Free If Looks Could Kill by Elizabeth Cage Page A

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    The noonday sun beamed happily down on the garden near the main temple. Caylin sat with Jenny and a halfdozen other members she had just met. Her indoctrination had begun in earnest, and the members sat in the warm sun reminiscing about their first days in the compound. The one common thread Caylin found between all of them?
    Too much money.
    But Lucien was doing his best to help cure them of it.
    â€œI feel so free,” a girl named Concetta said, holding her arms out to soak in the sunbeams. “Everything I used to worry about means nothing. It is true freedom, Caylin. You’ll know what we mean very soon.”
    Concetta came from Milan. From what she had said before, her father owned a vineyard that produced some of the finest wine in northern Italy. Big bucks. But for some reason, wine barrels full of cash weren’t enough to fulfill Concetta’s sense of self-worth.
    â€œListen to her, Caylin,” Barry from London advised. “She was one of the most lost causes you ever saw when she came in here. But look at her now. A veritable font of tranquility.”
    The others laughed. Barry came from a distinguishedBritish publishing family. He fled Cambridge for a chain-smoking trip across Asia. Then he found Lucien, smoked his last butt, and never left. He didn’t even miss the nicotine.
    â€œInner peace can be catching,” added Stanislaus from Prague.
    There were others: Molly from Seattle (her father was a computer game designer); Ito from Nagasaki (his father was into Japanese steel and golf course development); Gunther from Zurich (banking); Heddy from Iceland (designer soft drinks); Louis from Jamaica (resort development and agriculture).
    What was amazing to Caylin was that there were over sixty others who she hadn’t met yet. What did their parents do? Best-selling authors? Tax lawyers? Senators? It boggled the mind.
    She’d learned more about Jenny, too. Her mother was a real estate developer in the Chicago suburbs. Jenny had begun college but quickly fell into the wrong crowd. Drinking. Partying. Learning very little except how to skip class. Eventually Jenny scammed a hunk of moneyfrom one of her tuition accounts and headed out. By the time she got to Lucien, the rest of her tuition money was safely in her bag, in cash, waiting for the proper moment to be spent.
    That moment came on Jenny’s second day at the compound. Since then she was able to get Lucien some other account numbers belonging to her mother. Jenny justified this by swearing that her mother had more than she could ever need. She said it with such shocking disgust that Caylin had to wonder what her mother ever did to deserve it.
    â€œSo what does your father do?” Ito asked her.
    Caylin shrugged. “He’s an oil rancher. So was my grandfather and my great-grandfather.”
    â€œThere’s oil in Nebraska?” Molly from Seattle asked skeptically.
    â€œNo,” Caylin replied. “In Texas. We just live in Nebraska.”
    â€œI hope you realize how important it is for us to help Lucien any way we can,” Jenny told her. “We were all unlucky to be born into unbelievable materialistic situations. Luckily we don’t have to live with it.”
    â€œIt’s also lucky that most of us are able to siphon some ofthat wealth to Lucien,” Barry said. “I don’t know what I would do if this place ever shut down. I’d have no place to go.”
    Caylin smiled and nodded in agreement. But inside, she just couldn’t believe it. Were their lives so bad? So empty? Actually, they sounded too full. The way she saw it, they were just a bunch of spoiled rich kids who suddenly realized that they were at an age when people expected them to take responsibility for their lives. Get the expensive degrees. Take over the family businesses. Make something of themselves.
    Grow up.
    None of them wanted to do that. They had taken