Chapter 7 Kat #2
It is 8:03 p.m. right now. I don’t get an immediate answer, so I let her sit with it. I get ready, pack my bag, and prepare the apartment by pouring alcohol and everything flammable over the furniture in the small apartment.
Then I take a candle, tie several alcohol-soaked cotton strings around it roughly halfway, and calculate the burn time to match the two hours I need to finish my work. I knew the Ella personality of knitting and a cozy home would come in handy at some point.
I fix the ends of the strings at several points in the room, one leading to the bathroom, so that everything will incinerate perfectly the moment the candle burns down.
I hide a small knife, a clip, and some wire in my sleeve and pants; the rest goes into the backpack. If it comes to it, I’ll kill her with my hands, but I’d rather not.
Bye, Ella, I think as I lit the candle and close the door.
I leave with my backpack, which I will deposit at Penn Station. I chose Mojo’s for a reason: it’s central, and there are many people to blend in. I know the spots without surveillance, and it offers a quick getaway if needed.
After all those years of hunting assholes, my body knows what’s going to happen before it does. It‘ll be a close call, I can feel it already, but I have to improvise.
I feel unprepared because I had to act on such short notice, and two people are still following me. Meaning, I need to be very tricky and get lost in the crowd to get my stuff into a box without them noticing. Also, Zeus might be combing through the surveillance systems to keep track of me.
That program really is the pest.
As the subway reaches Penn Station, I get wet hands, which is not good.
My heart pounds faster because I know how difficult it’ll be, especially without mindful rehearsal and thorough preparation.
I am very confident that I can fool the human eye; it is all about perception, but what makes me nervous is Zeus.
I know only what I found in Sutton’s data about Zeus, everything that had been kept quiet from the public. I don’t know whether it is already implemented, whether it works as intended, or what the recognition software’s capabilities are. So I expect the worst.
Meaning, I need to evade digital detection while keeping the Ella identity and losing the human tail.
That’ll be a fun night.
I get into Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station and buy a sandwich, when I get an idea. I go to the in-person counter and buy a ticket for the latest Amtrak at 11:58 p.m., leaving for Philly, which lets me check my luggage with Amtrak.
I can therefore act in plain sight because I’ll visit a friend there. Not I, but Ella. I take Ella’s phone and text a contact that I’ve got the ticket. It runs into the dead anyway, because I set up fake friends with every personality I create.
Improvising it is.
I relax slightly when I have my backpack stored with Amtrak and get out of Moynihan Train Hall and walk over to Mojo’s ten minutes before I told Lilian I’d be there. I chose a table where I can see what is happening outside and also get away quickly.
Then I wait.
I can hear my heartbeat in my ear as I get more nervous by the minute. Whatever is going on with me, I haven’t been this nervous since the first job I did, and I’ve been on this for twelve years now. Twelve years of becoming the cold-blooded killer I needed to be for my revenge.
I glance at my watch, and the handle jumps to 10:03, exactly two hours later.
A black SUV comes to a halt in front of the bar, and I bite my lips.
I played her.
I made her bow.
Just the thought gives me a thrill.
A flutter in my chest.
Two of Lilian’s bodyguards check the surroundings and open the door for her.
She wears another female suit, an ascot, a silken white shirt, and high-waist suit pants.
High heels. Louboutins. Every day she combines the same set of clothes—it tells me how her wardrobe looks and what’s behind it.
Ten sets of the same outfit in different colors.
Organized, predictable, low effort, always perfect—that’s how she operates.
One of the bodyguards, Hannigan, follows her inside, as expected. He checks the room before he lets Lilian enter, and then she slides onto the seat opposite me. She looks tired and annoyed, but there is also this spark. A spark I know very well. The one I have when I am about to strike.
And Lilian thinks she’ll get Ella.
I smirk, self-sufficient, and wait for her to talk.
“Are you leaving?” she asks.
“Are you watching me?” I ask innocently.
“Liability,” says Lilian.
“I’m visiting a friend in Philly. Do I need to send you her resume?”
“Name is enough.”
I snort out. “You are a control freak, you know that, right?”
“I do, get used to it.”
She is in a very different mood, short answers, no humor, uptight, and I know she hates to get her feathers ruffled. It’s a game I’d love to play with her, if I didn’t have to kill her.
“I’m not sure you can handle me,” I say. I can feel Hannigan’s eyes breathing down my neck, so no slipping of a drug. I could make a fuss and stab her, but I’d have a gun on me in a millisecond.
