Ruthless (Lawless Saga Book 3)

by Tarah Benner

  Annalisa gave her a small off-putting smile. “We know a lot of things. Did Soren tell you where he wanted to go once you escaped?”

  Lark nodded. “He wanted to go to Texas to rescue his brother . . . and then to Mexico. But he said he’d take me back to my old house once we escaped.”

  “The house you lived in with your mother?”

  “Yeah. In Santa Fe.”

  “You just wanted to visit the house?”

  Lark shrugged. “I guess I just wanted to see if it was different.”

  “But things didn’t go as planned.”

  Lark shook her head. “My best friend was caught trying to escape. Soren wouldn’t let me go back for her, but I knew she’d try again.”

  “Did you make plans to meet up with Bernie later . . . some contingency in case you got separated?”

  “Uh . . .” Lark swallowed. She knew what she was supposed to say, but something wasn’t right.

  In the three days she’d been held captive and interrogated by Homeland Security, no one had ever called her best friend Bernie. All of Bernie’s paperwork said Bernadette, which made Lark think that Annalisa knew a lot more than she was letting on.

  “We didn’t make any plans, but I knew she’d go to her aunt’s house,” Lark lied.

  “Is this Aunt Stacey?” asked Annalisa, glancing down at the folder in front of her.

  “Yes.”

  “And you thought Bernie would be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just Bernie . . . Not Portia Wong?”

  Lark swallowed. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d screwed up somewhere in her retelling. “No. Portia was never part of the plan.”

  “Were you and Bernie close with Portia?”

  “Not really,” said Lark, struggling to get enough air to her lungs. She knew she wasn’t supposed to know any details about Portia’s escape — just that she’d fled the medical facility at the same time as Bernie.

  “And where does Bernie’s aunt live?”

  “She used to live in Albuquerque,” said Lark. “But I don’t know if she’s still there or not.”

  “Albuquerque’s only two hours from here,” said Annalisa in a tone of surprise. “You would’ve had to have taken I-25 south, not 285 . . . You must have noticed pretty quickly that something was amiss.”

  Lark hesitated. Annalisa’s tone was growing more smug by the minute — as if she knew that Lark wasn’t telling her the whole truth. Lark began to panic.

  Had Homeland Security underestimated how much GreenSeed knew? Was their entire plan about to blow up in Lark’s face?

  “Soren said we had to lose the cops first,” she murmured. “We didn’t know how long it would be before Bernie could escape, so I went along with it.”

  “But?”

  “But then we stopped at this town to get gas, and we knew something was wrong.”

  “Wrong in what way?”

  Lark looked at her as though she were crazy for asking. “It was abandoned. All the stores had been looted. The houses were vacant.” She didn’t have to fake the shiver that rolled through her as she remembered Loving, New Mexico.

  “Do you remember what town it was?”

  “No,” said Lark. “But Soren sort of lost it after that.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He said we’d never make it out of the state if we didn’t get some gas. He started acting really strange. He got mad, sort of muttering to himself, and he and Axel started fighting. I’d never seen him like that before.”

  “Did you know Soren was mentally unstable before you escaped San Judas?”

  “He’s not unstable.”

  “But you knew why he was imprisoned?”

  Lark gritted her teeth. She knew instinctively that getting this part right was crucial to selling herself as the slightly gullible girl who’d been led astray by the charming, if slightly unhinged, Soren. If she messed it up, her version of events wouldn’t seem authentic.

  “His mom told the police that he’d kidnapped his younger brother,” said Lark. “But he was just trying to protect Micah. His stepdad was horrible. Soren had to get Micah out of there.”

  “And did you know that he beat Clint Reeves with a baseball bat so viciously that Mr. Reeves had to be hospitalized?”

  Lark had known about Clint, but she widened her eyes like the doe-eyed idiot she was supposed to be.

