Ruthless (Lawless Saga Book 3)

by Tarah Benner

  Lark let out an impatient huff and sat back in her chair. “What do you want from me?” she asked, growing more irritated with Reuben by the second.

  Reuben raised his eyebrows. “We need someone on the inside — someone who can get us what we need.”

  Lark glanced at Cole, utterly bewildered.

  Cole seemed to realize how lost she was and sat up a little straighter. “We want you to infiltrate GreenSeed’s facilities,” he said. “Once inside, you would need to retrieve some samples.”

  Lark stared at them dumbfounded, sure they couldn’t be suggesting what she thought they were. “You want me to steal a bunch of seed samples from San Judas?”

  Cole frowned. He opened his mouth — possibly to amend her translation — but Reuben spoke over him. “From GreenSeed’s administrative facilities.”

  “And how the hell would I do that?”

  “We’d stage a handoff to make it look as though we were just transferring you into their custody,” said Reuben.

  “You want me to —” Lark broke off, swallowing down the surge of bile that was creeping up her throat. “You want me to go back there? Back to San Judas?”

  “You wouldn’t make it that far,” said Cole. “They wouldn’t reintegrate you into gen pop now that you’ve been on the outside. You’ve seen too much of what’s out there. If the other inmates knew that they were being held in custody after the entire country had collapsed, there’d be riots.”

  “But you want me to go back to being their prisoner?”

  “Temporarily,” said Cole, speaking quickly as if to keep Reuben from interjecting. “We’d extract you as soon as you secured the samples.”

  Lark shook her head, still reeling from their suggestion.

  “But if you got caught stealing, you’d be on your own,” said Reuben. “The government is never gonna cop to arranging the theft of intellectual property from a U.S. corporation.”

  “How do I know you’ll ‘extract me’ or whatever?” asked Lark. “And what’s to stop you from handing me right back once I give you what you need?”

  Reuben met her gaze with the seriousness of a man ordering a hit on the president. “We’d make it worth your while.”

  Lark thought about that for a moment. “You’d pardon me?”

  “No,” said Reuben as Cole opened his mouth to speak. “The best I can do is to release you on parole. You did kill someone.”

  Lark looked from one to the other, trying to process everything they’d just told her. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She felt as though she’d been swept up in some crazy old spy movie.

  “So let me get this straight,” said Lark, squeezing her eyes shut so she could focus. “I’m supposed to risk my life and my freedom on the assumption that you’ll make good on your promise to release me on parole?”

  Reuben shrugged. “That’s our offer.”

  “The samples you collect would essentially be your insurance,” Cole added.

  Lark sat back and shook her head, trying to wrap her mind around their offer. They still hadn’t said a word about Soren and Axel, which made her think that they weren’t part of the deal.

  “What about my friends?” she asked.

  “They aren’t included in this,” said Reuben.

  Lark swallowed. The leaden weight was pressing down on her chest again, making it difficult to speak or even breathe. “Then no.”

  Reuben let out a long sigh and rubbed his eyes, as if to say that he was sick and tired of bargaining with a twenty-five-year-old criminal and desperately needed a vacation.

  “No?” he repeated, looking at her as if she were a complete idiot.

  “No,” said Lark. “I’m not agreeing to anything unless Axel and Soren are part of the deal, too.”

  “You’re pushing your luck, sunshine,” said Reuben in a low, deadly voice. “Believe me when I tell you that this is a damn good offer — the best you’re going to get.”

  Lark forced a nonchalant shrug even though every fiber of her being was screaming in protest. “You know what I want.”

  Reuben shook his head and let out a condescending laugh. “Listen, sweetheart. Maybe you aren’t getting this. You are property of the U.S. government. You can’t afford to be choosy.”

  Lark glared at him. “That’s not how I see it.”

  “That’s not how you see it?” Reuben repeated in disbelief. “Okay, then. Tell me. How do you see it?”

  “You guys are desperate,” said Lark. “You need those crops. And if you don’t get them, people are going to die. You wouldn’t be asking me to steal them for you if you knew any other way.”

  Reuben blinked furiously and then leaned forward so that Lark could see the dirt-clogged pores dotting his large sweaty nose.

  “Okay. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s true.” He shrugged. “At the end of the day, you and your dirtbag boyfriend are still two escaped convicts with no family and no friends to wonder what happened to you. You’re in the custody of the federal government, and we can keep you here until the day you die.”

  Lark fought to keep her expression neutral, but she knew by the flicker of satisfaction that ghosted through Reuben’s eyes that the color must have drained from her face. She suddenly felt cold and clammy all over, as if she were running a very high fever.

  Reuben was trying to scare her, and it was working. She knew that they needed her to get to GreenSeed, but she also knew that Reuben wasn’t bluffing.

  “Fuck off,” she growled, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in her chair.

  Reuben’s beard twitched, and his mouth twisted into a nasty smirk. He clapped his hands together and stood up. “Your choice, sweetheart. I hope you enjoy cold showers and pissing with an escort.”

