Prince Charming

by CD Reiss

  He flips me over by the shoulder, and I see the other side of the room. The fireplace has no pokers, and there’s a latched screen in front of the fire. I won’t be able to hit him with a brass rod or throw him into the fire.

  He cuts away the duct tape. My arms creak and ache when I move them. The tape is still stuck to my arms. I rip off one side. It hurts like fucking hell, but I won’t give this guy the satisfaction of seeing me get squeamish about getting a little hair pulled. I pull away the other rectangle of duct tape. It takes a piece of skin. I act like I don’t give a shit.

  I don’t actually give a shit.

  I sit up straight, bending my knees to one side then tucking them under my bottom to sit Japanese-style.

  He puts the knife back in the little sheath.

  “For the record, you really are a shitty poker player.”

  “Poker’s not my game.”

  “Of course.” I slide off the bed on the opposite side so he doesn’t feel threatened. “It involves actual human interaction. Not usually a hacker thing.” I wave as if swatting away trivial concerns.

  “Are you trying to bait me?” He tilts his head a little, brows knotting in concern, as if I’m a monkey in a cage, palming a pile of his shit. He’s asking me if I intend to throw it, and if I understand he can destroy me if any lands on him.

  Sociopath.

  Not all sociopaths are evil. Most lead curious but normal lives. But grouped with narcissism and sadism, sociopathy is a very, very dangerous sickness.

  The sadism is apparent in the heel of my foot.

  The narcissism in the lengths he will go for vengeance.

  So. Here we are. Standing on opposite sides of the bed.

  I have this.

  I trust myself.

  “I’m thirsty,” I say. “I’m happy to get water myself, but you’re making the rules here.”

  “You may go.” He points at the bedroom door.

  One, two, three steps, favoring the burn on my foot. By the fourth step, it doesn’t even hurt and I’m out. He follows me, where I can’t see him. The rustic, open living space has a kitchenette, an old couch, a larger covered fireplace with no pokers. It’s a log cabin, and the horizontal lines of the logs encircle the exterior walls.

  I walk into the kitchenette, watching him in shiny surfaces. The microwave door. The windows.

  “Glasses over the sink,” he says.

  I reach into the cabinet. Plastic. Can’t break and slash. I fill a pink cup with a Budweiser logo. Turn. Drink, watching him over the rim of the cup.

  His fingers play with the pressed edge of his jacket.

  Sensory processing disorder.

  When he blinks, he squeezes his eyes shut.

  A tic.

  “So what’s next?”

  “We wait. If you behave, I don’t shoot you.”

  “Fine.” I put down the cup.

  His approach is swift and stealthy. He catches me in the millisecond I take to put the cup in a clear spot, punching me in the face with mercilessness and speed. My vision explodes into a thousand points of light and I drop to my knees.

  “In case you’re wondering who’s in charge,” he says from above me. “I’m not some basement-dweller. I don’t need this gun to make you comply.”

  “Okay.” I choke out as I put my forehead on the cold floor before I tip completely. My stomach twists, but I’m not puking. Nope. Not today.

  I’m not standing until I have my wits back. His shoe is right in my vision.

  “You were doing your job, but I trusted him. To find out he’d been spying on us all those years? It makes me look foolish.”

  I look up at him. His jacket is still open. His right middle finger still strokes the fabric’s edge, and when he blinks, it’s so hard his nose wrinkles.

  My right eye throbs. “He wasn’t working for us.”

  “I never said he was.” He holds his hand out to help me up. “You were doing your job, so I don’t mean to hurt you.”

  Timidly, I hold out my hand, and we grab each other by the wrist.

  “Thank you,” I say as he yanks me up.

  He blinks.

  I use the extra millisecond to slip my hand into his jacket like the artful dodger I am and pickpocket his gun, pretending to lose my balance so I can unsnap the holster while he’s tilted.

  I have it.

  Not one to waste time, I pull the trigger.

  The bullet hits him in the leg, and he falls backward. I stand over him. He’s got his hands up, but I’m not fooled. There’s no surrender in his eyes. I aim the gun between them.

  I’m going to finish this motherfucker.

  The roar of engines comes from outside. The flash of lights.

  “You are the luckiest man alive.”

  “My partner’s going to find you.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  The door bursts open. Headlamps. Shouts to clear the area. Only when I see rifle tips surrounding Kaos do I take my finger off the trigger and hold up the gun. It’s taken from me.

  I get a pat on the back. It’s Ken, arm still in a sling. When I face him, he flinches.

  “That’s gonna bruise up nice,” he says.

  I touch my eye. It’s heavy and tender. Orlando joins Ken in looking at my busted face.

  “I had him,” I say.

  Orlando nods. “I know.”

  Ken gives orders to forensics, getting pulled away in the chaos.

  “How…?” I don’t finish the sentence.

  A man I don’t recognize walks in. He has silver-grey hair, a long wall coat, leather gloves, and a stiff upper lip.

  “Agent Grinstead,” Orlando says, “this is Ambassador Brookings. He alerted me that you might be the target of this asshole.”