  Annalisa rifled through the files on her desk, opened one near the bottom of the stack, and produced a photo. It was a close-up of a man’s face, but his features were unrecognizable. His nose had been broken, his flesh was bruised and puffy, and both eyes were swollen shut. A swath of blond hair was plastered to his forehead, and he had a nasty cut above his eyebrow that was congealed with blood.

  “This is a picture of Mr. Reeves after the attack.”

  Lark let out a genuine shudder. It was shocking to see what Soren had done, but deep down she knew that Clint had deserved it. Soren was a good man, but he became a different person entirely when someone he loved was threatened.

  “Tell me about Carlsbad,” said Annalisa. “What happened there?”

  It took Lark a moment to find her way back to her invented narrative. The picture of Clint had had Annalisa’s intended effect. It had left Lark shocked and rattled, and she was struggling to remember all the made-up details of her story.

  “Soren thought there might be some gas stations in Carlsbad that still had fuel,” she said. “We made it there on fumes, but it was just as bad as the last town.”

  “And how did Soren react to that?”

  Lark looked down at her hands. “He uh . . . sort of lost it,” Lark muttered. “I’d never seen him like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Crazy,” said Lark. She swallowed. “We found this trailer near the highway. We thought it was abandoned, but —”

  “But what?”

  Lark took a deep breath. She and Agent Cole had rehearsed this part. She knew it like the back of her hand, but she wasn’t sure she could sell it. “But there were people living there . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut, as though she were trying to block out the memory. “This old guy and his wife.”

  “And what did Soren do?”

  Lark shuddered. “He killed them.”

  There was a long moment of silence as Annalisa scrutinized her.

  “How?”

  “He and Axel ambushed them in the trailer and shot them with the guns they’d stolen from the security guard. Then they burned the bodies.”

  Annalisa made a note in her file. “How long did you stay in the trailer?” she asked.

  “A few days,” said Lark, crinkling her brows as if the details were fuzzy. “Right up until the police showed up.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Lark gave her a questioning look.

  “Tell me about the trailer,” said Annalisa.

  “What?”

  “I mean you must remember what it looked like if you spent so much time there.”

  Lark’s heart beat a little faster. Annalisa was testing her. She cast around for some manufactured details but came up empty.

  “It was old,” she said after a moment of silence. “Kind of run-down. It had this ugly flowery wallpaper . . . yellow and brown.”

  “How many rooms did it have?”

  “Just a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and a bathroom.”

  “Carpet or tile?”

  “Carpet.”

  “What color?”

  “Beige-y,” said Lark.

  “How many beds were there?”

  “Just one.”

  Annalisa nodded slowly, as if Lark had just confirmed everything she needed to know. “And what happened when the police came?”

  “I heard them outside the trailer,” said Lark. “They were yelling through a megaphone. They said they had the place surrounded.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Lark. “It all happened
really fast. I heard Soren and Axel yelling . . . Simjay wanted to surrender. I just froze.” She shook her head as if she were still reeling from the ordeal. “I heard the door open, and then there were a bunch of gunshots. I got down on the ground. I couldn’t move.” She looked up at Annalisa. “They told me they shot the others.”

  Annalisa watched her for a moment in silence. She still had her fingertips pressed together. They formed a little tent in front of her mouth so that only her eyes were visible.

  “Thank you, Lark,” she said after a moment, pressing a button on her telephone pad. “I appreciate that you spent so much time rehearsing that little story.”

  Lark’s stomach dropped to her knees, and her insides turned to ice. She opened her mouth to say something, but she was utterly lost for words.

  “I’m not sure why you felt the need to lie to me, but it hardly matters now. I’m confident that we’ll be able to locate Miss Mitchell and Miss Wong in a matter of days.” Annalisa made a few more notes in her file. “As for Mr. Hensley, Mr. Kapoor, and Mr. Park, we’ll be launching a separate investigation into their disappearances.”

  Lark shook her head. She didn’t know what to say. She was beginning to panic. How had she fucked up so badly?

