The Mak Collection

by Tara Moss

  And this was different. Luther was not being paid to keep Mak alive. He was being paid to kill her.

  He stood near the edge of the mattress, and observed the vision of her at his feet with an odd cocktail of feeling. Exhilaration. Strangeness. He had killed a handful of women in the course of his professional duties, but he had never before had a living woman captive in his care. Since he was a small boy, his contact with women had been limited, and once it was clear that his mother would be safer believing him dead, he had lost touch with the one woman in his life who had cared about him. Women hired for their company were his only option, and if it were not for those women that Ms Rosalay introduced him to, he would not have had any intimate encounters at all. It was not that he didn’t like women. Luther loved women, and he was attracted to them. The problem had always been that they did not like him. He repelled them. It was only the girls at Ms Rosalay’s establishment who were nice to him. But frustratingly, most of them were not very good at masking their distress at his appearance. When they saw him—his size, his face, his scars, his crooked nose, his half-torn ear—their eyes filled with an alarm and disgust they could not hide. Some of the younger girls even cried when he got close. That was not what he wanted. Luther didn’t want to make women cry. He had no violence for them. That was not why he was there. He wished to avoid violence outside his work, and inflicting unwanted fear caused him a deep personal sadness.

  So, Luther’s experiences with women were few. Yet here he was with a woman at his feet. This woman…

  Will she recognise me now? Will she realise we have met before?

  Makedde was still weakly shifting, seemingly disoriented. Possibly the drugs had not worn off, he thought. She was moving though, and eventually, from under the dishevelled mane of her blonde hair, a pair of bloodshot blue-green eyes found him. He did not register any expression in them except exhaustion. He did not register any recognition. Her beautiful eyes were puffy and red, mascara making dark smudges across her lashes. She was contained. This woman would no longer be swinging a motorcycle helmet at his face, breaking his nose. She would not be kicking him, scratching him, fighting and fleeing. He had her. Six years after she first crossed his path, Makedde Vanderwall was finally helpless before him, and this fact delivered mixed emotions. For Luther this issue had become significant. The desire to contain her had crept up on him. Even in the Catacombs, he had not been sure what he would ultimately do with her, or how much his chosen method of elimination was motivated by professionalism.

  We have a history, you and I. We have a history.

  When Luther had first laid eyes on this woman, he had been in the early stages of his career. He had been roughing people up for cash, and not very good cash at that, certainly nothing like the five- and six-figure contracts he could now demand. Back in those days, his clients were lowlifes. The work was unsophisticated. Mak had been a Canadian visiting Sydney to work as a fashion model, and Luther had at first been hired to merely spook her: move things around in her apartment when she wasn’t there, confuse her, leave threatening messages, with the ultimate aim of scaring her back onto a plane to her homeland. It happened that one day he was concealed behind her couch and saw her in a state of undress. She’d had no inkling he was there, and she had moved through her apartment disrobed and radiantly naked. You are beautiful, he had wanted to tell her, but waited instead for a safe way to exit before being discovered. That week Luther lost the top of his ear to some unseen protector in her yard at night, in an incident he still did not understand. The man had come out of nowhere. He had used an extremely sharp blade. Luther had not been fast enough to respond. Even with all his many scars and the injuries he had received over the years, losing part of an ear was not something one soon forgot.

  But that was years ago.

  If he had not lost a chunk of his ear in a backyard in Sydney—sliced off by some protector of Makedde Vanderwall—he would not have fled to Queensland and might not have come to the attention of Madame Q. He might not have graduated to the international scene. So, in a way, this disoriented woman at his feet was responsible for his elevated career, his success.

  Strange.

  It was a surprisingly small world, and five years and many jobs later she had ended up on his hit list for the first time. It was a different world for Luther by then. He was a high-end professional hitman. But she had proved more resilient and unpredictable than expected. She broke his nose in the hallway of a townhouse in Sydney, fled by motorcycle, and crashed. But she survived the accident. Her survival had been one of his extremely rare professional failures, and now the same client wanted him to kill Makedde Vanderwall before she could return to Australia. This time he would not disappoint. Mak would not be going home.

  As time had passed, Luther had begun to build Makedde up in his mind. In his dreams she had become almost mythical. She was the one who got away.

  Here she is.

  Mak did not look so magnificent and mythical now. She had slumped over again, exhausted. One slim hand was stretched out towards the wall, palm up. Her perfectly formed lips were dry and cracked. Those intense blue-green eyes had once again shut.

  I must feed her. She needs water.

  Men like Luther Hand did not end up in the company of women like Makedde Vanderwall. He knew that. Still, she had left an impression on his life. A deep impression. Part of him had been pleased when she had survived the motorcycle crash in Australia. It should have disappointed him. It meant he had failed at his task. And yet, it did not seem a worthy fate for her.

  He left Makedde huddled on the mattress in the cellar, his mind strangely conflicted. He needed to gather himself and make a plan. Luther locked the cellar door and made his way into the kitchen. He checked his work phone. There was no message waiting from Madame Q, which puzzled him only momentarily. He thought for a while about what to do, and then, having decided his next step, he sent Madame Q a message with the agreed single word, to indicate that the job was done, and Makedde Vanderwall was dead.

