Chapter Thirteen
Adriana
My heart’s in my throat, pulsing like it wants to tear through the skin and disappear into the woods.
I lied back there. I lied to the smug, horny doctor, and I lied to the piece of shit who killed my sister — Ricky fucking DeMarco.
With that lie, I’ve disgraced my dead sister — her plaintive, outraged screams still echo in my ears over that fucking lie — and I’ve just thrown everything that I’ve dedicated myself to, everything I’ve sacrificed in this quest for revenge, like my job, my mental health, my friends, into the fucking dumpster.
I’m lying to myself, too. Lying if I think I can go through with your plan.
Lying if I think I can spend more time with Ricky and want to kill him at the end of this.
Even now, I feel my resolve slipping. And that time back in the car, where he needled that dickish doctor, with that heart-rending grin on his face, I could feel myself slipping.
Every second that passes with him, whether he’s saving his life, putting his cock in my face, or just fucking smiling, he wears me down as relentlessly as the ocean against the coastline.
It doesn’t matter how strong I am; it doesn’t matter what I fear that the more time I spend with him, the less I’ll want to kill him.
Am I just going to repeat my sister’s mistakes? To ignore every warning of my heart and mind and let myself give in to Ricky’s charms?
No.
I can’t stand here. Can’t spend another second in his fucking presence.
I have to get away. Have to get away from where my lie hangs in the air like a grim reminder of my failure.
Have to get away from that man who stands watching me, a living, breathing reminder of all the death and pain my sister and I have suffered, looming over there like the grinning reaper himself.
That’s what he is. The fucking Reaper.
But I won’t let him take me.
I storm into the cafe, slamming the door behind me so loud that all the truckers, even the bleary-eyed one in the corner who’s clearly on the comedown from too much illegal stimulants — meth, probably — looks up at me, startled.
“I want your least shitty whiskey right fucking now,” I yell out to no one in particular before hurling myself into a booth and praying that my alcohol gets here before Ricky DeMarco — no, I can’t call him that, I can’t fucking humanize that monster — gets here.
The door opens. That murderous bastard enters, and my whiskey — delivered by a server who looks so beaten down by life that it’s a miracle he’s here and not in the center of the earth — barely beats him to the table. I down it in a gulp, and bark at the server’s back as he scurries away. “Another.”
“This isn’t the time to get drunk,” he says.
“Such sage advice from the Reaper himself.”
“Who? What the hell are you talking about?”
The whiskey arrives, this time in a soda glass filled halfway. I make a note to leave a nice tip for the server.
“You. It’s you. You took my sister from me. She’s dead because she met the fucking Reaper.” My words would sound a lot more convincing if I weren’t crying and dribbling cheap whiskey out of the corner of my mouth like some intoxicated toddler.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m just reminding myself of the truth, that’s all.”
More like desperately trying to convince myself of what I need to believe. What I have to believe to keep my entire world from crumbling.
Even if my heart and mind both tell me otherwise.
And where does that leave me? What have I done with my life over a lie?
Sure, Ricky ‘Reaper’ DeMarco still maintains that he’s the one who killed Vanessa. That she’s dead because of him. But I have ears, I have eyes, I have a heart, I have a functioning, semi-intoxicated mind, and all of them have witnessed enough to make me question his story.
My hand is shaking, and it’s only partly because this whiskey — of which I’m now on my third glass, thanks to the attentive server — kicks like a horse and tastes like horseshit smells on a hot August day.
“You need to get ahold of yourself. We’ve got to figure out how to take care of Ruslan Volkov and get him off your back so you can do what you came here to do,” Ricky ‘Reaper’ DeMarco says.
I finish the whiskey and put the glass face down on the table.
I’m sick of the doubt, I’m sick of wondering if I’ve done the right thing, I’m sick of waiting.
“Fuck that.”
“What?”
“Fuck dealing with the Russians.”
“I will not let you go the rest of your life with a pack of fucking Bratva after you.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m drunk, I’m angry, and I’ve got a date with the fucking Reaper.”
“Adriana — ”
“That’s you, by the way. You’re the fucking Reaper who took my sister from me. I’m ready to do this now. I don’t give a fuck about the Russians. Bring them on. I’m tired of doubting, waiting, wondering. I just want this over with.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
My voice thunders through the cafe. “I know what I’m saying. I want to fucking kill you right now.”
