Nita pressed her mouth into a thin line. “You really only have yourself to blame for that.”
“Really? I somehow tortured myself?”
“Don’t play the fool. It doesn’t suit you,” Nita snapped. “This is vengeance, and you damn well deserve it.”
His head jerked up. “Are we doing tit for tat, Nita? An eye for an eye? Because I’m pretty sure we’re more than equal by now.”
“We’ll never be equal.” Nita’s words were tight with rage. “You sold me on the black market. You ruined my life. Because of you, there’s a video of me healing online that I will never escape. I can never lead a normal life. I’m constantly on my guard. I’ve been attacked dozens of times in the week since I escaped the market that, I remind you, you put me in.”
“So you poisoned me.”
“And you sent a mafia group to kill me in vengeance.”
“Not in vengeance,” Fabricio said softly. “I sent them because I was scared. I was scared you’d never stop trying to kill me, I was scared you knew too much about me and you’d ruin my life.” He said bitterly, “And I was right, wasn’t I? You’re threatening me with the same thing that happened to you. To release my information online and set the whole black market on me, hoping to use me against my father.”
Nita shrugged. “It would be poetic justice.”
Fabricio laughed, harsh and angry. “Oh, that would be poetic justice, would it? I thought having Kovit torture me was your ‘poetic justice’?”
“No. That’s just vengeance.”
Fabricio was silent a long moment, his whole body trembling. With rage or pain or something else entirely, Nita didn’t know.
“Vengeance.” His voice was cold and angry. “Is that what you’re calling this?” He met her eyes. “I never pegged you for a sadist when I first met you. I guess I was wrong.”
“No. You weren’t wrong.” Nita shrugged. “But people change. I changed.” She leaned forward, eyes cold. “I had to change to survive because of what you did to me. So, this, all of this?” She waved a hand around. “That’s on you.”
He glared. “I’m not responsible for your choices, Nita. You are. You chose to be what you are, and you chose to do this to me. I admit, I fucked up. I shouldn’t have sold you out. And I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve apologized a dozen times, and I mean it. But I can’t change it. And it’s not my fault what you’ve decided to do since then.”
Fabricio looked away. “I have enough things to hate myself for without adding your crimes in there too.”
Nita’s smile was tight. “I’m sure you do.”
“You can look as smug as you want, but at least I know what my crimes are.” His voice was bitter and raspy from screaming. “But, Nita, do you know?”
“Know what?”
“The price of your ‘vengeance’?” Fabricio raised his eyes and met hers, rage burning dark and cold in their depths. “I think it’s only fair you know, don’t you?”
Nita’s eyes narrowed.
“Shall I tell you what Kovit did to me?” Fabricio said softly, barely more than a whisper. “Shall I tell you what you let him do to me?”
An uneasy feeling coiled in the base of Nita’s stomach. She didn’t like hearing the details.
“I know what Kovit did.”
“Do you?” Fabricio whispered. “Then you know that he started skinning my fingers? Slow, small strips of skin, one after the other. He peeled them off like potato skins.”
Nita didn’t say anything, her expression hard, trying to cover the ugly, vicious revulsion coiling inside.
“Have you ever scraped your knees, Nita? That’s just a little bit of skin off. Just a small scrape. This was bigger. He scraped and scraped, and it was so painful that I couldn’t even tell you my own name. I couldn’t think over the pain.” He swallowed. “I suppose at some point my body decided it was too much pain to bear and stopped sending so many signals. But if I twist wrong, it hurts all over again.”
“Enough, Fabricio.” Nita sounded hoarser than she intended. “I get it.”
“Do you, though? Because I’m not done.” Fabricio’s blue eyes were steady. “Because he reached my nail at one point, and he slid that knife under my nail. And he ripped. It. Off.”
Nita clenched her fists at her side and said nothing.
Fabricio’s gaze bored into her. “Do you know what it’s like to have a fingernail ripped off? Do you have any idea how many nerve endings are in there?”
