In For the Kill

by Shannon McKenna

  “My choice. Not your fault. I’m sorry I put you in danger.”

  “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I’m officially done. If you care about me, collaborate with me. Have some fucking mercy on me.”

  “I do care about you, but I care about this, too! Renato is leaving tomorrow morning, and Villa Rosalba will be closed up, indefinitely. They both came back when they heard what happened, and I thought even you would agree that it’s safer for me there than—”

  “You thought wrong,” he said. “I don’t agree. It’s not safer.”

  “Just give me this,” she pleaded. “One night. One last try. No one will attack me or seduce me. I don’t want anyone but you. I’m trying so hard, Sam! Let me find some meaning in all this horrible shit!”

  He stared up at the ceiling, the glaring overhead light. That headache slammed heavily into his skull with every heartbeat. The price of that head-butt. The silence stretched, tense and tight. Then tighter.

  He shook his head. He couldn’t go with her. He couldn’t physically restrain her. But he’d be damned if he’d give her his blessing.

  “No,” he said. “I’m done.”

  “Oh, shit. Shit,” she hissed. “Please! Don’t turn this into a stupid ultimatum! I’ll be back tomorrow! After that, I’ll be good, I promise!”

  “Don’t come back tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t come back at all.”

  Her eyes were full of torment. He looked away from them.

  “You can’t mean that,” she whispered.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Enjoy your freedom, Sveti. Try to be careful.”

  “Don’t throw us away over this! I have to do this, at all costs!”

  “We both know what the cost is,” Sam said. “Pay it and go. We’re all done here.” He closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to look at her.

  She got up but did not leave. “Simone brought you a car,” she offered. “I parked the one we used before in a garage across the street. When I told him that it was covered with blood, he said to—”

  “Take it,” he said. “You need a fresh, untraceable car, if you want to go out and challenge your bad guys all alone.”

  “I’m not challenging anyone! Keep the new one. I’ll just rent—”

  “Take the car and go.”

  “Sam—”

  “For the love of Christ.” He put his hand over his eyes, blocking her out. “Please. Don’t make me beg.”

  He waited. The door clicked open, and after a long, torturous pause, it clicked shut again.

  Sam opened his eyes. He was alone in the room. So. It was done. She’d left the parking ticket on the little table next to the bed.

  He stared at the crucifix on the wall. It came clear to him, for the first time. The point of having a crucifix in a hospital room. It had eluded him thus far. He’d had some vague idea of comfort, tradition, prayer.

  But it wasn’t about comfort at all. No way. That crucifix was to put things into perspective for the poor bastard on the bed. The unspoken message being, You think your shit is bad? You call that pain?

  Yeah, his shit was bad. He struggled to breathe.

  Sveti leaned on the wall outside Sam’s door to keep from falling.

  After the events of the last twenty-four hours, she would have expected to be burnt-out and empty. But letting her barriers down for Sam had opened up a vast new capacity for suffering inside her. Oh, lucky girl.

  “Svetlana! There you are!”

  She wiped the tears off her face and did not try to smile as Hazlett strode toward her. If only she could get what she needed from the Villa Rosalba without having to do a smiling PR song and dance for it. But that was the price she had to pay. One of the many. She’d bargained away her own heart for this. “Hey, Michael,” she said dully.

  Michael gestured toward Sam’s door. “How is your friend?”

  “He feels terrible, but he should make a full recovery,” she replied. “His family will be arriving soon.”

  “Excellent.” He gave her a toothy, approving smile. “So you won’t feel like you’re abandoning him!”

  Hah. Right. Her feelings must have shown on her face. He laid his hand on her shoulder. It felt heavy and hot through the thin silk.

  “Is he upset?” he asked. “About you coming to the Villa Rosalba?”

  She shrugged, that being none of his fucking business.

  “Predictable. I anticipated that. But he can’t expect you to sleep in a hotel room alone, or to wander the corridors of the hospital all night, eating out of vending machines and sleeping in an upright chair!”

  “He just wants me safe,” she said quietly.

