And yet he has.
Shit, shit, shit.
We wobble down the stairs, both of us hovering treacherously on the verge of collapse.
Adrenaline is the only thing keeping me moving. Survival instinct. Fight or flight.
My shoulder is killing me. Literally.
Throb, step, throb, step. The rhythm is painful, intoxicating.
I’m still holding the gun. It’s covered in my own blood.
The silence of the warehouse is lethal, and my muscles tense, my body anticipating the imminent patter of gunshots as Andrijo takes aim from wherever he’s hiding.
We make it to the bottom of the stairs without fire cracking through the quiet. Maybe he’s out of bullets, I hypothesize hopefully, foolishly, desperately.
Or maybe his gun’s range isn’t long enough, and he’s waiting for us to draw closer before he buries the final bullets in our brains.
Erin collapses into the crate trolley. Surveying the warehouse one last time, I fix my eyes on the nearest door, just to the west of the aisles, and go. Push her in front of me, angle myself so I’m ready to drop down the second he shoots, make sure the gun is firmly in my grasp.
One hundred fifty yards away. One hundred twenty-five. One hundred.
My eyes stream, my vision dances. Erin’s crouched as low as she can.
The farther we get from the stairs on the wall, the more of an open target we become. There’s a dartboard on my back, and he’s taking aim. I can feel it. Feel his eyes on me, feel the barrel of a gun burning between my shoulder blades.
Seventy-five. Fifty.
I’m almost disbelieving as the huge sliding doors, corrugated iron and dull gray, draw closer.
Might we really survive this?
Twenty-five.
I start thinking about the next steps. Will the ground outside be hard enough to push Erin through a field on a trolley?
Will the police be here?
I imagine the relief of sirens blaring and blue and red lights lighting up the night sky.
Ten. Five.
We’re there.
Erin doesn’t know how much of a miracle this is because she’s blissfully ignorant of the fact Andrijo is not where I left him.
“Hold this,” I mutter to her, handing her the loaded gun, not reacting to her horrified stare. I’m dizzy and in a lot of pain, and my aim is bound to be even worse than before. And she’s going to be harder to push across open field in the trolley. “Safety’s off. Be careful.”
Thud.
Somewhere nearby, terrifyingly nearby, a cardboard box shifts and thumps to the ground.
We both recoil in shock, her swinging to face the offending shelf just ten yards away.
The next second lasts an hour.
No shadow shifts behind the boxes, no labored breathing can be heard over the silence of the warehouse.
Moving as quickly as possible, I haul the sliding door to the side, whimpering at the effort of tugging a heavy sheet of iron with a wounded shoulder.
Without looking back toward the aisle, I shove Erin in her trolley out onto the concrete forecourt. A floodlight illuminates the area—it’s motion sensitive. We’re outside. Queasiness tears through my abdomen, and the rays of light wobble across my pupils.
Blood loss. I think I’m going into shock.
It’s warm and sticky down my arm, beginning to clot.
The nausea is searing. I almost double over.
Can’t.
Push, Carina.
I try breathing through the agony in my shoulder. How is it possible for something to hurt this much? If I survive this, I’m never complaining of a migraine again. My skin is cold and clammy, and my pulse and breathing are quickening alarmingly. I’m so weak my head keeps drooping onto my chest, because the effort required to hold it up feels intolerable.
Definitely shock.
Think.
Keep thinking.
As long as you think, you’re still alive.
And Erin needs you alive.
A few sheafs stick out of the neatly stacked pile of papers in my head. The clinic. How does that fit in? Perhaps it’s just coincidence that Tim and Kasun were photographed there together all those years ago, but . . . no. Borko was there, outside. It has to be connected. And Brodie Breckenridge . . . is she relevant, or another coincidence?
Something prods into my hip: the thing Andrijo was willing to shoot me for.
Do the contents of this USB stick somehow link all this together?
There are blips and jerks in my consciousness, skipped moments like a broken tape.
