“Don’t make me fight you,” he said. “The last thing I want is to hurt you—it’s the whole fucking opposite of what I want—but I will if I have to, and that’s not how you want this to end.”
He wrapped a final twist and tucked the bandage tail under.
“You had a shitty childhood,” he said. “You were treated horribly, unfairly, abusively, but you know? At least you had a family. Your mother, brother, they might be crap at showing it, but they actually do love you.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said.
“No,” he said. “You don’t.” He reached for his bag, tossed it on the bed, dumped in the shirts he’d left hanging over the floor lamp. “If you’re happy with your life the way it is, you don’t need me in it.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t need you.”
He zipped the bag shut. Strode to the bathroom, flipped on the light, checked for anything he might have missed, flipped it off, headed for the door, and stopped there, facing it. He said, “You think I don’t know what it’s like to fear abandonment? I never knew my father, and the only memory I have of my mother is her bullet-riddled body. I was handed over as a trophy to the guy who ordered her dead, and he left me to wander his villa like a dog. I would have starved if not for the maids who snuck me food, or died from exposure if they hadn’t brought the little they could spare from their own homes until I was old enough to learn how to steal for myself.
“Me as a fourteen-year-old? Yeah, I was pickpocketing on the streets of Bogotá, and also hiding from the murderous bastards trying to claim the bounty put on my head because I’d gutted the asshole who’d had my mother killed. Do you have any idea what I would have done to have someone—just one person—who saw me as more than trash? Who loved me enough to push me the way Clare pushed you? Your mother can’t undo the past. Your brother can’t undo the past, but the past is where the best parts of you still live.”
He reached for the door handle.
She said, “Stay. Stay a little longer.”
Debate tore through him, agonizing debate.
He said, “You’re fascinating and brilliant, you’re funny, beautiful, and fucking insane, and I love every bit of that. But I respect myself and you enough that I won’t be complicit in your self-destruction.” He turned the knob. “I’ll be up on the roof. I’ll stick around long enough to see the night through, and then I’ll go.”
“Please,” she said.
Her voice had a tinge of desperation.
He stood there with the door open a crack.
She said, “You’re right.”
His shoulders sagged. With his back still to her, he said, “See, I want to believe you mean that, but I’ve already been on the receiving end of your play-pretend, and I can’t unknow what that’s like. You can say the words, act the act, and to me, it’ll still be you trying to keep from losing something just because you don’t want your brother to have it.”
She said, “I’m fucking hard to deal with, Chris, I know.
“And this thing with me and John, I don’t always understand it myself. But I can accept, okay? I accept that what he did in Prague was because he didn’t trust that I loved him enough to not sabotage him. And it wasn’t true, you know. At the time it wasn’t. But he couldn’t know, because I never let him. And if I can accept that, and let it go, then it means there’s hope I’ll eventually accept and let go of the rest.”
Holden glanced at her, and that one small movement splintered into several—a double take, a door slam, a roll toward the center of the room, a look.
He’d stay because he didn’t exactly have a choice right now.
Jill tossed him the X-Caliber.
He snatched it, looked at it, looked at her.
Heartbeats inflated into minutes.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
CHAPTER 31
JILL
SHE GRABBED HER KIT, RAN FOR THE SINK COUNTER, AND BOOSTED herself through the hole in the ceiling and into the crawl space. She dragged her kit behind her, strap looped around her ankle, elbowing forward over insulation and around wiring in a tight race for the boiler room at the far end. Scratches and shuffling told her Holden had followed her up.
He headed in the opposite direction, to a small access window Jack had created beneath the eaves. He’d already been up here twice, confirming and modifying.
The dude was thorough, she’d give him that.
She caught herself, and cut herself off.
Having him in her head would be like having another Clare. There’d be time for sorting out emotional baggage later.
She reached the marker, slid the ceiling tile aside, dropped her supplies down, and squeezed between bracing and clambered over pipes in an attempt to avoid getting burned in the fight to get to the floor.
Her toes touched ground.
She cinched her pack, inched the door open, scanned the walkway, and stole out into the dark. Twenty feet separated her from the next building. She scurried across the gap, sidled against the cinder block, and slid along the wall for the corner and a better view of the compound’s center. Security lighting cast a glare over the shadows.
She studied them, searching for motion.
Bodies came into focus.
She counted four in tactical gear, with tactical weapons, creeping toward Jack’s motel room like a SWAT team about to flash-bang a house on a no-knock warrant, except they were overcautious, deservedly wary, hugging the edges to avoid a direct line of sight on the building. They all knew they were the bait to draw fire, but reluctance on the right flank said at least two of them were here against their will.
She observed body language, watching for hand signals, searching for the team leader, and found her on the right, and paused. Her. Team leader was a her.
Of all the detail Jack had laid out, much of which didn’t matter, he’d somehow failed to mention what actually did. Jill retreated for the de facto alley that ran between the two-story building and the fence, a five-foot strip of storage and clutter, and she snaked through the dark toward the exit. Movement stopped her.
