“Come on out, Cain,” I cooed. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”
As soon as I stepped fully into the bedroom, Cain launched himself out of the closet and came at me from behind. I didn’t have time to turn around. He wrapped his arm around my throat and squeezed, but the idiot didn’t restrain my hands. I jabbed upward with the knife, catching the tendons in his forearm. He swore and let go, cradling his maimed arm. He stumbled out of the bedroom and into the living room again, aiming for Arden’s abandoned gun. Just as he was about to reach it, I threw another blade across the room with my left hand. It hit the gun and ricocheted off, knocking the weapon beyond Cain’s reach.
“I know who you are,” Cain said, circling around the room. “As soon as Beatnik turned up dead, I figured it was you. I can’t believe you aren’t dead.”
“Surprise,” I said.
He continued to move around the living room. I prowled along the opposite side, right across from him, keeping our distance equal.
“Well?” he prompted. “Here I am. The cop’s down, and there’s no one standing in your way. Come get me.”
I remained where I was, but tightened my grip on the karambit. Cain’s gaze flickered toward the weapon.
“You can’t do it, can you?” he said. “You can’t kill me.” He laughed, tipping his head back to expose his throat. In a second, I could lodge a knife in his artery, but something stayed my hand. “Oh, this is rich. You’re too scared to kill me, aren’t you? Do you know why?”
The feeling came back again, the unsettling tremor that had first hit me on the rooftop a few minutes ago. Cain remembered something I didn’t. He laughed again.
“Silly Veronica,” he said. “Don’t you recall? I’m the one that killed your mother.”
And then it came rushing back. My mother moaning. Kyle Fisher demanding someone shut her up. Cain raising his hand and bringing it down with unnecessary force on my mother’s face. He’d done it again a few minutes later. Harder. As if the noise of his fist against her skin made him feel alive. Here and now, Cain cackled and smirked. I lunged across the room.
Perhaps he’d been expecting me to be paralyzed with fear, because his eyes widened with shock when I latched myself to him and ripped the karambit across his torso. It was an intentionally shallow cut, but it reached from his shoulder to his hip. Blood splashed across the dirty carpet as he attempted to fend me off. I ducked under his poorly aimed attacks and slashed at his legs, deliberately holding off on a kill strike. I wanted Gerald Cain to suffer. He staggered around the room, unable to get a grip on me. I wove in and out, cutting into his skin like a sculptor. He ducked below one of my attacks. I missed, fell off balance, and swung around to face him again.
“Don’t move,” Cain said. He had Sheila Arden, who was barely conscious, around the neck. Her gun was in his hand, pointed at her temple. “Take one more swipe at me, and I’ll kill her. Her death will be on your hands.”
I didn’t look at him. I looked at Arden. She wore an intense expression of worry, one I’d seen before, and I finally realized why she was so familiar to me. “It’s you,” I said to her. “You’re the Giordano’s girl.”
She nodded.
“Shut up!” Cain pressed the gun to Sheila’s head. She squeezed her eyes shut as he clicked off the safety. “I swear to God, I’ll do—”
He never finished his sentence because I threw a knife through his eye.
Chapter Twenty - Sheila
The knife lodged itself in Cain’s eyeball with a sickening stick. The gun clattered to the floor. Cain thumped to the carpet, and that was it. The knife had punctured his brain. The Simone City killer had murdered someone right in front of me. Though it only took me a moment to process the quick second of violence, it was enough time for her to escape. She leapt out of the window, grabbed hold of the side of the building, and climbed upward. I recovered my gun and my radio and sprinted after her.
“Target’s on the run,” I shouted into the radio. There were cops stationed at every corner of Cain’s building. It had all been a part of the plan to lure the killer into the apartment. Theoretically, someone should have spotted her, but I hadn’t expected her to come in from overhead. “Rooftops, heading west.”
I hoisted myself out of the window and looked up. The killer’s boots disappeared over the roof of the building. “Please don’t let me fall and die,” I muttered, standing with shaky legs on the windowsill. The only way up was the rain gutter. I tested my weight on it, yanking on the rickety aluminum, and climbed up. At the top, I swung one leg over the lip of the roof and got myself on level ground again. My head throbbed from where she’d knocked me out. I rubbed the lump as I examined the rooftops. There. One building over, sprinting away like a cat.
The fact that she’d cleared the gap between the buildings seemed impossible to me, but I had no choice except to follow her. Down below, red and blue lights flashed as my unit responded to my directions. Sirens filled the air as I careened toward the edge of the building, pumping my arms to build up speed. Where the rooftop ended, I jumped. A yell ripped out of my throat as I hurtled through the air. Miraculously, I made it to the other side. The toe of my shoe clipped the roof, and I slammed face first into the concrete. I barely felt it. The killer paused to look at me, surprised by my audacity to take the jump. Then she ran off again.
