by Paula Cox
He turns his eyes to two of his men and gives them a significant glance. Maya follows his eyes with mounting suspicion, still not understanding what he’s getting at. But the two men do in fact look familiar, and she realizes the more she looks that she does know them. Igor and Ikov, her father’s bodyguards.
“We’ve reached a mutual understanding,” Oren continues. “The
Ceallaigh’s and the Russians. Or, me and the Russians, with Mattias’s oversight. That’s what I’m talking about. We’re an established presence, New England regulars. We’ve got money. The Russians are still visitors and need all the help we can give them. I went out of my way and hired some extra eyes.”
Maya listens without comprehending. Her eyes are still fixed to the TV, on the mangled and bloody body of Oren’s father. Someone off-screen is speaking but too softly for Maya to understand. Mattias listens intently, his eyes darting from unseen to form. The fear in his eyes makes her even more nauseous than the sight of all his bruises and blood.
“What does this have to do with me?” she asks in a dead voice.
Oren finishes his candy bar and drops the wrapper to the side of the bed. He smacks chocolate and caramel from the roof of his mouth.
“It has everything to do with you,” he says, looking her squarely in the eyes. “Everything, my angel. Everything I’ve done has been for you. You haven’t been out of my thoughts for a moment, not a single one, not in years. If only you knew how I think about you. That my head is bursting with thoughts of you. Sometimes I don’t know how I can stand it. Sometimes I think it’s too much—that’s it’s impossible for one person to think so much for another. But that’s my reality, you see. Sad and pitiful as it is, I’m your slave and that man—” he spits, indicating with his eyes to the figure of his broken father—“tried to steal you away from me. Tried to turn you into a business deal. It disgusts me. It makes me sick.”
He bares his teeth and sticks out his tongue like he’s trying to get rid of a bad taste in his mouth. “Can you imagine? Maya Butler: a commodity? A trade? The wife of my father? My sister? It disgusts me, maybe even more than it disgusted you.”
The TV exchange stops. Mattias’s chin drops back into his chest. A figure comes from off-screen, but so dark that his body and whatever he’s carrying are like shadows.
“The fact is I love you.” Oren turns to Maya and stretches out a hand. Maya takes it. It’s a thin hand, and cold as ice. “I love you,” he repeats. “I love you. More than anything else in the world, I love you. And I hate anyone who tries to take you away against your wishes. Just thinking of it—thinking of you with anyone else…”
He lifts his arm over his head and covers it like he was trying to protect himself from all the thoughts invading his mind. His hand tightens in Maya’s. He begins to rock back and forth on the bed, making little squeaks.
The figure on screen next to Mattias raises his object to the camera so that she can get a good look. Maya’s heart turns a somersault. The man’s carrying a container of gasoline.
“Oh, God, no,” she whispers. The man gives the container a swish to demonstrate that it’s full. “What are you doing, Oren?”
He unveils his head and turns back to her. His eyes are wet. Maya remembers how she used to love Oren’s sensitive side, thinking it was both cute and strong for someone to show as much emotion as he did.
“It’s all for you, my angel,” he says. His tears begin to trickle. “That man is a criminal. He’s a monster. You know that better than anyone.”
“We’re not getting married,” she says. “I would never... I wouldn’t ever…”
“I know.” He squeezes her hand again. “But the fact that he even tried. That he wanted to make you his whore, and that he thought you would debase yourself to him. And for what? Power and money? He really thought he could control you with that—it just shows how twisted of a man he is to think you could be bought so cheaply.”
“You don’t need to do this.” Maya’s eyes are filling with tears. She doesn’t know if she’s more sickened or terrified by sitting here with a man who was about to demonstrate that he was capable of murdering his own father.
“Yes, I do,” Oren says with conviction. He lets go of her hand and brushes away the tears collected on his cheeks and lips. “To keep him from ever coming near you again. I know—my angel—that you’re too good. You think he is capable of grace and saving, but you don’t know his type like I do. He’s put his mind to having you. He won’t accept anything else. He’s a parasite, a virus: he’ll find a way to worm himself into your life one way or another. He must be eliminated.”
“Oren,” Maya fights to talk. She fights past fear and nausea. Oren hasn’t said it, but she knows she’s the only thing that can possibly save Mattias Kroll from his hideous fate. He can’t be dead—there would be no reason for Oren to come to her if he’d already done the deed. He wants her to bargain with him. That’s what he’s counting on now. “Please, Oren. He’s your father. You can’t do this to him.”
“He’s not my father,” Oren spits. “He’s a scoundrel. He’ll die like a scoundrel.”
The man with the gasoline brings the container back from the focus of the camera. He pops off the lid and begins to pour a thin, glistening stream of liquid onto Mattias’s head. The old man thrashes in his chair, howling.
“Maybe he is.” Maya tries an alternative route. “But you’re not, Oren. You’re not a monster. Only a monster would kill like this. I know you, my heart. I’ve known you too well to know what you’re capable of. My heart… my heart… you mustn’t.”
