revenge on him. He's betrayed her trust. She wants him to pay for what he's done to this poor, unsuspecting man, and the dozens that probably came before him. She wants him to pay for all he's done to her. She thought she had meant something to him.
Apparently she had been wrong.
"That was wonderful," he says as they leave the restaurant, her small hand firmly clasped in his own.
She stops suddenly, feigning confusion. "What do you mean, was? We're not done yet!" And with that, she grins and pulls him toward a little corner ice cream shop.
Five minutes later, they're sitting down at a small table outside, in the still-warm early autumn air with their dessert.
"So, how long did it take you to do the maze?" she asks.
"Thirty seconds," he says without missing a beat, so seriously that he fools her for a few moments. Then, he laughs, and she picks up her spoon as if threatening to beat him with it.
"Honestly!"
"I actually paid my little brother to do it," he tries again, but he cracks up instantly, ruining the ruse. She glares at him before dipping a finger into the whipped cream of her sundae and very deliberately streaking it on his nose. He merely raises his eyebrows, as if to say, "really?" but he can't resist revenge. He picks out a chocolate chip from his own, licks it, and sticks it firmly to her forehead. She pauses, considering what he just did. Then, with a sudden swiftness, she's flicked a spoonful of vanilla ice cream at him and gleefully runs off across the parking lot. In a second, he's after her, all dignity tossed out the window.
It doesn't take him long to catch her, a fact she'll forever blame on the heels she chose to wear that night. He pins her against someone's car, and she tries to wriggle away. The chocolate chip has long since fallen off, but the whipped cream is still there, and he makes good use of that by burying his nose in her hair and wiping the stuff off, eliciting a protesting squeal from her. Then, he kisses again, and she instantly forgets about the whipped cream in her hair.
"Fourteen minutes," he says when he pulls away. He leans in to press his lips to hers once more, chastely and sweetly, but she throws her arms around his neck and deepens the kiss.
All of her unspoken suspicions of why they needed her help when they had the letter, all her hatred of these two men for abducting and inflicting psychosomatic torture on her, all her deeply-buried desire to protect the man she had loved, even if that man had been replaced by another; all of that was gone.
"The Caribbean," she finally says harshly. "He always wanted to buy a little island in the Lesser Antilles. He said, in the letter, that he'd finally found one and he'd be waiting for me, as soon as I had a break from school."
The man leans his bulk back and smiles. Distraught as she is, she misses how sadistic it looks. "Very good. Thank you." And without another word, he follows his partner out of the door, leaving her alone.
