by Callie Hart
Shitting hell.
I tuck the gun into the back of my pants, and I hold out the backpack of doom to Garrett. I had better be making the right call, here. If I’m not, I’m never going to forgive myself. “Here. Take this. There’s all kinds of shit in there. Use it if you need to defend yourself. I’ll keep the gun. Show me where Lazlo is and go. Take the boy away from here. For Christ’s sake, just take him somewhere safe.”
Twenty-Eight
PASHA
Lazlo’s been down here a long time. He knows this place like the back of his hand, but while he was ranting and raving, telling his story like the goddamn narcissist that he is, I was familiarizing myself with the place, too. Memorizing the layout. Taking measurements. Building a model of the room inside my own mind.
When the overhead lights go out, I land on my feet, already moving, flying across the room, lifting the wrench high over my head and bringing it crashing down on the computer tower that’s sitting on the desk in front of the television screens.
“NOOOO! Pasha, no!” Lazlo screams.
A gunshot rings out, deafeningly loud in the small room. The muzzle flash is too quick to see, but it burns itself into my retinas. In his anger and panic, Lazlo’s aim is wide. The bullet shatters the television screen to the right of my head, just as the whole bank of screens flickers and then goes dead.
Now, a true, absolute darkness cloaks the room.
I’m at home in the dark. I’m comfortable in it in a way that most people aren’t. My spatial awareness is second to none, too, which gives me an advantage as I run back across the room, hurrying, not to the location I last saw Lazlo, but to the spot where Sarah was sitting a few seconds ago.
“You really think that was a good plan?” Lazlo snarls.
Another gunshot goes off, the sound sending a jolt of adrenalin pulsing through my body. This time, the muzzle flash imprints a single snapshot of the room to the backs of my retinas. Lazlo’s aiming his gun at the ladder that leads back up to the tunnel, arm outstretched, as if he thinks I’d just blind him temporarily so I can make my escape. Clearly, he doesn’t know me as well as he thinks he does, the asshole. The flare of light is gone before he can turn and see where I am. I give myself away when I place my hands on the tops of Sarah’s arms, though. She screams through her mask, her terror getting the better of her, and I have to move quickly.
I need her out of the way. I need to make sure she doesn’t get hurt. The chair’s legs scream as I drag her to my right, using every ounce of my strength to shove my aunt, still zip-tied to the chair, up against the wall, wedging her between a filing cabinet and a large set of shelves. She whimpers as I quickly reach down and fumble, trying to see if the arms on the chair are loose at all. Loose enough for me to rip them off, one at a time, freeing her hands at least. They’re metal, though, one solid piece that runs all the way to the chair’s back and then down to the floor, forming one of the legs.
Fuck.
Something clatters to the floor ten feet away. There’s a table there, stacked high with dismantled computer parts. Lazlo must have just walked into the thing. I’m stealthy as a fox as I move back toward the television screens. There are no shadows down here. No vague outlines of shapes, or suggestions of objects. This far underground and without any light source whatsoever, there’s no ambient glow to give the surroundings any definition. My eyes are objecting to the blank void, which means Lazlo’s eyes are probably doing the same.
I use that to my advantage, creeping toward the table Lazlo just bumped into, and I reach out, feeling with my hands, patting the air…until I find something. A length of…wire? A cable of some sort. Wrapping it around my hand, I collect something else, too. A pen.
I bite down on my bottom lip as I hurl the pen away from both my own position and Sarah’s; it makes a loud clatter as it hits something, bounces off, and then lands on the floor. Lazlo takes the bait. The room lights up as the bark of the gun goes off, ringing in my ears, and I see him standing five feet away, back turned to me as he discharges the weapon into a wall like a fucking moron.
It’s easy from there.
One running lunge, and I’m behind him.
One quick grab, twist and snap, and the gun he was holding a second ago is on the floor at our feet.