I can’t get a grip on the world. I’m losing my foothold.
Part of me is floating above myself. The other part is nearly empty. I stop pushing the cart.
“Erin . . .”
“Yes?”
“I love you, you know that?”
From behind us, words slice through the moment: low, cold, final.
“Well, isn’t that touching.”
Andrijo.
He’s right behind me, and the barrel of a gun is pressed against my skull.
Erin whimpers. “Please, Andrijo, please don’t shoot—”
I hear the snarl without seeing it. “She killed my cousin.”
“Please,” Erin begs again. “Please don’t do this. All we want to do is go home and forget this ever happened. We wouldn’t tell a soul, I swear. We wouldn’t—”
The gun shifts slightly against my scalp.
A click. Safety off.
It’s too late. I’m already fading . . .
In the distance, a faint wailing.
Is it . . . sirens?
Less faint.
Erin’s head jerks to one side, listening.
Sirens.
I’m sure the sky is alight with blue and red flashes, but my world goes black. I’m succumbing.
They’re too late. The police are too late.
The last thing I hear before I slip away is Erin’s piercing scream and a gunshot cutting through the night.
Chapter Twenty-Six
August 5, Serbia
I COME TO in the ambulance.
The rattle of medical equipment. The blare of a siren.
Cold, so cold. I’ve never been so cold in my life.
Opening my eyes is like lifting a box twice my bodyweight: heavy, hopeless.
I’m lying on a stretcher, but my legs seem to be elevated. Covered in blankets, but still so cold.
I can’t even feel my shoulder.
Fade again.
WHEELING DOWN THE corridor in what sounds like a hospital.
Strip lighting in broken lines like road markings, whizzing overhead.
The smack of doors flapping open, the smell of disinfectant, someone sobbing.
Cold, so cold.
THE NEXT TIME my eyes peel open, it’s an altogether calmer affair. I’m warm, albeit woozy, and in a hospital bed with extra blankets. The ward is small, with only one other woman—elderly—sleeping in the bed opposite me. It’s light outside.
My limbs are filled with lead, but there’s no pain in my shoulder.
A short, blond nurse pads through, sees I’m awake and smiles. “Miss Carina. How are you feeling?”
“N-yerrgh?” My throat is parched, my voice box lazy.
“Oh, dear.” She chuckles good-naturedly. Her English is flawless, and her rotund build and kind face make me feel at ease. “The anesthesia will still be wearing off from your surgery.”
Surgery?
The bullet, I suppose. They can’t just leave it in there. The sadistic part of me wants to try and lift my arm, see how it feels, but I’m too foggy and, to be honest, too scared.
I make another incoherent noise. The nurse
smiles.
“I’ll get the doctor. He won’t be a moment.”
As she leaves, I let my eyes flutter closed again, purely because it’s easier than keeping them open.
I must drift off again, because I awaken to a cold stethoscope on my bare chest. The idiot in me blushes at the intimacy.
The doctor is young and handsome, dark hair and a deep tan. Like Andrijo minus the intensity.
Andrijo.
What happened?
Where’s Erin?
Is Andrijo in custody?
The gunshot in the hedge. Who was hit? Who fired?
Andrijo at Erin? Erin at Andrijo?
The scream, shudderingly high, replays in my mind.
Pain, or fear?
The doctor senses my panic. “Miss Carina. Please, try to relax. I’m Dr. Petrović. First, how are you feeling?”
More murmurings. I’m getting a bit pissed off at my inability to vocalize my thoughts.
“I must say, I’m surprised at how quickly you’ve woken up. You’ve only been out of surgery for a couple of hours. You were in quite severe shock when you arrived, but you should be feeling better now. We managed to remove the bullet from your wound—you’re lucky the shooter wasn’t closer to you, or it might have gone all the way through to your heart.”
