When Villains Rise

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  The phone ticked, and then she was on with an operator.

  “Hello, this is the INHUP tip line.”

  “Hi. I have information for Agent Vidthuvitsai about the unicorn murder in Montreal.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “I’ll only speak to her.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to pass you to Agent Vidthuvitsai without more information.”

  Nita hesitated, then covered the receiver and asked Kovit. “What was your mother’s name?”

  He blinked. “Thida.”

  “Tell her that it’s connected to the death of Thida ten years ago.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me. Pass it on, please. I’ll hold.”

  “It may be a while, ma’am. There are a lot of tips.”

  “She’ll want this one. Trust me.”

  There was a tinny click and then the elevator music started. Kovit fidgeted on the seat, and Nita paced across the room.

  “What if she doesn’t respond?” Kovit’s leg bounced, and his fingers tapped against the seat.

  “She will.”

  “They may not pass it on.”

  “They will.”

  He sighed, running a hand through his hair, face pinched with worry.

  Nita had opened her mouth to say something when the line clicked back on.

  “This is Agent Vidthuvitsai.”

  Across from her, Kovit stiffened at the sound of his sister’s voice. His whole body stilled, and the expression that crossed his face was strange, part fear, part longing.

  Nita blinked. “That was fast.”

  “It was an interesting message you left.”

  “I’m glad it got your attention.”

  There was a short pause and then a soft whisper, small and faint and barely audible. “Is he okay?”

  Nita’s throat tightened, and across the room, Kovit’s face broke a little, confused joy whispering across his features, as though he couldn’t quite believe his sister still cared about him.

  “Yes. But not for long. Can we meet?”

  “Where are you?

  “Toronto.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” There was a short hesitation as they both realized this was being recorded by INHUP and they probably shouldn’t be revealing anything incriminating on it. “I’ll give you my personal cell phone number. Text me, and we’ll make arrangements.”

  Nita wrote down the number Agent Vidthuvitsai rattled off and then hung up. She texted on the burner phone. Tomorrow morning, 10am. The mall at Eglington and Yonge, in front of the Pickle Barrel.

  The response was swift. I’ll be there.

  Nita tucked her phone in her pocket and took a long breath.

  Kovit stared at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fists, his expression a strange mix of hope and fear, pain and anticipation.

  “Are you okay?” Nita asked.

  “It could be a trick.” His voice scraped slightly. “To lure me in.”

  She shrugged. “But they’re not luring you in. They’re luring me in. And I’m not going to give you up.”

  “You could be charged for hiding a zannie.”

  “I could lie my way out of any charges by saying you were threatening me, and they’d have no way to prove otherwise.”

  He laughed softly, but the sound vanished swiftly. His voice was tight. “What if she can’t do anything?”

  Nita leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders. “Then she can’t do anything, and we’ll find another way.”

  He held her gaze for a moment, then his mouth quirked in a little smile. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  She grinned. “I’m prepared for all eventualities.”

  “Really?” He raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms. “Nita. Please don’t tell me your backup plan is to blow up the INHUP building here.”

  Nita blinked. “Uhhh.”

  “Because that wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t get rid of the data, and there’d be a lot more innocent casualties than even I’m comfortable with.”

  She rubbed an arm and lied, “I never thought about blowing it up.”

  He stared at her, a mildly disbelieving look on his face.

  “Okay, once,” she admitted. “Maybe twice. But not seriously.”

  “So, these plans you have don’t involve blowing anything up?”

  She tossed out one of her plans. “Nope.”

  “Uh-huh.” His look was skeptical. “Sure.”

  She flushed. “Look, I’m trying to think of backup plans. In case this meeting with your sister doesn’t go well. Or even if it does go well, and she fails.”

  “I know.” He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “What if you used those INHUP names you sold to Adair and started leaking them to the press?” He grinned. “No reason you can’t sell them a second time.”

  She blinked. “The press?”

  He nodded. “If you make links with reporters, if you give them reliable information and get them stories, you can maybe start tarnishing INHUP’s name. And the more people start digging, the more they’ll find out.” He met her eyes. “There’s more than one way to destroy something. Sometimes public perception can be as dangerous as dynamite.”

  Nita smiled slowly, liking the idea the more she thought it through. “That’s very clever. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Because there’s no violence,” he teased.

  She cracked a smile. “Maybe.”

  She pulled out her phone. “I should get started now—”

  “There’s time enough for that tomorrow.” His voice was gentle as he extracted the phone from her hand.

  She frowned at him. “Why? We’ve nothing else to do now.”

  His expression turned playful. “Oh?”

  And then before she could blink, he’d grabbed her hand and flipped her down onto the couch. She yelped in surprise as she spiraled and then thudded into the cushion.

  She blinked, looking up at Kovit. He had a smile playing on his face, and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Her heart pounded, and her mind whirled. They’d kissed earlier today, a broken moment of pain and fear, emotions running high. She didn’t know what it meant, or how things went from here, or even where she wanted them to go.

