Page 111 of The Circle

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

ALEC

The room is an anomaly. Not in a universal sense, but in the sense that it doesn’t comport with the rest of this centuries-old castle.

It is a playroom. Bedecked in vivid, primary colors. Soft mats on the floor so that a child might frolic and not be harmed.

Ironic, I would suggest.

A small “jungle gym,” as they call them, is in the middle of the space. It is an odd name, as there is nothing about them that resembles a jungle and they are hardly gymnasiums, but I suppose they are quite a bit of fun if one is only a tiny thing and wants to stretch one’s growing muscles.

A hopscotch grid is drawn on the floor beside the mats.

And lying on the ground next to the questionably named jungle gym is Theo Watson. He appears to be dead.

Appears to be. Because he moans and we realize he is not. At least not yet.

Blood covers the lower half of his body, but it’s not clear from whence it is coming.

I sweep the room with my weapon and that’s when I see another door on the other side of the area. It is open. I run over to Theo as Christine and Danny fan out to offer cover and, upon arrival, I can see that he has been shot in the leg. The upper leg. If his femoral artery has been hit, we will need to speak quickly.

“I tried to stop him,” Theo spurts out through his groaning. “I tried to stop him from taking her again.”

“Where’d he go?” I demand.

“They went that way.” He points at the door I observed on the far side of the room.

“Who’s they?” Danny asks.

“Gorny, Andra, and his man, Anton.”

“Where to?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Everything was… fine. They said… everything was fine until…”

Everything was fine until we arrived. I have an impulse to assume that the fault of this is mine. And, in some ways, it is. But in larger, less emotional ways, I know it is not. This is my father’s doing. This is of Zander van den Berg’s making.

I don’t control everything, as I once believed.

In fact, it’s possible I don’t control anything at all.

“Lize with you?” Theo grunts.

“Where does it lead?” I respond in non-answer, pointing at the door where he says my father and his man have fled.

“Not sure. I think back down to the main entry.”

Zander is on the run. He has abandoned his plan to negotiate for whatever malevolent bargain he intended to make and has decided it is now simply in his best interests to escape. Alexei Gorny—a ghost of a man feared (if he is to be believed) by millions—run from this place by the very people whose will he intended to break.

Zander van den Berg—a ghost of my own memory, a father who I barely knew and who taught me, in our limited time together, to be ruthless and calculating and cruel—driven to flee by the very bond of love he so obviously fears.

And it’s in this moment I recognize, finally, after so many years of not seeing it, that it is not power that has driven his motivations. Not avarice or even want. It is not that which he desires that compelled him to be who he was. Who he is. What he became.

It is only fear.

Fear of opening his heart and allowing in something that might touch him in a way he can’t control.

Where does that come from? His grandparents, my great-grandparents, certainly didn’t have that. In spite of their probable fear of what would happen to them, they faced it down and let their love for one another dictate their reality.