When Villains Rise

by Rebecca Schaeffer

  Fabricio wrinkled his nose as he walked in, and Kovit closed the door behind them. They were early for the meeting, and Nita sat down on the single bed, the plush surface sinking beneath her. Kovit sat beside her and Fabricio made for the chair, but paused, looking closely at it.

  “Is that blood?”

  Nita shrugged. “Probably. We murdered a man there yesterday. I didn’t see the point in cleaning that part until we were done with your father, though.” She considered. “I hope the maids don’t ignore the DO NOT DISTURB sign I put up.”

  Fabricio didn’t respond, just quietly backed away from the chair and stood leaning against the wall.

  “So, anything we should be aware of?” Nita asked. “Before we ambush him for the password?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re an unnatural. Is he?”

  “No.” Fabricio looked down. “My mom was.”

  Nita tilted her head to one side. “Where is she?”

  “Dead.” His voice was soft. “When I was young.”

  “I’m sorry.” Nita wasn’t really, she didn’t care, but it was something you said in these circumstances. “How did she die?”

  He hesitated, then admitted, “Cancer.”

  Nita was silent, curiosity sated, but Kovit commented, “That must have been hard.”

  Fabricio shrugged, a sad little smile playing on his mouth. “It was a long time ago. I don’t really think about it much anymore.”

  The seconds ticked by, Fabricio fidgeting nervously, eyes flicking to the door. Kovit twirled his switchblade in his hand, pensive, and Nita ticked through the to-do list items on her plans, trying to see if she’d missed anything, trying to plot where things could go wrong.

  When the knock finally came, Fabricio nearly jumped out of his skin. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, his breathing harsh and frightened.

  Nita felt a moment of pity for him. She recognized that terror. It was a feeling she knew well.

  Before she could think through her action, she put her hand on Fabricio’s shoulder. “We got this.”

  He stared at her, breathing slowing, and he gave her a slight smile. “Nita, you’re trying to comfort me again. Careful, I might think you have a heart.”

  She scowled and jerked her hand away.

  Then she went to the door and opened it.

  A man in his early fifties stood at the entranceway checking his phone. His gray hair was smoothed back from his face with a bit of gel, and he was clean shaven with cold brown eyes and lightly tanned skin, a little darker than Fabricio. His clothes reeked of money, all of them tailored to fit, and his watch alone probably cost more than the hotel.

  He blinked when Nita opened the door, then frowned.

  “Ah, I must have the wrong room,” he said, voice deep, his Spanish the same cadence as Fabricio’s.

  “No.” Nita smiled, reaching forward, grabbing his hand, and yanking him inside. “You came to the right place.”

  Kovit descended the moment he was inside, knife at Alberto’s throat, hand twisting one of the older man’s arms behind his back painfully, voice whispering threats of all the things he’d do. Nita shut the door behind them as Kovit led their prisoner to the chair Almeida had died in yesterday. Alberto was rigid with fear, Adam’s apple bobbing against the knife, and his movements were stiff as he followed Kovit’s directions. He didn’t scream or flail or fight, he just watched and obeyed, all his movements careful and calculated.

  They bound him quickly with duct tape while Fabricio watched, frozen, his whole body stiff with terror. His eyes, wide and nervous flicked to his captive father and then away, as though he couldn’t quite face what he was doing. Nita wondered if he was having second thoughts. Too late now.

  After Alberto was tied up and gagged, Nita stepped back to examine her work. Not a single hair had shifted out of place, and his shirt was barely rumpled from Kovit’s twisting his arm. His eyes were furious, flicking between Nita and Kovit before settling on Fabricio. A rage came into his gaze, a fury like Nita had rarely seen. There was pure hatred in those eyes, and Nita wholeheartedly believed that if this man got out, the things he would do to Fabricio were more horrible than even Kovit could imagine.

  But he wouldn’t be getting out.

  Nita turned to Alberto and smiled. “I’m sorry for the subterfuge, but this was the only sure way to request a meeting with you. I have some questions, you see.”

