by Lili Valente
When she reached the village, she parked just past the gas station and circled around to the trunk. She grabbed her straw hat and settled it on her head, taking her time fetching her cloth bags and shaking the sand from the fabric. As she moved, she scanned the road and the people milling about the open air market near the temple, but the early evening village scene was fairly typical.
There were a few stray dogs fighting over some rotted fruit near the curb, two teen boys without shirts on tinkering with a moped motor, their ribs showing through their nut brown skin, and a group of older women laughing over something on the shortest woman’s cell phone as they leaned against the side of the temple. The contrast of the traditional Malay clothing, the dusty street that hadn’t changed significantly in the past century, and the iPhone in a case with bright pink cherry blossoms jarred her the way things like that still did, even after months on the island. But aside from that brief flicker of “not right” nothing in the scene pinged her radar.
Slamming the trunk closed, she moved down the side of the road toward the market. There were no sidewalks here, but considering almost everyone drove mopeds or bicycles it wasn’t really an issue. There was plenty of room for people and vehicles on the road, as well as the occasional pickup trundling along with a bed full of local men bound for some construction project.
She wouldn’t have bought a car except that she had needed to transport large amounts of clay for her sculptures from the post office in town to her house and she didn’t want Jasper clinging to her waist as she zipped around on a moped the way the locals with kids did. There weren’t any other Caucasian children on the island—the non-local population was composed of older people who had retired here, scientists studying the turtle population, and a few musty-looking men Harley suspected were growing weed in the forest.
Jasper, with his blond curls, would have attracted attention and been remembered—two things Harley had always been careful about, especially since moving to the island.
In Paris, it had been easier to blend in and hide in plain sight. But then she’d made the mistake of getting too settled in, of making friends and establishing patterns that could be observed and predicted. Ian Hawke’s men had caught up with her near the flower market, where she’d gone every Wednesday to get fresh flowers for the flat. Even as she’d fought them, struggling to free herself and get back to Jasper, she’d cursed herself for making herself an easy target.
With that in mind, she veered across the street, stopping into the café for a Thai iced coffee, something she hadn’t done in months.
She perched on a stool overlooking the street and watched the world go by. There was a steady stream of mopeds headed inland from the ocean, several bicycles, and a four-wheeler with two skinny, barefoot children sharing the perch behind their father, but no larger vehicles and nothing suspicious. She stayed to see which of the dogs won the battle for the squashed mango—the little one with only one ear, never underestimate the underdog—and then slid to the ground and back out onto the street.
At the market, she took the opposite of her usual route, hitting the fish market first and buying a snapper filet, then stopping by the vegetable stalls for eggplant and cilantro before ending at the spice monger, who also sold cans of coconut milk she would need for fish soup. Once her purchases were snug in her bags, she took the long route back to the main road, circling around the back of the temple as the sun set, keeping her senses on high alert.
But she arrived back at the car without seeing or sensing anything strange. She scanned the road one last time, finding it even quieter than when she’d arrived an hour ago, before sliding into the car and heading for home. The island was beautiful at dusk and the smell of salt water and night flowers opening in the cooler air soothed the stress of navigating the winding pass through the mountain and back down toward the coast.
She passed a few people headed into town, but by the time she reached the dirt road leading to the cottage, the road had been abandoned for miles. Once she shut off the car, there wasn’t a sound aside from the waves rubbing gently against the shore and birds chattering in the palm trees as she passed beneath them.
An hour later, Harley had spicy coconut fish soup simmering on the stove, a beer in hand, and was sitting on the patio, trying not to think about how weirdly quiet the house was without the sounds of Jasper playing in his room or Dom singing along with the record player they’d found in the storage shed.
At least there was still music.
Tonight, she had on an old Eagles album that reminded her of childhood summers with her Aunt Sybil. Back when she was a kid, she and Hannah would swim in the lake all day and spend their evenings around the fire pit with long sticks and a bag of marshmallows, stuffing their faces while Sybil’s music drifted out to them on the porch. They would go to bed with sticky fingers, staring up at the starry sky through the skylight, talking about all the adventures they would have when they were older.
Instead, she and her sister had been ripped apart, and now Hannah was in another corner of the world watching the stars wink on in a different sky, and Harley was alone.
She truly felt alone and was as relaxed as she could be given what the future held. As she tipped her beer back for the last swallow at the bottom, the red truck and the mystery fisherman were far from her nostalgic thoughts.
That’s when he made his move, grabbing her from behind and shoving a needle deep into her neck, proving he was a superior predator.
Harley cried out as her muscles spasmed and her vision flooded black, but there was no one around to hear. No one but the man who grabbed her around her waist, lifting her into the air and carrying her away, leaving the music playing and the soup to burn on the stove.
Chapter Four
Clay
Clay Hart had spent the last two years of his career with the CIA shadowing mercenaries in Afghanistan and keeping watch over the poppy fields the CIA insisted they weren’t harvesting in secret and selling to U.S. drug companies desperately in need of poppy latex. He had learned to blend in, to move about unobserved, and to become part of the shadows until the moment was right to reveal himself.