  “Well, and so you will be. Finally. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate what he did for you, though perhaps keeping you out of the situation altogether might have been more intelligent.”

  “Don’t blame him,” she said. “He tried.”

  “Not hard enough, in my book,” Hazlett said. “Ready to go?”

  She hesitated, looking at Sam’s door. She could still change her mind. Run back into that room. Stay forever under Sam’s sheltering arm. It was wonderful, under there. Warm, safe, exciting, sexy. Fun.

  Everything she could want. And she did want it, desperately. But it meant staying forever in this tortured limbo.

  Sasha and her mother had both begged her, in their own ways, to take this next step. If she turned away, she would live and die always knowing that she’d fallen short and failed them. It was time to stop being poor little Sveti, flotsam on the tide, swept here and swept there. She had to grow up and do the hard thing. She’d heard that phrase thrown around both in jest and in earnest for years. Only now did she really understand what it meant.

  This was her hard thing. She’d had hard luck, and plenty of it, but the hard thing was not the same as hard luck. The hard thing was consciously chosen, its painful consequences stoically accepted.

  Walking away from Sam was the hardest thing of all.

  She followed Hazlett with the car Simone had provided, detouring to her hotel, so she could pick up her clothes, computer, and tablet. She had no idea how she got through the rest of that evening at Villa Rosalba. Drinks on the terrace with Michael and Renato, a late dinner she could not eat, invasive questions about her disastrous adventures. She performed like a puppet, chatted, smiled. Polite and articulate. Was this how she would feel for the rest of her life? She’d traded the vivid realness of being with Sam for this? Small talk, dull superficiality, crushing boredom? God, how depressing.

  Shortly after dinner, she caved. “I’m so sorry, but I can’t keep my eyes open any longer,” she said. “Would you gentlemen excuse me?”

  “Of course.” Hazlett got to his feet. “I’ll show you to your room.”

  He took her up a stonework staircase that led to the breezeway on the second floor. The moon was bright in the sky. Wall sconces glowed on the loggias that opened out upon the garden below. It was a Renaissance fantasy, and she was completely numb to it.

  Michael unlocked a room and handed her the key. She turned to go in, and he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Svetlana,” he began earnestly. “You’ve been through such an ordeal. If you need company, any time of the day or night, please, call on me. I’m right across the courtyard. Second room from the left.”

  “Thanks,” she murmured. As if. In your dreams, buddy.

  “You’re troubled,” he said softly, stroking her shoulder with his thumb. “Is it about your . . . I’m not quite sure what to call him.”

  “Friend,” she said. “He’s my dear friend.” Always, and forever. Tension rose inside her. She didn’t want Hazlett’s oily curiosity brushing up against that awful sore spot, not even slightly.

  “Just friend?” he demanded. “Nothing more?”

  She pried off his hand. “Not a good time, Michael.”

  He was instantly contrite. “Sorry. I won’t put pressure on you.”

  How very civil of him. Wow. She stared bl
ankly. The situation felt grotesque, against the backdrop of blood, death, and heartbreak.

  His expression was one of stoic fortitude. “I can be patient,” he told her, soulfully. “When something’s worth waiting for.”

  Wait until the sun exploded, then. “Good night, Michael.” She shut the door in his face with no further salute.

  Now she had to just wait, without going batshit. She’d be smart to sleep a few hours, but sleep was almost as laughable as Michael Hazlett coming on to her, with gunshots still ringing in her ears, and Sasha’s body barely cold. And Sam saying, Don’t come back at all.

  She sat on the bed, doubled over. The images that flooded through her made her rock, moaning. Sasha, jerking and twisting in midair as he took those bullets. He had been taking bullets for everyone for his entire fucking life, and he’d never gotten any thanks for it. She was so angry, so confused. So grateful Sam had not died, but damn Sasha for not finding some brilliant way out of that trap other than his sacrificial goat routine. And God, what a thing to criticize someone for. Self-sacrifice, heroism. It was so fucked up. So wrong.