  He crossed the room, walked through the door, and slammed it shut behind him. Lark and Cole were left alone, Cole looking like someone who’d just witnessed a very ugly breakup.

  Lark turned to stare at him with murderous eyes. If five years in prison had taught her anything, it was how to intimidate people with nothing more than a look. It had kept her out of a physical fight countless times, and it was working. Cole looked nervous.

  They sat in silence for several seconds, and then he cleared his throat. “This is the best deal you’re going to get, you know.”

  Lark didn’t say anything.

  Cole fidgeted in his seat for a moment and then leaned forward, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. “Listen. You said that we needed your help, and you’re right. This deal was the agency’s way of showing that they’re willing to work with you, but they’re getting impatient. This is their final offer.”

  “And what happens after that?” asked Lark.

  “After that, things get nasty . . . for you and your friends.”

  “You’re so full of shit,” Lark muttered.

  She could tell in that moment that Cole was losing patience with her. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bright with frustration.

  There was a long moment of silence as they sized each other up. The ID badge dangling from his lanyard said that his first name was Chase. In his picture, he was staring straight ahead like some unsmiling military hard-ass, but something told Lark that he wasn’t a hard-ass. He wasn’t just another cog in the machine like Reuben — at least not yet. He was new to the job.

  “Listen,” said Cole, breaking the strained silence. “I know you don’t have any reason to trust me, but this is a good deal.”

  “A good deal for who?” Lark snapped.

  “For both of us, potentially.”

  Lark scoffed and rolled her eyes.

  “It’s risky,” Cole admitted. “High risk, high reward. You bring us what we want, and you get to walk out of here.”

  “Yeah, maybe with an ankle monitor strapped to my leg,” Lark muttered.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that freedom is always better — no matter what the circumstances.”

  Lark stared at h
im intently, trying to see through the layers of bullshit the government had managed to pile onto Chase Cole in his first few years of service.

  “How do I even know my friends are still alive?” she asked.

  Cole let out a heavy sigh and studied her for a moment. Lark could tell that he was turning something over in his head, trying to decide whether it was worth the risk.

  Finally, he tore his eyes away from her and pulled out a small tablet computer from his jacket that looked as thin as a razor blade. He turned it on and fumbled to pull something up on his screen.

  Once he found what he was looking for, he hit a button, and a projector mounted to the ceiling powered on above them. Something flickered on the white pull-down screen, and a video feed came into focus.

  The first thing Lark noticed was the time stamp at the bottom. It was set to that day’s date. The time told her that it was around eight thirty in the morning, and the location just said “Cell 43B.”

  A man was standing — pacing, actually — in a small room that looked exactly like Lark’s cell. He was tall and paunchy with a hideous bowl haircut and small brooding eyes. He was wearing a pair of enormous cargo pants and a black Harley Davidson T-shirt.

  “Axel,” Lark breathed, so moved that she wanted to cry in relief.

  She stood up, and her reaction took her by such surprise that she had to stifle a laugh. She and Axel had been at each other’s throats since the day they’d met, and yet here she was — practically crying tears of joy at seeing him alive.

  Agent Cole seemed to take her reaction as a sign that he could move on, and he resumed his tapping and swiping to pull up something else.

  Axel disappeared from the screen, and Lark’s smile faltered. She noticed Cole hesitate, as though he were wondering if he was about to regret his next move.

  A second later, another video feed flickered on the screen, and it took Lark a moment to realize that she was watching something different. She was staring into an identical cell, but the man inside had his back to her.

  He was tall and lean with deep-copper skin and short black hair. As Lark watched, the man raised his muscular arms and banged on the wall with closed fists. His deltoids tightened as he beat the solid cinder blocks, and Lark sucked in a breath of air.

  “Like I said,” Cole began. “Your friends are —”

  “Stop,” Lark snapped, unable to tear her eyes away from the screen.

  A moment later, the figure turned, and Lark took a step back. Her calves knocked into the folding chair behind her, causing a bang and a scrape.

  She was looking into Soren’s familiar eyes, but they were burning with an expression she’d never seen before. His face was contorted in fury, and his eyes were flashing with malice.

  As she watched, he looked up at the camera, and his mouth stretched in a yell of anguish. His hands and wrists were discolored — splotched with gray — as though he’d bruised them by banging on the walls.

  Tears stung in Lark’s eyes as she watched him beat his fists against the wall. The video didn’t have sound, but Lark was sure that if she could have heard him, he would have been screaming.

  A second later, the video disappeared, and she found herself staring at a blank white screen.

  Cole cleared his throat, but Lark didn’t look at him. She could feel the tears carving hot tracks down her cheeks. Her nails were digging into her palms, and her lungs were struggling to inflate.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cole. “But I thought you’d rather know . . .”

  Lark nodded hurriedly, blinking back her tears. She had never seen Soren like that. Soren was always calm under pressure. He was the one who sprang to action when she froze — who found a way to persevere when things were at their worst.

  Clearly losing his brother had knocked something lose inside Soren, and Lark worried that the man she knew was gone.

  “You really think this is the best deal they’re going to offer me?” Lark whispered, shocked by the scratchy quality of her voice.