His superiors had hesitated to send a blue eyed, blond haired operative into the Middle East to “blend in” but Clay had quickly proved that their worries were groundless. He was never made. He never missed his mark. He never failed to get in, get out, get the job done, and do it all without being seen.
But Harley had seen him.
He’d felt her eyes on him as he’d bent over the bed of the truck, wondering what the fuck he was going to do if she decided to come over and say hello. He was a different man than the person she’d known, his heart empty and his soul dark from too much time spent staring into the void, but his face was the same.
She would have recognized him and then he would have had to explain himself. He would have had to come up with a lie that would convince her to drop her guard long enough for him to inject the sedative, and he wasn’t sure he would have been able to pull it off.
He was a master at making lies sound like the truth, but he had never lied to someone he hated the way he hated the woman hidden under the tarp in the bed of his truck.
Clay leaned over, eyeing the lump lying motionless beneath the thick gray plastic before turning back to the moonlit ocean stretching into the distance in all directions. The sedative should keep her knocked out for at least ten hours, more than long enough for the ferry to reach Ko Pha Ngan. From there, they would take his private boat to one of the smallest of the south Thai islands, an unnamed patch of land home to one of the CIA’s inoperative black sites.
Black sites—secret international prisons where the CIA locked away people they didn’t want to attract attention on U.S. soil—were fewer in number than they used to be, but they were still around. This one had closed a year ago but had been left intact, ready for reopening at a moment’s notice. The lights were still on, the water running, and the emergency bunker was stocked with e
nough canned goods to last a small prison population several months.
He and Harley should be more than comfortable.
Or at least he would be comfortable. Her comfort depended on how quickly she gave him what he wanted.
Clay glanced up at the night sky, lips twisting in a bitter smile. If he’d known that Harley had Jasper on the island with her, things would have gone down differently. But every still he’d captured from the bank security camera in the village had shown Harley alone. When he’d learned that she’d chartered a plane from Ko Tao to Bangkok, he had anticipated having to deal with one woman. One woman who would be easily put down with a tranquilizer dart and shuffled into the bed of his truck.
The airstrip was only for private use; so few planes came in or out that there wasn’t even an air traffic controller to monitor the area. Recon on the strip had assured Clay that the only person who might observe him kidnapping Harley was the pilot waiting in the plane and he wouldn’t be able to get across the field fast enough to stop Clay from driving away.
When a little blond boy had tumbled out of Harley’s car, followed by a tall man with dark hair, Clay had been forced to put away his stun gun and reassess the situation. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain to the son he’d never met why they would be building a life together without his mother in the picture, but he knew he couldn’t let Jasper’s introduction to him involve being yanked into a truck after seeing his mother and her boyfriend collapse onto the ground.
That was the kind of thing that scarred children for life, and Clay was sure the poor kid was plenty scarred already. After being raised by a sociopath, there was no way Jasper could have survived completely intact. But he was only six years old, still young enough to get help, get healthy, and have a normal life.
Clay had only known about Jasper for six months, but six months was long enough for him to realize he wanted to give his son the world. And if not the world, then at least a chance to grow up without being haunted by the ghosts of his mother’s mistakes. As soon as they were back in the States, he and Jasper would go to therapy for as long as it took to put Harley Mason and the shit she’d put them both through far behind them.
Now it was just a matter of getting Harley to cooperate.
The ferry landed a little after two in the morning. By three, Clay had Harley tucked away in the hold of his fishing boat and was headed south. They docked at the black site’s hidden cove just as the sky was graying, and by sunrise, Harley was tied to a cot in one of the officer’s cottages.
For the first time since carrying her to his truck, he had a chance to study her and see how she stacked up against his memories.
She was still beautiful, her long brown hair framing a face that belonged on a 1950s movie star, with a plush mouth and a chin that came to a sharp point, making her look almost feline when she smiled. She was in better shape than she’d been when they were younger—there were defined muscles on the arms stretched above her head—but still a little too thin, lending her the same air of fragility she’d always had. That delicacy had made it easy to believe her when she’d claimed that people had hurt her.
But she’d been the one doing the hurting. She was a monster, a devil with a pretty face, the kind of evil you never saw coming until your life was shattered and by then, she was already gone, moving on to her next victim.
But not this time.
This time, one way or another, Harley was going to pay for her sins.
Clay settled onto the small couch beside the bed, threaded his fingers together, and watched the morning sun creep across the white sheets, waiting for Harley to wake up and realize there was a bigger, scarier creature in the jungle.
Chapter Five
Harley
The first time Harley woke up, the world was blurry, her head throbbed like a finger with a splinter shoved beneath the nail, and her mouth was so dry she would have sold her soul for a drink of water. She blinked heavy lids as her head lolled first to the left—a large window with a view of palm trees and a smudge of ocean beyond—and then to the right—a man sitting on a couch.
