The Gender Game by Bella Forrest (historical books to read txt) 📗

way. I knew it wasn't. There had to be other scapegoats we could use. We could pin the whole operation on the men of Porteque. Leave a message behind on a building in big red letters or something, declaring it to be an act of rebellion. They were already anarchists, so this could follow on naturally from their recent kidnapping of me.

Whatever the case, once I'd seen Viggo, Lee and I would have no choice but to scramble around for another solution to prevent the blame falling on Matrus. Lee would be mad at me, but I didn't care. We'd figure out a last-minute alternative, because we'd have to. We both had too much at stake to fail in this mission.

Drops of rain began to fall. Drops which soon multiplied and came down harder and heavier, until I was drenched to my underwear.

Still, it didn't matter.

Almost there now. Almost there.

I was shivering by the time I recognized the turn down Viggo's lane. The rain had become torrential and it was a wonder that I hadn't skidded off the road entirely. I trundled down the dirt track—fast turning to thick mud—and skidded to a stop ten feet before Viggo's cabin.

No gas lamps shone through the gaps in the shutters. Perhaps he wasn't even home.

I had to pray that he was only asleep.

Discarding the motorcycle, I stood, my knees feeling shaky from the journey. The first thing I did was reach for my fake hair and tear it off, shoving it into my pockets. I might not even need it again after tonight.

My blood pounding in my ears, I hurried to Viggo's porch and scaled the steps to his front door. I hesitated to catch a breath, then knocked four times.

No answer.

I knocked again, five times, more loudly.

Still nothing.

Oh, no. Don't say he's out after all.

I left the porch, striding back out into the rain, and circled the building. Shutters covered every window. I couldn't see through a single one of them. Moving back toward the front of the building, I stopped dead in my tracks.

A light had been lit. As I turned a corner, at the bottom of the porch stairs was Viggo, wearing nothing but boxer shorts. His hair was mussed, his eyelids hooded. I had obviously woken him up.

But his expression came to life on realizing his intruder was me.

"Violet!" He gaped. "What are you doing here?" His eyes shot to the motorcycle, his face falling. "Where is your husband?"

I stood rooted to my spot as though paralyzed. "He's not here," I rasped.

Viggo launched forward and grabbed me by the hand, pulling me toward his porch, up the stairs and through to his cabin. He slammed the door behind us, towering over me in the hallway. He turned on me, backing me against the wall, his expression a mixture of alarm and utter confusion.

"You… You drove here?" he demanded.

My hands balled up. I nodded, holding his intense gaze.

"What the hell has gotten into you? Do you know the punishment you could receive for that infraction? And that's leaving aside the fact that you've roamed across a mountain at night completely on your own—have you forgotten what just happened to you?" He gripped my shoulders in frustration as I merely stared back at him. "Say something, dammit!"

I'd gone over what I was going to say to him in my mind already, but now that I was here, standing in this stupidly narrow corridor, Viggo so close to me we were practically touching, I felt breathless. Claustrophobic.

"I, uh, I need to tell you something," I managed, my voice deeper than it should have been.

His brows rose, eyes widening. "Clearly!"

I couldn't go so far as to tell him the truth, obviously. He couldn't know that I was a spy, that I’d been trying to frame him all along, or anything about our mission. After telling him all that, he’d likely not trust another word I said. Why should he? I had no idea how he’d react or what he’d do, and I couldn’t run the risk of losing the chance to see my brother again. A chance I still was convinced that I had.

I just needed to make sure that Viggo didn’t come anywhere near the lab tomorrow—even if I failed to convince Lee that the Porteque men would be better scapegoats.

Gathering confidence, I looked Viggo seriously in the eye, parting my lips to speak… but before I could utter a word, my jacket pocket vibrated. When I slipped a hand inside my pocket, it closed around my pager. I'd forgotten it was still in there. My throat drying out, I lifted the pager and glanced at the screen.

"SAY ANYTHING, AND HE WILL BE ASSASSINATED."

My blood ran cold.

Lee had woken up and tracked me down. I'd known all along this was a possibility, but I had been hoping against hope that I would make it back in time.

But what is Lee talking about?

Have Viggo assassinated?

Why?

How?

"Violet?" Viggo drew my attention back to him. "What's going on? Did your husband send a message?"

I hurriedly stuffed the pager back into my pocket. My first instinct was to assume that Lee had panicked on seeing me at Viggo’s and was now bluffing out of desperation. Lee doesn’t even have those sorts of contacts here, does he? I thought back to the moving red dots on Lee's computer screen. Lee had told me that they were people whose "help" he’d used. I wasn’t sure to what extent that "help" could stretch, or how much he trusted them. Obviously not enough to work with him in directly stealing the egg; otherwise, why did he need me? Or maybe Lee would find a way to pull off the assassination himself.

I supposed it was possible that Lee wasn’t bluffing.

But why? Why was assassination necessary? It was as though Lee was assuming that I'd lost myself to guilt and was about to spill everything to Viggo.

"Violet!" Viggo urged.

I parted my lips, on the verge of going through with my original plan.