When Villains Rise

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  His mouth snapped closed. “I have my reasons.”

  “If you really wanted to run, you’d have tried, money or not.”

  “I did try. Once.”

  Nita blinked. “Pardon?”

  “I tried. When I was . . . thirteen? Fourteen? I can’t recall. I didn’t make it far before I was recaptured.” He shuddered softly. “Let’s just say your mother wasn’t the first person to remove some body parts.”

  Nita stared, remembering the first time she’d seen Fabricio, with his bare feet, missing toes. Her mother had told her they’d been sold online by the collector who owned him. But there had never been any collector, just his father.

  Nita didn’t want to think too hard about what that said about Fabricio’s father, or how she felt about that, so she barreled ahead. “Fine. So you don’t have the passwords to get us in. Who does?”

  He looked away. “My father.”

  Nita shook her head. She didn’t want to go directly against Alberto Tácunan unless she absolutely had to. “Who else?”

  “That’s it.”

  “That can’t be it. He can’t run the entire company by himself. Other people need to have access.”

  “People have access to individual things they’re working on.” Fabricio shrugged. “But you want everything? Only one man has the password to get all the information.”

  Nita pressed her lips together. It wasn’t ideal, but she was prepared for this.

  She smiled at Fabricio. “Then I guess we’re going to have to get the password from your father.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “Perhaps.” Nita tilted her head and met Fabricio’s eyes. “Or maybe he will.”

  Fabricio just stared at her before a bitter smile crossed his face. “If only.”

  Nita knelt so she was face-to-face with Fabricio and grabbed his chin in her hands. “You wanted a carrot? Something to motivate you to work with me?”

  “Yessss.” He dragged the sound out, but his voice was nervous.

  She forced his eyes to meet hers. “Here it is, Fabricio. If you do everything in your power to make sure Kovit and I get this information, I’ll do everything in mine to make sure your father is never a problem for you again. And when the dust has settled and all the blood’s been spilt, we’ll call it even once and for all. No more blackmail. No more pain. No more threats. We just walk away. Deal?”

  Fabricio looked down at his bandaged, bloodied hand before he nodded. “Deal.”

  Sixteen

  FABRICIO ASKED IF he could have a shower, and Nita didn’t see any reason for him not to, so he retreated into the bathroom. She suspected it was less that he wanted a shower and more that he wanted an excuse to be alone for a while. She didn’t blame him.

  She also didn’t trust him. He’d seemed genuine in taking her deal, but she knew firsthand how superb an actor he was. But there was nothing she could do about it for now—she needed him, and he knew it.

  Kovit leaned against the counter. “What now? How are we going to get the password out of Alberto Tácunan, of all people?”

  Nita rested her chin on her hand. “If this were a movie, I’d leave you in a room with him for an hour and we’d have all the answers we wanted.”

  “You know torture doesn’t actually work like that.”

  “I know. He’d probably give us gibberish, make up things to get it to stop.” She sighed. “But it’s a nice fantasy. That things are so easily solved, answers so easily obtained.”

  Kovit smiled dreamily. “It would be fun. Answers or no.”

  Nita shivered at his expression, full of innocent delight at what she knew would be something truly terrible. “I’m sure. But we need a better plan.”

  His eyes came back to this world, and he raised his eyebrows. “Do you have one?”

  “Sort of.” She chewed her lip. “We lure him somewhere, we make him talk.”

  “We make him talk how?”

  “That’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” she admitted.

  He nodded slowly. “I see.”

  She rubbed her temples. “I mean, there’s a lot of pieces I haven’t figured out yet.”

  “Like?”

  “Where to start?” She counted them off on her fingers. “How I’m going to get that password. How I’m going to use this information to get rid of INHUP. Backup plans. You know. Stuff.”

  He considered. “Speaking of getting rid of INHUP, what’s happening with that vampire?”

  Nita looked up at him. “Zebra-stripes? What about him?”

  “INHUP didn’t put a wanted poster up for him.”

  “No, they didn’t.” Nita frowned, seeing where Kovit was going with this. “Zebra-stripes must have something on INHUP. Something so powerful that it’s kept him off the list.”

  Their eyes met, and a slight smile curled on Kovit’s face. “Blackmail powerful enough to keep him off the list would be good to have.”

  “It would,” Nita agreed, reaching for her phone. “It would be an excellent thing to have, in fact.”

  It might even be enough to keep Kovit off the list.

  And Nita really did want answers. And vengeance.

  She went online, onto the big black market websites, and checked her inbox. Kovit leaned forward and peered over her shoulder.

  There, sure enough, was a response to the message she’d sent the ad asking for information on her mother. The account that was likely from Zebra-stripes.

  She’d pinged it with an offer when she’d last been online, just to see if it responded—she knew her mother’s location, but wanted half upfront to guarantee she’d get paid. It was a common practice, and Zebra-stripes had accepted. Nita downloaded the money.

  She exchanged a glance with Kovit and took a deep breath, her fingers hesitating over her screen. Then she told Zebra-stripes that her mother was in Buenos Aires.

  “Done.”