  “Yes.”

  Her mind was racing. She thought back to the administrative building they’d broken into the night they’d escaped from San Judas. She remembered the long hallway lined with doors and the room full of computers.

  Then she had an idea. It was so obvious and simple that she wondered how she hadn’t thought of it before.

  “What if I had a deal for you?” she asked.

  She looked at Agent Cole, who was blinking slowly and deliberately. She knew that making a deal with her was above his pay grade, but he couldn’t hide his curiosity. “What sort of deal?”

  “You guys don’t just want GreenSeed’s crops,” said Lark. “You also need to figure out what’s wrong with them.”

  Cole didn’t say anything to confirm her assessment, but he didn’t interrupt her or say she was wrong.

  “You don’t just want to steal the seed,” Lark continued. “You want to make sure that it’s safe for the public.”

  Lark waited for some sort of response, but when she didn’t get it, she kept talking.

  “You said that these crops were different somehow.”

  Cole allowed himself a curt nod.

  Lark could feel the excitement bubbling up inside of her, and it took an extraordinary amount of effort to reign in her enthusiasm. “What if you had all the data they’d collected on the inmates they’d been testing their products on?”

  Agent Cole didn’t say a word. Lark could tell that she had him, but he was reluctant to give anything away.

  Lark took a deep breath, a surge of triumph swelling up in her chest. “You release me and my friends, and I’ll bring you all the information you need.”

  six

  Bernie

  “So, let me get this straight,” said Portia. “You dropped out of Stanford, took your student loan money, and started a cult?”

  “No,” said Simjay in a defensive tone. “God, you are so judgmental.”

  After siphoning enough gas to fill up the Camry and spending the night at Dick Kleberg Park, they were back on the highway headed north through Texas. Bernie still had a horrible crick in her neck from sleeping with her head pressed against the window, and she had yet to regain feeling in her left butt cheek.

  Simjay took a deep breath. “I dropped out of Stanford so I could travel the world. My parents weren’t thrilled about it, but I had to go my own way. The first two grand was just to get me started. I moved around, worked when I needed money . . . I paid back the student loan.”

  “After you started a cult,” said Portia.

  “It wasn’t a cult,” groaned Simjay. “I started as a life coach in Malibu. But then my client base just exploded, so I decided to open up Quest Ranch.”

  “Is that where you and your three wives gave birth to your thirty-seven children?” asked Bernie.

  “It was a retreat for the spiritually wealthy!”

  “So basically you used your cult to scam rich people out of all their money,” said Bernie, still riding a fresh wave of disgust mixed with fascination.

  Clearly she’d been right to feel creeped out by Simjay. The guy was smart and funny, but he was kind of a scumbag. He’d posed as a New Age guru, persuaded his wealthy followers to give up all their worldly possessions, and then pocketed the money. Granted, she’d burned a guy’s house to the ground, but that had been an act of environmental vigilantism.

  “Have either of you been to L.A.?” asked Simjay. “It’s full of miserable people with more money than sense. Movie stars, film producers, trust-fund babies . . . Silicon Valley douchebags who’d drive six hours on a Saturday just to get away from their lives. They’re all surrounded by wealth and success, and yet none of them will ever be rich or successful enough. I was legitimately trying to help.”

  “And you made them feel better by getting them to donate all their money to your bullshit organization?” asked Bernie.

  “Yes!” cried Simjay. “I know it sounds bad, but I’m telling you . . . People actually felt b
etter once they gave up all of their stuff. I helped them see what was really important, and if I made some money in the process . . .”

  “What I don’t get,” interrupted Portia, “is how you managed to convince anybody that they should listen to you. You were what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Even now you look like an IT intern moonlighting as a pizza delivery boy.”

  “You know, those are some pretty hurtful stereotypes that I think you and I need to unpack together later, but since you asked . . .” Simjay took a deep breath, keeping his eyes trained on Portia. “I read a bunch of self-help books, took some classes on meditation, went on a little weekend yoga retreat . . .” He shrugged. “The universe beckoned.”

  “It’s not like it’s rocket science,” said Portia.

  “What was your name?” asked Bernie, fighting a grin. On the one hand, she was beginning to feel that Simjay was a despicable human being who deserved the eight years he’d been given in San Judas. On the other, she couldn’t deny that she found his story wildly entertaining.

  “What does it matter?”

  “Siddharth Babu?” pressed Portia. “Mohammed Krishna Patel?”

  “No,” said Simjay defensively. “What kind of guru names are those?”

  “What was it?” asked Bernie.

  “Birapaar,” said Simjay.

  Bernie and Portia exchanged a look, both of them trying hard not to laugh.

  “It means ‘limitless courage,’” said Simjay.

  “Birapaar,” repeated Bernie, feeling a giggle bubble up in her chest. “Just ‘Birapaar.’”

  “One word. Like Beyoncé.”

  At this, Bernie couldn’t help it. She burst into laughter just as Portia let out a very unladylike snort that sent Bernie on an even more uncontrollable tear.