  The ambassador takes off his glove and holds his hand out to shake mine. I pin his accent in the first four words. “Sorry to meet you under these—”

  “Do you know where Keaton is? Is he alive?” I leave his hand hanging.

  The two men look at each other, then back at me. I’ve obviously shown my hand. I’ve told them what’s important to me, who’s important to me, and why I shouldn’t be going to Cyber Crime. I don’t give a shit. The FBI can shove that job up their ass, and this British guy can go right behind. I want Keaton. I want him now.

  “Tell me.” I snarl those two words. They come from deep in my throat and stop right behind my teeth

  “Grinstead.” Orlando uses my name as a call to attention, but I don’t need to be told to focus.

  There are probably a dozen agents in the tiny house. Things are getting overturned, there’s shouting, barking, the squawk of radios, and I don’t give a shit. I don’t give the tiniest little shit. I am more focused than I’ve ever been.

  “Let’s get the scene under control.” Orlando doesn’t know what he’s dealing with as he tries to stall me, treat me like someone with no skin in this game. He thinks this is about the job for me. It hasn’t been about the job since I met that man. “You’ll be briefed—”

  I cut him off. “You tell me right now what I need to know, or I’m going to burn this fucking place down.”

  Orlando looks at me as if I have lost my mind, and maybe I have. The ambassador, however, doesn’t know me from a hole in the wall. Doesn’t know who I am or what I’m capable of. To be honest, I don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of either, but he seems to know enough about me to know that I’m not going to sit in the back of the ambulance with ice on my eye, drinking hot fucking cocoa. Maybe he’s reading me like a book. Maybe Keaton told him, or maybe I have a star-spangled tell for being a woman in love.

  He slowly shakes his head, turning up his hands, one bare palm one leather-gloved palm, and says “I’m sorry.”

  That’s that then.

  You don’t say you’re sorry unless what you’re not saying is going to break somebody’s heart.

  I’m not going to faint.

  I am not going to faint.

  I am not goin
g to fucking faint. I am, however, going to throw up. I brush past the agents coming in, run outside, no jacket, no gloves, just enough time to jam my feet in the heels Kaos left by the door. The exact wrong shoes for an ankle-deep step into the snow as I go to the side of the house. I put my hand on the log wall and bend at the waist. All I see is the snow on the ground and the top layer of white flakes vibrating in the wind.

  He’s dead. They killed him. He’s dead. I killed him.

  My stomach lurches and I try to let it up. I try to just get rid of this loop of agony in my mind.

  He’s dead. They killed him. He’s dead. I killed him.

  I want to see the body. I never want to see the body. I want to know if he drowned or banged his head in the accident or if Kaos did it. I never want to hear his name again. I want to go. I want to stay. I want to throw up, but I can’t. I can’t let it up because if I do, I will be expelling him from me. He is permanent. Even if I never told him that he was permanent, he changed the shape of my heart forever. He let me trust him, molding my heart into the shape that clicked into his like a puzzle piece. No one else will fit. He custom-made my love to fit his.

  I will never let him go.

  “I trusted you,” I say to the wind. I say it to the cold. I say to myself, and I hear it.

  I trusted him.

  I still trust him.

  The side of the building drowns in the white lights of a car, and my shadow is a cutout on it. I am the negative space, taller in the angle of the lights, tripled in paler versions of me at the edges. As the car swings to the left, my shadow swings right and disappears. I’m still here. Only the shadow is gone.

  I’m going to disappoint you.

  I’m going to hurt you.

  I trust him.

  Had he not been hinting at this the entire time?

  No matter what happens, I’ll never leave you willingly.

  Willingly.

  But the text.

  An ocean cannot separate us.

  And the alphanumeric string he made me memorize.

  That code is everything you need to know.

  What was it? I need to know what it is, because now I know why it is.

  I stand up straight, and suddenly I’m not sick anymore.

  51

  cassie

  I’ve always been an ambitious person. I’ve always wanted something more. To be better. Do better. Go further. Now all of this energy is turned to one thing and one thing only.

  Find Keaton Bridge.

  The official story is that his body was lost in the river and they’re still looking for it.

  Good luck with that.

  I have a different strategy. Find out what the code meant. Find out his real name, even though he might not be using it anymore.

  I think best when one half of my brain is focused elsewhere. I’m at the firing range, squeezing off round after round after round. Pop pop pop. I don’t even feel myself doing it anymore. I don’t even feel the pain in my hand. I don’t feel hungry, thirsty. Nothing.

  The British ambassador in San Francisco does nothing but confirm lies. He’s very sorry about my loss. He can go fuck himself. I have another stop to make, but I need my head absolutely clear for it. I need to know what exactly I want.

  Pop pop pop.

  I’m not going to get emotional. I’m going to do this job, then when I know for sure whether he’s dead or alive, I’ll have feelings about it. I practically have my breakdown scheduled.

  Pop pop pop.

  I leave my last bullet between the target’s eyes and slide out the empty magazine. I’m out of bullets.

  “What’s on your mind?” Shadow Horse Brady asks. “Or do you have stock in a lead mine?”

  I sign myself out. “Just trying to think.”

  “I hear you’re moving?”

