Neeva didn’t bite. “What about the man disguise?”
“A man and woman traveling together doesn’t attract the same attention as two women,” she said. “As a man, I make us less visible.”
Neeva faked a laugh, folded her hands in her lap, and head still tipped against the window said, “In that case, why not just send a man?”
Munroe smiled. To herself. Humorously. Regretfully. At the history of survival and instinct that had made her who she was, and the unique set of skills both inborn and man-made that, once combined, had both blessed and very nearly destroyed her life. “None of their men can do what I can do,” she said.
WEST OF VERONA, ITALY
Under the fluorescent lights of the gas station overhang, Munroe refilled the Opel’s tank. The proprietor stared out from beyond the glass of the mom-and-pop-style convenience store with arms crossed, as if he was prison guard and she the only convict in this otherwise empty station.
She had no cash, no credit, nothing with which to pay for the fuel she was taking, only the word of Lumani and the instructions he’d given when he’d called ahead. She followed the details exactly, certain from the moment she’d reached the location and had kissed the lips of the nozzle to the mouth of the tank that the man-boy was out there, perched somewhere in the dark with the scope to his eye, watching through the crosshairs.
Munroe turned from proprietor to pump and, seeing without really seeing, watched the numbers on the display click upward. Neeva, who’d drifted off an hour earlier, hadn’t woken when they’d stopped, making it possible to handle the refueling without having to also guard against another episode of violence. The girl had slept a good deal since her failed bolt for freedom, and with any luck, she would stay under for a while.
The shut-off kicked in and, the tank full, Munroe replaced the nozzle.
In the window, the station owner still stared. Munroe tightened the gas cap and then stared back. He uncrossed his arms and waved her on. She knew the look: He didn’t want her inside, didn’t want to risk conversation or questions; wanted her gone as quickly as possible; a man caught up in the machine, blackmailed and browbeaten into submission just as she was.
She stepped around to the driver’s door and, once more, traded the cool of outside air, the taste of freedom, for the stale of the four-wheeled prison. Made yet another turn of the ignition, and Neeva slept on; another return to the dark and the roads and the trancelike hum of wheels against the pavement.
Along the empty kilometers, routing from one address to another, one random sleepy town after the next, Neeva’s words returned.
The rant about the them.
The obvious self-defense training.
The vicious refusal to quit even when she was outclassed.
The complete change when the girl realized she wasn’t dealing with a man—all of it part of a history that hadn’t shown up in any of the documents the Tisdale parents had forwarded to Bradford’s office, and Munroe puzzled over whether the catalyst had happened when the girl was still Grace Tisdale or after she’d become Neeva Eckridge.
Then she pushed aside the thoughts. Didn’t want to know, didn’t want to care.
The primal urge to fight, to win, to survive, was alive and well, but so was the darkness, licking at the edges, begging to come out and play again.
She really, really, didn’t want to care.
The emotional waters were muddied enough as they were.
Munroe reached for the Doll Maker’s phone, flicked on the screen, glanced at it, and shut it off.
Still nothing.
In the hours since Neeva’s run to the restaurant, the only contact from Lumani had been instructions for refueling, and although Munroe had listened for some hint in his voice, some betrayal of what retribution she might expect, there’d been nothing on which to draw.
The jolt, when it finally arrived, came not by way of a phone call but as an image downloaded to the phone. An alert so jarring that Neeva twitched awake when it sounded. Munroe took her eyes off the road longer than they’d any right to be, eased off the gas, and stared at the backlit screen. Neeva, yawning, shifted, turning first to look at Munroe’s face and then, following Munroe’s gaze, to the glow of the phone. Munroe reached for the vibrating piece, bracing for what the damage to Logan might be. She stared at the picture that filled the screen, stared at lifeless eyes. Two shots to the head, little red rosebuds an inch apart, flowers of death that never blossomed but instead trailed threads of color down the placid face.
Time imploded.
Then stopped completely.
Darkness descended.
The air trembled.
Ruptured.
And the inner voices, symbols of a vicious past that had been silent for nearly two years, violent pressure that had been tamped down and muted, came rushing forth in a torrent of madness. Somewhere in the distance, car headlights penetrated the blackness and beside her came screaming, loud and feral, and claws like a cat’s pulling and tearing at her right arm.
And then no movement whatsoever.
Munroe scratched at the door, the handle, until the barrier gave way to the cold of the night and she tipped out to the asphalt. Stumbled around the hood to the other side of the car, where her knees gave out. She heaved in rapid convulsions, an empty stomach offering up nothing but bile, and words, meaningless words, jumbled and collided inside her head, until after a time they re-ordered into form and shape and substance.
According to what they have done, will he repay.
The car door behind her opened.
Munroe didn’t open her eyes. Heard Neeva’s footsteps as one and, even in far-off awareness, knew the girl was still hobbled.
Inner darkness continued to swirl and, eyes shut, Munroe turned her face toward the car only enough for her voice to carry. Said, “If you run, I will kill you.”
Neeva didn’t answer. Clothing rustled and the girl’s hands touched the ground behind Munroe’s feet.