An enormous man.
Harley swallowed, her bone-dry throat clutching at itself as she fought to focus. She made out sandy hair, a square jaw, and finally the finer details of his face. His face.
His face.
“Good to see you.” Her words were a cross between a mumble and a croak, but it didn’t matter. This was a dream, she realized with a pang of sadness. That was the only time she saw Clay, in dreams where little things like alive or dead didn’t matter.
Dream Clay leaned forward¸ his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She was already being pulled back under, into a deeper, more fragmented sleep.
There she dreamed of staircases stretching into the sky with sweating glasses of water waiting at the top for her to drink them. But every time she reached the top and stretched her fingers out to close around the glistening tumbler, the stairs would flatten and she would slide down, down, down to where she’d started. She climbed the stairs again and again, her thirst growing until it was a screaming need clawing at her throat, until she wept and in her desperation smeared her own tears back into her mouth, sucking the salty wetness onto her tongue.
She woke with a moan and a shudder in her chest, her tears following her into the waking world.
“Water,” she croaked, her damp lashes sticking together as she opened her eyes. Her head didn’t hurt anymore, but the thirst was torturous. If this was how her captors meant to kill her, her death would be terrible, a slow descent into madness. “Please, water.”
“Here,” a deep voice said from beside her. “Just a sip.”
Harley’s head rolled to the right, her lips parting in a silent “oh.” If her throat weren’t so dry, she would have cried out with a sound equal to the shock of seeing a man risen from the dead.
It was Clay and this was no dream. He was here. Now. With her in this room.
He’d aged since the last time she’d seen him. His deeply tanned skin was lightly creased around his eyes and across his forehead and he had acquired a long, jagged scar above his left temple. It was where he had been bleeding the night of the crash, the night she had touched his cold face and been certain that he was dead.
“H-how,” she rasped, eyes wide as she scanned his face, searching for clues. There was something different about him, something more than the fine lines and the scar, but her fogged mind couldn’t figure out what it was. “I th-thought you were dead.”
“I have been,” he said, holding out a cup with a straw in it. “Do you want a drink or not?”
Blinking fast, she leaned over, closing her lips around the straw and sucking greedily until Clay grabbed the top and pulled it from her mouth.
“Not too much,” he said, setting the water back on the table by the bed. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
Harley lay back on the pillows, flexing and releasing her fingers as her thoughts raced.
Clay was alive.
Her arms were bound above her head.
Clay was alive.
She’d been kidnapped from her house.
Clay was alive.
There had been a needle in her throat and then the world had gone black.
And now she was here, wherever here was, and Clay was alive, sitting beside her bed, waiting for her to wake up.
“Wh-why….” She shook her head, trailing off as she swallowed hard, forcing the water trying to crawl up her throat back down again. “What—”
“I don’t remember you being this slow on the uptake.” Clay leaned in, his elbows resting on his knees. “Come on Harley, use that clever brain of yours. You know why. And you know what this is.”
Her eyes went wider until the muscles ached around the sockets.
This couldn’t be happening. Clay was the nicest man she’d ever met. He was laughter and thoughtfulness and long nights whispering beneath the covers like they were children breaking the rules
to stay up late and tell ghost stories. He was the only man who had ever made her laugh and come at the same time, and his eyes were the first place she’d seen a reflection of herself that wasn’t twisted or wrong.
He’d shown her a glimpse of a woman who was lovable. And for the first time in her life she’d dared to believe that maybe—when her revenge was complete and the bodies lying still in their graves—she could be a person like Hannah. She could be worthy of love and happiness and long sleeps without any nightmares in them.
Now, she saw that worthy person in Jasper’s eyes. And now, when she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a woman who kept her secrets close, but her son closer.
She wasn’t the selfish, destructive child she’d been the night she and Clay were run off the road on their way to get married in Niagara Falls. That girl had died, but she’d left wreckage behind and wounded people prepared to take up the torch of revenge and hold it to her bare feet.
She suddenly knew why Clay had brought her here and it made her heart stutter in her chest.
“I can explain,” she said, tongue slipping out to dampen her lips.
“You can explain why you framed Jackson for rape?” Clay said, the contempt in his voice making her cringe. “You can explain why you lied and convinced me that he beat you, destroying my relationship with a man who was like a brother to me?”
“It wasn’t about—”
“An innocent man,” Clay continued, before she could begin to explain, “who went to jail and lost everything—his career, his family, his good name—because of you. You destroyed his life, Harley. You took everything that mattered away from him. And why? To punish his father, who couldn’t give two shits about his son.”
Harley bit her bottom lip, fighting to think past the fear surging inside of her. She knew what was different about Clay now. His eyes didn’t reflect anything anymore. They were flat, hard, and utterly lacking in empathy. She had a barren place inside of her where their love had once lived, but Clay had a hellscape, a nightmare world inhabited by demons born from the special breed of hatred one can only feel for a person he or she once loved.