Challenges

by Natalie Grey

  “He’s not a very brave man, is he?” Gabrielle tilted her head to the side.

  “No,” Tabitha agreed, “but he didn’t have to do anything to get where he is. He just piggybacked on other people’s hard work.”

  “A lot of crime bosses do,” Gabrielle informed her. She glared at Santino. “Anything else?”

  “That’s all, I promise.” He held out his hands. “I could work for you.”

  “No,” Gabrielle said simply. “You see, I don’t think I can trust you alive.”

  “What? You said that you would let me live if I told you!”

  “And you all told Tabitha that her family would be let go as soon as she was done with this job.” Gabrielle’s face was like stone. “A lie for a lie, Santino.”

  There was a gunshot and Santino lay still.

  Tabitha stared down at the body while trying to remember how to breathe.

  “Are you okay?” Gabrielle asked her. “That was the first person you ever killed, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Tabitha hunched her shoulders. “And…I’m not sure if I’m okay. Can I just not be sure for a while?”

  “Yeah.” Gabrielle looped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Yeah, that’s okay. Should we go get those fuckers outside your family’s house.”

  “Yes,” Tabitha said emphatically.

  “Wait, don’t you need the notebooks?” Gabrielle looked over her shoulder.

  “Nope.” Tabitha started laughing. “Those are fake. They look a lot like the ones I used to have, but they’re not. And anyone who tries to use them to track Michael down is going to find themselves following a lot of dead ends, and possibly ending up with a few felony convictions in Kansas.”

  “Kansas?” Gabrielle gave her a look. “Okay, first things first… Let’s go kick some ass. But I’m going to need to hear more about these fake notebooks.”

  “Sure!” Tabitha grinned. “I’ll tell you over a choripan.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cipriano Alvarez was not having a good night.

  First off, he’d pulled the late shift. He hated the late shift. In most jobs the late shift was dead and you could play cards, but not when you worked for Thiago. Night was when Thiago did everything, because he liked to be like Anton.

  Cipriano had only met Anton once—which was to say, he’d been in the same room once—and he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Anton was dead now anyway, so how scary could he have been?

  That still left him with the late shift. Not only that, his girlfriend Serafina was off at a club with another man. Videl claimed not to be interested, but Cipriano was sure that the man was just waiting for him to turn his back before he made a move on Serafina.

  And so far it had been a slow night. That hadn’t improved his mood at all.

  They didn’t even need him here.

  Sure, there had been some excitement when Orlan’s group had brought in some tiny tattooed chick and a tourist, but the police weren’t going to trace the tourist here until later this week—if they did at all.

  So they were back to square one, bored and resentful.

  Renaldo, his shift-mate, spoke from the darkness. “Cipriano?”

  “Huh?” He didn’t feel like saying anything more.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Two gunshots, almost at the same time. I thought I heard one or two earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’m sure about these two.”

  Cipriano looked at his colleague with a withering expression. There were always gunshots nearby. There was always some gang trying to prove itself by encroaching on Anton’s turf. Most people in the city didn’t know Anton was gone yet. Most of them, in fact, hadn’t known who Anton was, just not to mess with his deputies, but recent rumors were leading other gangs to think theirs was weak.

  Thiago wasn’t helping. The man was weak.

  And then Cipriano heard another gunshot, and he understood why Renaldo was worried.

  The gunshots were coming from inside the building.

  The two men looked at one another anxiously. There were two options. One was that someone had attacked Thiago and the other was that Thiago was in a bad enough mood that he’d just shot three, or possibly five, of his people.

  If it was the second one, it might make sense to just leave. When Thiago got in one of these moods no one was safe.

  And then they heard the yelling and the shooting in the hallway just inside.

  The two men barely even had time to exchange a look before the door flew off its hinges and clattered into the street a few yards away.

  A woman in a red tank top, faded jeans, and black boots emerged. Her hair was the same dark red as the tourist who had gone in, but her face...

  “Madre de dios,” Renaldo moaned.

  He died with claws through his neck, and the woman let him slide off those claws onto the ground.

  “Not. Even. Close,” she informed him.

  She looked at Cipriano and he fell to his knees. To his horror, when he opened his mouth to plead for forgiveness his mind flashed faces before his eyes. Some had died on Anton’s orders, some had died on Thiago’s—and some, Cipriano had just watched die, never intervening.

  “You know you don’t deserve mercy,” the woman told him. “Just as there is no second chance for the lives you took, so there will be no second chance for you.”

  Cipriano’s life ended before he’d even had time to accept that he would die.

  —

  “May I ask… What will you do if you see Joaquin again?” Gabrielle and Tabitha were making their way through the streets toward Tabitha’s house.

  Tabitha looked at her in surprise, “I hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t come with us to Thiago’s hideout, did he?”

  There was a long silence.

  “If I let him go, would you be disappointed in me?” Tabitha asked finally. Her voice was very small.

  “It’s your choice,” Gabrielle told her.

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  Gabrielle paused in the shadow of a building. Children were playing nearby, although they were keeping a wary eye on the two unfamiliar women.