A half a breath later, and the length of wire I snagged from the tabletop is no longer wrapped around my hand; it’s wrapped around Lazlo’s throat, and I’m pulling on the ends, tightening my grip. He gurgles, a wet gagging sound filling the room as he chokes. His flailing legs hit the table, and something heavy crashes to the ground, followed by a series of tinging, tinkling metallic sounds—screws, or ball bearings, or something similar pouring out of a container onto the floor.
“You…can’t…” Lazlo rasps.
I bow myself over him, barely able to catch my breath around the righteous fury burning in the very center of my chest as I snarl into his ear. “No? Seems to me like I am.”
“She’ll…die…”
“Sarah’s safe.”
“Not…Sa…rah. Your…mother.”
What? I hesitate. He’s bullshitting me. Shelta left the glen this morning in the van. She’s probably halfway to one of the other clans by now, already planning what she’ll tell them to get their blood up and turn them against me. Lazlo doesn’t have her. There’s no fucking way. I pull the cord tighter, feeling it bite into the gristle of Lazlo’s throat. “You’re lying.”
“She…came…here,” he wheezes. His fingernails scratch at me, breaking the skin on the backs of my hands as he tries to free himself of me. “She brought…the card. The…Empress…”
Zara threw that card back in my mother’s face. It had gone under one of the chest of drawers in the gathering hall. If Lazlo has it…
I grind my teeth together, pulling even harder.
So what.
So fucking what!
If Shelta came here willingly, to a man she knows to be a fucking murderer, and she found herself neck-deep in trouble…then she got what she had coming to her. If he has her secreted away, locked underground with a limited supply of air, or he’s plastered her into a fucking wall, or he’s buried her alive and she only has moments to live, then that’s on her.
She lied to me.
Conspired against me.
Banished me.
Threatened to kill the woman I love.
Tried to force me to marry against my will.
Tried to play me like a fucking pawn in her plan for total Roma domination.
She’s fucking evil.
She can rot for all I care.
She should have looked out for me, not tried to hurt me.
She’s my mother, for fuck’s sake.
She’s my mother.
Fuck…
She’s my mother.
I roar as I rip the cord away from Lazlo’s throat. He was seconds away from dying. Seconds, and I’ve stayed my hand. It’s a temporary mercy; I still have a hold of the bastard by the back of his neck. He collapses to his knees, coughing and spluttering, the sound of his croaking, stuttering, life-saving breath making me want to drive my clenched fist into the back of his fucking head.
Shelta.
It’s always fucking Shelta, messing things up, causing chaos no matter where she goes. I hate her. The lies; the deceit; the twisted, hateful acts: I hate all of it. But she gave me life, and I owe her a debt for that. The most basic debt there is. The right to exist.
Lazlo retches, coughing so hard that he heaves, and I lean down, wrapping my arm around this throat this time. It’s better this way. I can feel the give in his wind pipe as I begin to apply pressure, closing off his air supply all over again. “Where is she, Lazlo? What the fuck have you done with her?”
The piece of shit claws at my arm again, trying to prize me off him. Instead of answering the question, the psycho laughs. “Let…me go. Release me, or…she’s fucking…gone.”
A long second passes. Fuck. I should let Shelta pay for her sins. I s
hould just snap the fucker’s neck and walk out of here with Sarah, then burn the guts of this evil place.
But I can’t.
I release him, shoving him to the floor. A panicked scramble follows, where Lazlo searches frantically for the gun I knocked from his hands. He doesn’t find it, though. It’s already pinned beneath the sole of my boot. I scoop it up, snap back the slide, and aim it at the back of Lazlo’s head…
…just as the room explodes with light.
It takes a full second to adjust to the intense brightness that floods the room. I shield my eyes, and there, standing at the foot of the ladder, is Zara. She’s paler than Shireen, her skin a ghostly white, eyes dark and tumultuous under the stark, brilliant white light blaring from a huge emergency light to her right. She glances around, taking stock of the nightmare she’s just stumbled into, and when her gaze alights on Lazlo, she freezes.
Suddenly, there’s a gun in her hand and she’s pointing it directly into the man’s face. “You?” she whispers. “How can it be you?”
