by Snow, Nicole
But actually...
For me, it’ll be easier than snapping my fingers.
If the intel on the drive identifies their port of launch, and I triangulate Tim Rook’s movements with a little common sense itinerary mapping, perhaps gain access to a crumb or two of Coast Guard radar data...
Easy.
Galentron’s MIA Chief Technology Officer will be in my hands in no time.
Also at my mercy.
Leo squints at me, his brows furrowing. “Why are you still after this, lady? The Galentron pack are racking up prison sentences left and right. There’s nothing left. They even got Leland Durham. What’s in it for you?”
“I have my reasons. I’ve always had my reasons.” I cock my head with a smirk. “You boys just made the mistake of thinking you ever had the slightest clue what those reasons were.”
Gray looks at me skeptically over his glasses, his emerald-green eyes flashing. “Hardly. I’ve never made the mistake of assuming I understand a single thought in your head.” Then his eyes narrow. “Your entire aim with these games we’ve been playing for months...it was never to publicly expose Galentron, was it?”
I shrug, folding my arms over my chest. “Expose them, raze them to the ground in a cataclysm of fire and vengeance...meh, either accomplishes my ends.”
Leo snorts. “And what are those ends, Fuchsia? What the hell are you after now?”
“What’s mine,” I say simply, the resolve cold inside me.
I’ve said enough. That’s all they’re getting out of me.
Some things are too personal to expose to the light of day. Or to two small-town heroes who’ll go to their graves believing they were the biggest victims of Galentron’s ruthlessness.
They do surprise me, though.
I’m expecting more derision. More suspicion. More disgust.
I’ve given them zero reason to trust me, after all.
What little I’ve done for them has barely tipped the balance of the scales against what I’ve done to them.
What I don’t expect is the way they look at each other.
Or the way Gray—icy, cool Gray, the overeducated town veterinarian, who’s only so cold and withdrawn and mistrustful because I helped to make him that way—softens his voice as he takes a step closer to me.
“Do you need help?” he asks—so sincere.
He’s always so sincere with everything that matters to him, and always has been, even when he was wet behind the ears. Dr. Boy Scout. “We started this together, Fuchsia. If there’s something that needs to be finished with the company, we finish it together.”
Okay.
I don’t want to admit how...
How that makes my chest clench like I’m being wrapped up by a particularly huge, angry snake.
Together.
Do I even remember what it’s like to be together with anyone, even as comrades in arms?
I delay a second too long in answering.
Just long enough for the agreeable lidding of Leo’s strange violet-dark eyes, the warmth in them saying he gets it before I speak.
I sniff sharply, lifting my chin, turning away from them with a flick of my gloved fingers. “Nonsense. You’d only weigh me down. You have...people. Kids and wives and friends to care about now.”
I don’t know how to say what I really mean.
That I work alone, and that goes double for what’s coming.
I don’t know how to be any other way.
I don’t know what I’d do with them, if they tried to help me.
Probably get them killed on this insane, almost certain-to-fail quest of mine. Rook will be the easy part, but there’s no telling where he’ll lead me.
For once, I’m not just being a raging bitch for the sport of it.
It’s the greatest kindness I can manage to cut them out.
This time, leave them the hell out of my problems.
They have lives here in Heart’s Edge. Happy new lives in the brightness of the sun, in the warmth of human company.
Hell, Gray’s even started going soft on me. I suppose that doe-eyed little slip of a thing—Ember, of all the names—has done quite a number on him with their new baby.
With my back turned to them, I can’t help but smile, my throat tight.
Good.
It’s good something was able to sprout up from this ruin.
Whatever hope I ever had for a different life was already dead years ago.
Now, I just want the truth, served with a steamy and oh-so-satisfying side of vengeance.
I look up at the wreckage of the Paradise Hotel, two burnt beams leaning against each other to form a spire. It’s like some kind of strange, creepy church high over me, a house of worship for lost souls.
“Just stay out of trouble,” I tell them. “Both of you. That’s the best thing you can do to help me.”
“Not something we’ve ever been good at,” Leo says with a laugh. “We’ll try. But will you?”
Knitting my brows, I glance over my shoulder at them. “Will I...what?”
“Stay out of trouble,” he finishes quietly, watching me intently. “Whatever you’re after, is it worth it, Fuchsia?”
“Worth dying for.” My lip curls. An unfortunate slip of honesty, but I push past it quickly, smoothing my hair and tossing my head. “Just don’t assume I’m the one who’ll be dying.”
I walk away from them, then.
I have to.
I can’t let myself feel anything like affection for those overgrown idiots.
Feelings get me in trouble.
Feelings are what set me down this track.
And if I’m going to get what I want, there’s no alternative and no room whatsoever for softness.
I have to be as cold as ice and use every scrap of training and experience I have to pull this off.
But as I step away, balancing my heels in the loose dusty earth with experience born of practice, Gray’s voice drifts after me.
“Take care of yourself,” he mutters. “Please.”
I don’t stop.
I don’t look back.
I don’t answer.
But...
Yeah, I think. Yeah.
