Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
LUKA
She’s sleeping when I wake up, phone near her hand as if she was clutching it until the last moment of drifting off. Her delicate features are serene, her hair in a messy halo around the pillow.
Memories of her caring for me flood back. The way she felt. Her hand on my cheek.
What the fuck.
Apparently, the bullet that grazed my skull took out a chunk of my senses because what was I thinking, letting her stay?
I look around the bed and see she’s been writing something on a pad of hotel paper. Taking notes?
I lean over and squint at the little scribbles—a few lines about broom making and a list entitled “fireside/hearth implements” followed by “andirons,” “tongs,” “trivet,” “cauldron,” and “spits.”
Brooms and hearths? What is this, Halloween shit?
I should wake her up and throw her out, but I guess she did stay up playing nursemaid all night, not that I needed it.
And who knows, maybe I’ll fuck her again. I tuck her in and leave.
I take a shower, fix myself coffee, and call Orton.
He’s over in a flash with an update on Storm. Somebody drugged him, but he’ll be fine in a day or two.
“Also? Aleksio got back to me. He appreciated the offer to assist and is convinced Lazarus did the Poconos killing and that he’s still alive. And he wants to send Razvan after him.”
“Razvan Bektashi?”
Orton nods.
Razvan is a notorious Albanian hitter who moves unseen in the darkness like the gears in a clock, a lethal hunter who can change his appearance so effectively that nobody knows what he actually looks like.
He’s picky about his jobs, too. He would’ve never taken the Tucumayo job, for example.
He would never go after a young girl like that.
But Lazarus? Everybody wants Lazarus dead.
“Razvan Bektashi,” I say, impressed.
“That’s where we come in. Razvan wants a face-to-face with Aleksio somewhere neutral, ideally in New York, being that Lazarus’s last known location was upstate. Aleksio thought you could facilitate.”
I nod. That I can do.
Sounds come from the room. She’s stirring awake. We switch to Latin, a language we were forced to learn in Tucumayo.
“Debemus id hic facere,” I say. We should do it here .
We love the Milaga Hotel for meetings. So many exits, so many hideaways. It’s a fucking rabbit warren.
I send him back to his room with instructions to work it out with Aleksio, and then I order up a pastry cart.
Not five minutes later, he’s back with the meeting arranged.
He shares the plan in Latin: They’ll secure the perfect room, provide detailed maps showing both official and hidden exits. Five of our men will be positioned discreetly, while Aleksio will bring his own security—including his brothers.
Will Razvan send people to do scouting? There’s simply no way to know. There’s very little known about the man aside from his eerie competence and deep reverence for Albanian customs. Like Orton, he’s the type to throw a match after every kill. Probably big on the prophecies, too.
“It’s good that we are doing this,” Orton says.
“ Pueri a mortuis revocati ,” I say. Everyone needs a friend. Especially boys back from the dead.
Orton leaves without a word. The door closes behind him.
She comes out, finally.
The sight of her wearing my shirt... fuck.
My chest tightens as animal instinct floods my veins.
I want to whisk her off her feet and carry her back to bed.
Shut out the world so that it’s just the two of us.
We’d fuck and feast and fuck some more. Maybe later do crossword puzzles or something stupid like that.
What. The. Fuck.
Just the concussion talking.
“Time to go,” I say.
She doesn’t listen, of course. She’s eyeing my face, all concerned. I know what she sees—fat lip, big, angry bruise on my cheekbone, goose egg on my head.
I point at the door.
“But your face—let me put some salve?—”
“Nope.”
“It’s on the bedside table. It’ll help reduce the swelling.”
I stalk right up to her. “You may think because you played nursemaid and saw some scars that we have some sort of connection. But we don’t have a connection; we have a transaction.”
Hurt flashes in her eyes, but she doesn’t make a move because it takes more than this for a girl like Edie to back off.
“You gonna make me throw you out in nothing but my shirt?”
“Fine.” She puts her clothes back on and comes out all ready to go, but she hesitates, wringing her purse straps. Of course.
“What?” I demand.
“I need to know. Whoever did that to you... to your back and all that. Were they ever held accountable? Did they answer for what they did?”
The scars.
“What do you care?”
“What do I care?” She looks incredulous. “Because of what they did to you, that’s what. That happened when you were young. Was it at the whatever school?”
“Look, Edie, shitty things happen all the time. A lot of really shitty things are happening to a lot of people this very second. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
“But this shitty thing happened to you ,” she says. “It happened to you when you were young, and it’s not okay.”
“Go.” I point at the door, voice hard.
“No,” she says, defiant. “I need to know if they ever answered for what they did to you. If it’s some institution still operating, they need to be shut down. If it was a person...” Her eyes flash with conviction. “They should pay.”
“And you’d be the one to hold them accountable?” I ask, incredulous.
“I would.”
“How exactly would you manage that?”
“I’d find a way.” Her voice drops, fierce and determined. “I’d make them pay. Don’t think I wouldn’t.”
My pulse races. She wants to avenge me ?
Something deep inside me turns upside down, the ground shifting beneath my feet.
