One Wrong Move

by Shannon McKenna

  “They’re not leaving it here,” Nina said. “His staff will dismantle it right after the gala. They’ll take it to Greaves’s residence afterward.”

  Aaro struggled to reason through the feelings that were jerking him around, but he could not reason with the constant now! now!

  now! thrumming inside him. So many reasons to wait. A thousand witnesses, for instance, and Rudd out among them somewhere.

  But Nina couldn’t wait. Better to grab it fast, inject the drug into her before anyone figured out what was happening, and apologize for the mess afterward. A thousand witnesses gave them a shield against Rudd, if they managed to stay out in public. The guy couldn’t melt their brains in the banquet hall.

  Maybe the police would take them away, lock them up in the relative blessed safety of the local jail.

  He turned to Nina. “You can’t wait,” he said. “We can’t ask permission. We take it. Fast and hard. Shock and awe.”

  She looked worried. “You don’t think . . . after the party, fewer people . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “Rudd’s not going anywhere until he pins down Miles, now that Anabel’s gone missing. If he finds her, he’ll be looking even harder. Greaves is going to be sniffing around for you, so lurking until after will only fuck the element of surprise that we have if we snatch it right now, while people are dancing and drinking.”

  “But what if we just called the cops? Explained to them?”

  Nina faltered. “We’re in the right, after all.”

  Aaro shook his head. “It’s day three,” he said. “In the best of circumstances, they’d seize the syringes as evidence, and sit on them. Bureaucracies move slowly. Like continental drift.”

  “So it’s another distraction you need,” Miles piped up. “A strip tease on the central table, maybe?”

  “That might work,” Aaro said thoughtfully. “You’ve got the meat for it. At least the ladies and gay guys would get a decent floor show.”

  Miles looked vaguely alarmed. “I was joking, man.”

  “Better yet. A big fight. I’m a jealous husband. I fling you up onto the model, crunch, smash. As you struggle to get away, you grasp for something to defend yourself, and snap, you grab the library.”

  Miles frowned. “Might work. But if you’re the aggressor, the security dudes will nab you and drag you away, and Rudd will have your sorry ass in his clutches. Then you die screaming in a little room somewhere with your brain running out your ears.”

  Aaro shrugged. “And if you’re the aggressor, you get dragged away. You’d rather have your own brains run out your ears?”

  Miles looked stoic. “He has less reason to melt mine than yours. At least until he finds Anabel. And you have a better chance of coercing your way out of the crowd so you guys can go shoot up with whatever that shit is in those syringes. Before you get stopped.”

  Aaro shook his head. “I can’t let you do that.”

  “What, you don’t think it’s credible, me attacking you?” Miles flung at him. “You don’t think I could throw you around? Don’t think I could take you?” Miles put up his fists. “I think I could, man.”

  “You think so, buddy?” Aaro said softly. “You really think so?”

  “Shut up.” Nina’s voice was chilly. “We don’t have time for a pissing contest. Why does it have to be one of you? Why can’t it be me?”

  Miles and Aaro exchanged eloquent looks.

  “Um, yeah,” Miles said, totally deadpan. “So, uh, Aaro had a gay fling with me, so you’re beating the shit out of him, all super-buff two-thirty of him, and tossing him up onto the model? Ooh, ouch. You go, girl. That is a scene I would love to see.”

  “Oh, shut up, Miles,” she snapped.

  Miles crossed his arms over his chest. “It has to be you who gets thrown, and me who throws,” he said, staring directly into Aaro’s eyes. “Your chances of getting away clean with the syringes are a whole lot better than mine.”

  Aaro opened his mouth to protest, but stopped, staring at Nina. The guy was right. But he hated it. “It’s fucking dangerous for you.”

  “Like everything else we’ve done isn’t?”

  He gazed at the younger man with new respect. “Do you have some kind of a death wish?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” Miles said glumly. “I definitely need my head examined. But if we’re going to do this, we’d better do it fast, before I lose my nerve.”

  Aaro looked at Nina. “Go outside and wait for us.”

  Her eyes widened. “And miss this floor show? Are you crazy?”