  He made a sound of rage through his duct tape gag, and Nita nodded. “Yes, I know the gag is annoying. Don’t worry, I’ll take it off shortly. It will be hard for you to answer questions with it on, I’m sure. Be patient. I just want to establish what’s going to happen today first. Some ground rules, if you will.”

  Sweat beaded on Alberto’s reddening face, and he glared silently.

  “Now.” Nita gestured for Kovit to come forward. “Perhaps you’ve seen the news? A new zannie added to the Dangerous Unnaturals List?”

  Alberto’s eyes widened in recognition, and Nita could almost see his mind matching Kovit’s face with the picture on the news.

  “If you don’t cooperate, I’ll give you to Kovit here. He’s had a lot of experience with uncooperative people, you see.” Nita didn’t actually intend to torture Alberto—torture wouldn’t work, she knew that. The threat was sufficient in this case. “He’s also very eager to demonstrate his skills to you.”

  Kovit gave Alberto his very best monster smile, all laughing glee and dark promises. Alberto didn’t flinch, but his jaw tightened and he swallowed heavily.

  “Now that you understand how things are going to work, we’re going to start asking you some questions.” Nita leaned forward and ripped the duct tape off his mouth.

  “I’m going to kill you,” hissed Alberto.

  “Good luck with that,” Nita said mildly.

  “Not you.” His eyes moved to Fabricio. “I’m going to kill you, Fabricio.”

  Fabricio’s face was gray, but his voice was steady. “You’ve already done far worse to me.”

  Nita’s eyes narrowed, and she spoke to Alberto in a slow voice, like one used with a child. “Now, now, no one needs to die today, as long as you answer the questions.”

  His eyes swiveled to her, full of hate.

  “First question. What is the administrator password to access all the files at Tácunan Law?”

  He ground his teeth. “I can’t give you that.”

  Nita’s gaze was flat. “Kovit?”

  Alberto sneered at them both. “That won’t help. I can’t give it to you because I don’t have it.”

  “Of course you do.” Nita rolled her eyes. “You’re Alberto Tácunan. It’s called Tácunan Law. It’s literally your company.”

  His eyes shifted to Fabricio and then back to Nita, full of controlled rage. “I’m not Alberto Tácunan.”

  Nita blinked, then stepped back. “What?”

  That was not an excuse she’d foreseen.

  Alberto was looking at Fabricio again, eyebrows drawn, gaze dark. “There’s only one Tácunan in this room, and if you want the passwords, you’re going to have to ask him for them.”

  Nita turned around slowly to look at Fabricio.

  He trembled slightly when he looked at not-Alberto, but his jaw was set and his gaze was steady as he met Nita’s eyes.

  “Is it true?” Nita asked. “Have you had the password all along?”

  He nodded, once, sharply. “I have.”

  “And your father?”

  He laughed, a small, broken sound. “My father is dead.”

  Dead. Alberto Tácunan was already dead.

  Nita stared at him, and then turned back to not-Alberto, his face still pulsating with rage. “Then who the hell is this?”

  Thirty

  NITA STARED AT FABRICIO, mind trying to process what was happening but coming up blank. Alberto Tácunan was dead. Had been dead for a while, in all likelihood. She couldn’t quite grasp what that meant for her, but she had a feeling it was very bad.r />
  All she knew for certain was that Fabricio had tricked them somehow. All along, Nita had thought she was the one in control, the one with the prisoner, but he’d been playing her the whole time.

  She’d been a fool.

  Fabricio was giving her a look that was a little sheepish, a little clever, and a little sad. He almost looked guilty, but not quite. There was a layer of fear underneath it all that was genuine. Whoever this man was, Fabricio was terrified of him. But everything else? She didn’t know. He was so good at faking emotions, at playing people’s strings. She couldn’t trust what was real.

  “Fabricio.” Nita’s voice went low and dangerous. She was angry at him, angry at herself, angry at their situation. “I asked you a question. Who the hell is this?”

  “His name is Ricci. Martin Ricci.” Fabricio’s voice was soft and vicious, something dark and hateful creeping into his words. “And he’s the man who murdered my father and masqueraded as him for the last five years.”