The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths.
Neeva sat beside Munroe, her breathing a shallow pant, the smell of fear on her skin. Munroe opened her eyes long enough to note the phone in her hand and her gaze fixed upon the image that remained on the screen, then she shut her eyes once more.
Neeva said, “Is this what they threatened?” and her voice shook, as if in spite of everything she’d endured thus far, only now had she grasped how tightly the puppeteer controlled the threads of life. “Is this the blackmail?”
Munroe, hands on her thighs, face toward the dirt, shook her head. No. This was a death she hadn’t seen coming, couldn’t have imagined or possibly foreseen when calculating what pawns could be manipulated in this madness.
Noah Johnson. A Moroccan-born American and chance encounter two years earlier that had turned into a six-month relationship, tender until the end. A lover she hadn’t seen or spoken to in nine months, a death far enough removed from her present life that she had no way to steel against it the way she could against Logan’s, against Bradford’s, or any of her family.
Crooked roads. No one who walks along them will know peace.
Unspeakable pain.
Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us.
“Who is this man?” Neeva whispered.
“He was my friend,” Munroe said, and wiped her sleeve across her mouth. “I loved him.”
Whatever Noah’s flaws, he’d been a good man, had loved her as intensely as she’d loved him, and she’d left to protect him from herself. He’d moved on and found another, and still, he was dead.
The shock of it wouldn’t leave her, was a truth she couldn’t acknowledge.
Munroe struggled to stand, and Neeva, beside her, stood also.
Among the strong, we are like the dead.
Munroe reached for the phone, took it from Neeva’s hand.
We look for justice, but find none.
Shut off the screen and handed it back.
<
br /> “Why did they kill him?” Neeva said.
The image burned inside Munroe’s head: Double tap to the head.
Blood trickling from the wounds. Body abandoned on the concrete pavement. “To control me,” she said.
They couldn’t kill Logan yet, because they needed the package delivered. But they could provide ample pain as punishment and motivation to comply. So they’d gone after others she loved, targets that mattered.
Innocent life.
Who else were they tracking?
If Kate Breeden was the one who’d charted this course, if she still fed them information, they would find Munroe’s entire family no matter how careful she’d been over the years.
Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands.
They’d hunt out everyone she cared about, move fastest against those she loved most. Kate had been her friend once. She should have put a bullet in her head when she’d had the chance.
Bradford not attempting to return the coded calls, a silence that had until now been reassuring, turned to death and coldness, to the sickness of the unknown. Had they gotten him, too? With the fear, the darkness swirling inside her head thickened into a suffocating blanket. Munroe hooked an arm around Neeva’s neck and drew her close. Kissed her forehead. Whispered, “Forgive me,” and before Neeva had a chance to react, jerked the girl forward.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the mind, rage- and adrenaline-charged strength turned Munroe’s fingers into vises, her own body into a machine controlled by the monsters inside her head. Munroe neither felt nor acknowledged Neeva’s clawing or screaming while she dragged the girl, with her bound ankles, from the dirt across the asphalt, to the middle of the road.
Munroe stopped and held Neeva’s arm high. Pulled from a pocket the strip of metal—the improvised knife with which Neeva had once tried to cut her—and held it to the girl’s arm.
Into the night, where surely Lumani lurked and certainly he listened, Munroe screamed for proof of Logan’s life. “Give it to me,” she yelled, “or I swear to God I will slice your precious package here and now and let her drain dry.”
Headlights down the road flashed on, then off. Just once. And then the phone, still clutched in Neeva’s hand, the hand to which Munroe controlled the wrist, began to ring. Without relaxing her grip, Munroe took the phone and placed it to her ear, aware now that the claws had stopped and so had the hitting, though the tears and the body trembling continued.
“Logan is alive,” Lumani said. “I can assure you no other has been killed. Get off the road. Return to the car, continue the journey.”
“Not without proof of life. No exceptions, no excuses.”
Munroe ended the call before he could say more. The phone rang again. Munroe placed it in her pocket. Neeva’s stifled tears and shaking body returned her fully to the moment, and aware now of the strength with which she still gripped the wrist, consciously and with almost reverent tenderness, she loosened her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she kissed Neeva’s hand and let go.
Neeva took a trussed step backward and Munroe caught her for balance. Guided the girl’s elbow gently. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and there, in the middle of the road, staring at Neeva’s flawless skin reflecting milky white in the moonlight, looking at the long line of where she would have cut and allowed the liquid of life to trail into death, she wished for all the heartache, for all of the pain and suffering of this one drive, that against the stupid, stupid rules and client demands, against the horror of everything this trip represented, that Neeva could have been drugged and thus spared them both the long torment.
And in that heartbeat of thought, that one second of darkness-induced clarity, staring at Neeva’s beautiful skin, smelling the fear on her breath, and seeing the terror in her eyes, Munroe understood the reason behind the rules.
No drugs. No bruises.
Another wave of nausea overtook her.
