He spoke so fiercely that she almost believed him. But he’d found the picture and the article, and he must have done his research after that. Read about what she’d endured. He had to know now that lightning could indeed strike twice.
“Do you want to hear about it?”
“You don’t have to tell me … unless you want to.”
“Besides the police, I’ve never really talked with anyone about it.”
“I can see it not being your favorite topic of conversation,” he offered.
She licked her bottom lip, thought about the psychiatrist’s office. She hadn’t talked much—instead, she’d drawn pictures of what happened, terrible pictures that went frame by frame, over a three-month period.
But she’d refused to speak on it.
She’ll talk when she’s ready.
She’d never been. “It was classic, textbook serial killer stuff. I took a shortcut through the park at dusk—I was late coming home from my friend’s house and I didn’t want my mom to be mad.”
She’d done it before, cutting across the darkened park through the bike trails. She knew them like the back of her hand, loved running through them when there was no one else around, her feet pounding the pavement in her worn-in Keds, wind pushing her along.
And then she tripped, fell so hard her knees burned. When she looked down, she realized she’d ripped the already worn patches at the knees, which her skinned knees now showed through. There was a lot of blood and her eyes had teared up, but she bit her lip. She had to keep going.
The rag pressed across her face before she had a chance to haul herself to her feet. She smelled something—horribly sweet perfume—and the next time she woke, it was dark and she was getting sick all over herself.
When she went to wipe her mouth, she realized her hands were tied behind her back.
“I would’ve died if he’d gagged me,” she reflected now. “I guess he realized that.”
God, the fear could still cut through her, sharper than any knife.
When the trunk opened, she saw an outline of a man, but it was so dark. She was happy to have some fresh air, but that was short-lived, because he grabbed her roughly and hauled her over his shoulder.
She struggled—screamed even—and the only response was a soft chuckle. She scrambled off his shoulders a bit, tried to stiffen herself so she couldn’t fit through the open doorway, because all she saw was blackness … no way out.
The doorway to hell.
It hadn’t worked, and she whacked her head on the side of the door frame for her efforts. And she was carried into the darkness, her stomach roiling, her head hurting so much she didn’t think she could stand the scent of the man another second.
“Shhhhh, stop crying. He doesn’t like when you cry.”
The words were hushed, urgent, coming from the corner of the room she’d been dumped in.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Erin.”
Olivia moved like a snake, on her belly, to get close to her. The other girl was tied to a chair, and when Liv got close enough, she could smell Erin’s fear. Or maybe it was her own.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Olivia told her.
“There’s no way out.” Erin sounded exhausted.
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’d been there for a month.” Olivia wouldn’t learn that until later. A week of starvation, and things Olivia forced herself not to think about.
She brushed away the tears that threatened impatiently. She’d shed so many over that poor girl, and she wasn’t sure it would ever be enough.
“When he took me into that cabin, I knew … I knew I wasn’t getting out alive. And every day he let me live, I wondered, Is it money? Are my parents not paying?” She paused and pictured it, the dirty floor, heard the scamper of mice, felt insects crawling over her.
It had been filthy inside that cabin—the stench alone had told her so, but when the police showed her actual pictures, she’d realized just how bad it had been. “There was garbage piled everywhere, he was a hoarder … I guess people were part of his acquisitions. He was … spooky. Scary. Like, he was Halloween all the time,” she said, because the nine-year-old part of her brain still viewed the man who’d hurt her that way. It was easier to compartmentalize him, to think of him as crazy and disturbed, when really she knew that people like him lived all around her without incident.
He never touched her—it was always Erin he took, and Olivia would try to hunch her shoulders enough to cover her ears. When that didn’t work, she’d turn away from the sounds of pain and press one ear to the floor in a futile attempt to lower the volume of fear that accosted her.
“He would drag me out of the room a few times to read my tarot cards,” she said, pictured the long hair, the sharp, beaked nose, the row of brightly colored cards spread like a ribbon of death across the table. “He would read tarot cards all the time—to predict my future, and Erin’s too.”
And on that day, the day that would forever stand out more horribly than the others—the days that simply spun together like a sticky web she could never quite extricate herself from—she finally learned why Erin screamed whenever she was with him.
Looking back, she was grateful Erin had never answered any of her questions.
He placed the cards down, one by one, as usual, never looking at her. And after the last card went down, he looked up, stared at her, his eyes glowing from the light of the single dingy candle.
Her senses were already on overload, and they’d shut down almost immediately. She was past hunger, past fear … past everything.
“This isn’t right, not right,” he muttered, scooped the cards up and placed them down again, then repeated that four times before saying. “No death here … no death for her. Not right.”
No death for her.
It hadn’t comforted her in the least.
He looked up at her again, his lip curled into a snarl. “No death, just trouble.”
She stopped for a second, didn’t tell Zane what happened next, didn’t want to hear herself tell that part out loud, when he’d grabbed her off the chair and hurt her. Because in her mind, she’d gotten off damned easy. “That’s when he hurt Erin—killed her—because he didn’t like my fortune. And then I knew, when he started hurting her, the other girl, who’d been there longer than me, I knew I’d be next.”