  “No, I’m practical. Go out onto the terrace, and take it to the left, down to the very end of the building. There’s a terrace on that side that juts out over the bluffs and the river. That’s far enough away from the balcony that it should be pretty empty.

  We’ll join you there.”

  “He’ll join you there, rather,” Miles said. “I’ll be well on my way to being incarcerated, I expect.”

  “Greaves did say the model cost upward of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Nina said.

  Miles winced. “Oh, fuck me.”

  “I’ll cover it,” Aaro said. “Any financial damages. If I survive.”

  “That’s not comforting me,” Miles growled. “Let’s just go for it. Some things you shouldn’t think too hard about, man.”

  “Go, then,” Aaro said. “A roundhouse is your signal to throw.”

  “You first,” Miles told him. “I’m chasing you. You’re running scared, you cowardly bastard, and I’m driving you. You prick. You sick, lying, cheating son of a bitch. ” Miles advanced on him, his eyes hot.

  “Whoa!” Aaro took a step back, unnerved by the fierce intensity in Miles’s voice. “Easy, man. This is playacting, remember?”

  “Easy, my ass.” Miles’s voice was unrecognizable. “The time for easy is over, scumbag. Was it easy for you, fucking my wife?

  Move, you shit for brains. Get your ass out there! Move! ”

  Aaro fled.

  Nina watched Miles herd Aaro out into the ballroom, and darted down the corridor of space between the columns and the far wall, trying to keep them in sight. Miles was terrifying, once he got worked up. The wisecracking, sarcastic nerd was a thin façade.

  Beneath it, he seethed. He was convincing as a jealous husband.

  He’d actually scared her.

  She reached the far exit to the terrace, and peered around the columns, craning on tiptoe, trying to see if she could catch a glimpse—

  A hot, damp hand clamped over her mouth. “Hi, Nina.”

  Terror throbbed through her as his mind stabbed deep. He’d taken her so completely by surprise, he’d breached her shield, and he was unexpectedly powerful. He held her against him, covering nose and mouth until she was smothering, and rooted roughly inside her mind.

  “Just as I thought,” he whispered. “The B doses. And Sasha’s gone to retrieve them. Meeting on the terrace over the bluff?

  Good girl.”

  She tried to reestablish her shield, but with him already inside, she could not dislodge him. Her head pounded as his probe continued. He laughed. “Wycleff Library, in the model? Clever of you, to figure it out!”

  He dragged her along. To a casual observer, of which there were several, they looked like lovers, who clung together and tottered along because they could not bear to stop kissing. His mind was so horribly strong. Crushing her. Suffocating her. She wobbled, faint.

  Aaro. Oh, Aaro. But he had just charged off to do something perilous and public. Now she expected him to rescue her, too?

  She’d rescued herself from Dmitri before. But before the thought could even form, Dmitri bit her ear, hard enough to draw blood.

  She let out a smothered yelp of pain, and he licked the wound he had made with relish, his slimy tongue hot and wet and re-volting.

  “Ah, ah, ah! Don’t even think it,” he whispered. “I am on to you.”

  He shoved her out the big double doors. It had begun to sprin-k
le outside, and it was chilly at this altitude, so most people who had been strolling outside had gone in. He pushed her against the railing.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “No one to be shocked and raise the alarm if I do this. ” He grabbed her strapless dress, along with the bustier, and jerked them both down to her waist, baring her to the wind and the rain, and his hot, lustful eyes. “Nice dress.”

  He bent her over the railing, until splinters of wood dug into her bare back and her spine felt like it would crack, and thrust his hot, slimy tongue deep into her mouth. She couldn’t pull air into her lungs. Her bile rose. Memories she’d striven for years to leave behind her surged up, from their secret place, and the feelings that went with them. Being small, feeling helpless, overwhelmed. Worthless.

  And the fiend saw it all and felt it all. He grubbed through her most painful memories and started to laugh, which liberated her mouth enough to almost, sort of breathe.

  “Stan, eh? Oh, ho, ho! So you’re one of those girls! The dirty stepdad. Such a cliché. Still turns me on, though. Feel, here.

  See?” He prodded the bulge of his erection against her thigh.

  “Does Sasha know about Stan? Does it excite him, too?”

