It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  She needed him to stop thinking. She needed to push him over the edge. She tilted her head back and brought it forward to slam into his face, the hard point of her forehead striking his already-injured nose. He staggered back, almost landing on his tailbone, which she thought might be what actually set him off. Looking foolish was far deadlier to his soul than a little blood from a broken nose.

  And finally he struck out at her. It was his fist first. Then, when he’d regained his balance, it was the heavy metal tips of his boots digging into her soft hips and the flesh that couldn’t protect the vulnerable organs beneath. She curled into a ball, knowing she had to get her arms up and around her head. That left the broad target of her back available to him, and he took full advantage. She cried out when his boot caught the edge of her shoulder blade, but she was able to bite back the rest of her screams.

  She was used to pain. She lived through pain. She loved through pain. She survived through pain.

  He landed one final, glancing blow but then seemed to gain control of himself enough to realize Anna was still free.

  She was huddled against the wall, watching the scene with wide, wild eyes. She’d wrapped her arms around her knees and was rocking like she’d seen a ghost, letting out little whimpers with each kick Bess took.

  Simon crossed over to her, digging fingers into Anna’s soft upper arm. He wasn’t gentle as he dragged her half-walking, half-limp form back over to her chain.

  He didn’t spare Anna another glance. But he came back to Bess. He looked alert as he squatted down in front of her, clearly braced for any more attacks.

  Reaching down, he drew her to a seated position, his hands on her bruised shoulders. She winced at the pressure. Her lip was cracked, and blood dribbled down her chin unchecked. She wondered if her black eye had formed yet, or if that would come later in a bloom of purple and sickly green.

  Would she even still be alive for it to matter?

  She cradled her arms defensively against her stomach, but she met his gaze. He was wearing that same expression he’d had earlier. The one that seemed to cut into her brain, searching for answers to questions he hadn’t even asked.

  “I underestimated you,” he said. “You have her fire.”

  She froze. “Whose fire?”

  His eyes crinkled just at the corners. “I didn’t think you would, you know,” he said instead of answering her. He reached out and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. “You don’t really look like her.”

  She swallowed hard. None of this sounded promising. It sounded creepy.

  “Why would I look like her?” she attempted.

  His eyes flicked over her face, tracing her features, before landing back on her hair. He pulled a lock of it in between his forefinger and thumb, rubbing the strands in between the pads of them. He closed his eyes in pleasure, and she tried not to gag.

  “That one is weak.” He tilted his head back in the direction of Anna, and she wanted to scream in the girl’s defense. She bit her tongue instead. “You’re not weak, though, are you, pet? You’re strong.”

  “I’m not,” she said, almost reflexively. She hadn’t even meant to say it. In fact, as the words came out, she wished she could have sawed off her tongue instead of uttering them. And he saw that she had revealed something she hadn’t wanted to.

  He swiped at his own bleeding nose before thumbing at her chin. Their bloods mixed on his finger. He stared at the red smear before bringing it to his mouth. He sucked on it as if he savored the taste, watching her as he did it. “I beg to disagree, pet.”

  This time she couldn’t stop the dry heaves. There was nothing in her stomach, but it was like her body wanted to purge itself of the image. They wrenched through her, and it was as if someone were putting pressure on every one of her bruised places.

  He was smiling at her after she had finished. “So strong,” he said again. “I wonder if this changes the game?”

  Delightful.

  “Or maybe not.” He seemed to laugh to himself. He chucked her chin with affection he would show a little sister, before standing.

  “Sweet dreams, girls. Oh, and don’t think you’ve been fully punished for that little stunt.”

  She was so taken aback by the whole exchange that she didn’t breathe as he made his way up the stairs. She heard the lock click, then waited. And waited.

  When she was absolutely sure they were safe, she shifted toward Anna’s shape in the darkness.

  “Anna,” Bess said softly. She didn’t want to hope. But she couldn’t help it. “Did you get it?”

  She saw a flash of teeth in the darkness and heard the smile in the girl’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CLARKE

  July 16, 2018

  “Do you know what the problem is?” Clarke broke the silence.

  “That you’ve been talking to Simon Cross and neglected to inform your partner, your supervisor, or the bureau?” Roger’s voice was ice.

  “No,” she said, keeping her eyes on him. She couldn’t quite meet Sam’s gaze yet. “It’s that he’s been calling the shots this whole time. And we’re left scrambling after him.”

  “Hate to state the obvious here, kid, but that’s the point of taking hostages.” It was the first thing Sam had said since she’d told them about the phone calls.

  “Right.” She drew out the word, her mind leaping in different directions. “If we don’t follow his game, the girls die. He’s proven it’s not an empty threat.” She met Sam’s eyes.

  “But, they die every time,” Roger commented.

  “They die anyway,” she said.

  “But do you know what . . .” Sam trailed off, a look on his face she’d long come to recognize.

  “What?” she prodded.

  “The photos,” Sam said, locking eyes with her. “Even at their most obscure, we always end up figuring them out.”

  “In time,” she said, her thoughts turning inward, scouring over the past year. He was right. Of course he was right. They’d missed only one deadline ever, out of dozens of clues.