“Actually, I do.” Nita could count them if she wanted to. Her own fingers tingled, as if waiting for her to do so. “It’s not an insignificant number.”
He blinked, his mouth slightly open. Clearly Nita hadn’t responded the way he’d expected, but he recovered quickly.
“Nita, please. You’re not a sadist. I know this. I remember how much it bothered you when your mother took my ear.” He began to cry. “Please stop hurting me.”
Nita stared at him, at his blood and tears and soft whimpers as he begged for her to have the conscience she used to, the same one she’d had when he met her.
But she didn’t.
Nita wasn’t that girl anymore.
The gory details still bothered her—they’d probably always bother her, she didn’t think she’d ever escape that, no matter what she’d told Kovit—but she didn’t feel sympathy for Fabricio anymore. She could see the points on his manipulation plan, each reaction, each word a calculated effort to pull on her strings and make her do what he wanted.
“Sorry, Fabricio. That ship sailed.” Nita knelt so she was eye level with him. “You’re going to have to learn how to manipulate the new me.”
He met her eyes, his face damp with tears. “No, Nita. You’re the one who needs to learn how to manipulate me. Because you suck.”
“Pardon?”
“You’ve given me nothing to convince me to work with you. You’ve sicced your pet monster on me—”
“Kovit’s not a monster.”
Fabricio laughed then, short and sharp. “That’s what you want to argue over? That? To me? Right now?”
She clenched her jaw shut.
“As I was saying.” His voice was cold. “You’ve sicced your pet monster on me, you’ve threatened me if I fail. But what fucking motive do I have to succeed? Why should I help you?”
“To not die.”
He laughed, sharp and bitter. “I’m going to die the minute I get back to Buenos Aires.”
“Why?” Nita asked.
He looked away. “That’s not important. What’s important is that I’m dead either way. So why the fuck should I help you when you’re just going to torture me?”
His hands twitched as he said it, breaking the scabs and causing blood to drip from his fingertips onto the floor in a steady thud-thud-thud. Nita forced her eyes away, but she couldn’t stop hearing the sound, the plop as the droplets hit the carpet.
“A good businessman knows that you can’t just use the stick, you need the carrot too.” He met her eyes. “Hurting people if they fail works better if you reward them if they succeed too.” He smiled slightly. “You need me. But I sure as hell don’t need you.”
“I have fail-safes if you try anything—”
“I know, I know.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “But I’m between a rock and a hard place. Dead either way. If I see an opportunity to run, you really think I won’t take it, cost be damned?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying. For all your posturing, I don’t think you enjoy seeing me hurt nearly as much as you pretend. I think you want to hurt me, you want your vengeance, but actually seeing it makes you ill. So don’t. Stop this. The only one having a good time here is Kovit, and any time a zannie is the only one enjoying a situation, you know something’s gone terribly wrong.” He leaned forward. “Stop this, Nita. Before you break both of us.”
“The only one breaking here is you,” she snapped, and tossed the box of pizza on the floor in f
ront of him, where he couldn’t possibly reach it.
She spun away from him, hating that he was right, that he’d played her again, that this wasn’t the first time she’d tossed food at him and run because she couldn’t face his truths.
Five
NITA CLOSED THE DOOR behind her and leaned against it, taking deep breaths. She tried not to see the parallels to the last time Fabricio had been her prisoner. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t.
But she still felt uncomfortably like it was. Except this time, she was playing her mother’s role.
She tried not to remember how Fabricio had screamed as her mother ordered Nita to cut off his ear. She’d thought he was innocent then, she hadn’t known what he’d do to her. It was natural for her to have been hesitant. It was different now. Now it was vengeance.
And Fabricio was wrong. It wasn’t breaking her to watch him suffer. She liked knowing she was getting vengeance.
But you don’t like seeing it, do you? You just like knowing it happened, not facing the reality, her mind whispered.
Shut up, Nita told it.