A client who merely wanted to own, to possess a woman like Neeva, would be content to have her gagged and drugged to expedite delivery. He wouldn’t mind if the package got smacked around a bit, softened up ahead of time. For that kind of depravity, bruises healed.
These rules, these instructions, had a common ancestor to Munroe’s own history, stemmed from the same sadistic psychopathic urges that had, through systematic brutalization by her own tormentor, turned Munroe into the predator she was now: hunting, always hunting, disconnected from and indifferent to most of humankind, allergic to all but the rarest of human touch.
Impossible choices. Impossible burdens.
No drugs. No bruises.
She now knew well the why behind every rule, and what had driven each step of the journey thus far: The client fed on fear, wanted Neeva to understand her life was his and so had instructed she be kept fully awake, fully aware; wanted the canvas clean and unmarred, so that when he sculpted, his tools would be the first, would be the only.
Munroe stared at the sky. Cursed her weakness, her inability to block out what it would mean to knowingly deliver the innocent into the same hell that had birthed her to life. In this moment of decision she condemned to death the one she would risk anything to save. To the night, Munroe whispered good-bye. Opened the floodgates to Gehenna—that place of the wicked, that place of the dead—and here in this deserted spot, she buried her soul.
Munroe took Neeva to the car and waited until she was seated, then reached for her legs and sliced through the tape. Balled the sticky mass and tossed it into the dark, and when she was once more behind the wheel, Munroe reclined her seat and cracked the windows to counter the stale air.
To Neeva she whispered, “When did it happen?”
“When did what happen?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Neeva stared at her hands, thumb massaging the wrist Munroe had crushed. “When you look like I do, sometimes guys obsess,” she said. “They’re convinced there’s something going on—see things that aren’t there—read meaning into things they shouldn’t, project on to you and then expect you to reciprocate. They get mad and take it personally when you don’t.”
“How old were you when it turned violent?”
Neeva was silent a long while. “Fourteen,” she said finally.
“Do your parents know?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “We’ve always been close. I was never afraid to tell them anything, not even when he threatened to kill me if I did.”
Fourteen. The same age Munroe had been when she’d maneuvered herself into the arms of a gunrunner and set into motion the chain of events that would, like a river diverted from its course, forever alter her perception of the world and mold her into the hunter—the predator—she’d become.
“My parents—” Neeva said, but before she could continue, Munroe held up a hand and stopped her.
Noise and movement beyond the vehicle had arrested her attention, but even with the windows cracked, she’d sensed, more than heard or seen, whatever was out there; intuition amplified by years of hunting and being hunted in the jungle dark.
A moment passed.
And then Arben’s face pressed up against the passenger window and Neeva screamed. He laughed, vicious and sadistic, and made a lowering motion.
Munroe caressed the dull edge of the tiny blade held tight between her fingers. “Don’t let it down more than a quarter,” she said.
Neeva lowered the window several inches. Stopped.
Arben waited, motioned farther down, and when Neeva shook her head, he stuck his hand inside and tossed a packet and a bag onto her lap: new tights and a small makeup kit.
“Szed össze magad,” he said. “Try not to look like a filthy pig for your big day.” And then he laughed again.
This was the first Munroe had heard him speak, and she understood now why Hungarian had been chosen for her language immersion and not any of dozens of other languages. His words had been intended to provoke a reaction in her, but Neev
a reciprocated as if she’d understood, gave him the finger, said, “Suck it, jerkwad,” and moved to close the window.
Arben, arm still inside the car, struck fast.
Grabbed Neeva’s hair before she’d moved the glass an inch, took a fist of it in his meaty hand, and yanked her toward him, pulling her head into the window with a thud.
If Neeva cried out, Munroe didn’t hear it.
Blood pounded in her ears, a rush drowning out all else. Pressure and agony and desire for the catharsis of pain all spilled from the fractured dam that had until now held them back.
She was out the door, over the hood, and in Arben’s space before he’d fully let go of Neeva. Collided with him by the time he’d backed away from the door, rage and madness working their way from inside her head to her hands and limbs.
Arben was large. Strong. Armed. And these, his strengths, were his greatest weaknesses. Brute force and the ability to control others through fear and intimidation made men lazy. Overconfident. Slow.
She would never be as fast as a bullet, but in close contact, would always be faster than the hand that drew the gun. Speed was life. Speed was survival. Speed born from the will to live, from the necessity of staying one move ahead, speed carved into her psyche one sadistic knife slice after another. That which hadn’t killed her had made her faster.
Flesh against flesh, Munroe connected with Arben’s throat, and in response came a crack of pain across the side of her head, and with the pain, release. Catharsis. Laughter.
Blow for blow, Munroe fought, not with the burning, insatiable passion to kill, which so many years before had, night after night, meant the difference between bleeding to death or living through to another dawn, but to make him suffer. She wanted this man alive in the way they wanted Neeva alive.
Along the steep incline beside the road, attuned to his breathing, her instinct and hearing filled in the gaps left by limited sight. She moved one step ahead, one step aside, hunting openings at his most vulnerable points: jaw, knees, eyes, groin, each movement made in vented hatred toward the poison Arben was.
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