Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
The next twenty minutes are a blur of pain. Keller works me over with methodical precision, targeting the spots that hurt worst, never quite breaking anything but coming close. He asks the same questions as Julia. I don’t answer. I don’t scream. At some point I start to float, my consciousness detaching from my body, watching from somewhere far away as this broken thing in a chair refuses to give them what they want.
When it finally stops, I’m barely conscious. Blood is pooling in my lap, dripping from my face onto my thighs. One eye is swollen completely shut. My ribs scream with every breath. I spit out a bloody molar.
I am nothing but pain.
Julia is at the door. I can hear her heels clicking, receding, and then stopping.
“This was just the introduction,” she says. “A taste of what’s to come. When I return, I’m bringing someone who’s much better at extracting information than Keller. Someone you know well.”
I lift my head, blinking through blood and swelling, and see her smile before the door slams and the lights go out.
And I’m alone in the dark, bleeding, broken, with nothing left but the promise I made in the van.
I’m going to kill you.
CHAPTER 43
VANGUARD
I carry Cal’s body to the roof of the hotel.
It’s the only place I can think of where no one will see us. The rain continues to fall, steam rising from vents, the skyline blurred with fog. I land on the gravel near the water tower and lay him down as gently as I can, like that matters now. Like anything I do matters.
His head is at the wrong angle. I can’t stop looking at it.
You did that. Your hands. Your choice.
I kneel beside him. He’s still warm. His eyes are open, staring at nothing, and I reach out to close them because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? That’s what they do in movies. Give the dead some dignity. I’ve never given any of the dead dignity before, but I should have. I should have.
My fingers are shaking and his eyes won’t stay shut.
“I’m sorry.” The words come out broken. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
He doesn’t answer, he’ll never answer, not me, not anyone. He’s dead because I killed him, and no amount of apology changes that. He came back to bring her earrings. Replacement comms. He was doing his job, being her friend, loving a woman who couldn’t love him back, and I snapped his neck like it was nothing.
Because Julia told me to.
No. That’s the coward’s answer and I know it. Julia sent the footage. Julia wound me up like a toy soldier. But I’m the one who flew to that hotel room. I’m the one who let jealousy chew through my insides until there was nothing left but teeth. I need to be held accountable.
This is what you are, Mia said.
Maybe she was right. Maybe this darkness isn’t programming at all. Maybe it’s just me—the thing I’ve been running from my whole life, the violence that felt good when I was a Green Beret, the cold satisfaction I felt in Red Hook when I killed those men.
Maybe they didn’t put the monster inside me.
Maybe they just took the leash off.
I stay with Cal for a long time. Long enough that his skin goes cold under my hand, and the fog starts to lift around the rooftops. I think about his parents—he must have at least one—who don’t know yet. I think about his friends, his colleagues, the life he had before he walked into that hotel room to help a woman he loved, and I’m making up a whole life story about him to fill in the blanks.
I think about Mia, having to watch her lover kill her old friend.
Then I call the only number I can think of—Danny. I tell him to bring the hover car and that I need help disposing of a body and he takes it all in stride because that’s what he does. He does it because it’s his job, but I like to think it’s because he’s my friend.
Maybe the only friend I have left.
The call comes three hours later.
I’m still in my penthouse, sitting in the dark, staring at my hands. Haven’t moved. Haven’t eaten. Haven’t done anything except replay those last seconds over and over—Cal’s eyes going wide, the crack of his vertebrae, the way his body dropped with so much finality. That dark, ravenous evil taking over me like a virus flooding my bloodstream.
My watch buzzes. Julia’s name on the screen.
I almost don’t answer. I want to rip the watch off and fling it off the balcony and fly somewhere far away, somewhere they can’t reach me. Iceland. Antarctica. The fucking moon.
But Mia is out there somewhere, hopefully having made it to her colleagues, hopefully having left the country by now.