She shook her head, forcing Fabricio’s words away. He was trying to manipulate her again. That’s what he did. He crawled into her head with his silver-tongued words and twisted her up until she did what he wanted, not what was best for herself.
He deserved everything that she’d done to him.
She let out a breath and walked down the hall to the other recording studio. The door opened silently, to reveal Kovit awkwardly sitting on one cot, avoiding looking at Gold, who stared at him with judgmental eyes while she slowly ate a piece of pizza.
Nita looked between them. “Did something happen here?”
Kovit shrugged and avoided eye contact.
Gold snorted. “Nothing but a zannie doing what it does best.”
Kovit bristled and his jaw clenched, but he didn’t say anything.
“Is that really how you should be talking right now, Gold?” Nita closed the door behind her. “Given your situation?”
“And what is my situation?” she asked, her eyes boring into Nita’s. “Am I your prisoner?”
“No,” Kovit said, at the same time Nita said, “Yes.”
Gold raised her eyebrows. “So which is it?”
Nita pursed her lips. “What do you plan to do now, Gold?”
“Do?”
“When you leave this room, what will you do?”
Gold shrugged. “Go back to the Family, of course.”
“Everyone else in your team is dead. You could easily pretend to be dead too.”
“But why?” She frowned, her lip piercing catching the light. “Why would I want them to think I’m dead?”
Kovit responded, voice soft. “To start a new life.”
“I don’t want a new life.” Gold’s eyes narrowed as her gaze shifted between the two of them. “My life may not be perfect, but I like it.”
“You enjoy being the flunky in a mafia group?” Nita asked.
“I enjoy being the presumptive heir to one of the most powerful and extensive crime families in North America.” Gold grinned, sharp and fierce. “Someday I’m going to rule the fucking world.”
Nita blinked. She had to concede, that did sound like a great life. And given her own ambitions, she couldn’t really condemn Gold for it.
So instead she said, softly, “And what about Kovit?”
“What about him?” Gold asked, voice cold.
“It might be useful, if you want to rule the world, to have a zannie on your side.”
Gold’s mouth tightened. “I want nothing to do with monsters. When I’m in charge, I’m going to get rid of every monster in the organization and burn them all.”
Nita raised an eyebrow. “The human ones too?”
Gold gave her a withering look. “Don’t patronize me.”
“It’s an honest question. Henry was human, but I would argue he was a far worse monster than Kovit,” Nita commented mildly. “He loved torture as much as any zannie, not even to eat the pain, just for the sheer pleasure of it. And he was far more ruthless and less loyal than Kovit. So, what do you consider him?”
Gold’s lip curled in displeasure. “Henry was my father’s right-hand man.”
“I didn’t ask what your father thought of him.”
“What does it matter what I thought of him?” Her eyes turned to Kovit. “He’s dead now, isn’t he?”
Kovit flinched.
Nita crossed her arms. “And will you tell the Family how he died?”
Gold shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter if I tell them, does it? Kovit’s going to be up on INHUP’s wanted list in a week, and there’s no way he’ll survive it. There’s no point in wasting Family resources going after him.”
Kovit’s shoulders tightened, and he swallowed noticeably.
Nita frowned. “And if he wasn’t on the list?”
Gold tugged at the bandage on her face. “I don’t see how you could get him off it.”
“This is a hypothetical question.”
Gold waved it away. “I’ve never seen the point in hypothetical questions. Especially ones like that.”
Kovit was quiet for a long moment, and then he leaned forward. “Would you tell them to kill me, May?”
Nita’s heart hurt a little every time Kovit called Gold May. It was the internet name she’d used for years, commenting in a group chat and pretending to be his friend when in reality she’d been spying for the Family. It was the name of a nonexistent girl, the name Kovit clung to because he didn’t want their years-long friendship to truly be gone, to have to admit that maybe it had never existed at all.
Gold turned to him, and the light glanced off her various earrings, making them sparkle in the too-bright room. Her lips thinned, and Kovit met her stare head-on.
