Chapter 21
MILO
I'd picked this place for a reason. It was just south of Bastrop, forty minutes from anything, surrounded by nothing but scrubland and silence.
An abandoned building made up of the poured foundation and wooden walls.
The kind of place where sounds went in and didn't come out.
I'd cleaned up two bodies here, maybe three years ago, from an Italian job.
The concrete still had faint discoloration near the west wall if you knew where to look, and I knew where to look.
I'd been here since noon, preparing.
The chair was positioned center of the room. Metal. No armrests. The kind you'd find in a church basement or a community center, which is what this building might have been in another life. Now it was a stage, and I was building the set.
The camera sat on a tripod eight feet from the chair, angled to capture the full frame.
I'd tested the recording three times. Checked the battery twice.
Adjusted the height so the lens would catch her face, her body, the full scope of what was about to happen.
Konstantin wanted proof. He wanted to see her break and he wanted to watch it on a screen and feel satisfied that the problem had been resolved.
I was going to give him exactly what he fucking wanted.
Or close enough.
The syringe was in my jacket pocket. Midazolam and fentanyl, dosed by a doctor who hadn't asked a single question once he saw the amount of cash I paid him.
The cocktail would slow her heart to nearly nothing.
Make her breathing so shallow it would be invisible to anyone who wasn't pressing fingers to her throat.
Her pulse barely discernible to the touch.
To the camera, to a man watching from across the room, she would look dead.
She needed to look dead.
The substitute body was in the trunk of a car parked behind the building.
Jane Doe from the county morgue, close enough in build and age that they'd believe me when I pulled it out of my trunk to get rid of.
I'd even found a green velvet dress similar to the one Raven was wearing.
And I'd handled the acquisition myself. No middlemen. No loose ends.
The fire accelerant was staged in the northeast corner. Gasoline and acetone. Hot enough to corrupt DNA. Fast enough to gut the building before anyone noticed the smoke.
I'd thought of everything.
Everything except how I was going to live with this.
I stood in the center of the warehouse and stared at the chair and breathed and built the mask, layer by layer, the way I'd been building it since I was eight years old and my father handed me a mop and pointed at a dead woman's blood and said, Clean it up, son. It's just a mess.
Just a mess.
That's all this was.
***
Viktor's headlights cut through the warehouse windows at 8:47 PM. I heard the crunch of gravel, the engine dying, a car door. Then his footsteps. Measured, heavy, and absolutely unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be.
He stepped inside and surveyed the room the way a restaurant critic surveys a dining room. The chair. The camera. The concrete floor. Me, standing by the far wall with my hands in my pockets and my face expressionless.
"Good," he said. Just that. An approval of the stage I'd built.
He crossed the room and sat in a metal folding chair I'd placed against the wall to the right of the camera. He pulled a cigarette from his coat, lit it, and I watched as the smoke curled up into the stale air.
"When?" he asked.
"After her set."
He shook his head, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Now," he ordered.
My hesitation was barely noticeable. "Okay. I'll go now."
He nodded and settled back. Patient. Comfortable. A man pulling up a chair for a show. "Dmitri will drive. He's waiting in the car."
My jaw ached like a mother fucker. I was going to need dental work when this was all over.
I don't think I'd relaxed since I'd left her apartment in the gray morning light with her scent still on my skin and her voice still in my head telling me she loved me too. Not with the knowledge that in less than twenty-four hours I was going to break every promise those words contained.
The drive to The Silver Table took about fifty-six minutes with the traffic, and I used every single one of them to kill what was left of the man she'd said those words to.
Not the mask. The mask was fine. The mask was always fine—shaggy hair and dead eyes and a California drawl that made people think I was harmless. The mask could do this. The mask could do anything.
It was the thing underneath that had to go. The thing she'd found. The thing that had no business existing in a man who'd spent over two decades teaching himself not to feel.
I pulled into the restaurant lot and sat in the car for ten seconds.
I love you, little bird.
Then I buried it. Deeper than the bodies I'd dissolved. Deeper than the boy in his father's van. I shoved it down into the black and locked it there and walked into The Silver Table wearing the face of a man who didn't have a heart left to break.