Speaking of my heart, I suddenly realize I cannot feel it beating. That might sound ridiculous, but as someone who deals with palpitations almost constantly, the absence of feeling is disturbing.
“Whurrr-n?”
I think that was supposed to be “Where’s Erin?”
He’s leafing through my chart and doesn’t respond. He checks my vitals one more time, jots down a few things, then says, “Detective Ilić came by with a few questions for you, but I asked him to return later. You need to rest, okay?”
Drawing together all the energy I have, I focus really hard, and eventually manage, “Whereserin?”
A sigh, but it’s not impatient. Just weary. “Please, Miss Carina. Try to rest. Everything else, it can wait. Your health cannot.”
Like hell I’m going to rest.
After everything I’ve been through in the last twenty-four hours—hell, the last three weeks—I’m not going to lie down and sleep without knowing what happened to the best friend I fought so hard to save.
I try to push myself up then, prop myself onto my elbows in protest, and it’s a mistake. Pain shoots through my shoulder, up and down my arm, so sharp it takes my breath away and I collapse back down.
“All right, all right,” he concedes. “You have a couple of visitors waiting outside. They know you’re fine, and we were going to wait until visiting hours, but . . . you don’t seem like you’re going to do as I ask until you get answers.” A smile I try and fail to analyze. Is he . . . pitying? Bearer of bad news? The guy should play poker. I have no idea who’s about to walk through the door. Or what they’re about to tell me.
My mum and brother? Would they have flown out at the news, or frugally considered it a waste of money because they know I’m safe?
Or do they?
Ilić and Danijel? Come to conduct a debrief? Ask about the final moments of Erin’s life?
Dr. Petrović helps me take a few sips of water, which helps my speech a little, then exits the room. But unlike when the nurse departed, I’m too nervous to fall back asleep. My shoulder continues to throb in protest at my foolish attempts to move.
The door takes an eternity to open again, but when it does, I almost collapse in tears.
Forget almost. I do.
Erin and Karen.
Karen pushes Erin in a wheelchair. Erin is ashen-faced and frail, but alive. They both burst into tears when they see me.
Hot, thick, fast, all the motions of the last few weeks come pouring out. Erin reaches the bed, and her hand grips mine—warm and bony, no trademark jewelry. For a second all we can do is cry and hold each other.
“You’re not wearing your rings,” I observe, for lack of anything better to say. “Normally you’re like fucking Saturn.”
She laughs then, not a fake girlish giggle, but her signature sailor laugh. Coupled with the tears of relief, it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. Karen drops into the plastic chair to the side of the bed. Her eyes are red and swollen, her skin dry and puffy. She wraps her cardigan tightly around herself and lets the tears flow without any effort to stop them.
“We’re alive,” Erin whispers, disbelieving. “We’re actually alive. I thought . . .”
Her voice catches, and I squeeze her hand back. “I know.”
Our eyes meet, and so much is left unsaid in that moment. Endless thank-yous, a thousand are-you-okays, a million descriptions of how scared we were. We stay quiet, communicating with our eyes—everything I feel, I see in her, too. Relief. Lingering fear. An unprecedented gratitude for the fact we’re still breathing. Voicing these thoughts would cheapen them somehow.
Karen watches us, not wanting to interrupt the moment, and for a long time the three of us sit there in perfect silence.
Then Erin breaks it, her voice still rough and hoarse. “So . . .” Something new flickers in her oceanic iris. “We’re both killers now.”
It’s the least funny thing in the world, but exhaustion and delirium and residual adrenaline force the laughter from me, melting together with my tears. “You shot him?”
She nods. “You collapsed. Lifeless. Even though there was no sound, I genuinely believed that he’d shot you. And in that moment . . . I was so angry, Carina. And scared. For what he’d done to me, and what I thought he’d done to you. So I raised the gun you gave me and shot into the hedge. Three, four, five times, until there were no bullets left.”
“He’s dead,” I say, trying out the phrase. The words aren’t as loaded as they should be.