  “I’m only forty-two years old, Lark. Do you think that I worked my way up to the C-suite of one of the largest corporations in the world by being a fucking idiot?”

  Lark just gaped at her. It was strange to hear the phrase “fucking idiot” coming out of Annalisa’s prim, composed mouth.

  “I know that the U.S. government would do anything to get their hands on our technology, and the fact that they’ve put their faith in some little thug princess doesn’t surprise me in the least. What surprises me is that they thought I would fall for it.”

  Lark heard a rustle of movement behind her, and the guards grabbed her by the arms.

  “Do yourself a favor, Lark,” said Annalisa. “Don’t ever lie to me again.”

  After Annalisa had finished with her, the guards dragged Lark away. They pulled her down the hallway and through the fancy waiting area and then tossed her into the back of the van. They drove around a parking garage to another building situated along the edge of campus.

  This was the one administrative building that Lark had never visited. It was a tan three-story structure, but instead of sandstone, it had a plain brick exterior. With its rows of shiny windows and the long covered walkway leading up to the entrance, it looked almost like a hospital.

  The guards drove Lark around to the rear of the building to a loading zone with a rolling metal door. K. Lloyd yanked her out of the back seat with a violent tug and marched her into a dimly lit hallway.

  There were no windows on this side of the building — just a bunch of heavy doors that looked as though they led to storage. Lark didn’t have a chance to get a good look at her surroundings before the guards reached a door near the end of the hallway and thrust her into the room.

  As soon as Lark was inside, she knew she’d been right to assume that the building was some sort of medical center. The speckled white tile, plain white walls, and chemical stench reinforced the hospital vibes she’d gotten from the exterior. This must have been where Bernie and Portia were held.

  Two women were already waiting inside the room. One was a chunky black woman with tight curls done up in a short ponytail. The other was blond and robust with vaguely masculine features. Both were dressed in navy-blue scrubs and were wearing latex gloves.

  The door slammed shut behind Lark, leaving her alone with the two women. She wasn’t sure if they were nurses or guards, but there was no doubt in her mind that they could overpower her easily.

  The tall blonde forced her to strip and took her time inspecting every article of Lark’s clothing. Lark held her breath as the woman stuck her hand down inside each boot, loosened the laces, and removed the foam insole to make sure Lark wasn’t hiding anything underneath.

  The black woman told Lark to squat and cough. Lark knew the drill, but that didn’t make it any less humiliating. When the woman was satisfied that Lark wasn’t hiding anything on — or in — her body, she strapped a bulky ankle monitor onto Lark’s leg.

  Lark’s chest constricted. Since she and her friends had all cut out their health sensors, they must have decided to give her a tracker that she couldn’t easily remove.

  Once the ankle monitor was activated, the woman handed Lark a folded square of light-blue fabric, a pair of plain white underwear, and two disposable shoe covers.

  The square of fabric turned out to be a shapeless button-up smock — almost like a hospital gown. Lark swallowed. She didn’t know why they were giving her a hospital gown, but she was certain it wasn’t for any fun reason. Lark had already undergone a rigorous medical examination off-site before she’d been admitted to San Judas, but she couldn’t see the point of repeating the exam if they were just going to be placing her in solitary confinement.

  The blonde touched a button on the wall, and a moment later, the door swung open. But instead of K. Lloyd and the short, stumpy guard, two heavyset men in identical navy scrubs appeared. One of them was mostly bald and looked as though he spent all his time playing video games in a dark basement. The other had a mat of tight brown curls sculpted into a high-top. They were wheeling a gurney behind them.

  “Why are —” Lark began.

  “We need to run some tests,” said the black woman, pushing Lark toward the gurney.

  “But —”

  “Relax,” she said. “It’s just standard procedure — nothing to worry about.”

  That was easy for her to say. She hadn’t spent the last five years of her life acting as GreenSeed’s reluctant guinea pig. But Lark didn’t have a choice. The bald male nurse slapped a handcuff on her wrist and attached the other cuff to the rail of the gurney.