She’d heard it more than seen it.
She froze, crouched in the dark, listening to the night.
The shadows moved again, two bodies at least, gauged and scoped, slipping over the fence with the grace of big cats on the prowl.
She tucked in behind a garbage can, calculating distance against risk.
Footsteps turned her way, and in her mind’s eye, she saw the shooter, scope swinging, hunting for anything with heat, anything alive.
She was at the point of weakness, hidden from Holden by a two-story building and invisible to Jack, who, no matter what he’d said about timing and urgency and places to be, was here just as certainly as she was. She could feel him, the way she always did when they worked in tandem, knew he was up on that convenience-store roof, waiting to put holes in any fool stupid enough to try to stake out the high ground.
The footsteps drew nearer.
A hundred times she’d been here, a hundred nights, a hundred strategies, Clare pushing her over and over. What were you thinking? You weren’t thinking. Dead again, Julia. Go. Do it better. Clare at her day after week after month after year until reaction was instinct and instinct was instant.
The objective had always been survival by any means necessary.
Tonight survival meant getting to that woman team leader, and that wasn’t going to happen if a barrage of bullets ripped through the silence before all the pieces were in place. She pulled the infrared torch from her kit and unsheathed the bowie, a full tang, ten-inch blade forged and custom tempered by her own two hands.
The thing weighed nearly a pound.
Swung correctly, it could lop clean through a forearm.
Jack had collected it from Houston with the X-Caliber and had brought it as a peace offering. She cradled the hilt, mentally placing footsteps, feeling time compress.
She saw shadow before body, a shift
of shade against the fence, shooter stepping aside to clear the space in which she hid. She was coiled energy, counting seconds, waiting for death, and when death arrived, she flicked the infrared beam up into its face, arm high, light blinding, body low, rolling beneath the muzzle.
She dropped the light. Came up fast on the other side of him. Brought the blade down across his shooting wrist, cut into bone, yanked the rifle free, drove blade point up beneath his chin, and stopped with the tip resting inside his mouth, beneath his tongue. She tugged the earpiece from his ear, pulled the mic free, tossed both on the ground.
“This thing heads straight up,” she said. “One shove, one slip, and all the way into your brain it goes. Struggle, you die. Try and fight me, you die. Make any noise, and I have no reason to keep you alive.”
She left off the part about how fast he’d bleed out if that wrist wound wasn’t stanched. She said, “I’m going to walk backward, and you’re going to follow me. You don’t keep pace, and this thing will slice into your jaw.”
She took a step. He followed. She took another, and so did he.
Foot by foot, they progressed down the alley, blade in his chin hurrying him on as much as he could be hurried, and time raced on without her. She’d kept this guy alive because his body was a heat-signature shield and a bullet blocker, and he was too damn heavy for her to lug as deadweight, but this was too slow.
She needed to get to that woman.
She had to cut him or cut him loose.
He made that decision for her, slamming forearms down onto hers.
The bowie sliced his jaw. The tip slipped free.
He gripped her wrist with his working hand, strong, not afraid of pain.
Clare, cold and ruthless, was in her head.
Empathy and mercy for killers always gets you killed.
She kicked his stomach. Shoved him off. Lowered the blade point.
He charged her, good hand lunging for her neck. She arced the bowie, twisted her wrist, swung into a backcut. Impossible to see. Impossible to avoid. A skilled bowie fighter could deliver a five-slash sequence in barely half a second.
She wasn’t that fast. Didn’t need to be.
Velocity. Continuing force. Angle of attack. Ten inches of leverage went clean through the arm closing in on her neck, and the blade arced again, back up under his chin, into a sinus cavity, and she shoved right up into his brain.
She pulled the knife free.
He collapsed. She wiped the blade on his pant leg, shoved it back into the sheath, turned, and ran for the corner. The pop of suppressed semiautomatic fire followed.
Bullets chased her, whining past her ear, kicking up gravel, grazing her thigh. She rounded the corner, made it to the fence, still had to get across the street exit to get behind the woman. The world exploded with the lightning and thunder of compression grenades tossed into the compound.
Inside her head she said, No, no, no, no, no.
She’d been so close.
Orderly, quiet movement turned to chaos.
The two men on the left flank jerked in quick succession, as if they’d been stung—Holden with the CO2 projector, shots he’d held off on taking while waiting for the entire team to draw in closer. That wasn’t going to happen now.
Stealth had become pointless.
The woman, who’d been halfway to their motel door, tensed.
Her focus shifted. She looked right up to Holden’s position. Her mouth moved, and she changed trajectory. And just like that, Jack’s plan was fully off the rails.
Jill slowed, skidded, changed direction, and barreled directly for the woman.
Speed was the only advantage she had.
She came up on her fast, boots pounding gravel, and the woman turned and, in that turn, exposed her neck, and Jill brought the blade of her hand down hard over the greater auricular nerve. Brachial stun. Three to seven seconds was how long it took the body’s nervous system to recover, longer if she’d hit too hard.
The woman’s legs went out, and she dropped hard and fast.
