by Ryan Schow
What was she even doing there anyway?
Holstering her gun, Kiera glanced up at Atlas as if he had answers to questions she was now starting to have. He gave her a stiff nod, as if to say, Do whatever you want with this situation. Kiera knelt down and opened her arms to the girl, mimicking Cira’s reaction to Nadia. The girl held her and Kiera looked back at Atlas as if she wasn’t sure what to do.
Unblinking, trying to get a read on her, or even take a peek down into those shiny green orbs, he wondered who she was, if she even had a soul. She held his gaze just as firmly. Almost like she was searching for something as well. What was she thinking? And why did he get the feeling she was about as socially skilled as the child in her arms?
When the food finally came, Kiera was back on guard. At the sounds of someone entering the home, she turned her pistol, trained it on the door. The small girl who stood beside her, wordless but emboldened by Kiera’s strength, stepped behind the female defector. Cira and Kofi appeared. The kids closed in on them like rats on dropped cheese. Cira unpacked sandwiches for everyone, handing them out one by one. Seeing their joy was worth every penny Leopold had spent to make this happen.
“Thank God I got extra,” Cira said to Atlas. She grabbed the last sandwich, then handed the empty bag to Atlas. Narrowing her eyes, she said, “That’s for pulling my hair like a bitch.”
“This is bullshit.”
With a congenial laugh, she said, “You want to split mine?”
Looking around, he said, “This whole ordeal cost me my appetite.”
The truth was, Atlas and Kofi were closing in on a double-digit kill count, so no, he didn’t want to split the sandwich. He just wanted a bed. Maybe enough time to clear his head. And he wanted a bed he didn’t have to share with a man who shared the same name as a bitter morning brew.
It was while they were all together eating that an armed man burst into the room, lowered his rifle, and opened fire on all of them.
Chapter Twenty-One
ATLAS HARGROVE
Everyone scrambled for cover, but more than a few of the girls were killed right away. All these dying children. Nadia. Even the little one sitting next to Kiera. Atlas was quick into action. Kiera was quicker. She shot to her feet and closed the distance on the shooter before he’d even completed his returning arc. Kiera could have killed the shooter, but instead, she clubbed him across the face with the butt end of her handgun.
The gunman absorbed the blow and blindly lashed out at her. Kiera ducked under a wild haymaker, shot him in the thigh, then threw an uppercut into his chin and fired three more rounds into the front of his shoulder.
Her left hand held a blade he never saw her unsheathe. As the shooter hobbled backwards, she thrust the four-inch knife into his side five times fast, then ripped it out sideways and drove it into his armpit. He gasped, his face full of fear, his entire body twisting in pain.
Glancing up at this beast, indifferent to the pain she was causing, Kiera slowly turned the blade. He winced, and groaned, the look of surprise in his eyes monumental. She pulled out the knife; he staggered backwards.
Kiera could have let the asshole fall down and die; instead, she shot his other arm, swapped the blade for the handgun in a coordinated toss, then plunged the knife into the man’s neck. His mouth fell open, a silent scream caught in the back of his throat. She worked the blade back and forth, and then she slashed it out sideways so hard that arterial blood geysered halfway across the room in violent, pumping spurts.
He crumpled in a heap, his body destroyed, all but dead. Kiera dropped down before him then drove the knife into his chest and leaned on it like a psycho. She then gave it a final, brutal twist before sitting back up and pulling it out.
For a long time, she just sat there, breathing hard and fast. Then slowly, painfully, she turned and looked at the dead girl she’d hugged, almost like she didn’t know how to process the little one’s sudden demise.
Kiera’s body began to tremble as she turned those big green eyes on him. For the first time since he’d met her, Atlas saw something curious. Tears and sorrow. An incredible amount of sadness. Standing up, she stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her so hard the entire wall shook.
Atlas looked at Cira, who was every bit as stunned as he was.
“Holy shit,” he said, reverent.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Kofi?” Atlas called out.
“Right here,” the man said from behind the couch. To Cira, he said, “Atlas and I will attend to the kids if you want to check on Kiera.”
When Cira made no move to go after Kiera, Atlas went to check on her. Besides, he couldn’t be around any more dead kids. Not if he still wanted to function.
He found Kiera outside sobbing, her head bowed, her entire body trapped in fits and starts. He moved to her cautiously, barely keeping his own grief at bay. When she became aware of him, he opened his arms to hug her and she punched him in the chin so hard, he staggered backwards into a knee-high planter, stumbled over it, then fell over backwards. He landed on his spine in the grassy spot of yard, a big breath of air bursting out of him.
Rather than getting up, he lay there for a while, looking up at the stars, thinking prison was probably easier than this. When he finally got up, Kiera was gone.
Atlas brushed himself off. He tried to move his jaw around only to find himself wincing in pain. Unbelievable! Ego-checked and infuriated, he trudged back into the house, looked at Cira, and said, “That fucking nuthouse rat ain’t no Russian defector.”
“No shit,” Cira said.
“And where were you in all this?” he barked at Kofi.
“Right here with you.”
“I thought you cleared the pool house!”