She’d spoken so fast she was out of breath, but that didn’t stop her, the crescendo of the confession cascading until there was no way for her not to continue.
“And he hurt her so badly. She couldn’t run. She could barely crawl. There was no way we’d make it far. And he would do the same to me and then there was no chance at all for us, and so I ran. And I didn’t look back until I got to the small gas station two miles away.” Her breathing was riotous, the way it must have been then, fear and adrenaline racing together—except this time, she was able to say what she wanted to, because she was looking at Zane, and there was no judgment there. “He killed her as soon as he found out I’d left. And so, especially when my claustrophobia rears its head, I have to think about the fact that I lived because another girl died.”
The look on Zane’s face after she finished speaking said it all.
Zane had been watching the entire scene play out in Liv’s eyes, had watched her withdraw into herself as she told him the story. But now she was quiet, and he had to tell her she’d done the right thing. Because she had. “Liv, you were thinking—you were smart. Your plan was good.”
“It didn’t help the other girl, did it?”
“We save who we can. You didn’t escape unscathed.”
“No,” she said quietly. “I took some scars with me.”
She lifted her shirt and pointed, and he stared at the tattoo again, the dark swirls, the colors, and all he could see was a mix of colors and a pretty cool tattoo. “Come closer and I’ll show you.”
He did. She took his finge
r and traced it along one part, noting that he immediately felt the deep indent that wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
He looked up at her face as she traced it again, and she saw the realization bloom in his eyes. “It’s a letter. T.”
She nodded and moved his finger over a bit and traced a second letter with him. R.
The third, O.
“Jesus H. Christ.” His voice sounded hollow, his eyes dark with horror as he realized the word trouble had been carved into her. “He did this to you. That bastard. That’s what he did to you … what he was doing to Erin.”
She nodded. His free hand clenched into a fist, but she noted he didn’t move his other hand from her tattoo, simply placed his palm flat there as if he could magically make the scars beneath it disappear.
“There was no way to explain the scars,” she said. “Doctors kept saying, They’ll fade as you grow, but they didn’t. My mom wanted me to have a skin graft, like the plastic surgeon suggested, but I had to wait until I was older anyway. And I decided that I’d get this done instead to cover it. Not for me, because I know it’s there. I’d always know it’s there. It seemed to be so important to other people that I get rid of it. I thought this was a good compromise.”
“Your parents figured, out of sight, out of mind. And then you went and put it on display,” he said. But he saw why it was her mark of survival, what drove her.
“I never told my parents, the police or the psychiatrist what he said about me.”
“Why?”
“I told myself that it was because I didn’t want to believe what he said. But all along, I felt it … knew he was right. It wasn’t over. And if I close my eyes, I’m back in the cabin, tied to a chair, facing the table and watching his scarred hands work the tarot cards. Telling me that I wasn’t going to die now because I had more trouble coming for me in the future.”
“Liv—”
She didn’t stop, couldn’t, he guessed. “He told me other things too. Things that have come, true. I’ve lived my whole life trying to be about science and the logic behind it; I didn’t want to let his truth override that plan. And as much as I tried to tell myself he was wrong, that it was all hocus pocus bullshit, a way for him to justify his insane belief that he was killing because it was all in the cards, I could never shake the feeling that he was right. And so I armed myself. Prepared. And I was ready, did what I had to do. And now you want to drag me home and I’m not ready to go yet. I need to put this behind me, come to terms with it before I go back.”
Her tone was plaintive, her eyes glittered with various emotions, ranging from hate to fear, but most of all what came through clearly was that she wanted him to understand … and to leave her here.
Wasn’t that what he’d wanted all those years ago? No doubt. Still, he was grateful that no one left him behind.
“Come here.” He enveloped her in his arms, tightened them when the sobs came. “You need to let it go.”
“Are you able to do that, to let all the bad things go?” she asked, her face buried in his chest.
“I’m trying my damned best.”
“I fight and fight. And I’ll be damned if that’s not going to make a difference.” Her voice echoed fiercely in the night.
“Running isn’t the answer—you know that. You didn’t deserve what DMH did to you. This isn’t a punishment because you escaped, because you think you didn’t run fast enough. You have to know that.”
She wasn’t sure what she knew anymore. The edges of her life had blurred, until all she wanted to do was erase the memories and start over someplace new, where no one knew anything about her.
Make up for the pain she’d caused.
“You’ve made up for enough.” His voice was gentle, but it still startled her, because she hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “My past fucked me up too. Maybe together we can let it all go.”
Could they? “You know everything. And now you expect me to say, ‘All right,’ I’ll follow you to Freetown. And I’ve come farther with you than I’d promised myself I would—so much farther than I thought. But just because you know—”
“Doesn’t mean you’ll make things easy on me, right?” he finished. He didn’t give any indication as to whether he agreed or disagreed with what she’d said. Simply kept his eyes on hers, his expression neutral, and she was beginning to feel like a prisoner of war. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
That I could fall in love with you. That a part of me already has, and damn you for that.