You too, Doc Sad Eyes.
All of you, please take care of yourselves.
And, if you can, if you just keep on keeping on the same way you’ve been since you made Heart’s Edge your world...
Take care of each other.
4
Pour Some Sugar on Me (Fuchsia)
I was right.
Finding Tim Rook is like taking candy from a baby.
There’s a certain level of paranoia that can make someone invincible. Prepared for every contingency, always with a backup plan, a way to cover their tracks and erase their presence in an instant until it’s like they never existed.
Then there’s a certain level of paranoia that makes someone hammer-on-the-head stupid.
The kind of dumb that leads a man to do things like keeping the black box recorder on his cruise-ship-sized yacht active. All because he’s terrified of drifting out to sea with no one able to rescue him if he gets lost.
Guess which kinda paranoid I am.
Now guess which kinda paranoid Tim Rook is.
And guess which IT guy didn’t even think about how easy EDR black boxes are to hack, especially the outdated kind they fit on boats like his.
Oops.
But I guess he feels safe. Because when I slipped up on the blind side of his enormous dick-waving yacht in a silent, fast-moving single-person motorboat, speeding across the Puget Sound just off the shore from a Seattle beach...
He had his lights up, making himself a beacon on the dark water, music playing loud enough to be heard for miles around.
Apparently, stupid buys a lot of gross overconfidence that leads to funny things like hiding in plain sight. Or maybe it’s just that Timmy’s captain went AWOL and decided he’d had enough of getting paid to hide a wanted fugitive.
Sur
e, these boats are so automated they practically maneuver themselves. But the ocean proper is a big, scary place for a man with zero experience on ships outside his pleasure cruises. Tim Rook decided to play it safe by staying close enough to still see civilization.
Make that safe-ish.
With no other boats in sight on the horizon and the shoreline a good twenty miles away, he didn’t have to worry about the nosy neighbors.
He did have to worry about me.
And as drunk as he was on the expensive champagne he’d apparently been mainlining since sunset, I didn’t even have to try to lay him out on his ass.
He’s a large man. Stocky, thick beer belly, barrel chest. A lazy, drunken bear.
I think the boat actually shakes when I slice the flat edge of my palm against his neck, striking a crucial nerve through layers of muscle and fat. It sends him toppling over with his eyes wide and his tongue lolling in confusion, red and wet and messy.
He starts to struggle up.
I never give him a fighting chance.
He just flops there on the floor of his luxury built-in personal movie theater cabin, thick whimpers in the back of his throat, his ankles kicking loudly against the seats on both sides of the aisle.
It’s a sad, pathetic sight that normally might give me a flicker of amusement, but today?
I’ve got no time and even less chill for his agony.
Snarling, I pin him in place with the four-inch stiletto heel of my black Louboutins.
Right over the hollow of his throat.
One hard stomp, and I puncture his windpipe and drive clean through to the floor.
What can I say? I like being efficient in my threats.
And this one doesn’t need a word.
Rook goes deathly still, his breath wheezing. His jowly cheeks go cherry-red, and he stares up at me with bulging eyes in a washed-out shade of shallow blue.
“I-is...is this...fuck!” He makes a choked sound.
Narrowing my eyes, I let my heel up just a tad.
“Spit it out, you little idiot,” I say.
“Is...is th-this some kind of uh...dominatrix thing?”
Bad, bad choice of words.
I almost spear my heel through his throat right then and there.
Shame I need him.
So I press down a little harder, enough for a satisfying ulp! sound before easing up a little.
“You know damned well who I am,” I bite off—and surreptitiously shake my hand out behind my back, from where I struck him. That bruised a little. Not that I’d let him notice. “And you know exactly what I can do to you, Rook.”
He splutters, sweat beading on his upper lip. “Jesus, fuck, I don’t know anything! I swear I don’t know anything about...anything!”
“And I wish I didn’t find that so easy to believe.” I hold in a sigh.
I also wish I was enjoying this more as I bend over and drill my gaze down into his eyes.
Any other day, I would’ve taken delight in making this man slobber and whimper at my feet, but some things are more important than a finely honed taste for sadism.
“Tell me, what do you think I’m here for?” I ask, very clearly and very precisely.
Because something grating pricks at my intuition.
Sometimes it’s better not to do the heavy lifting.
Sometimes you just need to give people enough rope to hang themselves.
Or ask just the right questions to let them talk themselves into a hole and give away far more than they ever intended.
“D-Durham!” he spits out instantly as my shift in weight puts that scary spike just a little deeper into soft, tender flesh. “You want to know where Durham is! I mean...don’t you?”
His voice goes small. I let one eyebrow go up.
On the long list of boring, desperate, pleading nonsense I expected, this is more interesting.
My lips thin. I look at him for several long seconds while he goes pale, eyes darting wildly side to side as he realizes something fun.
He just fucked up.
Hardcore.
“Hmmm. Curious choice of words. Last I checked, Leland Durham was locked up for life in a Supermax prison. Booked on so many charges he won’t wriggle out of them before the next millennium ends,” I say slowly.