  COMPLETE.

  CHAPTER 51

  Makedde Vanderwall felt clear-headed and eerily calm.

  With deliberate movements, she resumed her cross-legged position on the bare mattress that had become her narrow domain. It was no coincidence that her repose resembled that of a person meditating. She was captive in the cellar of an old building, her ankle chained to a wall, and if she had any chance of getting out, it would require mental alertness. Until now, focus had been proving difficult. Her temples still throbbed lightly from a gradually retreating headache. Her tongue felt furry. The strained muscles in her shoulders ached. Her socks were caked with dust. Her lips were cracked, and she thought she tasted blood.

  Think.

  Think.

  She was, for the moment, successfully swallowing her panic.

  Mak had deduced that she was trapped in an underground wine cellar, and as soon as the drugs had worn off and she became sufficiently lucid, she had checked for her mobile phone in her coat, hoping for emergency reception. Finding her phone missing, along with her money and keys, she had done a meticulous search of the space she was trapped in, moving in a grid pattern from one side to the other as far as the chain would allow her, in much the same pattern as she had methodically searched crime scenes. This is a crime scene. The victim is you, she thought darkly. She had carefully scoured the ground for bits of wire, safety pins, anything sharp, anything she could use as a weapon. So far she had found nothing save for dust, alcohol and splinters of wood. She could smash a bottle and use it to slash at her attacker, but she would be easily overpowered by a man the size of the one she remembered seeing briefly standing over her—if her recollections were at all accurate. Her only vision of him had been blurry and dark. She had examined the bottles on the shelves, and found that they were mostly French red wine, and some cognac, which gave her hope that she was still in France, perhaps not far from where she had been attacked. But where exactly? And why? Some of the vintages w
ere impressively old. She wondered how often the place was frequented. Not often enough to be a commercial restaurant cellar, by the look of things. In fact, it didn’t look like the place had been frequented at all recently. Except to make her a cosy little bed, of course.

  She was desperate to remove the heavy iron cuff around her right ankle. During her schooling for her Certificate III in Investigative Services, she had learned how to pick locks. She was not particularly practised at it, but she knew she could bust out of handcuffs, given time and the right tools. But where to find the tools? A simple bobby pin could open handcuffs, and she could do that behind her back without even looking. She felt that a similar trick should work for the cuff that bound her. Now she wished she was in the habit of putting her hair up.

  Fuck.

  And she wished she had taken the time to study her new lock-picking book.

  Increasingly, she sensed that she had arrived in her predicament via an experienced hand, or perhaps even a professional’s. Since becoming more lucid, she had not had the opportunity to lay eyes on him. She did not know his plan, his reason for keeping her, or if he was acting alone. But the attack in the Catacombs had been quick. So quick. She hadn’t time enough to react, and that was rare for her. Until the past couple of hours, time had been a blur. She had obviously been drugged, but she could not guess with what. A needle had been jabbed into her buttock, and she thought she felt a bruise there when she shifted position on the mattress. What she could remember was that there had been a man. A man had done this to her, he was responsible for her captivity, and was clearly intent on keeping her here against her will. He’d supplied her with water. He’d given her blankets. He had not yet done physical violence to her. She had vague flashes of memory about him, but those recollections were slippery and she did not trust them because of the effects of whatever drug he had sedated her with. She was sure, however, that the man was not Arslan. The man she had seen possessed a completely different build than the contortionist, or any of the other performers for that matter. They were all wiry and lean. Her impression was that the man who was keeping her was quite enormous in size. In her unreliable recollection he took on monstrous physical characteristics—a huge body with a thick, knotted neck and a scarred, odd-looking face, the details of which were patchy. She thought she remembered his hands as being the size of dinner plates, meaty and muscular. In the few memories she could grasp of her captivity, he had visited her once or twice, and each time he was a dark blur, misshapen and strange, a Mr Hyde to someone’s Dr Jekyll.

  She knew these recollections were not entirely reliable.

  It isn’t Arslan. It’s someone else.

  But who? Why?

  Was this someone acting for Arslan, or the troupe?

  The facts that Makedde had some sense of certainty about, the important facts, were that there appeared to be only one person holding her captive, it wasn’t Arslan from the theatre troupe, and that the man who was keeping her here and had come into the cellar had not been wearing a mask. Nor had he blindfolded her. He had allowed her to see him, and that was a very bad thing. That meant that her release was not part of his plan. She was not gagged, which led her to believe that her screaming would not cause her captor any inconvenience. She would not waste her breath on screaming until she heard other voices, other footsteps, and given the opportunity she would then scream with all her might, and not stop. Her situation was clearly one of life or death, and she would take no half-measures. Mak had killed a man before, and she was willing to do it again. She did not have romantic notions of perishing. She would have to get out, and to do so she would probably have to kill the man who had attacked her in the dark Catacombs, amongst the bones and the dust. And anyone else who might be working with him.

  Mak had no intention of letting him get his way, whatever it was he had in mind.