No one turns their head. Not a single trucker looks up from his drink.
Maybe I’m not the first person to scream about murder in this truck stop cafe.
Or maybe even they know that there’s a large part of me that’s screaming just as loudly about how I don’t have the guts to kill the son of a bitch who murdered my sister.
Ricky ‘Reaper’ DeMarco takes too long to answer. I spit at him and then stand up, gesturing for him to follow.
“Come on, you piece of shit. Let’s take a walk.”
He stands, eyes narrowed, his trademark grin nothing more than a grim set line.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Ever since Vanessa died, this is the only thing I’ve ever been sure of. I fucking hate you. I fucking hate your charming, crooked smile, your warm voice, that you are brave and saved my life. Fuck it all. I want to kill you.”
He grunts, nods, then reaches into the pocket of his skinny jeans, and pulls out a couple of twenties and throws them on the table. “Fine. Let me get the tab.”
I take the money and hand it back to him. “No. You’re not buying me a fucking drink before I kill you. That’s too close a date. Take it back.” I turn and yell to the server. “How much do I owe you for the whiskey?”
His reply comes nonchalantly. Almost tired. “Four bucks.”
“Four bucks for three whiskeys?”
“You heard me.”
I heard him. But that doesn’t mean I understand. I’d master calculus before I understand how three large glasses of whiskey can cost less than a cup of coffee.
“How the hell is it so cheap?”
Something between a mix of pity and regret crosses his face. His voice drops, low, mournful, like a soldier caught in memories of compatriots dead and gone, of the horrors of war necessary to win. “You don’t want to know.”
Time seems to freeze, and then my stomach rumbles like two fault lines experiencing a contentious divorce. I have to move. Grimacing, I put down a five and then head for the door. “Come on, Reaper. We’re taking a walk in the woods.”
He follows, walking as calmly as if I asked him to go to the corner store and get a gallon of milk.
The parking lot gives way to forest, and a rough deer track takes us deeper into the woods.
The trees around us — oaks, mostly — give the air a rich, earthy, vanilla scent.
Leaves and twigs crackle underfoot as we tread deeper into the forest.
“This isn’t the choice I would make, but maybe it’s the right one,” Reaper says behind me, his voice sharp in the quiet forest. “It’s been a long time coming. Hell, it isn’t really my fucking choice, either, is it? It’s yours. It was your sister who died.”
“It was.” A bird caws — a raven, and I nearly stumble over an outstretched root. I catch myself, but don’t fail to notice Reaper take a quick half-step toward me, ready to catch me should I fall. “Don’t.”
“Whatever you say.”
I want to hit him for that. He’s infuriatingly nonchalant, and it burns my heart to think that, in a way, I’m giving him what he wants by doing this now.
I’m rewarding him for killing my sister by doing the thing that he’s been too much of a coward to do.
My revenge is going to have the cost of giving my sister’s killer his last wish.
But I can’t deny that I need to do this now.
Because the war against everything else I feel for Reaper besides the primal hate is a war that I’m afraid I can’t win. And if he did what I want to believe he did, how can I live knowing that I fell in love with my sister’s killer?
So I have to do this. I have to hurt him, to make him angry, to break through that facade of remorse and see the monster that I know lurks beneath his skin, the monster who sold drugs, ensnared my little sister, and took her life.
I want to see it, so maybe this will be easier for me.
So I won’t understand how Vanessa could so easily fall for this man. So maybe I won’t feel echoes of those same feelings in the hollow space between my ribs where once my heart beat until it was snuffed out by the son of a bitch walking beside me.
“Tell me about her.” It isn’t a question.
In my time in law enforcement, I became an expert in using what I called my ‘command and control’ voice.
Harsh, directed, forceful, a reminder that — if you fuck with me — I’ll hit you back harder than you’ve ever imagined, because as a woman throwing herself into the most dangerous assignments, dealing with Triads, with street gangs, with drug-pushers from the Dominican Republic, backwoods militias, and human traffickers from the Chicago suburbs, and dealing with coworkers that suckled machismo from their mother’s breasts, every day in the career that I loved was a fight not just for survival, or justice, but to be seen as a human being.
My voice hits Reaper, and he freezes in his tracks, blinks, and shakes his head like I’ve just slapped him. “What?”
“Vanessa. Tell me about her. Everything you remember. Everything about her last days.”
“Why?”
“You took her from me. I want a piece of her back.”