Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

guests have left. Mr. Desmond is at the bar sipping the last of the champagne, and the Mother is gathering together her girls.
    “What did he say to you?” she asks me.
    I shrug. I can feel Desmond’s eyes studying me, and I am afraid of saying the wrong thing.
    “Why did he choose you? Did he say?”
    “He only wanted to know how old I was.”
    “That’s all?”
    “It’s all he cared about.”
    The Mother turns to Mr. Desmond, who has been watching us both with interest. “You see? I told you,” she says to him. “He always goes for the youngest one in the room. Doesn’t care what they look like. But he wants them young.”
    Mr. Desmond thinks about this for a moment. He nods. “I guess we’ll just have to keep him happy.”
     
    Olena wakes up to find me standing at the window, staring out through the bars. I have lifted the sash and cold air pours in, but I do not care. I want only to breathe in fresh air. I want to cleanse the evening’s poison from my lungs, my soul.
    “It’s too cold,” Olena says. “Close the window.”
    “I am suffocating.”
    “Well, it’s freezing in here.” She crosses to the window and pulls it shut. “I can’t sleep.”
    “Neither can I,” I whisper.
    By the glow of moonlight that shines through the grimy window, she studies me. Behind us, one of the girls whimpers in her sleep. We listen to the sound of their breathing in the darkness, and suddenly there is not enough air left in the room for me. I am fighting to breathe. I push at the window, trying to raise it again, but Olena holds it shut.
    “Stop it, Mila.”
    “I’m dying!”
    “You’re hysterical.”
    “Please open it. Open it!” I’m sobbing now, clawing at the window.
    “You want to wake up the Mother? You want to get us in trouble?”
    My hands have cramped into painful claws, and I cannot even clutch the sash. Olena grabs my wrists.
    “Listen,” she says. “You want air? I’ll get you some air. But you have to be quiet. The others can’t know about it.” I am too panicked to care what she’s saying. She grabs my face in her hands, forces me to look at her. “You did not see this,” she whispers. Then she pulls something from her pocket, something that gleams faintly in the darkness.
    A key.
    “How did you—”
    “Shhh.” She snatches the blanket from her cot and pulls me past the other girls, to the door. There she pauses to glance back at them, to confirm they are all asleep, then slips the key into the lock. The door swings open and she pulls me through, into the hallway.
    I am stunned. Suddenly I’ve forgotten that I am suffocating, because we are out of our prison; we are free. I turn toward the stairs to flee, but she yanks me back sharply.
    “Not that way,” she says. “We can’t get out. There’s no key to the front door. Only the Mother can open it.”
    “Then where?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    She pulls me down the hallway. I can see almost nothing. I put my trust entirely in her hands, letting her lead me through a doorway. Moonlight glows through the window, and she glides like a pale ghost across the bedroom, picks up a chair, and quietly sets it down in the center of the room.
    “What are you doing?”
    She doesn’t answer, but climbs onto the chair and reaches toward the ceiling. A trap door creaks open above her head, and a ladder unfolds downward.
    “Where does it go?” I ask.
    “You wanted fresh air, didn’t you? Let’s go find some,” she says, and climbs the ladder.
    I follow her up the rungs and scramble through the trap door, into an attic. Through a single window, moonlight shines in, and I see the shadows of boxes and old furniture. The air is stale up here; it is not fresh at all. She opens the window and climbs through. Suddenly it strikes me: this window has no bars. When I poke my head out, I understand why. The ground is too far below us. There is no escape here; to jump would be suicide.
    “Well?” says Olena. “Aren’t you going to come out, too?”
    I turn my head and see that she is sitting on the roof, lighting a cigarette. I look down again at the ground, so far away, and my hands go clammy at the thought of climbing out onto the ledge.
    “Don’t be such a scared rabbit,” says Olena. “It’s nothing. The worst that can happen is you fall and break your neck.”
    Her cigarette glows, and I smell the smoke as she casually exhales a breath. She is not nervous at all. At that moment, I want to be exactly like her. I want