  Kovit nodded. “Good. Now we just need to make sure he goes where we want him. We don’t want him running all over Buenos Aires not knowing where he’ll go.”

  Nita grinned, an idea sparking in her mind, tangling up with her other plans. “Then we’ll give him a direction.”

  Kovit raised his eyebrows, but Nita just smiled at him.

  Nita scrolled through the internet, searching for anything interesting happening in Buenos Aires she could use. Her fingers paused a few hits down from the top. Apparently, there was a multigovernment meeting about laws regarding unnaturals starting tomorrow and going on all weekend. It seemed like the sort of thing people in the black market might take an interest in.

  The kind of place she might be able to set a trap for those people.

  As she clicked through, she learned more. The conference involved trade ministers and representatives from Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Since Peru wasn’t a part of INHUP, they were often a haven for black market dealers who took advantage of the different laws to run their trade. The article on the conference said it was a meeting to discuss how to enforce stricter laws against unnatural trafficking and get rid of the pervasive black market influence.

  Nita let out a long breath. She wondered if this conference had been sparked by her burning down the big black market on the Amazon, el Mercado de la Muerte. She hadn’t thought anyone would care. The idea that she’d done something that could cause so many ripples, change so many things, was a bit overwhelming. She kind of liked it. It made her feel powerful.

  But as she scrolled down, she realized that no, this wasn’t her doing.

  It was Mirella’s.

  Mirella, the girl who’d been a prisoner at the same time as Nita, who Kovit had tortured, who’d lost an eye to the market, had been using pods of dolphins to disrupt all the trade along the Amazon. According to the article, the protests had gotten so bad and businesses were losing so much money on trade that the governments had decided to do something.

  They’d chosen Buenos Aires as neutral ground, since actors from a variety of factions would also be th
ere and didn’t feel safe meeting in a country under the control of the people they were protesting.

  An uneasy feeling bubbled to the surface, a thought popping up like a virus, and she immediately checked the attendees roster for the pink-haired girl. But Mirella was still in the Amazon, fighting. She’d made a statement last week that she wouldn’t be attending because the conference refused to guarantee her safety. Apparently assassination attempts had been made.

  Nita let out a heavy breath of relief. That was one complication she really didn’t need.

  She went to the conference hotel and booked a room for tomorrow night under one of her mother’s more well-known aliases. One that Zebra-stripes was surely familiar with.

  Tomorrow morning, she’d check into that room and build a trap.

  She smiled to herself. This time, she wouldn’t be rash, she would think ten steps ahead, she would plot and maneuver and make sure she’d examined everything from all angles before she went forward. She wouldn’t let this end up like Toronto. She’d learned, and she would see her enemies destroyed before the end of this.

  “What are you up to, Nita?” Kovit rose from the couch where he’d been texting and sat down on a stool by the counter near her. “You’ve got quite the expression right now.”

  She gave him a grin, fierce and free. “I’m engineering some destruction.”

  He smiled at that, but it fell away quickly, and he sighed and tipped his head back and looked up at the lights. “Do you really think this will work, Nita? That we’ll be able to rob Tácunan Law, take down both INHUP and the black market? It just seems so . . . big.”

  “It will.” She set her jaw. “We’ll make it.”

  “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “It’s not confidence.” Nita’s voice was soft as she leaned against the counter beside him. “It’s determination. I will make it work, one way or another. If this plan fails, I’ll try another one. And another, and another and another.” She put her hand on his face and turned it so he was looking her in the eye. “I won’t let INHUP kill you, and I won’t let the black market kill me. We will be feared, and we will be untouchable.”

  Then, before she could hesitate or think too hard about what she was doing, she closed the gap, leaning forward and kissing him. It wasn’t a soft kiss, it wasn’t gentle or romantic or sweet. It was hard and firm, full of power and a need to express it.

  Nita didn’t know why she’d kissed him before, when Henry died, couldn’t untangle the snarl of emotions inside her. It had felt right at the time, like she was full of emotions and she needed a way to express them, to show him just how much he meant to her, and the only way she’d ever seen those kind of big, complicated feelings expressed was through romance.

  But this? This was something different. This was about power. Showing it, sharing it.

  Kovit made a small sound in the back of his throat but rolled with it, matching her vicious kiss with equal force, as though taking the power she was pressing into him and drinking it in until he was as vicious as she. His fingers curled around her body for a moment, digging into her shoulders almost painfully before he pulled away.

  Nita blinked, her mouth tingling, and her body somehow both hot and cold at the same time.

  He ran his hand through his hair. “Nita, I . . .”

  She frowned, concerned. “What is it?”

  He stared at the ground, searching for words that didn’t come.

  Nita tried to defuse some of the tension, even though she was still nervous. “Kovit, just tell me. Whatever it is, I’m not going to be mad, or abandon you, or throw plates, or whatever it is they do on those overdramatic sitcoms.”

  He laughed at that, a grin spreading across his face. “But, Nita, what if I confess that I’m actually a long-lost identical twin who has woken from a decadelong coma to replace the original Kovit and that I’m madly in love with another?”

  “Yeah, you’re actually in love with Gold.” She rolled her eyes, then paused. “You’re not, are you?”

