Spending the better part of the day with her exhausted me, and I was happy to hide behind my oversized sunglasses on the bus ride from her apartment to Brain’s hotel.
Okay, so I didn’t go straight from one place to another. I rode the bus to the hotel my alter ego was staying, opened the door, grabbed a larger bag from just inside, and closed the door without going in, so it would look like I went in and stayed. I hugged the side wall as I walked around a corner, so no cameras would pick up on the fact I hadn’t gone in, and made my way down the hall the other direction.
While still out of shot of the cameras, I put my outer blouse in my bag, revealing a different colored tee. I removed the sunglasses, pulled my hair into a ponytail, and pulled a smartphone from my pocket, so I’d have a reason to keep my face down as I walked through the hotel. My purse went into the larger bag, and I moved to the middle of the hall and walked to the elevator.
I went out a different entrance, and put huge pink sparkly sunglasses on this time, instead of the brown leopard ones I’d worn earlier. A quick taxi ride four blocks over, and then a two block walk, going into and out of a few stores to be sure I wasn’t followed, and I finally made it to the hotel Brain was staying.
I couldn’t wait for the plastic surgeon to rearrange my face enough so I didn’t have to worry about facial recognition picking me up on random street cameras.
Also, I was debating the merits of living in the sticks where a stranger following you is immediately noticed, but it would be harder for me to disappear. I had a few months to decide where I’d want to settle down. I’d never considered it a true possibility, but now… the idea appealed to me. Of course, if I was going to follow through with my restaurant idea, I’d need to live near a population large enough to support it. And if I was going to go all the way to the strip club, I’d have to be in a large city. One preferably not in the bible belt.
I was still playing around with ways I could plausibly put Harmony on a horse farm, though.
Brain was waiting for me in the lobby, and he handed me a key card as we walked to the elevator. “So you can come and go as you please. How was your day?”
“Exhausting, even though we only sat around and talked most of the day. How was yours?”
“Great, since I knew I’d see you this evening. There’s a workout room in the hotel, if you need to burn some energy off.”
He wasn’t touching me, and I wanted a hug. I’d gone years not allowing my boyfriends to hug me, insisting I hug them first, and now I was mentally bitching because Brain was keeping his hands to himself.
“If no one’s in the indoor pool, I think I’d rather swim laps.”
He waited until we were in his suite to tell me, “I’m hacked into the hotel’s security, we can see how crowded the pool is from here. Also, I have my car, and I wouldn’t be opposed to heading to Piedmont Park for a run, there’s a nice four mile loop trail.”
“That’s perfect, though I’m certain you can run eight miles in the time it’ll take me to run four.” The only way I’d been able to outrun him had been by taking turns into tight places, where I could fit and he had to stop to figure out how to get through.
Now, finally, he bent down and brushed his lips across my forehead. “I didn’t spend the day talking to a woman under a death sentence. I don’t mind running at your pace, whatever it is. You can change in the bedroom, I’ll take the bathroom.”
Damn, was I really doing this? Spending time with him, giving him a chance? It appeared I was.
The park was awesome, and a four mile run was exactly what I needed. I requested we stop for shakes at The Varsity on the way back, and he indulged me with a smile.
I’d worn a ballcap while we ran, and I swapped it out for sunglasses when we got back in his car. As we pulled out of The Varsity, he asked, “You’re sure the minor changes will be enough to keep facial recognition from picking you up?”
I nodded. “Yeah. The surgeon gave me mock ups of how my face will look, and I also played around with some images, based on what he says he’s doing.” I looked out the window and considered how much to tell him. He needed to know the danger, what we were up against if I was recognized. “Twice now, I’ve tested cams to see if they’re still looking for me.”
“Kind of a risk, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I needed to know, and I planned it carefully.”
He glanced at me, back at the road. “Tell me?”
This was a test, and we both knew it. How many of my secrets was I willing to tell him? He already knew a good bit about how I operated, as he’d learned me pretty well when he chased me down.
I took a breath and started the story. “The first time was a few blocks from Times Square, and I planned it to the minute. I walked through wearing a red and white dress, a wig with nearly black shoulder length hair, red heels, with my face showing. I went into a theater and to a bathroom I knew didn’t have a camera on the door, and changed into a black dress with low black heels. My small purse had barely held the black dress and shoes. It was reversible, so I flipped it inside out, turning it from white to black, and put the red dress and heels in, then crammed the wig into the shoes. My short hair was dyed blonde at the time, and I’d gelled it to look stylish, but formal, which meant my hair color and length changed. I went from bright red lipstick to pale pink, put some heavy designer glasses on, and made my way through the theater and out the side door, to a restaurant across the street where I was supposed to meet someone for dinner.”
I paused, wondering how much of this next part to tell him. It didn’t put me in a good light, wouldn’t make me good girlfriend material. Did I want to run him away, or did I want to hold onto him a few more weeks? I didn’t know, but decided to give him the truth and let the chips fall where they may.
“I watched government agents arrive and scour the place. We had tickets for a different theater later, then we spent the night at his apartment, and he drove us to Connecticut to a lovely bed and breakfast the next day. Everything in his name, of course. We had a nice day and evening on vacation, and I told him I was going for a run the next morning.”