  “It shouldn’t be possible,” Roger said.

  “Every time we got stuck . . . ,” Sam started.

  “We got lucky,” she said, snapping back to attention.

  Sam raised his brows. “But . . .”

  “We don’t get lucky.” It was an echo of what she’d told Della days earlier.

  “So that means he’s playing you even then,” Roger said. “How do you guys always get to the right spot within twenty-four hours of his deadline? Always?”

  How? How? How was he orchestrating even that?

  “The tip line,” Clarke said, her voice soft.

  Sam rocked back on his heels. It wasn’t a new idea—for killers to reach out to authorities through the very lines of communication created to stop them. But they hadn’t thought of it. It seemed too simple for Cross, even if his goal was to help them meet his imposed deadlines.

  “It wouldn’t be hard to track our movements. Plane information, hotel rooms,” Sam said. “If we weren’t moving on a clue quick enough, all he had to do was shoot us an email or call in to give us a nudge in the right direction.”

  Roger looked between them. “And you hadn’t thought of that? Is this your first day on the job? Jesus.”

  Clarke’s cheeks flushed with actual shame. It was rare for her to care about Roger’s criticism. But they’d messed up. It was careless and stupid and could cost them Anna. Bess.

  The silence was heavy. Roger was the one to break it. “The phone. Please tell me you had it checked.”

  “Della,” Clarke said before thinking.

  “She knew about it?” Of course he picked up on that.

  “Don’t blame her.” Clarke would never beg for herself. But Della had only been doing her a favor. “Blame me.”

  “Oh, I do,” Roger said. It didn’t matter, though. Clarke had crossed too many lines for any of them to think she’d come out of this unsca
thed. What mattered was that Della wasn’t taken down with her.

  Sam shifted, and she remembered he was there. Sam. He would protect Della. He was good at that. And cleaning up her messes.

  “He’s tracking us, he’s playing us, he’s plotted out this entire thing,” Clarke said. Her screwups were inconsequential at this point. “God, he’s running the whole table.”

  “He’s running the whole casino,” Sam corrected. “Scratch that—he’s running whole fucking Vegas.”

  They watched each other, wary and assessing. The room was tense, far more than it should have been for a simple conversation. Cross was putting them on edge, and she thought again about just how much power he held over them.

  “Why the hell are we still playing his game, by his rules?” she asked, frustrated and exhausted and tired of feeling like the fibers of her body were being stretched to the breaking point.

  “The girls,” Sam murmured.

  “We’re always too late,” Clarke said, her voice loud in the small confines of the cabin. It bounced against the walls and sounded far too desperate to her ears when it came back to her. She took a breath. “We keep thinking that if we just catch the right break, we’ll get a step ahead of him. But we can’t. We can’t.”

  “You just want to, what, ignore the clues, then?” Sam asked, and it was a genuine question. He was asking her.

  She pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead. “No. We just . . . I want us to be smarter. I want us to be able to make our own rules.”

  “If wishes were horses, kid,” Sam said, but his voice was kind instead of mocking.

  Roger glanced at Sam, then back at her. “Cross said something to you to make you look at the pictures differently, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he wants you to look at the clues differently. Anything you get from them is because he prompted you to find it,” Sam said.

  She took a beat. “Shit. Everything is . . . shit.”

  The air in the cabin grew heavy around her, like she could feel the particles of it pushing against her skin. Soft, gentle, but ever present. Wanting to slip between her lips, into her nostrils, in an effort to fill her up until there was nothing left of her. She closed her eyes and gathered the frustration and hopelessness and panic and let it seep out with the breath she exhaled. Focus. She just had to focus. She exhaled again.

  And then there it was.

  “It’s not an escalation,” she said, dropping to her knees before the men could respond. Her fingers found the file she’d tossed aside earlier. “Every other time it’s been the same thing, right? Same pattern every time. This time it’s different. Everything’s different.”

  She opened the file marked “Bess Stanhope” and met the woman’s eyes. His patterns were falling apart.

  “He wanted us here,” Sam said.

  “The question is why.”

  She didn’t need to say what they were thinking. If they knew the why of anything that man did, they wouldn’t be here.

  But then Sam surprised her. “He wants you to know where he is.”

  “That’s what we’ve been saying,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No, he wanted you to know exactly where he is. So what does he do?”

  Her mind spun. “He called me.

  “He called you,” Sam said.

  “He called me when he knew I would be able to calculate his location. He wanted me in town long enough to get the opportunity to do it.”

  “He’s setting us up,” Roger said.

  She glanced at him. “He knows you guys have had enough time to assemble backup. He knows that now that I have a radius, it’s just a matter of time before we storm the castle.”

  “So what does he have there waiting for us?” Sam wondered out loud.

  Again, none of them had an answer.

  “What did you mean it’s not an escalation?” Roger asked instead.

  Their eyes focused on Clarke.

  She pushed to her feet, feeling decidedly vulnerable on the floor, then held the file open against her chest so that Bess Stanhope looked back at them all.