  Lark sat back on the crinkly plastic pad, and the nurse with the high-top pushed her down forcefully. Her head hit the pad of the gurney, and a fresh wave of dread crashed over her.

  Something was wrong. These tests weren’t “standard procedure.” Otherwise they would have been performed in the regular intake building. She wasn’t being taken to solitary confinement. She was in GreenSeed’s medical center. She was one of their test subjects again.

  fourteen

  Soren

  Being alone in a cell did strange things to time. Minutes faded into hours without any way for Soren to mark their comings and goings. He had no idea how long he’d been there.

  The periodic food drops were the only indication that days were slipping by. Every once in a while, someone would come to his cell to deliver a metal tray full of the half-frozen garbage, but Soren hardly ate a bite. He didn’t feel hungry. He didn’t feel tired. He didn’t feel any base human need that he should have been feeling.

  Soren didn’t know how many days he’d been confined, but he’d been there long enough that his mind was starting to play tricks on him. At times the walls seemed to be closing in, or the room would spin and Soren would have to lie down to avoid being sick.

  Somehow, he must have slept. He woke up several times in the midst of fitful dreams about Naomi. In one, he was a little kid buckled in the back seat with a present-day Micah. Naomi was tweaking in the passenger seat while a faceless Clint drove them over a bridge.

  Rain was pelting the car windows, and Soren could hear the rush of water below. He felt the wind buffeting the side of the car and sensed their tires losing traction as they were swept off the bridge into the churning river below.

  As the car filled with water, Soren tried to unbuckle his seatbelt, but it wouldn’t budge. Clint struggled to open the doors, while Micah tried to break a window. As water filled the car, Naomi lay motionless in the front seat, soaking in a rising pool of fetid water. Clint tried to shatter the glass with his belt buckle, but it just rebounded off the window.

  By the time the pressure equalized, the car had already filled with water, and neither Clint nor Micah was thinki
ng clearly enough to try to open the doors again. They floated helplessly in the dark murky water, pain and terror written all over their faces.

  For some reason, Soren never drowned in his dream. He was able to breathe normally and watch the entire scene unfold like some morbid TV show. First Naomi died, and then Clint, and then Micah. Soren couldn’t move or speak. He just sat there helplessly and watched as his brother drowned.

  Sitting on the edge of his cot staring into his water cup, Soren knew he should have been in pain. He’d beat on the walls. He’d yelled and screamed. His throat was raw from shouting into oblivion, and he suspected he’d fractured his wrist.

  His hand shook as he lifted the cup to his mouth, but all he felt was the memory of pain. His chest still had a phantom ache from the feeling he’d gotten when the agents told him that Micah was dead. In that moment, it had felt as though they’d taken a hammer to his sternum, cracked the bone, and then cut out his heart with a dull garden trowel.

  Micah hadn’t deserved to die. It seemed almost unfathomable that he had. Micah didn’t take risks. He never got into fights at school. He never talked back, and he never cheated. He wasn’t a straight-A student or a star athlete, but he stayed out of trouble and kept his head down.

  The only time Micah had even been hauled into the principal’s office was the time they’d found a gram of weed in his locker. He was fifteen, and he looked like a burnout. He wore raggedy jeans because Naomi never bought him new ones and lime-green gauges in his ears. He hung out with the stoner crowd, but he was a good kid just trying to stay out of Clint’s crosshairs.

  Micah was quiet, but when he did speak, it was hilarious. Growing up, all he had to do was mutter something clever under his breath — a joke about their mom’s cooking or their always-naked neighbor — and no matter what he was doing, Soren would unravel.

  Micah could make him laugh so hard that his ribs would ache the next day. That was what he missed most.

  It killed Soren to know that he would never catch his brother’s wry smile across the dinner table again. He’d never pound on his bedroom door to tell him to get ready for school, drive him to the mall, or slow down the car to embarrass him when they passed a girl he liked.