  He burst into laughter, clutching his stomach. “No, God, no.”

  “Oh, good. That would have been awkward.”

  He sighed softly. “No, you definitely don’t have to worry about that.” His face went solemn. “It’s nothing that simple.”

  Nita shifted slightly, giving him space while still remaining close. “Okay. Do you want to try and explain it to me?”

  He mussed his hair. “I . . . I’m not really sure what I’m feeling about all this. All the relationships I saw in the Family were—well, let’s just say they’re not the sort I ever want to emulate.” His smile was bitter. “And my other point of reference is movies, and whatever we have, it’s certainly not something you’d find on Disney.”

  Nita snort-laughed at that, imagining Kovit as Prince Charming. In her head, he looked like Aladdin but with more gore.

  He swallowed. “When I was a child, I used to be terrified of turning into an adult, because all everyone could talk about was how they lost control to their hormones, and the idea that I would just one day wake up and suddenly not be able to control myself was . . . Well, it was terrifying.”

  “That’s just an excuse people use to justify bad decisions. No one’s a slave to lust,” Nita pointed out.

  “I know that now.” He shrugged. “But it really got to me. It terrified me. All I have is control. If I lose control, what am I but the mindless monster the world paints me as? The thought of willingly participating in something where I would give up control was abhorrent to me.”

  Nita understood. For someone like Kovit, who always maintained such tightly wound control, such care in every action he took, in every shiver he suppressed, in every choice he made—for him, control was everything. There was so little in his life he’d ever had control over that he clung tightly to anything and everything within his power. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing it.

  “Anyway.” He laughed a little. “Turned out I need not have worried. I’ve never really been, you know. Interested. Maybe all the puberty hormones skipped me.”

  “Well, if they did, then they skipped me too.” Nita shrugged. “I’ve never been particularly interested in sex either.” She considered. “I suppose I might try it someday to see what all the fuss is about.”

  A little of the tension left his shoulders, but some remained. “I guess it’s more common than I thought. The noninterest.”

  “Probably.” Nita watched him carefully. “Is that what was worrying you?”

  “Part of it,” he admitted. “But it’s more than that. It’s just—this, us, it’s so new and so different from any kind of relationship I’ve had before. I don’t want to hurt you if all of this life-and-death stuff ends and it turns out I don’t think about you that way. You know?”

  “You won’t hurt me.” Nita’s voice was gentle. She hadn’t truly thought about the impact of her actions. She couldn’t really get a handle on her emotions, she’d just been following instinct. It had seemed right to kiss him, so she had. But what did she actually feel?

  After a moment, she was forced to confess, “I’m not . . . I’m not sure about what I feel either.”

  He tilted his head, a question.

  Nita flicked her eyes to his and then away. “I just . . . I have feelings, and sometimes I feel like they need an outlet, a physical form of telling you how big they are. I don’t even know if they’re actually romantic. I don’t even know what romantic feels like. All I know about relationships is what I’ve seen on television. And on TV, everything ends in a kiss.” She considered. “Or a cut to a softcore porn scene.”

  He laughed at that. “Ouch. Too true.”

  She looked down, suddenly feeling empty and a little dark. “I’m not really sure what people mean when they talk about love sometimes. I loved my father, but obviously not, you know, that way. And I guess I’ve just never understood how romance was different from a friendship? I mean, aside from the kissing?” She looked away. “I don’t . . .
I don’t know what any of these things are supposed to be like. I don’t understand what I’m feeling,” she admitted, and then she bit her lip and whispered, “But I don’t think I’m experiencing it right.”

  He frowned. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t think my feelings match what people say they’re supposed to be.” Nita couldn’t explain it more than that. There was a disconnect between what she thought her feelings were supposed to be—big, all-consuming, rose-tinted glasses, giddy with love—and what she actually felt. Something strong and warm and fierce, but not really . . . that. She didn’t feel lust, she didn’t want to rip his clothes off. She didn’t feel like he was perfect, his flaws were all still striking and real. But she did feel warm when she was with him, content and relaxed.

  He hesitated, then leaned forward and put his hand on hers. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”

  She choke-laughed. “Yeah, we are.”

  They stayed like that, hands just touching, a unanimous decision to link themselves together, even though neither of them understood what kind of link it was.

  Seventeen

  AFTER A TIME, the shower stopped, and Fabricio came out. He had changed back into his clothes, but his hair was sopping wet and dripped all over the floor where he stepped. He froze in his tracks when he saw them sitting silently at the table. “Uh, am I interrupting something?”

  Kovit lifted his head, irritation crossing his features. “Your jokes are getting old.”

  Fabricio held his hands out, palms up, for peace. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

  Nita went to the window, and tilted her head as she looked at the street below. Cars cruised down the street, an odd mix of old boxy models and new luxury brands. People laughed and chatted as they puttered down the sidewalk. A little girl ran ahead of her parents, carrying a blue balloon.

  Nita turned back. “Fabricio.”

  He gave her an uneasy look. “Yes?”

  “There’s an international conference starting tomorrow dealing with unnatural trafficking along the Amazon.” She crossed her arms. “Would your father come?”