  She breathed deeply and looked around her with a gaze sharpened by anger at the injustice of her predicament. Wine bottles, cognac, wood, stone, drain in the floor, wood staircase, bare light bulb, cuff and chain on right ankle…It was with determined clarity that she juggled the elements in her head, over and over, seeing which ones could go together, which ones could affect her position, could be combined, could be used for something. This peculiar perspicuity was a familiar state of being for Mak, having emerged from horror a handful of times in her life already. You are the clear-headed one when things go wrong, the one for whom the world decelerates to slow motion once the gun is drawn, the car is veering off to impact, the exchange turns violent. She had a strange clarity in those moments, her adrenaline running like a constant beam of focus, static-free. Was that why terrible things kept happening to her? Because she was able to take it? Was that why she was a psycho-magnet? It was a survival mechanism that some people possessed, that ability to sever all emotional connections for a time, suspending grief and confusion so they might better find a way out of danger. It was common in fire-fighters, paramedics, surgeons, highranking soldiers…

  And psychopaths. She had met those.

  Can you feel it? Can you feel Thanatos pulling at you, urging you to return to the soil?

  This was life or death, and there was no time for selfdoubt. There was no time to wonder how she could be so unlucky. Self-pity would get her nowhere, and whatever the reason for her ability to keep panic at bay, Makedde would take advantage of her cool head to do whatever was necessary to escape from this place.

  There was a bowl beside her, half filled with water. It was a plastic cat’s bowl, sitting low and open on the cold stone floor, with little feline pawprints painted around the circumference along with the name MINETTE. A few splashes of water were drying on the stone floor around it. Desperately thirsty, she had already drunk from it.

  Drink, her body told her.

  Mak eyed the water dish, and with a defeated sigh crawled across the mattress until her chin was at the edge. She tipped it up with her hands and licked at the dish like an animal, relieved at the sensation of the moisture on her tongue and trickling down her throat.

  Relief.

  It was while she was in this position, her coat pulled halfway up her back, and her legs kicking out, that the door at the top of the stairs opened again.

  Mak froze.

  She thought to suddenly right herself, so that the man who’d imprisoned her would not have the satisfaction of seeing her in such a humiliating position, but it was too late. He was already looking at her. Calm, and taking a deep breath to further steady herself, Mak rolled over and sat up. A droplet of water rolled from her mouth to her chin. She wiped it away, and strained her ears for outside noise—traffic, voices, anything. So far, she had heard nothing but a single set of footsteps and the creaking of floorboards. One man.

  Fucking arsehole.

  Her dirty-blonde hair hung over her eyes, and she shook her head to flick the hair out of her line of vision.

  There he is.

  The man walked down the creaking stairs towards her, the same man she remembered, and his appearance was as menacing in life as it had been in her nightmarish and confused recollections. To her alarm, she found that he appeared every bit as large as she had remembered. She guessed him to be closing in on two metres in height and weighing in at around 115 kilos. This was the man who could well be acting alone to imprison her here. But why? Perhaps he was waiting for something? But what? Again, he wasn’t wearing a mask, and now that Mak was fully cognisant, she took note of his features, which were at best irregular. She recognised in him the hallmarks of facial surgery. Perhaps he had been in a fight and had tried to correct some scarring, but that hardly made sense, considering that his nose was crooked from a break. Had he been injured in the ring? He had perhaps been a boxer, or a fighter? She imagined that his very appearance would have aroused considerable fear in his opponents. Why the facial surgery? Was it reconstructive? Was he vain? Insecure?

  The Eiffel Tower.

  In an instant the recognition hit. This man had been at the
top of the Eiffel Tower on the viewing platform. He had been in the same small elevator as she was, on both the way up and down. She recalled the immensity of him, and the strange features of his face.

  He had followed her.

  Who are you?

  The man stood in front of her, and Mak worked to swallow her fear and panic. She sat cross-legged on the mattress and tried a smile. It was a measured smile, not out of place, just a pleasant face to begin an interaction between strangers. She had to think of this as an opportunity for interaction. Getting angry was not going to make him let her go. Screaming would get her nowhere until she heard the movement of other people in the building. No, she would have to reason with this man, she would have to understand him. She had to figure him out. She had a PhD, didn’t she? All those years of study that she was not really using, perhaps they weren’t for nothing. Perhaps. Even as she thought it, she worried about the feebleness of psychological methods when pitted against a man-mountain intent on keeping her in captivity and…well, she didn’t know what else he intended, but he surely felt that what he had in mind would not be something she would co-operate with. But until she could get him to uncuff her ankle at least, she was not going anywhere. For one dark moment she wondered if she would sever her foot if she had to, if she had the knife to do it.

  Yes.

  Mak looked up at the man, steady. She kept her mouth fixed in its small smile, her head level to appear nonthreatening, as if the simple fact of her captivity was not enough.

  ‘Thank you for the water,’ she said, gesturing to the bowl. Her voice was croaky. ‘I was very thirsty,’ she ventured.

  He didn’t respond.

  Don’t try too hard at first. You don’t want him to think you’re being manipulative. He might get angry at you and do something.

  The huge man was no longer looking at her. His eyes were wandering around the space—the mattress, the blankets, the bowl, the floor.