Oren pauses the screen and turns to her.
“You can’t, my heart,” Maya says, again and again; trying with each repetition to calm him, somehow dispel him from his mad plan. Mattias can’t be dead, she tells herself. Oren wouldn’t be here if he’d already killed him. There’s still a chance. There has to be a chance.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that to me again?” Oren says weakly. His lips are trembling. He takes her hand, laces his fingers with hers, and looks her in the eyes and says, “My love, do you even realize?”
“I’ve been stupid. I’d forgotten about us, my heart. But I know you—you’re not capable of something like this.” She hardly recognizes the words coming out of her mouth. They’re just words to soothe, words detached from anything she’s actually feeling.
“Do you know how I’ve thought about you, my angel? Do you know what it’s done to me, to have to be separated from you?”
“I can only imagine.”
“I can’t go through it again, my love. My only one. It will tear me to shreds. I’ll cease to be. I won’t think. I won’t be anything.”
“I won’t do it again, my heart. Anything you want. What do you want me to do for you, my love?”
Without thinking about it, she begins to stroke his leg. Anything to relax him and work him out of his passion. Oren smiles gently like an old father. He places his hand on hers. Maya swallows and prepares herself, but he doesn’t do what she expected. He doesn’t move her hand over to the bulge in his pants but puts it back on the cover of the bed separating them.
“Not like this, my angel,” he almost coos. “I’m not going to have you like the others want to have you. You will be mine, but soul and body.”
Maya hardly hears any of this. To her, it’s just more words. She knows already what Oren wants. And at that moment if she can save someone else’s life and possibly her own, she’ll do whatever Oren wants her to.
“Did you hear me?” He puts three fingers at the bottom of her chin and tilts her head up so that he’s looking at her eye to eye. “Do you understand, my angel?”
“Of course I do.” Maya forces a crooked smile on her face.
“Forever and ever, my angel. We’ll never have to be parted again. We’ll never have to face the darkness alone. No one in this world will be able to tear us apart.”
“Yes,” Maya says. Her eyes flutter to the TV
, to the frozen image of Mattias swamped in gasoline, a cloud of spewed liquid obscuring his face from where he was spitting out. “Never again.”
“Then you accept.” Oren beams and wraps her into a hug. His thin muscles wrap around Maya’s body like the bars to a cage. Oren is small and compact, but his embrace is the strongest she’s ever been trapped in. “Our new beginning starts now. Oh, my angel. You don’t know how happy I am!” He releases her. Maya catches her breath and forces her smile to stay in place. She’s just agreed to marry Oren Kroll. The realization is slow in coming. But she hardly thinks about it—all her attention is focused on the man she’s just saved.
“Everything will be done as soon as possible,” he says. “And then we’ll escape this place together. Put as much distance between these murderers and us as possible. You can’t stay here a second longer—but you know that as well as I do. We need a new life. It’ll all be done immediately. Nothing will hold us down. We’ll never have to see these terrible people, not ever again.”
He cradles her head, wrapping her into his embrace. “No more of this. No more. But wait—” he turns his excited eyes to hers. “What have I been thinking? You don’t even know it yet!”
“Kirill’t know what?”
“The best part!” He smiles and plants a dry kiss on her cheek, which saps her strength like he’d just stuck her with a knife.
The TV resumes at the click of a button.
No. No no no no. He couldn’t have. He can’t.
The shadow flicks open a Zippo lighter and reveals its dancing flame to the camera like he’s showing something indecent. Maya watches in horror as the man inches closer and closer to the broken, gasoline-soaked figure bent over in its chair. Closer and closer: the tiny flames gets smaller and smaller.
And then, an eruption. Piercing screams. Maya opens her mouth to make one herself, but her breath escapes in a soundless gape, and she falls, unconscious, onto the sheets of her hotel bed.
Chapter 26
I’m just sitting there, letting the seconds since Maya told me to off her father turn into minutes, and fold out into their first hour. The air is so cold it’s like freezing water in the car, but I can’t move a muscle. Not even to bend down and get the phone that dropped from my hand. I don’t need it anyway. Even I got a call—hell, even if it was Palmer himself who was doing the calling—I doubt I could so much as breathe out a word. Not in this cold. Not now—not when I’m still sitting there in Maya’s Maserati running through the last thing she told me.
Kill Theo Butler.
No—not Theo Butler. Maya’s dad, if she still saw him that way.
Christ. Why the hell can’t I move? It’s like someone’s dropped the universe down on my head and it still keeps pushing me down, down through the car seat and floor, then asphalt and ground, straight to the core of the world which, for some reason, is rotating with a face that glows the way Maya’s face glows when the light catches it in the right way. Turning her hair into gold. Making her skin seem like something silkier than skin, making it like wine.
I snap back into focus and focus snaps me back to looking at her room. At her silhouette through the curtains. But I’ve made hits before. Dozens: a dozen at least. I don’t know how many exactly. More than twenty, less than fifty. But I never keep count. That’s for the braggers, the careers. The guys who think the only reason humans ever developed thumbs in the first place was to steady your grip when you’re pointing the barrel of an Item into someone’s face, your fingers flexing on the trigger like tiny dancers.