  One thing, at least, was clear. She didn’t care what bridges she burned. She wasn’t going to London for the Illuxit job. It felt wrong now.

  Of course, everything felt wrong right now. They said not to make life-changing decisions when depressed, but if she followed that rule, she’d never make any decisions at all. Life was too short to tolerate Hazlett’s smug smile, his groping, squeezing fingers. She had plenty of other things to grit her teeth about. She didn’t need to go looking for more.

  But the thought didn’t take up much space in her head. Nor did she appreciate the beautiful room, the priceless antiques, the moon on the veranda. The serenity of the place mocked her. An industrial wasteland, with caustic fumes, smokestacks, bursts of angry flame stabbing up into a dingy sky. That would be more appropriate.

  Hours crawled by. She paced. Powered up her laptop, poked through the JPEGs. She set up a slideshow of photos her mother had sent her from Italy. Many were of Villa Rosalba. It occurred to her that Mama had not sent a single picture of Renato.

  At three, she unlocked her door and stepped into the breezeway. There was a rhythmic night chorus of insects in the garden. The sound was shrill and ominous. Beckoning her to her doom. No big deal. Doom was her natural habitat. She knew her way around it like a pro.

  She walked down the corridor. No one stirred. Down the stairway. Into the sculpture garden. She made her way to her mother’s bench, with the view of Atlas. Grateful for the sconces and their dim, wavering light. She was an antenna, tuned for the faintest sound of movement. What an idiot, not to get her hands on a flashlight.

  The light that filtered through the thick foliage was barely enough to follow the pattern of the tree trunk tiles. It got more difficult farther out, where the shadows were deeper, but once her eyes adjusted, she began to see the dim outlines of the images on the tiles.

  She found the tile with The Sword of Cain. Abel’s blood seemed black, but she’d seen so much blood recently, her brain filled in the color.

  She dug her fingernails into the space around the tile and pulled. It was heavy, awkward. The cavity beneath was a well of utter darkness.

  She laid the tile down, wincing at the rasping clank it made, and reached down blindly into the darkness.

  Deeper . . . deeper. She leaned forward, braced herself on the other side, reaching . . . and oh, God, no. Water.

  Her touch released a whiff of festering plant matter. She groped around, in slime and muck, and found what felt like a plastic sleeve, the kind one put in a spiral binder. It was brittle, stiff.

  She felt delicately around for the edges and grasped it between her thumb and forefinger. She lifted it out.

  It was stiff, misshapen, stinking. It dripped.

  She laid it gently on the ground and leaned forward again, teeth and belly both clenched, careful not to inhale. She quartered the watery space and felt again. Every last centimeter of that slimy cavity. Small things wriggled and squirmed away at her touch. She kept at it, hoping for a sealed item, something plastic, vacuum-wrapped. Something that might be somehow protected from six years of mold and seep.

  There was nothing. When she drew her hands out, they were fouled with muck. She set the tile in place, smearing it as she did so.

  But there was nothing to hide, or to gain from all this stealth. Her hope had flatlined to steely calm. Whatever was in that plastic sleeve was too light to be anything but paper, and nothing paper could survive proximity to water for any period of time. Let alone six years.

  She got up, holding the plastic between thumb and forefinger. Renato or Hazlett could pop out like a horror movie cliché, with lurching zombie hordes along with them, and she would not blink. She had no secrets to defend. They had died and decomposed along with Mama.

  Fuck. Them. All.

  She went upstairs, not bothering to tiptoe. She did not allow herself to look at the envelope as she marched down the breezeway.

  She laid the thing on the desk and trained the lamp on it.

  It was stiff, deformed. The plastic was too clouded to see the contents. She tried to tease the contents from inside the sleeve, but it was adhered to the plastic. She took scissors and cut it open. The paper had slid down to the bottom of the envelope in a shapeless wad.

  Just in case, she examined it thoroughly, fiber by fiber. Nothing.

  She’d gone to these crazy lengths and paid this unspeakable price for a lump of discolored, shredded wood pulp.