I got to my feet and took off, nose streaming blood. The buildings were all connected, and we raced across one long rooftop. The killer dodged behind air conditioning units and access doors, trying to lose me in the maze of confusion, but I kept a close eye on her. Finally, she reached the end of the group of buildings and disappeared over the edge. I skidded to a stop and saw her clambering down the fire escape. I followed, taking the rusted metal steps three at a time. She dropped the last few feet and landed in an empty alleyway. Her head whipped toward the mouth of it, where a cop car drove by with its blaring siren, and took off in the opposite direction. I reached the bottom of the fire escape and let go, the air whooshing through my hair as I dropped to the pavement.
She was fast—that was for damn sure—and she knew the area well. Just when I thought I was gaining on her, she’d dart down a side street or another skinny alleyway, forcing me to switch directions. In those precious seconds, she put a few more feet between the two of us. Then I changed tactics, slowing down to anticipate her moves. No matter how quickly she ran, I kept up with her, a step behind but never far. I hadn’t run track in high school and college for nothing. Speed might have been the killer’s secret weapon, but mine was stamina. She began to falter, her leg muscles unable to keep up such a rigorous pace. As she headed for another empty street, a squad car drove right by her escape route. Her toe caught a lip in the pavement, and her ankle dipped to the ground at a terrible angle. When she tried to put weight on it, her whole leg shook.
I dashed forward, but as soon as I was close, she whirled around and jammed her elbow toward my jaw. The hit clipped me as she toppled over, unable to balance on a single foot. In another unexpected move, she grabbed the front of my protective vest and dragged me down with her. We tussled, rolling around on the damp pavement. Neither one of us was willing to put in a hard hit. I didn’t use my gun, and she was holding back too. From the feel of it, she had plenty of knives left to throw, but she never reached for another one. Instead, she landed petty jabs on my ribs or cheeks. I fended them off, trying to catch her hands long enough to put her in cuffs, but she was wily. We rolled over again, and her injured ankle knocked into the curb. She let out a whimper of pain and reached down, leaving herself unguarded. I sat on her chest so her arms were pinned down. She squirmed but couldn’t dislodge me, not even with the hip-chuck trick she’d done earlier.
“You didn’t kill me,” I said. My breath was thick and heavy. The chase and subsequent fight had knocked it all out of me. “Up in Cain’s apartment when he had the gun to my head. You could’ve killed me and gotten out of there totally free. Why didn’t you?”
“Yo
u know why.”
I shifted my weight so that she could breathe better. Tentatively, I pulled the mask off to reveal the rest of her face. She looked relieved. Relieved and scared. And though her face had thinned out since she was fifteen, there was no denying who she truly was.
“Veronica,” I said. “I wasn’t sure it was you. Well, I was pretty sure.”
Her eyes were damp and confused. I felt like a teenager again, trying to find the right words to say to the girl who’d disappeared all those years ago. But I wasn’t a teenager, and the once innocent girl had turned into a murderer.
“You saved my life,” I said. “Even though I’m the one trying to track you down and put you in prison. I have to know why. You have to say it out loud.”
She wriggled one of her hands free and touched the outline of my cheek, as if trying to commit the shape of my face to memory. “You saved my life. I saved yours. Now we’re square.”
A squad car stopped at the end of the alley. The flashing lights gleamed in the whites of Veronica’s eyes. She tilted her head back to look at the car, panic settling into her expression. I sat on my heels, freeing Veronica’s other hand, then rolled off of her.
“Go,” I said.
“What?”
“Go,” I said again. “Before I change my mind.”
She pushed herself up from the pavement, leaning heavily on her good ankle. The doors of the squad car opened and shut as the officers got out. I looped Veronica’s arm around my shoulders and half-carried her to another side street. When she was hidden from the police lights, I set her down and urged her to keep moving.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just have to keep saving you. Don’t make me regret it.”
My radio buzzed with static, startling both of us. The nearby officers steadily approached. “Detective Arden?” one of them called, squinting into the dark alley.
“Here.” I stumbled out of the side street and planted my hands on my knees as if I’d run a race. “Suspect’s gone. She gave me a run for my money.”
The officers shined their flashlights around, checking the various offstreets. I looked after Veronica, but the shadows of Venus had swallowed her whole. My gut squirmed. I’d just let a killer go free.
Missed Connections: Book 0 Page 13