Nod. “They both are.”
Karen clears her throat, although she’s still sobbing. I wonder if she’s stopped since Erin was returned to her. “Is it strange to tell you both how proud I am of you?”
“For being murderers?” Erin snarks, smiling cheekily, and seeing her familiar sass is the best thing ever. I worried three weeks in hell might have buried her personality forever.
“For fighting for your lives. No matter what you had to do.”
I swallow hard, trying to forget the shudder of the letter knife plunging into a muscular neck and draining it of life. Fleetingly, almost as a reflexively anxious reaction, I wonder what the elderly woman across the ward thinks of this conversation, but the thought is so minuscule, so insignificant in comparison to everything that’s happened, that it’s almost laughable.
Karen looks at us in turn, then says, “I’ll leave you two alone.” She leaves quietly.
“Erin,” I begin softly. “Why were you here? What . . . what happened?”
“My dad . . .” she murmurs, staring at her hands. “He’s showing symptoms of Aubin’s. And there’s nothing the doctors in the UK can do. Especially not the ambivalent arseholes who deal with prisoners. So when I went to visit my dad a couple months ago, he begged me to help him. He got so urgent he grabbed my arms—” she gestures to the bruise on her arm “—and the guards nearly had to get involved.
“He’d been illegally buying the Aubin’s medicine from Bastixair for years . . . through Tim. With the help of Andrijo and Borko, Tim traffics the drug all over Europe—it’s not approved by most of the national food and drug standards agencies—and nobody bats an eyelid at his excessive flying because he’s always traveling for press trips anyway. But the drug isn’t cheap, and Dad owed Tim a lot of money for my grandma’s medication. And I mean a lot. Which meant he owed Kasun a lot of money, and Kasun doesn’t forget debts that big. So when Dad put me in touch with Tim, and I came here . . . they . . . they kidnapped me so they could blackmail my dad into paying up onc
e he got out of jail. ‘My money for your daughter.’ ”
It clicks into place.
“When Simon’s mum got really sick, he couldn’t cope. Turned to drink. Simon adored that woman, and he couldn’t cope with her demise. Then the financial crash happened, and we just about survived, but that sense of stability was gone. He started drinking even more. And the drink, coupled with the grief, is what ruined him.”
The economic recession wasn’t just a vague contributor in Simon’s decline. It was the main catalyst. He ran out of money, but desperation and love for his mother made him keep illicitly buying the drug regardless. And he got into debt. A lot of debt. Enough to inspire Kasun to kidnap his daughter in order to get his money back.
I’m filled with hatred for Tim. “Andrijo said . . .” Tears slide down Erin’s cheeks now. “Kasun would’ve been willing to forgive the debts if Dad had gone to him and explained. Kasun’s son has early onset Aubin’s. He knows how brutal it is to watch someone you love suffer like that. But after he heard my dad had gone to prison for domestic abuse . . . I guess his sympathy ran out. He said my dad must never have truly loved his family, or he’d never have wanted to hurt them. Never.”
“I’m sorry, Erin,” I whisper. “I’m sorry about what he did to you.” She shrugs miserably. “Why did you . . . ?” I can’t finish. But she knows.
“Why did I help him? Even after what he did? What he became?” She sighs so deeply I’m amazed there’s any air left in her lungs. “He’s still my dad. I couldn’t bear to see him in pain. No matter how badly he deserved it.”
There’s something I want to say, something I need to say, something burning so hot in my throat that I can’t bear to swallow it because it’ll scorch me from the inside out. Something that started growing when I first saw her grab-mark bruise, and manifested into a monster when I tied that piece of the puzzle to her imprisoned father.
“I just . . . I hope you didn’t help your dad because . . . you’re afraid of him, you know?” I work hard to remove any trace of accusation from my tone. “I hope you’re not . . . scared of your own father. The Erin I know is too fierce for that.” I try for a small smile, but it falls flat on the ground.
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