There is only one way. Transit. Transit is always the most vulnerable moment; we have to leave together.
“I can handle you quite fine, the problem is, you haven’t signed this,” she says, slamming a folder from her purse onto the table.
I sigh, one last round of Ella it is. Because Ella would never do certain things.
“Strike out clauses five, six point one to six point three, eight, fourteen entirely, nineteen point five, and twenty point nine,” I say without opening the folder, because Ella would never do certain things.
“You remembered them?” she asks as she eyes me, and I know I am giving away too much.
“No, there is a Post-it above your head where I read it off,” I snap at her.
“I’ll spank you with twenty for that,” she says. I would’ve said the very same, but today I have to play submissive brat.
“If I sign,” I add.
“You will,” she says as she strikes out the clauses I have told her to. “Anything else?”
“Yes. I am not an object. Use the damn term girlfriend.”
A look to kill shoots at me. I wonder how far I can push her.
I don’t even know why I said it, but I have this desire in me to test how far I can push her before she snaps.
“I won’t take you anywhere public,” Lilian says.
“Hell no,” I say, soaking in my triumph. “But no hiding from family and friends.”
“You will hide freely from my family, and what friends?” she says, and I see so much of myself in her. Only that my family is dead. But if they’d still be alive, everyone would run from them.
My father, the aggressive alcoholic, wanna-be drug lord who killed my mother and beat me half to death, raped me, and abused us. Hell, no. And what friends? I don’t have friends with a lifestyle like mine.
“You can relate. Why?” Lilian asks, and I realize how closely she’s observing me and how good she is at reading people.
I almost blurt out what I had just thought about before I catch myself. Ella. Still Ella.
“Why do you think I came to America?”
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, I curse in my mind.
We stare into others' eyes for a moment. She has these intense ice-blue eyes that remind me of a Husky and are, honestly, slightly creepy if they didn’t draw me in like that.
“Here,” she says, turns the contract, and hands me the pen. “Sign.”
I don’t remove my eyes from hers as I take the pen. Our fingers touch, and a gasp escapes my mouth as a small electric shock shoots through my finger. Not physically, but energetically.
My core prickles the very moment, and I am instantly scared of myself. I rip my hand away.
My chest heaves up and down.
I know she watches me.
This can’t happen.
I can’t.
She can’t.
We can’t.
She has to die.
The videos.
Remember the videos.
The photos.
Of what she has done.
She has done so many horrid things; she was in on Sutton’s network, she—
I cannot be triggered again.
Everything zones out.
It takes me all my willpower to sign quickly, breathing away what had just happened.
Her hand wanders over mine. She has cold hands, and yet, warmth radiates through my body as a longing overwhelms me. Stupid and reckless.
My gaze wanders from our hands up to her eyes, and I don’t know who I am right now. I can’t be Ella because I am me. And I can’t be me.
Everything is so far away.
“Come,” she says, and I let myself be pulled by her.
What am I doing here?
We walk past Hannigan, step outside the bar, and I only have this moment. But then Lilian pulls me close, pushes me into the wall behind me, and her lips find mine.
Her firm yet unbelievably soft lips demand mine, and I can only give in. Lilian's cold fingers grasp my neck, and her nails dig into my skin.
Suddenly, the world is so real. I feel myself and her, experiencing myself as a being, not as an issue. I am here. Just here. With that sensation in my chest, radiating heat through my body.
A soft moan comes over my lips as I can’t stop myself from giving in to the desire that comes with it. I open my mouth slightly, and our tongues explore each other in a small fight of carnal desire.
Lilian presses her body against mine. I want to touch her, explore her, consume her. All of her. She pushes up my chin and nibbles down my throat to that sweet spot right above the collarbone.
I want to get lost in her.
But I can’t.
I have to kill her.
She needs to die.
I can’t have her touch me, while all I want is for her to do exactly that.
I try to focus on what I have on her, what she did with Sutton, the pain, the loss, the horrid things, but all I feel is longing.
For her, Lilian Anne Knightley. Control freak. Billionaire. Sociopath. Probably Psychopath. With lethal secrets. Secrets that are worth being killed for. Secrets that included abusing girls. Like me.
I need to stop it.
It needs to end.
“I thought no public affections,” I breathe out with a forced smirk. “Clause 4.1.”
Lilian mumbles something against my skin as she comes up to look me in the eyes that sounds like “Fuck the clause.” Before she turns towards the car and pulls me with her.