But she didn’t have the courage to say any of it out loud, and so she said nothing, leaving their fragile peace somewhat intact for the time being.
Cael was drawing again. This time, it was Zane’s face, although it wasn’t a recent version. No, this one was aided by the memory of an eleven-year-old boy walking into the Scott house with the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder. On his face, a mix of fear and bravado, all mixed together into the sneer he’d given both Caleb and Dylan when Mom and Dad had introduced them.
This is your new brother—he’ll have his own room and you two will share. Enjoy!
God, that had sucked.
He stared down at the sketch now—Zane’s face in the photograph from Africa retained all that bravado, but none of the fear. It was still there, but the man never let it show. Couldn’t.
Shit.
Cael threw the pad aside, ran his hands through his hair and closed his eyes for a second.
He sketched whenever he felt out of control, not a feeling he enjoyed, especially when the fucking world was falling apart around his ears.
He’d been at the new safe house with Vivi for a little more than half an hour—they’d driven for three to get here and he’d made the executive decision to tell no one the location. He refused to let Vivi use the computers. Internet connections were spotty at best out here anyway but that had never been an issue before.
No, this was a family cabin, deep in the backwoods of North Carolina—off the grid and pretty much unused since his parents died, although someone had been keeping it up. If he had to guess, he’d lay bets that it was Zane.
Vivi had looked as though she was in a fog when they walked in. She sat down on the couch across from him, and the next time he looked up, she was asleep.
Too restless himself to sleep, he went to the kitchen to grab some food, even though he wasn’t all that hungry. In the middle of heating what Caleb was pretty sure would prove to be a crappy frozen dinner, Mace called.
“Give me some good news,” he told his teammate.
“We pulled some prints,” Mace said. “Compared them to the ones Kell and Reid ran first. The guys who broke in were wearing gloves—they left nothing new. There were another set of prints besides Vivienne’s, though. We didn’t get a hit on them, until I sent them to our friend at Homeland Security—he told me they belong to a guy named Ace.”
Caleb knew what his friend would say next, but prayed he wasn’t right.
“Ace is one of the major DMH players. And before you say anything else, you need to know we found the fingerprints in pretty intimate places—inside the fridge … on Vivi’s headboard. From the evidence, it looks like she was involved with one of the founding members of DMH.”
He wanted to punch the walls, but controlled that impulse. Instead, he forced a deep, calm breath. Took some more, and wondered what the hell Vivi had been involved in.
“You still think she’s innocent?” Mace asked in a voice that told Cael his teammate did not.
“Yes.”
“Cael …”
Mace hadn’t spent time with her. His natural distrust often clouded his instincts—and granted, in their line of work, sometimes that was for the best.
But not this time.
“Noah wants her turned over to the FBI. Now.”
“Then pretend you didn’t get in touch with me.”
“You’re going against a direct order, for some chick who might be involved with DMH? Jesus, Caleb, what the hell?
” Mace sighed when Cael didn’t answer. “You got any solid proof that she’s not in with them?”
“No.”
“I suggest you get some. Noah’s going to want it. And don’t let her back on the computers. She’s done.”
Cael was about to ask Mace when he’d started issuing direct orders, but before he could do so, Mace was asking about Zane.
“Beyond getting his picture taken by a DMH operative?” Cael couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice, but both he and Mace knew it was masking fear. And it took an awful lot to scare him these days.
Mace was silent for a few seconds and then, “Someone’s been in his apartment. Riffled through his shit—I can’t tell if they took anything or not. Most likely, they’re just looking to see if he’s left Africa yet. Want me to tell Noah we need to go in—now?”
“Dylan’s headed to him.”
“Dylan doesn’t have enough manpower.”
“Don’t underestimate him, Mace. He’s got contacts everywhere.”
“So does DMH. It would be a brilliant move for DMH to erase one of their own and let Vivienne infiltrate us to see what we know, to plant fake intel,” Mace said, voicing what Caleb had been reluctantly thinking.
Yet … “There was no guarantee we’d go after her.”
“Maybe they expected Homeland to get to her first?” Mace asked. “You still believe she’s not working for DMH? That she’s not a damned good actress?”
Cael didn’t regret a damned thing he’d done up until this point, knew that if you wanted to win it all, you needed to be prepared to risk it all. And when it came right down to it, he was the one who could get the truth from Vivi—and he would. “I’ll take care of this, Mace. Trust me on that.”
“With my life,” Mace said before hanging up.
Cael glanced toward the bedroom and wondered how much Vivi would spill to him now that she was tired and secluded. Wondered how much of a prick he’d have to be to see if she’d been telling him the truth all along.
Julia was in pain and Doc J was dealing with other people who’d come into the clinic that morning, and even though Rowan planned on leaving, there was no way she’d sit there and not make Julia as comfortable as possible.
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