  “In a way that is your answer,” Gabrielle said finally. “Whether Joaquin lives or dies is your choice.” Of course if he actually tried to kill Tabitha, Gabrielle wasn’t going to pull her punches, but she wasn’t going to tell Tabitha that.

  “What do you think Michael would say?” Tabitha asked. Her tone was wistful.

  “That your sense of honor has to be yours and yours alone,” Gabrielle said firmly. “Do you want to be merciful to Joaquin?”

  “No!” Tabitha said instantly. Her eyes widened at her own admission. “Wow, I’m a vengeful bitch, aren’t I?”

  Gabrielle laughed. She started walking again and grinned down at Tabitha. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”

  Tabitha relaxed slightly.

  She remembered when she’d first awakened in captivity after the bank job. Her colorful language, tattoos, and piercings had seemed to make people think that her outward appearance was a direct indication of how courageous she was.

  And when she was out of Anton’s sight, it almost had been. Tabitha liked joking with people, putting them off-balance and sharing a laugh with them. Without the constant fear of someone finding her attractive or wanting her to get ever-deeper into risky and immoral schemes, she had found herself enjoying the person she had pretended to be for so long. She loved the tattoos she’d gotten and she liked spiking her hair up sometimes—and frankly, Michael’s expression when she did that was really the icing on the cake.

  Coming back here had brought her fear roaring back, though.

  But she was changing. Standing up to Thiago had taught her that.

  And she wasn’t about to let anyone hurt her family.

  **

  The snipers, secure in the incorrect assumption that they would hear anyone coming onto the roof, died within seconds
of one another. Gabrielle rolled their bodies away as Tabitha peered through the rifle scope at the street below.

  “I only see four of the guys,” she told Gabrielle.

  “The fifth is in the shadows just around the corner on the left.” Gabrielle pointed at him.

  “It must be nice to be able to see that well,” Tabitha said disgustedly.

  “It is,” Gabrielle agreed sweetly. She gestured at the street. “What do you want me to do?”

  Tabitha had already thought about this, “I want to make sure no one in the house hears. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, but why?” Gabrielle sat back, crossing one ankle over the other as she frowned at Tabitha.

  Tabitha twisted her hands. “I’m…not sure I want my family to know I’m here, and I’m definitely sure I don’t want them to know they had assassins waiting for them outside,” she added hastily.

  “Wait, back up… I thought you came here to check on people?” Gabrielle’s frown deepened.

  “Yeah, and the first person I saw sold me out!”

  “Your parents aren’t going to do that, right?”

  “No, they aren’t. They wouldn’t!” Tabitha shook her head. “But Joaquin was a wakeup call. I thought I’d come back and tell people I was all right and they’d be glad, you know? I thought it would ease their minds to know I wasn’t dead, but they have whole lives here, and maybe they’re angry at me, and maybe they don’t really want to see me.”

  “But you wanted to know if they were all right,” Gabrielle protested.

  “I can do that without seeing them,” Tabitha told her. “Santino and Thiago are dead. The human side of Anton’s gang is just going to fade away now; they only had it because he built it anyway. My family will be safe.” She looked down at her hands. “I think I’ll just leave them a message that I’m alive. That way they don’t have to see me if they don’t want to. After all, I did just disappear on them. I bet they’re angry, and they have every right to be.”

  Gabrielle’s heart ached for the younger woman, and she tried desperately to act as carefree and nonchalant as she did most of the time.

  “Okay,” she said. She stood up and helped Tabitha to her feet. “Your wish is my command. Five very quiet ass-kickings coming up.”

  “Thanks.”

  Tabitha followed her down the fire escape and dropped from the last level to the ground. She looked up to see Gabrielle’s expression of surprise.

  “I lived on people’s couches,” she explained. “And sometimes… Let’s just say they didn’t know I was there. I’d sneak in during the day when people were at work. I got good at climbing up and down fire escapes.”

  “While eating… What are those sandwiches?”

  “Choripan. And that would have been difficult.” Tabitha grinned as Gabrielle dropped lightly down beside her. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  The guard around the corner from the others was the first to meet his maker. He was just lighting a cigarette when Gabrielle sauntered up to him out of the dark.

  “So.” She plucked the cigarette out of his fingers and took a drag. “Working tonight?”

  “Yeah.” The man stared, transfixed, at the red lips around the cigarette.

  Gabrielle took one last puff and dropped the cigarette on the ground, grinding it out with her boot. “I swear, no one makes good cigarettes these days.”

  “Huh?” The guy just looked at her.

  “So what are you doing for work tonight, hmm?” She trailed her fingers down the side of his face. “Keeping a family hostage?”

  “How did you—” He stammered the words out, suddenly worried. A woman this pretty—and unarmed—should be afraid of him if she knew what he was doing.

  “I know a lot of things,” Gabrielle told him. “I know you work for two lowlifes named Thiago and Santino. And I know they’re dead now.”

  “What? W-why?”

  Gabrielle snapped his neck. “Because they do things like this,” she told his body. She stepped over him and peered around the corner.