Finally Gold looked away. “I don’t see the point of answering anything. You won’t believe me if I say no because you’ll think it’s just a ploy to escape. And I’d have to be pretty stupid to say yes under the circumstances.”
Well, she had them there.
“The real question is what you’re going to do with me. You’re going to keep me here until you’re forced to make a decision.” This time her eyes found Nita’s. “And I know your type. You don’t like risks.”
Nita’s mouth pressed in a line. “No. I don’t.”
“Watch out, Kevin.” Gold turned back to Kovit, using his fake internet name, pulling the same emotional strings Kovit had reached for. “She’s going to kill me while you’re sleeping so you don’t have to.”
Kovit stood quickly. “Nita wouldn’t do that.”
But there was fear in his eyes, and Gold saw it and smiled. “Sure. If you say so. A convenient carbon monoxide leak will be at fault. Or perhaps I’ll choke on my pizza.”
Kovit whispered softly, “You’re wrong.” He turned to Nita. “She’s wrong, right?”
“Of course she is.” Nita crossed her arms and held Kovit’s gaze. “She’s just trying to sow doubt between us.”
Kovit nodded once, sharply. “Exactly.”
And Gold probably was trying to sow doubt. But the best seeds of doubt were based on truth. And the truth was that Gold was a complication they didn’t need, with the potential for great harm. She would need to be neutralized. Whether that meant being brought over to their way of thinking or dying, well, that was up in the air.
Kovit had already been forced into killing one of his friends. Nita couldn’t let him be responsible for another. So Gold was right. Nita might need to make her have an accident. And Kovit knew it. And he knew Nita was capable of it.
Nita cleared her throat. “It’s late. Kovit, why don’t you and I go in the reception room and leave Gold to rest?”
He wasn’t quite able to meet her gaze. “Sure.”
They turned away, a hum of tension between them that hadn’t been there moments before.
Gold just smiled at them both and ate another slice of pizza.
Six
THEY MADE THEIR WAY back into the lobby, and Kovit flopped back onto the couch. Nita paced the room.
“Gold could be a problem,” she murmured.
Kovit looked at her with steady eyes. “But she’s one that won’t be solved with murder.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.
Nita’s hands moved at her side, sharp motions of cutting with an invisible scalpel. “There are other ways to deal with her than murder.”
He looked at her for a long time and then closed his eyes and leaned back into the sofa. “Good.”
Nita sighed, mind whirling, clicking through all the things she still had to do. Her body was exhausted, but she couldn’t rest yet. She pumped herself full of adrenaline. She still had one very important task.
She went to the bag Kovit had brought back and fished out one of the burner phones. It was crappy, so she used her own phone to bring up INHUP’s website.
She stole a glance at Kovit as she scrolled through pages. “I’m going to call her now. Your sister.”
He stiffened and sat up on the couch. “Do we have to do it right now?”
“We’re on a bit of a time crunch. Only a week before INHUP releases your face. Do you really want to stall?”
“No, no.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You’re right. We should call now.”
Nita met Kovit’s eyes. “You don’t have to be here for this conversation.”
He held her gaze. “I do.”
Nita went back to her phone, scrolling through pages for the anonymous tip line. When they’d seen Kovit’s sister on the television earlier today, she’d been being interviewed about a murder case in Montreal involving a unicorn who had eaten the soul of a teenage girl and left her lying on the pavement, iris-less eyes staring at nothing.
She eventually found a tip number on one of the news articles about the murder, titled Montreal or Monstreal? Unicorn Murder Rocks the City. Nita rolled her eyes at the pun, but called the tip line. She flicked the phone onto speaker so Kovit could hear what she was doing.
It rang a moment, and then there was a click and a prerecorded message told her everything was confidential and that she was encouraged to give as much information as possible. She was given an option to record a message and leave it for the police or to speak to a live person. She clicked the number for the person.
When Villains Rise Page 3