Twenty-Nine
ZARA
Archie said these exact same words when he stumbled into his vardo and found me putting my socks on twenty-four hours ago. I steal them from him as I see the man kneeling at Pasha’s feet, hands splayed against the concrete as if he’s searching for a missing contact lens.
I’m transported back in time, to a church in New York. I’m pissed that my father’s made me come here and then abandoned me in a pew on my own. My friends are celebrating after our college graduation, partying like animals up in the Hamptons, and the very last place I want to be is here. The silence settles over me, and I eventually make my peace with my situation. And then there’s screaming, splintering the silence apart, and a man emerges out of the door that leads to the rectory.
He walks toward me down the aisle, rubbing his hands on the front of his pants, smearing the material with…smearing it with blood. He doesn’t even look at me. Not that I notice. I look at him, though. I see the deep-set lines on either side of his mouth. His almost jet-black, thick hair looks out of place on him. His shoulders are pulled back, his chest proud. His skin is sallow and waxy, and his sunken blue eyes are disturbingly void as he stares straight ahead to the church doors.
That very same man is staring up at me now, in the same void, vacant way as he sinks back onto his heels, his chest heaving, and a twisted smile contorts his features.
A priest explodes from the confessional. The woman he was hearing confession for screams as she tears past me toward my father, pleading to use his phone.
My brain shutters as I recall the next part—the medics arriving and carrying the mauled, broken, bloody body of the nun out from the rectory and down the church steps, loading her into the waiting ambulance.
The coppery tang of blood shoves its way up my nose as I aim the gun at the figure kneeling in front of Pasha.
“Hello, Sweetheart,” he says. “At last, here we are, face-to-face. Eye-to-eye.” He coughs, rubbing at the base of his neck. “I see you remember me, then?”
“You raped that woman. That nun. You nearly stabbed her to death.” The words sound alien to my ears. They feel disconnected, as if they aren’t even coming out of my own mouth.
The man—Lazlo, because it’s all so fucking obvious now—smiles in the most unnatural, freakish way; he makes my skin crawl. “I saw you sitting there so prettily in that church, and I thought to myself, this is kismet. A beautiful, red-haired angel, sitting there so peacefully, witness to my divine act. I thought you were a vision. But then you were in the paper. Zara Llewelyn, twenty-three, daughter to Stan Llewelyn, attorney at law, and I realized my mistake. You were just a woman with beautiful hair. You said terrible things about me in that newspaper, Zara. You called me some unkind names.”
Is...is he fucking serious? I open my mouth, and then close it again, unsure how to react. “You…raped…a…nun,” I say, stressing each word. “That wasn’t a divine act. You almost killed her. Those were the actions of a fucking monster.”
A cruel grimace sweeps Lazlo’s smile aside, contorting his face and transforming him into some sort of dark, stunted gargoyle. “She was no nun,” he spits. “She was an imposter. She didn’t know the first thing about St. Luke’s. I’d never seen her there before. I knew every single last one of those bitches.”
“She was a novice,” I whisper. “She was young. She was on some sort of exchange from Canada.”
“Bullshit. I know what they told everyone, but she lied. She was pretending to be a holy sister but she fucked me with her eyes. Don’t you think I know a slut when I see one. She was just some two-bit whore, disrespecting the church, masquerading around in a habit. Well, I showed her something. I taught her a fucking lesson.”
“Him? He’s the one you saw in the church?” Pasha’s voice cuts through the chaotic haze that’s clouding my mind, bringing everything into sharp, crystal clear focus. There’s blood on his hands and flecked up the side of his face. He looks storm-tossed, his hair wildly standing on end, his jacket pulled back, sliding down one arm. His eyes are more intense than I’ve ever seen them, burning into me, filled with heat and anger, surprise and worry.