  But instead he whispered, “Go to sleep, Nita. Enough planning for today. You can’t scheme if you drop dead from exhaustion.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it. He was right. She was tired. Today had been so very long—she could barely believe it was the same day she’d woken up to. She’d murdered an INHUP agent, been arrested, freed by her mother, captured by Henry, and had a showdown with Adair. Even thinking about it all made her whole body heavy with the desire to sleep for the next decade.

  But there was still so much to do.

  “Nita,” Kovit whispered, curling up beside her. “You need to sleep. Everything else can wait until tomorrow morning.”

  Finally, she sighed softly and rested her head on his shoulder. “Fine. You’re right, I should sleep.”

  They lay down on the couch like that, curled together in a gentle embrace. Nita’s eyelids were heavy, and her body sank into the warmth of Kovit’s arms as sleep began to pull at her.

  Before she drifted away, she murmured, “Kovit?”

  “Yeah?” His voice was sleepy and relaxed.

  She hesitated. “For now, let’s not hurt Fabricio anymore.”

  There was a long silence before he whispered, “Getting cold feet?”

  “No,” she lied. “I’m just . . . planning.”

  He laughed softly. “All right. I won’t touch him.”

  A small knot in her stomach released, and she whispered a sleepy thanks before she closed her eyes and drifted off.

  * * *

  Nita woke in the middle of the night to the snick of the front door closing.

  Her mind was instantly alert, adrenaline rushing through her blood. Quietly, so quietly
, she removed Kovit’s arm, draped over her hips, and crawled off the couch.

  There was no one in the room.

  She enhanced the rods and cones in her eyes to give herself better night vision, but still, no one.

  Her eyes moved from the front door to the path that led outside. She tiptoed over, turned the handle carefully, and opened the door.

  Outside the recording studio, the apartment hall had bright, burning fluorescents, illuminating rows of other doorways, each painted fire engine red to contrast the beige walls. They also illuminated Gold, stumbling down the hall on her crutches, her arm in a sling, trying to make an escape.

  Nita sighed and closed the door behind her so as not to disturb Kovit, and then patiently walked after Gold.

  “Going somewhere?” Nita asked.

  Gold froze, and then turned back around. The bandage on her face had come loose in one corner, and it flopped back, exposing the edge of a nasty acid burn Nita had given her.

  Gold smiled, a bitter, cruel expression. “Oops. Caught me.”

  “Where were you off to?”

  “Oh, you know. Out to get a midnight snack.”

  Nita gave her a flat look.

  Gold rolled her eyes. “What does it matter where I was escaping to? The point is that I was escaping.”

  Nita sighed. “Did you even bother to try and save Fabricio in the other room?”

  “No. Why the hell would I risk my escape for him?”

  Nita wished her younger self had been as wise.

  Nita leaned against the wall. She could get rid of Gold now. Kill her, shove her body somewhere, end all this. Kovit would wake, and she’d just be gone. Nita could tell him she must have escaped in the night. It wouldn’t even be a complete lie.

  But Kovit would never forgive her if he found out.

  Nita considered just . . . letting Gold go. She didn’t want to deal with the black market heiress anymore. But Kovit might still be afraid Nita had disposed of her in the night, and that was the whole point of not murdering Gold in the first place.

  And Gold was bound to be a problem. Even if Nita had blackmail to keep Gold in line, like she did with Fabricio, she didn’t think it would work. Gold didn’t really seem to care about the practicalities of what she stood to lose by hurting Kovit. Her hatred ran too deep.

  “Thinking about murdering me?” Gold asked, still smiling slightly.

  “Considering it.”

  “Kovit would know. He’d be very angry.”

  “It’s so fascinating that you’re convinced he’s both a soulless monster and that his regret and grief over your death will protect you.” Nita shook her head. “Your hypocrisy is amazing. Truly astounding. You’re literally relying on the humanity you don’t believe he has to save you.”

  Gold’s smile fell into a scowl. “Fuck you.”

  “And you result to swears because you have no comeback.” Nita tsked. “Childish.”

  Gold swung around on her crutches, hissing softly in pain as she did so. She glared at Nita, her eyes cold and angry. “You’re one to talk. You talk about his humanity and then condone . . .” Her face pinched in disgust. “The things that happened in the other room with Fabricio.”

  Nita’s stomach dropped, and she tried not to think of Fabricio’s graphic descriptions of what Kovit had done to him.

  “Kovit is evil. I’ve never denied it,” Nita admitted easily. “But he’s still human, and he has good sides. I won’t disagree with calling him evil, but I will always disagree with painting him as a one-dimensional monster from a slasher film.”

  Gold’s expression became infinitely sad. “You’ll understand one day. Once you’ve seen more of him. Once you’ve seen him hurt and hurt and hurt. He punished everyone in the Family. He did it because they asked him to and because he liked it. He just turned off the part of his brain that had a soul, the part that went online and chatted about movies and consoled friends. He flicked it off like a switch, and he made people scream.”

  Gold swallowed. “You don’t really know him. You don’t know what he’s like.”

  The words hit closer to home than Nita anticipated, and she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to drown out an INHUP agent’s screams. She replaced it with an image of Kovit holding her while she wept with grief over her murdered father.

