Kiss Me and Die | ONC 2024

2. Everything's okay, thanks

Amelie frowned as she peered through her binoculars. Her ex-family's estate was surrounded by a fifteen-foot stone wall and the yard itself was liberally populated with trees, shrubs, and various gardens. That made it a little challenging to spy on. The tree she perched in helped raise her vantage point so she could see over the wall, but there were still a lot of blind spots.

Still, she was able to make out the occasional guard dressed as a groundskeeper. Her father believed in hiding his people in plain sight, and every one of his people, from the maid to the cook, was a very capable bodyguard. With a history as long and shadowed as the van Rovensil's, taking such measures was a must.

Growing up, she had thought that it was normal to have cleaning staff who could just as easily stab you as they would mop the floor. She remembered one of the cooks telling her how to identify symptoms of various poisonings and how to treat them. It wasn't the type of conversations adults generally had with nine-year-old children, but Amelie hadn't thought much of it.

Then there was a time when a lost hunter trespassed on the yard and got apprehended. She had watched how they trussed him up in zip-ties and duct tape and held him for hours while he sobbed and pleaded to be let go. Eventually, her older brother had sent her out of the root cellar where they'd been holding him. She never did find out what happened to the poor man, but her brother had told her they sent him on his way, whatever that meant. Amelie, at the time, just thought that was standard protocol with suspicious strangers. Surely everyone had a root cellar to keep unwanted guests?

It wasn't until she spent some time in the outside world that she began to understand just how abnormal her family truly had been.

Frowning, Amelie lowered the binoculars, her lips pursed in thought. This little scouting trip wasn't exactly as fruitful as she'd hoped. But she did confirm that everything looked the same as it did years ago, which was about what she expected. Either way, she was going to have to infiltrate the estate.

It was a good thing she had a couple of ideas on that already.

She climbed down the tree quickly, jumping the last several feet. Her boots hit the soft ground and she briefly steadied herself with a hand against the tree trunk. The forest she was in didn't exactly have a name, but it was as old as the estate itself. As a child, she'd snuck off into the forest multiple times to play, until the one time she got lost and spent a terrifying night in a tree. She'd never ventured into the forest again after that.

Until now.

It took her nearly an hour to backtrack through the forest, using the GPS on her phone to make sure she went in the right direction. Eventually, Amelie could hear the traffic coming from a road nearby, which meant she was finally at the end of her long hike.

She walked out of the line of trees and onto the road There was her rental car, parked on the shoulder a hundred yards up the road.

Then she frowned. There was another car parked behind it: a sleek black Lamborghini of all things. The sight of it made her briefly consider walking right back into the forest, because the kind of people who tended to drive such cars were usually insufferable rich heirs.

The only reason she didn't was because she was parched and her extra water was sitting in her car. With some reluctance, she walked up the side of the road, her gaze tracking over the sleek rich-people car.

The driver's side of the black car opened and a rather ordinary man stepped out. He was young, somewhere in his mid to late twenties, and he wore black slacks and a white button-down shirt like he'd just come from a business casual meeting. This surprised her, because he didn't look like an arrogant rich brat.