Sure I’ve done this before. Hits. Kills. Murders—whatever you want to call them. Cheaters, scoundrels, rapists, and criminals, and also poor bastards with the bad luck to have had a run-in with a psychopath and the worse luck of getting on that person’s bad side.
This was no different than all those times. Hell, it would be easier. This wasn’t some twenty-something kid or an ex-husband or anything like that. Butler was an old guy with a hell of a lot more blood on his hands than he could get rid of saying rosaries or making donations. I’d probably be doing a lot of poor bastards in the future a favor by plugging him now. Guys who’d have targets on their back from loans gone wrong. Guys who’ve probably got targets on their backs right now, who walk out of their offices and check for bombs in their mail, or who memorize the numbers of license plates, or who can’t help adjusting their side mirror every three seconds when they’re on the road.
And Butler—that guy sure as hell has his share of people who want him dead. He’d probably be the one I’d help the most. A single shot in the head would probably be a whole lot nicer than most of the ways the other guys would off him. Simple. Easy. Quick.
So then why the fuck couldn’t I move?
I slide my hand across the leather, feeling its surface. Smooth, hard, and cold like marble. This goddamn car was becoming a prison every second longer I sat there. Another hour of this and I’d lose my mind. I needed to go—that’s what I needed to do. Back to the Clubhouse or on to the hospital. Scratch the hospital. Maybe I should just duck into a cheap hotel of my own. Put myself into a little box with walls thick enough so that the neighbors can’t hear me beating holes into the mattress with my fists. Find a pillow and roar into it like a fucking high school girl dumped the night of prom. Unleash. Find some bottles and squeeze off a few rounds just to feel powerful again and not so low and paralyzed.
I needed to get Maya Butler out of my head. Some way or another. Because if she doesn’t leave, I’m done for.
I stretch my fingers out nice and easy, one at a time. They’ve gotten clamped and clawed, like nails grown too long. I swear I can hear the cracks from frozen sweat breaking. I crank my neck—left, right, forward, back. Thing hurts like hell, but at least I’m moving again. It must have been four hours since I was parked there. Almost midnight.
I lean down and shove the phone into my pocket without looking at it, and start the engine. The Maserati gives a bear’s roar and thrums into life. The shake of the engine makes the seat rattle; makes my whole body shiver back into life, and only then do I realize how fucking cold I am. Blast the heaters. Defrost the windshield. Accumulated snow drips down and off the screen like viscera.
When I feel there’s enough life thrumming through the pipes I clean off the shields and put the thing in drive and spin two fast circles on the icy lot. The tires squeal like little creatures. The wheel yanks left and right. The whole metal shell is protesting, but I keep on going, spinning up snow and ice, wheeling myself and my extra two thousand pounds towards the mouth of the highway. I don’t look twice, even when I know that if I just glanced at my side mirror, I’d see the light from Maya’s room winking back at me.
Kirill’t look, I force myself to chew the thought. On the highway now. I’m the only car, go figure. Plows haven’t gotten onto the roads yet, and I can only imagine what a brawl it would be with someone else sharing lanes with me: just pulling onto the road, I skid three lanes and almost smash into the metal rail separating road from ocean. Kirill’t look back. I kick the car into gear for no apparent reason—this road’s got me going fifteen no matter how far I shove the pedal down. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. The words are an anthem, a creed, a promise, a last grip on sanity: the only thing separating me from going over to Theo Butler’s this very second to put as many holes in his heart as I can, if only to get one last kiss from his daughter.
Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look back. Kirill’t look—
Fuck.
Five minutes I must have spent spinning and hydroplaning on this road before the fact hits me. I can tell myself what to do as much as I want. I can tell myself you’ve got a boy who’s possibly bleeding to death in the hospital and who needs to see his brothers there for him. I can try to convince myself what the most important thing in the world to me is: it doesn’t make an inch of difference. I knew it the second I pulled out of the lot. I’m going back for Maya.
Highway rules woul
d probably frown at making a U-turn across three lanes of an interstate, but I don’t exactly see state troopers marshaling out of the ocean, so I make the spin and watch my fronts kick up chunks while my backs go flying.
Back up the road we go. I haven’t got a thought in my head about what I’m going to say to Maya—I’m still not sure I’m even capable of making words. Her phone call did something to me. Set me off. Clammed me up. Put me in fight or flight or some equivalent that forced me into auto-response and sent my brain scanners flying with the single order to kill, kill whoever you had to kill and kill like your life depended on it because, without Maya, you’d have no life worth living.
The snow’s falling thick, like a curtain. The car’s getting a hell of a wash out of it but my lights don’t show much of anything except for a few outlines. Two minutes, I count in my head. Then the half, the quarter. Three. Motel Six creeps back into view, with its dozens of glowing room lights. My eyes shoot immediately up to Maya’s room like they’re being drawn there by heat-seekers.