  Two of the guards had gone on their patrol around the block, which left only two across the street from Tabitha’s house. She’d take those two first so they didn’t notice that the patrol didn’t come back, and then take out the patrol when they came around the corner.

  The next two to die lurked in the shadows, watching the door. They looked left to one corner, then right to the other, panning their eyes along the building’s front.

  They were trying to be diligent, but really, they were so predictable that their diligence was next to useless.

  Gabrielle slipped across the street while they were looking to the right, and was between them before they had much of a chance to react.

  “Hello, boys.” Her voice was a low purr, a reminder of the days when she had indulged in every kind of pleasure she could find. “Who’s up for some fun?”

  The men looked at one another and then stared at her. She could see the mental calculations going on. Did they want to risk Santino’s ire by leaving? Maybe, if their night was going to be good enough.

  “Uh, what kind of fun were you thinking of?” one of them finally asked. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but she could see the pulse jumping in his throat.

  “Well...” Gabrielle drew the word out, rolling it in her mouth. “I was thinking you two could start running in opposite directions, and I’ll see if I can kill you both before you make it to the ends of the block.”

  Both men froze.

  “And lest you think I can’t do it,” Gabrielle said sweetly, letting her eyes go red and her teeth grow, “you should know that Thiago, Santino, your two snipers, and the guy who snuck off for a cigarette are already dead.”

  One of them drew in a breath to scream.

  “Ah, ah, ah.” Gabrielle punched through his bulletproof vest and pulled his heart out. “No screaming. That’s against the rules.” She smiled at the other man. “I guess it’s just you and me then.”

  His gun clattered to the ground and he took off for the end of the block like a man possessed.

  He made it barely three yards, and Gabrielle disappeared into the night to find the two members of the patrol.

  Tabitha emerged from the shadows to stare at the two bodies. These men would have killed her family without hesitation, she knew. It was strange, just how much she hated them for that. If Santino had ordered it, they would have gone into the house and killed everyone there for no reason at all.

  She didn’t like it, but she was glad he was dead.

  And then before she had the chance to move, the door opened and light flooded into the street.

  “Tabitha?” her mother whispered.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tabitha froze. She turned her head away, trying to think—but her mind was a muddle. Did she want to go? To stay?

  And then her mother was there, tears in her eyes, and wrapped Tabitha in a hug. “You’re alive,” she whispered.

  “How did you even recognize me?” Tabitha whispered. “With the hair and the—”

  “You’re my daughter,” her mother said firmly. “I can recognize my daughter even when she has bits of metal through her face. Why you had to do a nose ring I’m not quite certain, but it does suit you in a way. I’m sure you’ll find a man who…” She practically dragged Tabitha through the open door, chattering all the while.

  “Tabitha?” Her younger sister Selise jumped out of her chair at the kitchen table and ran to hug her. “Dad, it’s Tabitha!”

  Tabitha swayed. Everything hit her at once: the smell of her mother’s cooking, the orange-scented soap she always used on the dishes, the way the wooden tables and chairs gave off their familiar oak-y smell. There was a new dog at the edge of the kitchen, wagging a fluffy tail cautiously as its humans laughed and cried over this strange newcomer.

  From the street, Gabrielle watched as Tabitha’s father came to enfold her in a hug as well. She smiled. She had hoped Tabitha would speak to her parents, and she was glad that ther
e was none of the anger or resentment that Tabitha had been afraid of.

  Tabitha, meanwhile, caught a glimpse of Gabrielle in the shadows as her mother shut the door. There was time to see Gabrielle nod. She was standing guard, and would wait.

  How many hours passed in that kitchen Tabitha was not sure. She was careful to give an edited version of recent events, but knew that her parents would be able to connect the dots on some things. After all, they had lived in Buenos Aires for years. They knew what could happen when someone got caught up in the gangs.

  She expected them to be angry at her for being so stupid as to get caught, but her parents, it seemed, were proud of her in their own way.

  “I have missed you, my dearest love,” her mother said with tears streaming down her face. “We would have kept you safe. We would have helped you—but how could I be mad that my daughter would do such a selfless thing to help her family?”

  Tabitha, who knew that her mother could not have called in anyone strong enough to have taken Anton on, just smiled and clasped her mother’s hands.

  “Can you stay now?” her father asked quietly. He was not a man who cried, but once or twice in this conversation she had seen a suspicious sheen in his eyes.

  “I can’t,” Tabitha explained. “I mean, I could. I’m not being hunted anymore, but the organization I’m with now—they are trying to keep those types of people from hurting anyone else. They work to keep people safe, and I want to keep working with them. I’ll be around more, so I can come visit. And I can email and call! I just won’t always be here.”

  “That will set your mother’s heart at ease,” her father said, “although you could also set it at ease by not doing ridiculous things with your hair.”

  “Dad!”

  Her mother smiled to hear the two of them bickering, and got up to go to the door.

  “Where are you going, Mom?” Tabitha asked her.

  “Well, there were two men sleeping in the street near you, and I think I should try to hurry them along in case the police come through.”