I let her touch me in that bed, but it was nothing compared to how she’s reaching into me now.
Suddenly I need her back in my bed with an urgency that stuns me—a hunger almost stronger than the vengeance I’ve sworn.
I shake myself out of it.
I don’t do relationships. This is a transaction. It can never be more.
“If you must know,” I say casually, “they did, in fact, answer for what they did. You’re right that I was a kid. I was sent to a school for bad kids down in the jungles of Tucumayo. Very old-fashioned and Draconian ideas of things. All iron rods and fire and brimstone. You know Tucumayo?”
She shakes her head, expression unreadable.
“It’s a tiny jungle principality between Suriname and Brazil, and there’s a notorious reformatory there. Bad kids were sent there from both North and South America, and there were a dozen adults in charge. I slaughtered them all—the adults, that is. Not the kids.”
She straightens. “Excuse me?”
“Well, I slaughtered most of the adults, let’s say.”
Her eyes widen—in horror, probably.
Good.
“At one point, I let Orton and a few of the other kids out of their rooms, and they worked out some of their own fury on the adults. It was quite the bloody scene.” I turn to the breakfast cart and select a scone, but really, I’m back there, standing over Sara’s lifeless body just hours before I went wild with some berserker force.
I had nothing to lose, and all the sadistic, grim-faced schoolmasters who I’d naturally blamed for her death didn’t stand a chance.
Silence. I’m sure she’s been rendered speechless by my little report. Well, sometimes you need to bring out the big guns.
I break the pastry open. “Needless to say, if you repeat any of this to anybody, you’ll get a firsthand demonstration.”
“Did you find a gun or something?” she asks.
“I had a bag of rocks at the end of the rope and a whole lot of fury. A few I killed with torches that I ripped from the walls. A bit of accelerant, and I burned them alive. You never heard such yells.”
I concentrate on my scone. I can feel her vibrating with intensity. I always feel her.
“The head schoolmaster I killed with my bare hands. I ripped his windpipe from his neck while I looked him in the eyes. It takes a good deal of finger strength to grab a man’s windpipe through his throat, but I was seventeen, and I’d done my fair share of finger pushups.
” I turn and force a smile. “A horrific and painful way to die, but it’s not an injury you come back from, let’s just say. ”
She’s watching me thoughtfully. No revulsion. No fear. She simply crosses her arms. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah. Because if you hadn’t done it, I’d want to go down there and make them answer for it myself.” Her voice goes soft. “For what they did to you.”
Something unwinds in my chest.
Because what the fuck? She... approves? What part of this is she not understanding?
I lower my voice. “Do you know what it feels like to take a man’s life with your bare hands? To feel their blood run over your hands while the light goes out of their eyes?”
“N-no.”
“It feels fucking amazing.”
Edie sharpens her gaze.
It’s the revenge that feels amazing, not the actual killing, but this is no time to split hairs. “I once gouged a man’s eyes out with my thumbs. He was still alive while I did it. He was alive and fighting for his life?—”
“Okay, okay, okay, I get it.”
“Get what?”
“Is this a thing where you’re trying to get me to be disgusted and horrified with you? You want the scorn back, is that it? Your precious scorn?”
“It would be a lot better than maudlin Mother Teresa.”
“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she says. “God forbid anybody gives a hoot about you. Wanna know what I think?”
“A hoot ?”
“I think scorn is your comfort zone. You’re the badass who nobody gets to care about. Case closed.”
“This is what you think? ”
“Yes. And you killed all those people, but here you are telling me all the graphic and bloody details because I dared to have some freaking compassion for you. The eyes, the yells. I think it’s a smokescreen you’re putting up so that I can’t see the brokenhearted kid who deserved better.”
I bark out a laugh that I’m not at all feeling. “Okay, then. Well, it’s a good thing I don’t pay you to think, isn’t it? What do I pay you for?”
She frowns.
It’s a low blow, but she’s not in Kansas anymore. She needs to see that and that she’s not dealing with some brokenhearted kid, either.
This is not a relationship.
“Do you remember what I pay you for, Edie?”
She narrows her eyes and there it is. The scorn. And I do like it. She’s very fuckable when she’s got that scorn going.
“Do you remember?” I repeat.
“You pay me for my body, but you have no say over my thoughts and emotions.”
“Your thoughts and emotions.” I snort. “Not a fan.”
She glares. The scorn’s really rolling now.
I hold out a hand. “Let’s have that phone.”
She stiffens. She understands what this means—that phone is our only line of communication.
“You were a good lay, but it’s gone on too long.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Hand it over.”
She hesitates, then she pulls the phone from her bag and throws it onto the couch.
“That works,” I say. “You’re officially free to go to Vegas now.”
“Excellent,” she says.
“Just keep quiet.”
“Unlike some people, I’m good for my word.” She spins on her heel and leaves, shutting the door behind her .
I have the impulse to go after her and demand to know what she means by “unlike some people.” Demand she give one example where I wasn’t good for my word, something I happen to pride myself on.
I have my hand on the knob when I finally stop myself.
Because what the fuck? Why do I care?
This is not a relationship. It’s a transaction, and that transaction is over.