She was playing my favorite song. The one where the whole room goes quiet because even men who've killed people can recognize something beautiful when they hear it.
I stopped at the edge of the platform. Close enough to smell the scent I'd fallen asleep breathing and woken up craving and would carry in my lungs for the rest of whatever was left of my life.
Her fingers paused on the keys. Barely. A hesitation so small the room wouldn't have noticed it, but I noticed, because I noticed everything about this woman. Always. And that was the whole fucking problem.
She knew I was there. And she knew something was wrong. Raven could read me from across a room without seeing me, and right now she was reading the void where my warmth used to be.
"Time to go," I said.
"My set isn't finished."
Jesus Christ, don't do this to me.
She was defiant. Even now. Even sensing what she did, her chin lifted and her voice steady, because even blind, Raven Oakley did not go quietly into anything.
"It is now." I grabbed her arm.
"Milo—"
"Don't," I said when she started to speak. "Get up. Don't make a scene." She reached for her cane and I stopped her. "Leave the cane."
"What?"
I knew what I was doing. I knew exactly what taking her cane meant.
It meant stripping away her independence, her orientation, her ability to navigate the world on her own terms. It meant making her dependent on me for every step, every turn, every inch of space between here and the warehouse where Viktor sat smoking and waiting.
I did it anyway, because Viktor was going to watch me do much worse.
I pulled her off the bench too fast. Her hip caught the edge of the piano, and the sound she made—a small, sharp intake of breath—went through me like a blade.
"You're hurting me."
The people sitting closest to us were starting to notice, but I didn't slow down or respond as I dragged her through the restaurant.
Her shoulder clipped a wall. Her shin hit a table leg and she stumbled.
And through it all, I kept my grip and my pace and I didn't adjust, didn't murmur directions, didn't do any of the things that had become as automatic as breathing over the last few weeks.
Because this story that had to be airtight if I was going to survive: Milo Scott dragged a woman to her death without mercy, without hesitation, without the slightest tremor in his hands to suggest he'd ever pressed his mouth to her throat and whispered her name like it was the only word he knew.
Outside, I got her into the car without helping her, feeling nothing when she hit her head on the frame.
The drive took close to an hour. She tried to talk to me twice. Asked where we were going. Asked me to talk to her. Asked who was driving.
I gave her nothing. I couldn't. One word of comfort, one crack in the mask, and I wouldn't be able to do what I had to do.
She had to believe this was real, because it was.
We pulled onto the gravel road. The crunch under the tires filled the silence.
I could practically hear her mind spinning as she took it all in.
The change in road surface, the distance from the highway, the acoustics of the surrounding landscape.
Filing it away in that extraordinary mind of hers, building a map she couldn't see.
The car stopped. I got out and opened her door and pulled her into the night.
She reached for my arm to steady herself, and I let her for exactly as long as it took her to find her footing. Then I pulled away. The contact lasted maybe two seconds, and it burned through my skin like acid.
She knew Viktor was there.
I saw it happen. The full-body change, like a current running through her.
The fear hit her all at once. I could feel it in the sudden rigidity of her arm under my hand, in the way her breathing went shallow, in the way her feet tried to stop while the rest of her kept moving because my grip gave her no choice.
She understood now.
Not everything. But enough. Enough to know that the man who'd held her last night and told her he loved her had brought her to a warehouse where his boss sat waiting, and that whatever happened next was going to be very, very bad.
I shoved her toward the chair. She stumbled, caught herself, hit the seat with her knees. Sat.
I watched her hands grip the edges, white-knuckled. I saw her shaking. Saw the goosebumps on her arms because her dress wasn't warm enough and I hadn't allowed her to get her coat.
I walked away from her to turn on the camera. My hand went to the power button.
And the red light started blinking.
We were live.
***
"I hate you," she said.
The words scraped out of her throat like something being dragged across gravel.
"I hate you. You're a fucking monster. You were always a monster. I can't believe I was so stupid to believe you were anything else."