  Nita let out a long breath. “You’re the one who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  Gold just shook her head. “You’ll see eventually.” Gold tipped her head back, the fluorescents painting her face a chalky yellow. “Even if it’s not me who takes Kovit down. Even if you manage to get him off the list before INHUP hurts him. Someday, somewhere, one of his victims will survive. And they will make it their life’s mission to hunt down and stop the monster who hurt them.”

  Nita’s voice was tight. “That’s ridiculous. Vengeance stories like that only happen in the movies.”

  “Perhaps,” Gold said softly. “But Kovit goes around doing terrible things, and eventually, those things will come back for him. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but there will always be someone out there with more hate than logic who will try to kill him.”

  “Like you?”

  Gold’s smile was bitter. “Like me.”

  Nita was quiet for a beat. “Was it someone you cared about? That he hurt, I mean.”

  After a long moment, she said, “No.”

  Nita thought she’d guessed wrong, but then Gold said softly, “My father used to make me watch the recordings, you know, as I was growing up. I’d look into those people’s eyes as Kovit made them scream. And my father told me, That’s how you run an empire. That’s how you make people fear you. That’s how you gain respect.”

  Gold leaned heavily on her crutch. “The first time I saw someone try to kill my father, I was twelve. It was a woman in her early twenties. Her husband was a bruiser for my father, but he’d . . . made a mistake and been sent to Kovit. When he came home, he was missing some critical pieces.”

  Gold closed her eyes, and the light danced on her cheeks. “I still remember the sounds of her bones crunching as Kovit twisted them round in the socket until they popped out. My father told Kovit that she didn’t need to survive, that she was going to send a message to anyone who dared go against him.”

  She met Nita’s eyes. “People are afraid of my father. Most people, they don’t dare try anything. But there’s always a few who have more hate and anger than fear, who try to kill him. They’ve never succeeded, because my father has guards. He knows how to play the game.

  “But Kovit? Kovit has you. And how long he has you, I don’t know. One day, someone will have more anger than fear, and they will come, and they will kill him.”

  Gold’s gaze was steady. “And on that day, I will light a candle for the loss of the friend who could have been, and then I will celebrate the death of the monster that was.”

  Seven

  THE BLEE-BLEE-BLEE BLEE-BLEE-BLEE of the alarm jolted Nita awake the next morning. It hurt to open her eyes, like there were broken grains of glass behind her eyelids, so she didn’t. She pawed around for her cell phone and swiped at it blearily, hoping that she’d turned it off instead of just snoozed it.

  Beside her Kovit moaned softly and pressed his face into her shoulder, as though hiding from the sound. “It’s too early to get up.”

  “We have places to be.” Nita rubbed her eyes and sat up. Her hands were sticky with duct tape glue from tying Gold up last night. “We have to meet your sister.”

  His eyes snapped open, and Nita regretted reminding him so quickly. His whole body was tight with nerves.

  “It’ll be fine,” Nita whispered, gently putting a hand on his shoulder.

  He gave her a shaky smile. “I don’t even know what I’m more afraid of. That she hates me, or that she doesn’t. That she’ll still love me, and I’ll only have a week to see her before . . .”

  Before INHUP put his face up. Before the world turned on him and butchered him.<
br />
  Nita swallowed. “Don’t think of that.”

  His smile was bitter. “Kind of hard not to.”

  Nita sighed. She couldn’t blame him. Wasn’t she just as consumed with her fear over the black market, the release of that damn video of her online?

  She rose and went to the washroom to splash some water on her face. She was tired, and she hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep because of Gold’s midnight escapades. She rubbed her temples and considered healing her body of its sleep deprivation, actually going in and replicating all the things sleep did. But that would probably just make her more tired and seemed like a waste of effort.

  Instead, she closed her eyes, focused on her adrenal gland, and made it start releasing more adrenaline into her body in an effort to wake herself up. She opened her eyes and immediately felt more alert, but underneath the alertness was a bone-deep exhaustion that had been building for the last week. Something was going to have to give. But not yet.

  She made her way back to the lobby and found Kovit eating cold greasy pizza leftovers.

  Nita sat down beside him and took a slice. “Gold tried to escape last night.”

  Kovit hesitated. “Is she hurt?”

  “No more than she was yesterday. I tied her back up with some duct tape.”

  “That’s good.” His shoulders relaxed.

  Nita sighed. Despite Gold’s hatred, she didn’t think Kovit would ever stop caring for the other girl. They’d been friends once, and Kovit was far too loyal to discard someone he’d once cared so much about that easily. He’d had to be right at the breaking point with Henry, and Gold hadn’t done anything nearly as terrible.

  Nita rubbed her temples. “I’ve got her taped to the bed, but something has to change. She’s going to find a way to escape again.”

  Kovit shrugged. “We’ll just check her bindings regularly.”

  “Kovit . . .”

  He rose. “Let’s check them before we leave.”

  Nita followed him into the studio Gold was staying in. She was awake and lying in bed, awkwardly pinned by Nita’s sloppy duct tape job.