  Nita’s mind whirled. “How? And why?”

  Fabricio’s hateful eyes went to Martin Ricci. “Power. Isn’t it always power with people like these?” Fabricio’s laugh was brittle and broken. “He saw what my father had, and he wanted it. So he murdered him, hid the body, made the fact that the crime ever happened disappear, and then tried to take my father’s place.”

  “But . . .” Nita trailed off. “People would know. People who’d met your father . . .”

  “Were few and far between,” Fabricio said bitterly. “My father liked his privacy. He was always a behind-the-scenes kind of person, and he enjoyed his anonymity. Sure, there were some people who knew him by face. But they were easily dealt with through bribes and a few ‘accidents.’”

  Ricci interjected. “He’s lying. His father died in a car accident. I raised this ungrateful little brat after his father died. I took care of the company. I kept it from collapsing from his father’s loss. I made sure that the investors and the clients didn’t annihilate us when he died.”

  Fabricio’s voice was cold, and his voice so full of derision and revulsion that it felt like it should be toxic to hear. “You had power over me, and you fed me and kept me alive, but that doesn’t mean you raised me.”

  Nita nearly flinched, not just at the tone, but at the cold truth of those words when she thought about her own life.

  Fabricio turned to Nita. “My father was very smart. He knew that if anything happened to him, I’d be in trouble. A man like him, with a lot of money and a lot of power? Everyone wanted a piece of what I’d inherit. So he set things up so that the company couldn’t run without me. The mainframe needs my fingerprint to be activated. I’m the only one alive now with the admin passwords. If I die, or if I don’t check in often enough, all security goes down, and everything goes online.”

  Nita’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “It was a security measure to ensure no one would get rid of me to take over the company. I’m necessary for this damn company to function. And only I can change the settings to make myself not necessary.” Fabricio smiled bitterly. “Of course, my father wasn’t a fool. He knew that pressure could be applied to make me tell people the passwords. Which is why I don’t have the passwords to change any of the settings. Even if I spill passwords that I do know, the machine still needs a fingerprint from me. All the information on how to reset the fingerprint password and such was sealed away in a vault I couldn’t access until I turned eighteen.”

  It was a brilliant insurance policy, Nita had to admit. If anyone wanted to run the company, they needed either Alberto or Fabricio. It meant that even if he died, his son would stay alive.

  It was a touching gesture, even if she had the sinking idea it hadn’t ended well. Fabricio’s father had at least tried.

  Fabricio closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The first few months after they killed my father, Martin and his flunkies pampered me. I stayed in my nice, swanky room in my father’s penthouse. I ate everything I wanted, and anything I asked for, they gave me. But I refused to give them access to anything. And when we had to do updates or change things, I refused to enter the codes on anything unsecured, anything that they could use to steal the passwords I had.”

  Fabricio’s voice hardened, his whole body going still. “Then they got mad.”

  A chill ran down Nita’s spine at his tone.

  “They locked me in a small, dark room. A basement somewhere. They starved me for a while. Occasionally they beat me. They hired a zannie for a few weeks—that’s the real reason I lost my toes.” He smiled bitterly at Kovit. “Sorry, Kovit, you’re not the first one here. I know all the tricks for getting through the pain.”

  Kovit gave him a look of horror. “Weeks?”

  Fabricio’s smile was broken, and his whole expression looked a little cracked, like he was trying to make a normal expression but didn’t quite know how, it had been shattered into a thousand pieces and he’d taped them back together to try and approximate normalcy. “Twenty-three days. It felt like longer, but I counted the time, the seconds and minutes and hours, one, two, three. I put them to a beat in my head, music helped me focus on things besides the pain.”

  Kovit swallowed, eyes wide, and Nita tried to hold back her revulsion at the thought, tried to block her brain from imagining thirteen-year-old Fabricio in the dark day after day, screaming and singing to try and take the pain away.

