Page 61 of The Wolf and the Monarch

One.

Two.

Three.

Four times.

He was beginning to think she wasn’t going to answer and was about to hang up but her familiar voice came through the other end. “Benji?”

Just hearing her say his name was enough for him to sob. Benji had no idea where it had come from but it must have been something he had been holding in for the past week or so. He just didn’t think he’d ever actually hear her voice again. Even if she was potentially hiding things from him, it was still so good to hear. He stopped his pacing and plopped down in a chair at the kitchen table. His hand covered his eyes and he nodded his head as if she could see him. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Oh my God,” she sobbed, “Is it really?!”

“Yeah, Andi. I swear, it’s me.”

Sobbing was no longer an apt description for what she was doing. She was having a full blown breakdown. “Something just told me to answer this call,” she admitted. “Are you okay?! Where are you?!”

“I don’t know… I’m alive somehow,” he answered as sincerely as could. “I'm somewhere in New Jersey.”

“New Jersey?! Why are you there?”

He wiped at his eyes and shook his head. “It’s so fucked, Andi. The whole thing was a fucking set up, I think.”

“What? What was?”

“The mission that I went on.”

“What do you mean? What makes you think that?” He sighed. Benji didn’t really mean to bring the whole thing up so quickly but he supposed it was just something that needed to be said sooner than later. “Benji?”

“I need you to be one hundred percent truthful with me, okay? No bullshit. If you know something I don’t, you need to tell me because after what I just fucking went through, I deserve that.”

“Okay, of course. One hundred percent honest.”

Benji huffed and ran his fingers through his hair as he leaned back in his chair. “You saw what I said, right?”

“Yeah. Something didn’t feel right. That’s all I’ve been thinking about…”

“Well, I was right. When I was there, I was invaded by some…people. They didn’t give a shit about that hard drive. They wanted me. They took me and held me hostage in some fucking basement. But they thought that I was you.”

Andi fell silent. He could imagine her face at that moment. Her brows were probably scrunched together as she tried to figure out what that meant. “They thought you were me?” She repeated. “But…why? How?”

“They kept asking me about some guy. John Raymond. They said I, or you, were working with him. Does that ring a bell?”

“Yeah…it does. I worked with him. Dad and I did. It was a super quick job.”

“What was it?”

“Just a wire transfer.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I was told. You were supposed to transfer the money from John to another account, right?”

“Yeah, and I did.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“Well, something happened because they never got their money.”