  Disgust sharpened her focus, just enough to give him a hard mental thwack. He rocked back, startled, but lunged for her again, and his monstrous force penetrated her shield once again.

  “Check this out,” he said. “I learned this trick from you, Nina, and I’ve been practicing it all day, on everyone I met. I have something special for you. Open your eyes, Nina. Look at this.”

  She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut. So he’d learned to project. She didn’t dare look. There was nothing his mind could create that she wanted to see.

  But something was happening to her. The shoes Lily had sent with her dress were gone. Her bare feet pressed the rain-slicked wood of the terrace. Her legs were bare. How . . . ? She was wearing an evening gown. But her arms were bare, too, now, the wind and rain chilling them. What had happened to her shrug? What on earth . . . ?

  She opened her eyes, peeked. Saw the pink lace-trimmed summer nightgown she’d worn when she was twelve. Her feet were bare, toenails painted pink. Her mother had used to paint them, back in the old days. Before things got really bad. The rain plastered the pink nightgown to her body. Her shorter, twelve-year-old body. Her budding twelve-year-old breasts showed through the wet fabric. Her twelve-year-old self cowered there, small and shrinking and terrified. Oh, God, no.

  “Yeah,” the monster said, his voice thick with lust. “Yeah, that’s how I like you. Open your eyes, baby doll. Come to papa.”

  She looked up, unable to stop herself. It was no longer Dmitri standing there, leering at her, trapping her against the railing.

  It was Stan.

  When Miles was in college he’d had lots of girlfriends, or rather, friends who were girls, who told him all manner of intimate stuff about their lives. One had been a girl studying acting.

  She’d gone to a New York acting studio, and told him she had been taught to use real-life experiences. So the emotions por-trayed on stage were not fake, but just as real and as potentially painful as the original emotions had been.

  He’d been much struck by that. That a sane person would willingly jerk themselves off, and feel angry or abandoned or hurt, or whatever, and have it be real. And out there, for everyone’s viewing enjoyment. Like, why? Why would anyone do that to themselves?

  That question had just been definitively answered for him.

  He’d hauled out Cindy and her rock star lover, Aengus, and used them like a pitchfork as he went after Aaro. Who loped in front of him, half backward, half forward, stumbling over tables, knocking over chairs before Miles’s furious charge with a look of absolutely genuine shock and alarm on his face. But it wasn’t Aaro, it was that prick Aengus McGowan, with his fucking pasty Irish skin and his fucking nose ring and his fucking chest hair, sticking out of his fucking affected black silk poet’s shirt, and fuck him and his whole fucking stupid alternative rock band, Raven Run, along with him. He aimed a kick at Aengus/Aaro’s ass, sent him sprawling into some dowager’s lap, amid shrieks and gasps. He smashed into a table, ignoring cries and yelps, the smash of breaking crystal. “Had a good time with her, huh?” he yelled.

  “Did you do it in my house, prick?” He hauled off with a savage side kick. Aaro jerked back barely in time. Almost to the model.

  Circling it. He threw another punch. Aaro blocked, stumbling into the model, making the low table shudder and rock.

  “Hey, man, take it easy!” Aaro pleaded. “Calm down! I didn’t—”

  “Did you do it in my bed? Those nights when I called at two A.M., and she was all kissy kissy on the phone, were you in bed with her? Inside her? Did that get you off, you pervert? Hearing her lie to me while she fucked you? You twisted piece of shit! ”

  Aaro threw the signal roundhouse. Miles blocked, grabbed him, twisted him, and flung, accompanying him up and forward as Aaro sailed, headfirst . . . right onto the Greaves Institute model.

  Crash. The underlying structure crumpled under Aaro’s weight, and the guy scrambled frantically back on the table to get away from him, smashing miniature buildings to splinters. Miles flung himself onto Aaro, bellowing incoherently, punching and screaming. Aaro tried to block, knocking Miles off, lurching onto his knees. Tottering, falling back right between the two tallest hills, knocking a gaping hole between them. His arm reached, desperately groping. Snapped off the tower of the library just as Miles yanked the observatory building off the other hill and brought the telescope dome down right above Aaro’s head.