  “On my fourteenth birthday, they finally gave up and let me out.” Fabricio’s gaze turned inward. “I did the bare minimum to keep the company afloat, which was mostly just be alive and make necessary authorizations. I kept the penthouse suite, and no one hurt me anymore. And we all just waited for my eighteenth birthday to roll around, because then I’d have access to all the passwords, even the reset ones—and Martin would have access through me. He could just go to the bank with me, look over my shoulder, and it would all be over. After I turned eighteen, he’d be able to finally get rid of me.”

  Fabricio laughed a little, his voice hoarse and sad. “My life has been a ticking clock, a countdown to my death.”

  Nita licked her lips. “When is your eighteenth birthday?”

  “Last week,” he admitted. “While I was in INHUP custody in Bogotá.”

  Pieces clicked together in Nita’s mind. “This is why you were so desperate not to go back. Because you knew if you were sent back—”

  “They’d bring me to the bank, I’d open the sealed vault, Martin would take the information.” He closed his eyes, breath whooshing out as he whispered, “And I would die.”

  Nita was silent a long moment. Across from them, Martin snorted.

  “Turning yourself into a tragic hero, Fabricio?” Martin looked up at them all with cold brown eyes. “Using that silver tongue of yours to spin the very best tale possible, make yourself the hero of this story. Always the tragic fucking victim, aren’t you?”

  Fabricio’s smile was bitter. “You can curse me all you want, but I’ve only spoken the truth.”

  “Oh, I never said you lied. You just strategically omitted things, the way you always do.” Martin turned to Nita. “What he didn’t tell you here is that he learned on his daddy’s knee. That he’s actually been a major force in preventing people from finding out his father is dead. I’m the fake face of Alberto Tácunan, but he’s the behind-the-scenes Alberto Tácunan.”

  Fabricio shrugged. “It’s true. If the world found out my father was dead, and the situation with Tácunan Law, the monsters would descend. A million people would want to kidnap or kill me for the same reason you did, Nita. I’d never survive. And God knows Martin here didn’t have the knowledge to pass as my father.”

  Martin ground his teeth. “Snotty as ever, I see.”

  “I guess you shouldn’t have hired a zannie to torture me when I was thirteen, then. Maybe I’d be nicer.”

  “Get over yourself.”

  “Get over my—no. I’m not doing this again.” Fabricio’s face was a mask of rage, and his whol
e body shook. He turned to Nita, stiff and sharp. “There. You finally have the truth.”

  Nita stared at him, mind racing. “So. In summary, you’ve had the passwords. You’ve always had the passwords.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why the hell did you want me to kidnap him?” she snapped, gesturing at Martin.

  Fabricio blinked. “Isn’t it obvious? I want him dead. He’s the one running Tácunan Law now. He’s the one who’s going to murder me if things go wrong. He killed my father.”

  “So you made us kidnap him?”

  Fabricio corrected her placidly. “I created a situation where you have no choice but to kill him.”

  Nita raised her eyebrow. “No choice, huh?”

  “Well, he’s seen your faces. You’ve tied him up and threatened him. You don’t think someone like him will forgive and forget that, do you?”

  Nita’s jaw clenched. He wouldn’t.

  Kovit voiced her thoughts. “Fabricio’s right, Nita. He’s seen too much. He has to die.”

  Nita didn’t really care that Martin had to die. She’d been planning to kill him from the start. What she cared about was that she’d been manipulated into committing a murder she had no stake in. She’d been used, played, and tricked into doing Fabricio’s dirty work.

  “Fine.” Nita’s voice was hard. She’d had enough of this. “Kill him.”

  “No, wait—” Martin cried, but the sound was cut off by a sickening crack.

  Kovit released Martin’s head, and it lolled at an impossible angle, eyes staring.

  Nita turned to Fabricio. “He’s dead now.”

  “Yes.” Fabricio’s gaze was glued to Martin’s body, something cold and hard in his eyes. “Thank you.”

  “Now you’re going to give us the information we need.”

  “Yes,” Fabricio agreed. “I’ll break you into the office, I’ll put in the password, you can take whatever information you want. I don’t care. Rob the company blind.”