  I never officially turned down the Cyber Crime assignment. It didn’t seem wise, not when I was as likely to find Keaton from California as I was from Doverton.

  “Can’t beat the weather in California.”

  “Nice shiner on that eye,” he says as I put my jacket on. “I heard what happened. Everyone’s talking about what a badass you are.” He winks at me.

  “Just don’t get in my way.” I wink back at him.

  52

  cassie

  I’d opened Keaton’s dossier as soon as I got a clean bill of health, minus a black eye, and after the firing range, I look at it with a clear head.

  I don’t know if he tried to tell me all of this before and I was just blinded by him and how he made me feel. His life was spent keeping secrets. I can only imagine how hard it would be for him to hint at anything or tell me something that had been locked away for so long.

  My assumptions about him were both right and wrong.

  Keaton has an asset dossier, not a criminal dossier. Cyber Crime watches him closely. Both of his parents worked in military intelligence for the British government. Low level, mostly data analysts. But his father made an enemy, and I assumed correctly that the family was moved to New Jersey to protect them. So when Keaton was busted hacking, MI6 recruited him. Unlike Taylor’s work with the FBI, Keaton never quit. He had been working undercover for MI6 from the beginning, and right up until the end.

  There are details on top of details about his work and his relationships. None of them more prevalent than with the two dark web hackers Keyser and Kaos.

  Kaos is in custody. Keyser is not.

  There’s no match for the code he gave me. No indication of what it might be.

  I consider the possibility that he’s dead and I’m in denial. I let that option sink in, but I cannot accept it until I see either the body or some other proof.

  I don’t have a picture of him. I don’t have a memory that’s physical. An object holding my hand. The photograph of him in that dossier is all I have, and Lord knows I’m not so stupid as to try to take it with me. So I memorize it. I memorize the slopes of his body as they ran under the curves of my hand. I remember the feel of his cheeks in the morning before he shaved, the blue of his eyes that is not captured in the photograph but in the beginnings of the night sky just after twilight.

  “I’m coming for you,” I whisper. “Buckle in, Keaton Bridge, because I’m coming for you.”

  * * *

  I’m not exactly cheerful, but I have a purpose. I had purpose before Keaton. Get promoted. Move up. Be better.

  Now my purpose is love, and if that’s not happiness, I don’t know what is.

  The light buzzes over the door to the utility closet. The flat green is as institutional and putrid as ever. I’ll see this hallway again, and one day I’ll stop walking its linoleum, but it’s no more than a passage from one place to another.

  “Grinstead!” Orlando calls from behind me. I wait for him. “Did you get the comm from cyber? About Keyser?”

  “Closing in, sir.”

  “I want to make sure you’re not chasing him down yourself.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. They have it. You should be sleeping off that knock on the head anyway. You get paid downtime for a reason.”

  The end of the hall is a right turn for the coffee machines and a left turn for the exit.

  “I’m picking up my grandmother from the hospital.”

  He shakes his head slowly, “Jesus, it’s been a rough week for you.”

  “I’ll be fine. Really. Don’t worry. I run faster uphill.”

  With a light shot on the arm, he turns right and I turn left.

  53

  cassie

  Nana and I are like two wounded warriors when I bring her home from the hospital. She’s in a wheelchair, dying to get out of it, talking about how she’s going to attack physical therapy as she has attacked nothing before in her life. I look as if I’ve been hit on the side of the head with a two-by-four, and I too am ready to attack my own healing like nothing I have attacked before.

  I’d put a plywood ramp up the short steps, and I wheel her up it. The d
oor’s wide enough for the wheelchair, and with things all moved around, the living room is clear for her. I’ve already set up a bed and a chair that’ll tip her in and out of it.

  “I cannot wait to get out of this cage,” she says for the hundredth time. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore. I’m fine.”

  “You have pins in you. Do you want to sit on the couch?”

  “When is the nurse coming? Don’t you have better things to do?”

  I help her to the couch and set her gently in her usual spot. “Someone’s coming tomorrow to help you. I have to finish packing. They say you can move with me in a couple of weeks.”

  “Cassandra, I have to tell you something.”

  I fluff her pillows and lay a blanket over her knees. “Okay, tell me.”

  “I don’t want to go to California.”

  “Nana—”

  “I mean it. I want you to go there alone. I’m very sorry about what happened to that boy, and if you need me to be with you, I’ll be there. But I like it here. I’m used to it. I have friends.”

  “You were so excited to go. Don’t pretend you weren’t.”

  “I thought if I went with you, it would make you happy.”

  “It was an act? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I realized I was too old for the long con. I don’t have the patience. And moving? I get tired thinking about it, and I get tired thinking about living with you again. I have to sit up and wait for you while you’re off toting a gun and catching criminals. I have to worry day in and day out. And then I have to worry that you’re stuck in a rinky-dink field office with no chance of making something of yourself. I moved here to take care of you, and maybe now it’s time you take care of yourself so I can take care of myself. I’m a selfish old woman.”

  I sit next to her. “If you’re lying… I don’t want you to underestimate how angry that will make me.”

  She rolls her eyes at me. What seventy-three-year-old woman rolls her eyes? I laugh for the first time in days.