  It splintered. Suddenly, hands grabbed him, trying to drag him off the table, but he couldn’t calm down. He kept screaming, flailing. Wanting it to be Aengus in the rubble, blood running from his nose.

  People reached in to help Aaro out as they dragged Miles away. Aaro sat up, panting, wiping blood from his face, and looked at Miles, patting his tux jacket as if checking for broken ribs.

  The crowd of civic-minded guys who’d subdued him dragged him down, getting themselves kicked and slugged in the process, but they knocked him to the ground at last, and sat on him, en masse.

  Success. Aaro had signaled success. He’d done the job he set out to do. So why the fuck was he crying? Six guys on top of him, no way to wipe his nose as he hitched and sobbed. Horrified people in evening wear, staring down at him as if he were a threat to their way of life.

  The security guys arrived. They jerked him into a painful hammer lock and hauled him through the ballroom with grim dispatch. Down a hallway. Into what looked like a security office.

  Full of big guys, all looking at him with unfriendly eyes. Yep, he was in for a rough night.

  The door burst open, and Miles’s stomach thudded down, like two ton of cold, hard lead punching through rotten floorboards.

  Harold Rudd stormed into the room. “Where’s the asshole who destroyed . . .” He stopped, and stared blankly at Miles, for a long moment.

  “You,” he said, with vicious emphasis.

  “Yeah,” Miles said, swallowing hard. “Me.”

  Aaro allowed himself to be helped out of the wreckage, holding his prize tight against his body under his arm. He accepted a napkin from somebody, to mop up the blood from his nose.

  He was genuinely shaken. Who knew? He’d seen Miles practice, had even sparred with him a few times. He was strong and fast and gifted, sure. But he had not known that the guy could flip a switch and go flat-out fucking insane. And it had been absolutely believable. He was practically feeling guilty for having boned Miles’s nonexistent wife.

  He shook off offers of help, using a few jabs of delicate coercion to intimidate away the most insistent ones, and limped through the crowd. The library tower dug painfully into his armpit. Every step he took felt like swimming through tar. He wanted to run, sprint, fly to Nina.

  Stay normal, dickhead. Invisible. Neat trick, with blood streaming down his c
hin. He got out on the terrace. The people who were watching him melted away, with a sudden, overwhelming desire to be elsewhere.

  The terrace was deserted. It was raining, with gusts of chilly wind. Nina would be cold in nothing but that skimpy wrap. He’d been an idiot to send her out here alone. He picked up the pace, turned the corner. And stopped, very suddenly.

  “Hey, Sasha,” said Dmitri.

  “You’re sure, sir? The guy has definitely had combat training,”

  the security guy said doubtfully. “He had two firearms on him, and he might even be hopped up on some performance-enhancing drug. God knows what he was planning. I strongly suggest that you let me—”

  “I’m sure,” Rudd said. “I can handle him myself. For God’s sake, he’s handcuffed, right?”

  “But, sir, ah, I strongly recommend—”

  “I need to be alone with him.” The edge in Rudd’s voice made the hairs in Miles’s neck prickle up, like nails on a chalk-board.

  The security guy blinked, and started backing away. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Let us, uh, know if you need us, sir.”

  “Of course.” Rudd smiled thinly. “Good-bye.”

  The man practically stumbled over his feet to get out the door fast enough. The click of the door closing was the knell of doom.

  Miles tasted blood in his mouth, and licked it away. It wouldn’t be the last.

  Rudd walked over to him. “Where is Anabel?”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” Miles said.

  Thwack. The guy backhanded him. “That wasn’t my question.”

  Miles licked away more blood. “I left her upstairs.”

  Rudd went to the door, yanked it open, bawled for the security guy. Ordered them to search the place until they found Anabel.

  “We shall see what she has to say when they find her,” he said.

  “I’m sure she will enjoy helping me interrogate you, don’t you think?”

  Miles’s tender places recoiled. Anabel and her sharp stick were going to catch up with him a lot quicker than he’d dreamed.

  “I imagine she fucked you, hmm?” Rudd said. Miles shook his head, and Rudd rolled his eyes. “Of course she did. I know my Anabel.”