  She stared at it, hot-eyed. What brainless cow stuck a piece of paper into a hole in the ground under the open sky and then died before she could tell anyone where to find it? Her mother had been an intelligent woman. Where in the fuck had she put her brains?

  To be fair. Mama had never meant for it to be a long-term hiding place. Nor had she ever intended to get murdered.

  She’d been so desperate for some storybook closure, but such a thing didn’t exist. It was a cheap trick her mind had played on her, to escape from the cruel stupidity of reality. And now, the cruelest one.

  She had traded her future with Sam . . . for this.

  She went into the bathroom. Yesterday’s scrapes and bruises stood out in stark relief on her pale face. Scratches, from the thorns. The lump on her head was still sore. She wondered if it was getting infected but couldn’t summon up the energy to care. All she could focus on right now was how stupid she was.

  Stupid, and very alone.

  Moping. Becca lectured her about that, but it wasn’t like she didn’t fight the despair. She tried hard to channel her energy in a positive direction, to turn her back on the pit of despair. But the pit of fucking despair had her name all over it. There was a magnet at the bottom, pulling on her.

  She’d thought she was fighting back. The grand, definitive fight, but it had all come to nothing. How would she fight now?

  She didn’t even know where to begin. What muscles to flex.

  After the tenth time she’d washed her hands and could still smell the festering slime, she concluded that the clinging stench was all in her head, like a whole lot of other highly undesirable things. She dried them on the fluffy white hand towel and walked back into the room.

  In the dimness, her mother smiled from the screen, a ghostly apparition. Sveti gasped, jumping, and then laughed without mirth. Jumping at nothing. She’d put that slideshow up with her own hands.

  Mama’s smile mocked her. How could she smile, after cheating her daughter out of her best chance at happiness? It was the JPEG of the photo in her bedside frame. On the printed copy, she’d trimmed off the side with the tumbled rock and hillside and most of the numbers, too, in order to center Mama’s face and fit the frame. It seemed odd, to see the image without “The Sword of Cain” and the numbers over Mama’s head.

  The image faded, transformed. Now it was a gnarled olive tree against a sunset-tinted sky. Then the ruins of a Roman bath carved directly out of the
rocky seaside, lapped by the waves. That faded and was replaced by a crumbling tower on a peninsula, the lurid colors of the graffiti on its walls bright against the vivid blue-green of the sea.

  Sveti walked closer, hypnotized by the stream of images. She hadn’t been able to bear looking at them since Mama’s death. Now, each photograph felt like a message she almost understood. It stirred in her brain. Teasing, beckoning. She had to pin down that ticklish flash, translate it into something concrete. Something she could use.

  She stopped the slideshow and got into the folder of JPEGs, clicking around until she found Mama’s portrait. It filled the screen.

  This was the first time she’d looked at anything in that picture other than Mama. Her head was framed in one half. The half Sveti had trimmed off showed a rocky hill with a dark cleft in the rocks, a heap of tumbled boulders in front. At the far right was the edge of a concrete building. A chain-link, razor-wire fence encircled it.

  She closed her eyes, picturing the numbers Mama had written. Only the first two digits of each number had remained on the piece in the frame. A 40 on the top, a 14 beneath. The rest of the digits had gone out with the trash, years ago. She remembered thinking, seven digits? Phone numbers, maybe. She didn’t give a shit whose, under the circumstances. No one she wanted to call. That was for damn sure.

  One never knew what to value while one had it. Only when it was snatched, smashed, or thrown away did one begin to understand. It had been that way with her parents, her childhood. Her innocence.

  Just not with Sam. She’d known he was a treasure from the start.

  She pushed that thought down before it could derail her, and found a program that accessed the metadata. Her mother had used a digital camera. It might have geotagged her photos.

  In fact, it had. And the first two numbers of the longitude and latitude matched the written numbers on her photo. Forty. Fourteen.

  She stared at them, terrified to get her hopes up again. She’d gotten slapped down so many times. It could just be random. But it was all she had left. That was reason enough to take it and run with it.