  “Well, what if it’s not an escalation?” she asked, meeting Sam’s eyes. “What if it’s a finale?”

  Clarke needed time she knew she didn’t have. She rubbed her sweaty palms against the black fabric of her jeans, the toughness of it wicking away the moisture. She didn’t want to be in this room, talking so many words and not doing anything.

  There were so many strings unraveling. And they all led back to something she couldn’t quite see yet.

  The pictures.

  The pictures were meant for her. They had a secret message that she’d only started to decode. But even if she did figure them out, would they really tell her anything? Or would they lead her directly into his waiting clutches?

  His lair.

  He was nearby. She knew it. He’d given it away. But why? Did he want her to find him? He must. He’d lured them to this town, this place. Set them up so nicely. What was his endgame?

  The girl. Bess.

  She was blonde. It broke the biggest pattern there was. So why would he take her? He only ever kidnapped redheads. Not once had he deviated from that. So why had he taken Bess? What was it about the girl that was so compelling to make him break the strictest of his patterns? The thing that got him off the most. That’s where the answer was. Once she figured that out, the rest would come.

  Cross.

  She knew what he wanted. She knew what he’d always wanted. And it was in her power to give it to him. Doing so would be the ultimate defeat, though.

  She pushed the thought away as she always did and focused on the players in Chief Bradley’s office.

  Roger and Sam mirrored each other in the chairs in front of Bradley’s desk while Lucas propped a shoulder on the far wall. Clarke was hitched up against the windowsill. They had all fallen quiet after filling in the chief on their theories.

  “Well, I’ve already provided my officers with a list of buildings to scout,” the chief said, breaking the silence. “We only have three other guys on staff apart from Lucas, so I’m not sure how much ground they’ll be able to cover. We’re a small station.” She said the last bit with an apologetic shrug.

  “We’re in full manhunt mode,” Roger cut in smoothly. “Now that we know how serious the situation is, it’s all hands on deck.”

  Bradley nodded, grateful.

  “Can we see the list?” Clarke said, instead of the snide comment that lurked in the dark corners of her mind.

  “Of course.” Bradley held out a piece of paper. “Keep it, it’s a copy.” Clarke took it and scanned it, but nothing jumped out at her immediately. “There are a lot of buildings on here.” Searching them all would take longer than she wanted it to, even with the help of the extra agents.

  Bradley shrugged. “The recession.”

  Clarke tucked the list into the pocket of her jeans.

  “We need to talk to the boyfriend again,” she said to the room at large. “We need more information about Bess.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, today’s the deadline for the last picture,” Roger said, issuing a little slap on the wrist. Often because Cross arranged the drop-offs ahead of time, the packages were waiting at the locations whenever they figured them out. But this time there hadn’t been anything at the cabin when they’d first checked. And when they’d checked each day since, they’d turned up nothing. It would have to be there today if Cross was sticking to his own deadlines.

  “Oh, is it?” she asked, the false sweetness coating a thick layer of sarcasm. “Thanks so much. It had slipped my mind.”

  “Clarke.” This time it was Sam reeling her back in. She wondered how much longer she could take this, this walking on the edge, this feeling that she was always one comment away from slipping over.

  “Sorry,” she said after an indrawn breath, almost as if she were trying to hold the apology inside herself so that Roger couldn’t take it. Couldn’t hav
e it.

  It was a piss-poor one, anyway, and Roger knew that. His fingers slipped into the pockets of his trousers, and she wondered if he did it to hide the way they bunched into fists.

  The chief’s eyes were darting between them, and Clarke could tell she favored Roger’s side in the battle of wills by how she rocked just a half step closer to the man. To her, Clarke must appear erratic, insubordinate. Maybe she was.

  Sometimes she wondered why he put up with her. Mostly she thought it was for Sam.

  Now, he deliberately checked the heavy silver watch on his wrist, refusing to break the tension that she’d provoked.

  Only after another thirty seconds did he look back up. “So you two will head to the cabin for the next photo,” he said. There was no room for negotiation in the command. “Meanwhile, my team will take the lead on the buildings search.”

  “I’ll bring in Peterson. He’ll be here when you get back,” Bradley said, and Clarke appreciated the bravery it took to join in the conversation at just that point.

  But Clarke couldn’t trust herself to say anything, so she just swiveled and headed for the door, knowing Sam was close behind.

  Her eyes met his for a brief moment when they turned into the hallway. Her lips parted, the words catching in her throat.

  “Don’t,” he said, holding up a hand. “I don’t even want to look at you right now.”

  The words were the slap she’d braced for, but knowing it was coming didn’t make it sting any less.

  What made her feel like a caged animal was that she knew she’d messed up. She should have told him about the phone calls. Each time she’d answered was another little betrayal. It made her want to lash out at him instead of herself. To tell him that it was his fault. To remind him she’d known something like this would happen. To rage that she’d never wanted to be part of the case. Never thought she should be. But he’d convinced her.

  Instead of giving in to the need, though, she just nodded her head once. So that he would know she wouldn’t fight it.

  They continued the rest of the way to the car in heavy silence.