Red Rainbow by G Johanson (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

César questioned whether he was better taking his chances with them over her. She had one weapon in her arsenal, a weapon she kept going back to whether it was warranted or not, downplaying the consequences of it so much that even a benign chanteuse having a bad night wasn’t spared. Florence was just ‘borrowing’ her energy to make a point, with no thought as to how this could affect the young woman’s faith in her abilities in the future.

“That is a shit plan.”

“It would be if the Allies hadn’t landed, yes. You’ve not left me with many choices. I’m playing for time, muddying the waters to try and stop them killing 87 of our people.” She ridiculed his group for their inferior resistance, blind to the consequences of her own actions. Any time César may have put into organising acts of resistance was wasted on damage limitation and de-escalation because of her.

“I believe you.” Florence was disappointed. He’d taken the joy she got out of sparing him in a superior manner – he was not beholden to her at all this way. “Maybe I won’t let them arrest you.”

“You don’t get to stop me.”

“At least my grand gesture wasn’t playing the martyr.” Florence was aggrieved, feeling betrayed even though he was Judas kissing himself. He had to trust that he had enough influence on her to stop her from wrecking his scheme, even if she believed she was letting him be arrested as punishment. He had her hook, line and sinker – the only issue was she was still a shark, and they weren’t easy to land. He was wary of flirting with her at full force – he had already whetted her appetite for more, it wasn’t worth wetting anything else, not when loving him made her want him on a hook of her own to toy with. “Play it your way for now. I can locate you whenever, wherever. If you don’t get the job done...”

“The job in question is similar to many of the Foundation’s aims. If I’m successful, there won’t be anything to notice. Failure will be noticeable and it’ll be too late then. We’ll meet again when this place is open ’til after midnight.” His captivity would last the rest of the Parisian occupation. The puppetmaster had to be near the puppets, after all, the Love Phantom curious as to how he could pull their strings to negate them.

“You’re gambling a lot on your powers of persuasion.”

“It’s all I’ve got. It’s got me ahead in life so far.”

“I don’t know if I’m leaning towards letting you do this because your powers have worked on me, or if it’s just to see you fail.”

“I don’t either. That’s the problem of having no off switch.”

“Oh, you have an off switch,” Florence reminded him a little too gleefully. The dinner would serve its purpose in getting him arrested. And that was about it really, they hadn’t made progress as allies. He wanted peace, she wanted sustenance, the two aims not as compatible as they should have been.

“Did you think I’d poisoned the food?” César said with a crooked smile, feeling slow on the uptake at how long it took to come to this realisation. She’d got him pegged entirely wrong. He hoped that, if nothing else, this meeting had helped them understand each other a little more, for better or worse. He felt sorry for the little girl forced to become someone else to get through her childhood – she’d just picked a lousy new identity. He hoped that she now didn’t think of him as a master assassin – she didn’t need to know that betraying her had been discussed because he had never seriously considered going through with it. And certainly not like this. Killing someone at a meal – or a concert – that they had been invited to was very poor form.

“I would have taken yours regardless. More fun.”

Capture me now, Gestapo. This thought was in jest, César accepting that she was nowhere near as bad as them. Maybe more dangerous, though, to him at least. She was completely his, only her love didn’t work quite that way. She thought he was completely hers. Sure, it was a get out of jail free card, but was there a card to get out of her crosshairs?

Chapter 11

A Charmed Life

The Love Phantom’s power had always been there. It was a passive ability which he could not turn on or off, nor could he amplify or reduce it no matter how hard he tried. He could turn on the charm, as anyone could, and had developed a mellifluous persona partly as a means of explaining his popularity and why people fell for his charms. He could also be rude to discourage attentions, but these actions were not related to his ability which was always there at the same level. Those that felt it felt it at the same level according to their own disposition in the moment, their own levels of weakness.

He was his mother’s favourite, his father’s too. They didn’t bother to disguise it, not that his siblings resented it because they understood why. He was their favourite member of the family too. He was always picked first at school, was always put in the lead role, was always graded higher by teachers who knew him – and much worse by independent markers who’d never met him. It was like a red carpet was laid out in front of him wherever he walked.

And it was all a lie.

His name was not supposed to be César. His parents had a set name for him and then abandoned it as not sounding grand enough for the baby in their arms. Whatever he was exuding, they were awed from the start. With almost everyone loving him, it felt meaningless, fraudulent. They were bewitched, nothing more. The only love he trusted as genuine was that of his family, and even that existing love