I shrugged, uncomfortable with the next part, as I knew it hadn’t been nice, but then, the person I’d turned into wasn’t especially nice. “I stole a motorcycle, rode twenty miles back towards New York, and stopped to call him and tell him I’d had a nice time with him, but we just weren’t going to work out. I told him I was headed back home on my own, hung up, destroyed the phone, and then drove to another large city, went to a mall, bought some shit, changed clothes, with layers so I could easily strip down and look different, took three busses to the airport, rented a car, and drove several hundred miles to another city with a storage unit with my stuff. I turned the car in, took a few busses to my storage unit, got on my motorcycle, and made my way to Chicago.”
He smiled, tilted his head, and said, “I’m guessing the second time was in a smaller city, and you had your own transportation out of town this time, with a computer set up to monitor and record activity, so you could watch later. Too much of a risk to stay around and watch the second time, especially since you wouldn’t have a huge crowd to get lost in.”
No judgmental crap from him, and he’d guessed my game plan for the second test. I couldn’t analyze my feelings for him now, though, with him sitting right here, so I nodded and said, “Yes, exactly. Medium sized city in Mississippi. I walked by the county courthouse in broad daylight, let the cameras see my face, and got on a bicycle, rode it four miles to a wooded trail, turned onto the trail and went another couple of miles to where I’d stashed a dirt bike. I rode it over a few mountains, using jeep trails and old logging roads, until I came to another town, where I had another storage unit, this one with a car. I drove to New Orleans, got lost in the crowds.”
“How long did it take them to show up?”
“The feeds showed local police activity within fifteen minutes — uniforms looking around and showing pictures to bystanders and as
king questions. Feds took two hours to arrive.” I shrugged. “I tried it at a mall, once, and nothing happened. It’s possible they’re only jacked into government owned cams — traffic, parks, courthouses, whatever. I make sure I’m always camouflaged in some way, though. A huge chunk of hair over one eye, sunglasses, or a hat with a visor. The latest algorithms measure the ratios between your eyes, as well as eyes to lips, lips to chin, and eyes to chin. Law enforcement believes these are infallible, since you can’t move your eyes around in your face, but I’ve played around with the algorithms and discovered changing the eyebrows and eyelids is enough to trick the software into thinking the eyes are slightly higher. This, combined with a chin implant, throws the facial recognition off. Having my nose tweaked, and the cheekbone implants as well, will make me look different enough to the naked eye so people who’ve seen pictures of me won’t recognize me visually.”
“I think you’re beautiful, now, but it’s your brain and your courage I’ve fallen for, so it won’t matter what you look like.”
* * * *
Brain
She seemed to have decided to open up and let me in, but I knew she’d shut down the instant I mentioned the Russians, so I moved the conversation everywhere else. She drank slower tonight, but was still three sheets to the wind when she climbed on my lap and kissed me.
It took every ounce of willpower I had to let her control the kiss, but when she went to take my shirt off, I put my hands on hers and gave a soft, “No.”
Her eyes looked incredulous, then pissed, then hurt — all in the space of five seconds.
“I want you more than words can express, but we need to talk about some things before we go there, Buttercup.”
I expected her to storm off, or perhaps hit me, or tell me to go fuck myself. Instead, she gave a single nod, went to her laptop, and became engrossed in something. My instincts told me to let her do whatever this was without interrupting, and five minutes later she went to her bag, retrieved a USB drive, plugged it into her computer, hit a few more keys, and pulled the thumb drive from her laptop.
She walked to me, put the thumb drive on the table beside the sofa, and said, “Details of everything that happened, including the names I picked up, all conversations I heard, and the location I was held prisoner. I’m never going to talk to you about it, so don’t try. Password to access it is butter dot cup, but use an 8 for the B, 3 for the E.”
She walked to the bedroom door, turned, looked at me a few seconds, her eyes dark. “If you ever look at me with pity in your eyes, you’re history. That’s my past, not my present. I’m in control of sex now. No one fucks me, I fuck them. If you can’t deal with that, you should leave.”
I watched her walk into the other room, and only spent a few seconds debating whether to go to her or not.
She was in bed when I got there, and I crawled in with her. “You aren’t going to read it?”
“I am, but I’m going to hold you until you go to sleep, then I’ll read it.”
She didn’t know my night vision let me see her expression, and the vulnerability I saw in her face made me want to hold her and never let go.
I stroked and petted her until she was asleep, and then went to the living room to read.
Ice had put every detail she could remember in, and it took me nearly five hours to go through it. She’d also included pictures of people and places, as well as maps. She may not claim to want revenge, but she’d kept up with the main players enough so, if she had to, she could go after them with little further research.
I uploaded the files to my own encrypted server, and then sent an email to Kirsten. I’d met her a few times and liked her. She was a therapist, she knew about supernaturals, and a close friend of mine trusted her completely, which was enough to make me trust her, as well.
I asked her if she could give me an appointment for a session via phone or video chat, and let her know I had Aaron’s encryption software, and was assuming she did, as well.