Jill grabbed her collar, dragged her backward into the light.
Five seconds was what it took to get that deadweight into Holden’s range.
The night around her turned into a war zone.
A tranquilizer hit the woman’s upper thigh.
Jill let go and rushed for the motel-room door.
No time, no time, they had no time.
The noise would have raised the neighborhood. A law-enforcement response wouldn’t be far away, and any engagement on their part—deadly or otherwise—was out of the question if the rest of this was going to work.
They needed to get gone.
The ceiling rattled, and Holden dropped down to the sink counter.
“There are more of them out there, coming over the fence,” she said.
“Go,” he said. “Go, go, go.”
Outside came another burst of gunfire, and then another after that.
She reached for his gear, slung the strap over her shoulder, hefted her own bag, strapped up the CO2 rifle, grabbed hold of the weapons case and supplies, and heaved her way out like a laden donkey, headed for the fence opening to the street.
In the rooms around her, doors remained closed, and curtains motionless.
Guests would have to be insane to do more than roll to the floor and reach for their phones. She lugged her way to the vehicle next door, which Jack, in his many-steps-ahead thinking, had secured for them. It was disposable. One-time use. That meant plates from a clean vehicle had been swapped out for those on this stolen one.
By morning it’d be a death trap.
Silence took her past bodies of the men who’d come over the fence, dead from shots she hadn’t taken, that Holden hadn’t taken. That’d been Jack on the rooftop, using whatever their compatriots had carried up there, turning their own weapons against them. He’d never been one to let a good setup go to waste.
When the cleaners moved in and pored over the scene, all data would point to a defector in their midst, and the analysts would reject that narrative, but the idea would be planted, and it’d be there, infecting every skirmish that followed.
She reached the beat-up RAV4.
The keys were beneath the passenger seat, same place she stashed those for the Fiesta, because that’s how things worked.
She off-loaded the equipment into the rear.
There were already bags in the back, courtesy of Jack, and she stole a few quick seconds to run through the inventory.
Women’s clothes were there with the rest.
Brother dearest had most certainly known team leader was a woman.
She ran for the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, pulled the vehicle out onto the street, and blocked the motel entrance.
The woman still lay on the ground where Jill had left her. The other sedated bodies were missing, and the motel-room door stood open. Holden stepped out, shut the door behind him, headed for the woman and, with barely a break in stride, hefted her over his shoulder, body armor and all.
Jill shoved the transmission into park, jumped out to get the rear door.
Holden dumped the woman onto the backseat and slid in behind the wheel.
She didn’t have the energy to fight him for it.
She climbed into the passenger seat and locked the seat belt in.
He hit the gas, took the vehicle out in the opposite direction of the sirens. A few blocks down he hung a right into a neighborhood of sleepy houses and quiet streets, following Jack’s directions for the fastest camera- and license scanner–free route to the freeway. Distance between them and the motel grew.
Jill’s heart rate settled. They both knew they were clear.
Holden glanced at her.
“Your brother’s a real piece of work,” he said.
In the silence and aftermath and adrenaline dump, those were the last words she’d expected from him, and in the shock of them, she let out a bark of laughter. He laughed, too, and just like that, wit
h the kidnapped woman in the backseat, all of them barreling forward in a race to insanity, they’d made peace.
CHAPTER 32
Johnson County
Texas, USA
KARA
HER SENSES SURFACED, SUMMONED FROM OBLIVION BY MERCILESS pounding in her skull. Her eyelids fluttered, catching glimpses of muted color, and a blur slowly took shape and formed into a small table, and across from the table, a sofa chair, and on the sofa chair, her pants, neatly folded, and beside them, her shoes.
Conscious thought was groggy, slow to engage, struggling to reconcile incomplete and scattered memories of the motel—the door, darkness—with this.
She was on a mattress, a shaking mattress.
Pillow, blankets, clean sheets. Hands and feet both cuffed.
The click of wheels against tracks reached in from the fog, and the disparate pieces came together. Train. She was on a train, in a private sleeper cabin, sofa pulled out to make a bed. But sleeper cabins were for long-distance routes.
She edged onto an elbow, peered beyond the window shades, and winced against a clear, cold late-morning light. East out of San Antonio would have taken them into the piney woods, and west would have taken them into the desert, but what she saw here was oak and ash, mountain cedar and low, rolling winter grassland, which meant north. But the only thing that really told her was that target had timed the lure and attack to suit a particular travel schedule, and that just made her head hurt worse.
She dropped back to the pillow, body aching, memories clashing, holding on to the insane hope that her team was alive, and fighting despondency and despair, because even if this ended well for them, there was no way it ended well for her.
Headquarters would be looking for someone to blame.
It wouldn’t mean shit that she’d warned Hayes about the trap. She had been there in Prague and was now unaccounted for at the hit site, which made her the only common denominator, and Liv Wilson was still running the show.
Kara rolled toward the wall and shut her eyes.
Behind her, the door slid open, and a soft floral fragrance wafted in.
Liars' Legacy Page 27