Chapter 30
Olena dragged me by the arm to the same back door I’d planned to use.
Her claw-like grip dug into my flesh the same as it had done when I was a kid.
It was as if nothing had changed. The full-circle moment had become even fuller.
When Plans A and B weren’t options, I’d come up with Plan C, but I had no Plan D.
This was never supposed to happen, but I felt instantly foolish for not anticipating it.
“Let go of me!” I cried and struggled against her grip. She was inhumanly strong for someone so birdlike and the shock of seeing her again erased every move I’d ever learned to defend myself from my mind.
She whipped around and slammed me against the hallway wall.
Her face moved inches from mine. Close enough I could smell the sour champagne on her breath.
She looked the same as she did in my nightmares, only older and hardened.
Her eyes still blazed like blue fire. Her beaklike nose had a sharp hook in it now, surely thanks to the elbow I’d thrown in her face years ago.
“You stole from me, you little bitch. That diamond was mine to sell, and you took it and ruined everything. I spent ten years in prison because of you, and if you think this is going to end any other way than with you at the bottom of the bay and that diamond in my hand, you are wrong.” She jerked me hard with another shove into the wall.
My head banged off the concrete and sent my vision sparkling with stars.
“I can’t trust anyone to do this job right, so here I am doing it myself. Give it to me.”
I was still blinking stars, trying to recover.
“Give it to me!” she shouted in a shrill cry, which rang through the empty hallway.
Her voice and her grip and the cruel snarl of her mouth turned me into a frightened teenager. It was suddenly the worst night of my life all over again. I could do nothing but tremble.
“Oh for God’s sake, you sniveling little brat,” she spat and began roughly patting my body, looking for the diamond.
Her cold hand smashed into my chest, my hips, my stomach.
Finally, she crudely shoved her hand down my dress and yanked the diamond from my bra.
“Yes, there you are.” She gazed at the jewel with pure reverence.
I could have taken the opportunity to punch her in the stomach and make a run for it, but I was still too stunned, reeling in my age-old trauma, to move.
She tucked the diamond into her own gown and yanked me away from the wall.
I couldn’t help but stumble after her. “Let’s go.
I need to get rid of you once and for all.
” She pushed open the hallway door to a dark parking lot where a sleek car with tinted windows waited.
“Get in,” she said and shoved me at the car’s back door.
I obeyed, still nearly frozen with fear. I climbed into the leather back seat, which smelled like expensive perfume and cigarettes. A bulky figure sat behind the wheel, and I knew who it was without even needing to look.
“Hello, princess. Nice to see you again,” the ghost from that night purred.
I swallowed the terrified lump in my throat and fully realized, for the first time, I was going to die tonight.
“Go,” Olena commanded after she climbed in next to me and slammed the door.
The ghost put the car in drive and flipped around to exit the parking lot.
He kept stealing glances at me in the rearview mirror.
I could only see his eyes and thick brow, the scar still angry and puckered, but I could tell he was smiling.
“What, no prince to save our princess tonight?” he taunted.
The reference to Bray made my heart ache. At least I’d gotten a goodbye kiss.
Olena hissed something angry at him in another language, and he stopped smiling.
We drove in silence down Highway 101 for several miles. I could only imagine where they were taking me, what dark shadowy shoreline they planned to dump my body on. Olena would probably end me with a gunshot to the back of the head—or maybe the face, with how much she hated me.
“You were hard to find, you know,” she said as we turned east onto one of the many bridges crisscrossing the bay.
Maybe they planned to shove me out at the highest point and save a bullet.
“I’ve been looking for you for ten years.
No one knew where you were, not even your father.
” She turned to me with a cruel bend in her lip.
“And I believed him because a man like that is always thinking of himself. If he had anything to bargain, he would have used it.”
The painful reminder stabbed at me like a knife. Not that I needed it, but it was further confirmation I couldn’t trust my father. Olena had given him the chance to give me up, and he hadn’t, but only because he couldn’t. They would have found me years ago if he’d known where I was.
Olena kept sneering at me like twisting the mean knife was bringing her great pleasure.
“That man hiding you, he did a good job,” she said.
“It was unfortunate we had to kill him.” She suddenly leaned in, and I leaned back.
The car’s window pressed into my bare shoulder; the door handle dug into my arm.
I half expected her to try and strangle me again, but instead, she spoke softly but with an edge of certainty.
“A man like that, one willing to die to protect, that is a father. Why he cared about you so much, I do not know. But you were lucky to have him.”
The mention of Wallace made my already aching heart crack.
I was mad at him for lying to me, but her reminder he’d died for me—and hearing it in such juxtaposition to my real father—put the truth in even sharper perspective.
Wallace was right: We had done good together, despite all the struggle it put me through, and I couldn’t say I regretted it.
Something snapped inside me.
I was not going to die tonight. Not after everything. The frightened teenager vanished, and the woman I’d become—the fighter, the survivor—woke up.
I glanced out the window over Olena’s shoulder, not letting on I was scrabbling together a plan in my head. We were out over the water now. A black void waited below us, spotted only by the occasional freighter slowly passing like an enormous, lit-up whale. The East Bay dimly shone in the distance.
“How did you find him?” I casually asked as I discreetly slid my hand down to unbuckle my left shoe.
Olena smugly shrugged and sat back against her seat, facing forward once more.
“That man in Florida you targeted, the one selling rare animals, he ran in a circle I knew. Word got to me a pretty young woman matching your description turned him in to the authorities, and that woman had been seen meeting with an older man. It took months to track you down after that, but it was the first trail in years.”
Megan Thorpe. That was my identity on that Florida case.
It was the last one before I got transferred to New York for the insider trading case as Vivian.
Just thinking of the name brought back the feel of the humidity, the smell of swampy wetlands.
I’d played the part of a conservationist with one hand in the black-market trade for rare birds, fish, reptiles.
Endangered species being shipped around as trophies.
The overlap with Olena’s trafficking operation made sense.
I’d bet a few tigers had passed through her keep on their way to being illegally caged in someone’s home.
“Everette Freeman,” I said as I slipped my foot out of my unbuckled shoe. Bless Melanie for lending me such sharp heels.
Olena nodded at the Florida man’s name. “His arrest was actually good for my business. Less competition,” she said with a snide wink.
“So you kept operating, even from prison,” I said, and pressed the sole of my shoe into my palm.
Olena was too busy smugly recounting her machinations to notice what I was doing beneath the fluff of my skirt.
It didn’t take a genius to know she was telling me everything because she planned to kill me.
“Where I could,” she said sourly, as if she didn’t like the reminder of prison. “I have many hands doing my work, but they cannot fully function without me, the brain.”
I had a solid grip on my shoe now, the heel pointed outward like a little couture spear.
I knew it was of the highest quality because it belonged to Melanie Browning.
I hoped she would forgive me for getting blood on her Jimmy Choo.
“You must be happy to be back, then,” I said and shifted in my seat.
Olena had taken to gazing out her window and didn’t see me reach for my seat belt and fasten it. The click drew her attention.
She smiled and a laugh bounced her shoulders. “You think a safety belt is going to help you tonight, princess?”
I calculated the likely outcome of the next sixty seconds and decided it was my best shot. I looked Olena square in the eye and spoke with a determined resolve. “Yeah. I do.”
She flinched when I suddenly moved my shoe to my right hand, but she wasn’t my target. I sat forward and jammed the sharp heel into the ghost’s meaty neck. I shoved as hard as I could, feeling it pierce flesh and twist through tendons until a spurt of blood splattered the windshield.