And then I looked at the pictures of the men who’d hurt Ice, branding them into my memory.
After a long plane ride halfway around the world, during which she’d been repeatedly raped, they’d taken her to one of their strongholds. The first few days hadn’t been bad in comparison to what came later. They’d strapped her to a table in their lunch room area, her arms over her head, her legs spread and tied with a rope running under the table. They’d left her like this for days, and every man in the organization had used her in every hole possible. When they realized this wasn’t going to break her, they’d started on actual torture.
Ice was convinced their main torturer, Grigoriy Ivankov, had been out of town when she’d first been brought in, and this was why she had it so easy those first days.
He walked in, fucked her ass, asked her a dozen questions, and then ordered her taken downstairs.
The act of moving her was excruciating, as she’d been bound to the table for so long, but now she wasn’t bound at all. Grigoriy beat her with a rubber truncheon, all over her body, and when she was lying in a puddle of her own sweat and blood, a swollen, bloody mass of pain, he used pliers to remove the nails from both pinky fingers, and both of her smallest toes. He told her he’d be back in five hours to ask the questions again.
Unfortunately, Ice didn’t have the answers they were looking for. She only knew what her contact had looked like, the lack of discernible accent, how much money they’d given her, the account it’d come from, and the email address she’d used to contact them.
Over the next ten days, she was beaten twice a day, morning and night. The first five days, four nails were removed at the end of each evening session.
Ivankov seemed to get particularly turned on when he ripped her nails off, and usually tied her into the position he’d want to rape her, before he wrenched them away from her nailbed. Once, he buried his cock deep inside her ass and then tore them off, groaning in bliss as she screamed and writhed in pain.
One day, they beat the bridge of her nose with a rubber mallet, several days, they beat the bottom of her feet with a brass rod. Another day, they beat the outside of her feet, just below her baby toes, with the rubber mallet.
And nearly every day, Grigoriy Ivankov would play with her hair as he talked to her, twisting a strand around his finger. Sometimes, he’d let it relax around his finger and slip off. Other times, he’d yank the hair out by the roots.
The nights were also hell. Sometimes she’d be tied so she had to sit on a stool leg all night, meaning she had to keep her weight on her thighs to keep the stool from poking too far into her rectum, or too far up her pussy — depending on how they sat her on it.
Other nights, she was placed near an open window when it was bitterly cold, and the guards would throw ice cold water on her every couple of hours.
One day, he took her back upstairs to the table, strapped her as she’d been bound those first days, and used a scalpel to remove her clit hood before allowing all of the men to use her as they pleased until it was time for her evening torture session. He’d used what she was pretty sure was styptic powder to stop the bleeding, and she’d written it had burned worse than the fires of hell. The men had taken great joy in messing with her clit directly while they used her, reveling in her agony as she pleaded with them for respite, as any touch at all was too much sensation, and excruciatingly painful. Ivankov had raped her six times that day — once before he stopped the bleeding, and he’d used her blood as lube when he fucked her ass. Then, her screams from the burning of the styptic powder had turned him on so much, once he’d hosed her down to get rid of the blood, he’d raped her again before telling the men she’d be available the rest of the day.
They hadn’t carried her back to her cell until late in the evening, when it was time for her next beating, and Ivankov had flogged and then belted her pussy and exposed clit while two men held her down, and two other men held her legs apart. Her screams had turned them on, and they’d argued over who was going to get h
er first. In the end, they’d gone three at a time, using all of her holes at once until their lusts were all satisfied.
Between the sleep deprivation, being kept on the edge of starvation, the beatings, and the continued sexual assaults, she’d been well into both visual and auditory hallucinations, so far gone she’d have told them whatever they wanted to know, if she’d only had the information.
She was so far gone, her guards became sloppy. The night guard fucked her before tossing the ice water on her, and he didn’t lock her restraints back right. She was ready when someone else came to fuck her, and she took him down, got his gun, and bashed him over the head with it to knock him out. She tied him up, got his keys and knife, and made her way out of the facility a few hours before daylight. She had to kill three people on the way out, using the knife mostly, and the gun as a bludgeon instead of shooting it and drawing attention. She undressed one of the smaller dead men, put his clothes on, used his key fob to figure out which car belonged to him, and drove herself away from her hellish prison.
She was in a strange city in the Ukraine, just on the border with Russia. No money, no clothes, and she was starving and weak. She used the dead man’s credit card to buy clothes and groceries, and she stole another car and drove across the Ukraine, filling the tank with gas on the dead man’s card before discarding it and everything else that could tie her to him.
Since there were huge hunks of hair missing from her scalp, she shaved one side of her head a few inches over her ear, and then let the rest of her hair fall to the other side, to hide the bare spots. My wolf growled as I read the part about her having to use heavy makeup to cover the red spots where larger chunks of hair had been ripped out.
She drove to the coast, pickpocketing and robbing people when she had the chance, so she could buy gas, clothes, shoes, and toiletries. A few hours in an internet café on a rented computer, and she had tickets and ID overnighted to her, along with a credit card for the identity, and some cash.
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