“You insisted on feeding them first,” he replied. “So I went with Cira.”
Only then did he see the dead girls, exactly seven of them—the same body count as back in California—and only then did those scared, rancorous emotions come racing back. For a second, he felt a part of himself tear away from his physical being, as if half his body was taking flight from the other half, charging away from the scene, hoping not to see any more carnage, or feel any more emotion.
But then his soul slammed back into his body, and with this union came an onslaught of emotion, a furious pain not unlike a sledgehammer striking his chest. He couldn’t breathe. He turned and walked back out front, passed Kiera again (he held up his hands as if to say, “Not again.”), but she moved by him like a shark in dark waters.
When he sat down out front in the fresh air and under the starry skies, he succumbed to the torrent of agony. It was so overwhelming he felt the sting in his bones. Making matters worse, he was coming down from the adrenaline dump, his limbs shaking, his face hot despite the cool night, or the carnage he witnessed inside.
Lying back down on the grass where he’d fallen before, he closed his eyes to it all—to the dead girls, the God-awful pimps who’d ruined them, this rotten, godless country.
“I didn’t know a person could move like that,” Cira said, rousing him.
“Who the hell is she?” Atlas asked.
“An asset of Leopold’s. She’s new, though. I’ve never seen her until the flight here.”
“Has that psycho even been field tested?” Atlas sat up and asked. “Because I get the feeling she’s fresh out of the wrapper. And not just because she dropped me the second I tried to console her.”
“The lesson in that,” Cira said, “is to mind your own business.” She offered him a hand. He took it and stood up.
“This is my business,” he said, thinking about the kids who had died on his watch.
From the second-floor window, the sounds of breaking glass startled them. And then a body dropped down not five feet from them. Another scumbag. Sticking out of his eye was Kiera’s blade. Surprisingly, it looked just like his.
He yanked it out, wiped the blade clean on the corpse’s shirt, then looked up to the broken window
where Kiera should have been standing. She stalked out front a moment later, looked down at the dead body, then to him. Specifically to the knife. She held out her hand, snapped her fingers, grunted.
“Did you just get this?” he asked her, holding the knife up. She didn’t respond. Instead, she snapped her fingers again—harder this time—and then she gave a second exasperated grunt.
“You want it?” Atlas challenged. “You’ll have to ask for it.”
Kiera’s face became a scowl.
“Just go ahead and say the magic word and it’s yours.”
She closed the distance between them; he took a step sideways, pulled the blade back the second she reached for it. The next thing he knew, there was a gun in his face. Her gun. She snapped her fingers again, shook her extended hand. And those pretty lips? They showed absolutely no signs of speech. Not to tell him he was a cocksucker, not to threaten him, nothing.
“Are you deaf?” he asked. She shook her head slowly. “Do you have a tongue?” She gave a cold nod. “Then say the magic word and I’ll give you the knife.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Cira told Atlas.
“Just give her the blade back,” Kofi added, coming out of the house.
Kiera moved forward, into Atlas’s space, the business end of the barrel practically touching the edge of his forehead. He tucked the blade in a tactical grip, prepared himself to use it. This girl was insane. And scary. She racked the slide, turned the gun just a bit to the side, letting him know that from centimeters away, any shot was guaranteed to end him.
He hit the girl’s arm sideways, slashed at her side, then moved…only to find himself laid out on his back again, this time with her boot on his face. And the gun? It was still pointed at his face.
“Good God, that was fast,” he said, breathless.
She leaned harder on the boot, bent down, then took the fallen knife and stepped off him.
“What are you?” Atlas asked.
Rather than dignify him with an answer, she sheathed her knife, then turned and walked back inside without a word.
Cira crossed her arms and looked down at him with a frown.
“What?”
“You just got your ass handed to you by a hundred-and-twenty-pound sprite.”
“She’d have done worse to you.” Atlas stood and dusted off his backside, the frown on his face all-consuming.
“Except I didn’t poke that bear. You did. Dummy.”
“Either way, your little robot is malfunctioning,” he mumbled. “You might want to remind her which team she’s on.”
“Looks like she’s more valuable than you,” Cira said. She headed back into the house but stopped and glanced over her shoulder first. “Did you ever stop to think she might be reminding you which team you’re on?”
“You don’t think I can handle this?” he said, getting up.
“Of course you can’t. You speak the language and you have some policing skills, but Kiera’s the speed and the muscle.”
“I can hold my own just fine,” he groused as he went after her.
“Says the guy brushing off his butt.” With a cold laugh, one devoid of all humor, she walked through the front door and shut it behind her.
He stopped, looked down at the dead man. On a hunch, he went through his pockets, found a set of car keys, then hit the open button and waited. He heard a chirp and followed the glow. He found the source of the noise. Outside the estate’s six-car garage was a large vehicle he didn’t recognize. Some European rattlebox designed to seat six grown adults.
When Atlas walked into the house looking overly confident, Cira said, “Is there something I need to know?”
“We’ve got our own wheels now.” He held up the keys, gave them a little shake.
Kofi hung up the phone, then said, “One of the outreach programs is on their way now. They’re prepared to pick up the girls. All of them.”