That’s what I last saw on the news. You’d have to be living in a cave the last few months to miss Galentron’s dirty laundry hitting you in the face constantly. Every grown-up news rag and Sunday TV interview has barely touched anything else for months.
The evidence unleashed by the Bell sisters with Leo’s big, scarred helping hand, plus a little magic from yours truly, opened up a real can of worms, as the kids like to say.
The icing on the scandal cake was the grand CEO of Galentron himself going down on conspiracy and terrorism charges. Justice finally served for once in this fucked up system we live in.
Or so I thought.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being wrong.
And Rook’s eyeballs can’t bulge enough as he watches my calm, hell-frozen-over stare become hotter-than-hell’s-furnace psycho bitch mad.
“I...” His voice is just a murmur I don’t even have to silence.
“No. I am very, very interested in what you mean by where he is.”
Rook swallows. With the way I have his chin trapped, it moves like a wattle. “I, uh...I don’t...I didn’t realize he’d been sentenced. That’s all. I didn’t know he was already in jai—URP!”
Imbecile.
This time, I make sure it hurts.
I stomp down just hard enough to make him gag. If I’m not careful, I’ll render him unable to talk with an impromptu field tracheotomy, but I jab that stiletto in just enough for a nice bruise and a groaning heave of his chest.
I need to calm the hell down.
Fortunately, I keep something special around for these tricky cases. My little talisman that always keeps me focused. I reach into my pocket and feel the familiar crinkle of a thin wrapper.
“Like I said,” I purr, silky-sweet, pulling out a smile just for him and showing every last one of my teeth, then pinching the ball of sweet pink candy between my teeth. “You know who I am. And you know what I can do to you. That also means you know I hate liars.”
Except myself, of course. There’s an important distinction.
I know how to lie my little heart out with charm.
Plus, I always have a good reason.
Any good femme fatale does, especially when she’s trapped behind enemy lines with a slob who just said too much.
Then again, I think Rook might just be more afraid of Durham than he is of me. The poor boy actually stays silent save for his snuffling, whining breaths. His eyes snap around the room, looking for a miracle, an escape.
Nope.
Not today.
There’s nowhere to go but hell.
It’s just us here and the steady slap of the waves on the hull, and somewhere distant, the cry of a few night birds hunting.
Even if I threw him overboard, I doubt he’d make it swimming the twenty or so nautical miles back to shore. Not in his shape.
But I step back, lifting my heel off his throat, letting him breathe. He hisses out a relieved sigh, his hands clenching and unclenching.
I lean back on one heel.
Let him get comfortable and think the worst might be over.
Then I whirl around in a sharp, downward-driving roundhouse kick that catches him square in the side of the head with the toe of my pumps. My foot snaps to the side so hard there’s a hollow thunk of impact that echoes as his skull goes bouncing off his own shoulder.
Howling in pain, letting out a sobbing sound, he curls up on his side in the fetal position, clutching his brow.
I sink down into a crouch next to his head, leaning down, and whispering in his ear.
“Now, with that out of the way,” I breathe. “I can make it hurt much more and stain this pretty carpet much redder...or you can be a good boy. Te
ll me what you meant about Durham and where he is.”
Still this stubborn piece of shit protests, hacking out sounds as he rubs at his head. “I can’t! I...I can’t, he’ll—”
My patience is threadbare.
God, the audacity of some people.
This isn’t even what I came here for.
Snaring my fingers into Rook’s greasy brown hair, I yank his head back, forcing him to look into my eyes, into my sweet-as-sugar smile made sweeter by that fuchsia ball of sweetness clasped in my teeth.
“Listen. You won’t live to find out what he might do to you if you don’t stop testing my patience. Let’s try this again, one more time, with feeling...” I shake his head hard, snapping it on his neck, to punctuate my next words. “Where. Is. Leland. Durham?”
“H-here!” he yelps, kicking his legs like a fussy baby. “He’s in Seattle! He’s...he’s leaving soon. Flying out from the airfield at Bellingham tomorrow. I don’t know where!”
Oh, I have a few ideas.
Places where no foreign government will ever agree to extradite a fugitive to the U.S. Places where a wanted billionaire can molder in lavish comfort while everybody at home believes he’s locked up or dead.
Working my jaw, I spit out, “If Durham’s free...who’s in that jail cell, then?”
“It’s a double. A body double...you know, like Saddam Hussein had?” Rook sniffles, his nose bubbling. “Paid the guy real well—I even had to route a private wire transfer without a bank, was crazy hard getting that much money to his family without a trace. But he gave it all up so his kids could live good.”
Whatever. I don’t want to hear some sentimental story about a man who sold his soul to Galentron for any reason.
Even if part of me knows exactly how he feels.
Goddammit.
This isn’t my mission. This isn’t why I’m here.
And I almost wish I didn’t know this now.
Let the FBI handle fucking Durham. I have more important things to do than run around with an urge to slice off his balls. I don’t need the tempting satisfaction, even if it would feel pretty damned good.
Hey, I might even be nice and call in an anonymous tip to help the Feds out.