“Yes,” I answer. “It was him. I never thought for one second—”
“You should never have given that police statement,” Lazlo says in a sing-song voice. “That was a bad idea. I’m not very good with computers, but Garrett, on the other hand…he’s quite spectacular. He hacked into the cop’s database and got your address. Watching you was easy after that. You fought with your parents every day of the week. Noise carries in a quiet building, you know. I heard you tell them you wanted to leave. I heard you tell them you wanted to move as far away as possible.
“It was simple, planting the seed in your mind to bring you here. A flyer addressed to you in your mailbox—'Come to Stunning Spokane!’” Lazlo begins to laugh, though he ends up coughing and hacking, groping at the base of his neck again. There’s a purple line beginning to form all the way around his throat. I can guess how he got such a bruise.
“I sent emails to your inbox with Spokane in the subject bar. I found your transcripts and applied to Gonzaga University’s Master’s program on your behalf. Everywhere you looked, you were being drawn here.”
What the hell? He can’t be serious. My father and I fought like crazy when I received an acceptance letter from Gonzaga. I thought he’d gone behind my back, applying to the school without my knowledge. He’d denied it. “Why the hell would I send you to fucking Spokane, Zara? You think I wouldn’t insist on you staying here in New York if you were going to stay in school?” But I hadn’t believed him. I’d assumed he was trying to manipulate me into doing what he thought was best at the time. But all along, it was Lazlo?
“You’re insane. You’re fucking crazy if you think I moved all the way to the other side of the country because you drew me here. I’m not that impressionable.”
Lazlo smirks like the goddamn Cheshire Cat. “The human mind is so open to suggestion. Even the smartest, most intelligent people succumb to it. You ended up right where I guided you.”
I feel sick. This man disrupted my life in such an awful way. I became a dispatcher because I wanted to be there to help others caught in such horrific situations, but I was determined not to let what he’d done alter my life. I wanted it to be my own. I didn’t want his violence or even that poor nun’s tragedy to shape my future. I needed it to be my own.
And now I’m finding that I haven’t been making my own decisions for years because of him? That I’ve been influenced, controlled and lead down a path that I might not have otherwise gone down? I can’t. I just can’t handle this…
“Zara.” I look up, and Pasha’s handsome face is grim. “Where’s Garrett?”
“He’s with Corey. He’s taking him somewhere safe.”
Pasha’s face is a picture of confusion. “Corey?”
“Delusional bitch,” Lazlo hisses. “Don’t you read the news? The b
oy’s dead. I was finished with him. Garrett disposed of him for me.”
I try not to shake, but the wrath building up inside me feels like it’s about to boil over any second, and I won’t be able to stop it. “Did he? Hmm. I just had a very interesting conversation with that little boy. Seems Garrett’s his friend, and he’s been keeping him alive and safe, away from you.”
“Fucking liar.” There’s a glimmer of doubt in Lazlo’s eyes, though. He can’t be certain, but he suspects I might be telling the truth.
“You cut out his tongue. I’m willing to bet you did so much worse to him, too, didn’t you? He was your first true manipulation. You’ve treated him like a dog, his entire life. But you should know, Lazlo…you keep kicking a dog, and one day it’ll eventually turn around and bite you.”
“He would never disobey me.”
“Why not? His life’s worth nothing to him. You’ve hurt him. Taken everything from him. He didn’t have much left to lose. He finally said enough was enough.”
“He didn’t say anything.” Lazlo’s smile is a cruel, bloody slash across his face. “I took care of that.” He shrugs. “If he’s gone, then so be it. The man is broken. He won’t survive without me.”
I take a step forward, readying myself. I wasn’t prepared for the vengeful need that pulls at me now, demanding he pay for everything he’s done. I’ve thought about this for days—whether I’ll be strong enough to do what has to be done when the moment arrives. Now that we’re here and that moment is upon us, I…I think that I can.
“Zara, wait. He has Shelta.”
I blink, staring at Pasha. “How?”
“She left the camp and came here, to find him.”
“Why the fuck would she do that?”
Lazlo leers at me. “She cast her own sister out for tying herself to a gadje, but she didn’t cast out the gadje in question? She didn’t even tell anyone who he was? Makes no sense, right?”