Even though Cira had put sheets over the dead girls, the blood was seeping through, a sad reminder of both the violence and the lives lost too soon.
“If I don’t like even one of them,” Atlas said, his mood tunneling back down into darkness, “then they’re all out. I’ll throw them out myself.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Cira said of the social workers. “If anything, Leopold’s thorough. So if he sends them, he’s sure they’re on the level.”
“I’m not kidding, Cira. You’ll have to throw my ass back in prison before any more of these girls get hurt.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You think you can do this with Kiera alone?” Atlas asked, a bitter laugh in his voice. “Go ahead and give it your best shot. You and the mute will do a bang-up job, I’m sure.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“In this dark, disgusting world, you can only get so far without the hammer.”
“You’re not the hammer, Atlas. You’re the pen,” Cira said. “Kiera’s the hammer.”
“I’m the hammer!”
“Everyone just needs to breathe,” Cira said, gesturing for him to take it down a notch or five.
Kofi glanced over at Cira, then under his breath, he said, “Where did you find this hack?”
Cira ignored Kofi. “This is a test run, Atlas. Just remember, you’re not doing us any favors we’re not returning in spades.”
“Meaning?”
“Did you forget about Alabama?”
He was in her face in a flash. He’d moved so quickly he forced Kofi to pull a gun. Kiera already had hers unholstered and trained on Atlas.
“If you’ve ever had anyone so important in your life that you’d sacrifice your very soul for them,” Atlas growled, a couple of inches separating their faces, “and that person was taken from you? Oh, sweetheart, you would never forget it. Not for a day. An hour. A minute. Don’t ever say my daughter’s name again unless it’s to tell me you’ve found her.”
“Back off, Atlas,” Cira snarled.
When he did, Kiera and Kofi holstered their weapons, but neither softened their eyes. A few minutes later, a threesome of Russian women arrived with two European-looking men in tow. The woman in charge went first to Cira, but the severe blond pointed to Atlas and said, “You’ll want to talk to him, he’s in charge.”
Grateful for the concession, Atlas said to the woman, “Who are you with?”
“A division of Children’s Hopechest,” the spokeswoman said in a heavily accented, very clunky form of English. “We specialize in rescuing vulnerable children. My name is Bronya Kotova.”
As she said this, Bronya glanced around at the children both living and dead. Her brown eyes remained dry, but she began to fidget with her hands, her fleshy fingers trembling. She hadn’t moved, but he could feel the pudgy woman shrinking up inside herself second by second, as if she were working to distance herself from the heartbreak. The effect was moving, a clear confirmation that he was with a savior, rather than an abductor falsely offering salvation.
“I have seen this too many times,” Bronya said, the now glistening evidence of tears forming in her eyes. She wiped them discreetly. “President Putin made it a law not to traffic children, either for labor or sexual purposes, but the police are not required to enforce such laws. They merely pay them lip service. I think this is how you say it.”
“It is,” Atlas affirmed.
“Many of these children…,” she started to say. She was so overcome, she could not seem to finish.
“I need to ask you a question,” Atlas said, sparing the woman from her emotions.
Bronya turned to him with a most serious look on her face. He figured it wasn’t his beaten, hostile-looking presence as much as it was the state of the children that bothered her. That and the bloody sheets covering all those little bodies.
“Ask me anything you want,” she finally said, standing taller.
“Are they safe with you?”
She smiled, nothing in her expression alarming him. “You found them, and you saved a few o
f them. We will either find their families or help the older ones get on their feet as adults.”
“I don’t want a single one of them left behind, or neglected.”
“You are a good man.” She smiled, her pain obvious.
“That’s a stretch. But right now I’ll take it.”
“Did you kill the men I see dead here and out front?” she asked, looking at a few of the bodies.
“It was a group effort,” he answered in Russian. “But yes, I did kill one, or maybe more.”
“You look American,” she said, returning to her native tongue, “but you speak Russian like you’re from Belarus.”
“That’s where my wife was from.”
“Is she a good woman?”
“She used to be.”
Bronya seemed to think about his answer, but there was something in both his answer and his expression that made her abandon her line of questioning.
“As far as matters go in Saint Petersburg,” she continued, “you’re doing God’s work. These men are demons on earth. Sent up from the bowels of hell to torture the innocent.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered in English.
“I say this not to exaggerate this nightmare, but to tell you I understand the landscape quite well. There are a dozen more powerful men with operations like this in Saint Petersburg. They are brokers of the innocent. And sadly, they operate without pushback or reprisal from the local government.”
“That’s what I understand,” he said.
All around him, the other workers from Children’s Hopechest were getting the surviving girls outside. One of the men, the quieter of the two, was attending to the dead children. Atlas wondered if he was keeping Bronya from her duties, if the others would take her conversation with him as her slacking on her responsibilities.
“Many government officials are being serviced by these young women,” Bronya continued. “They keep many of them out of trouble, but they also keep them hidden. Our large city must be beautiful for tourists and wealthy locals. But if you look deep enough into the underbelly of this somewhat grim society, you will find thousands of girls just like these.”
