by Nashoda Rose
My gaze darted to the driveway when I heard the crunch of tires. Not from the road ahead, but from behind me. I groaned as the running jarred my shoulder. I veered off the driveway into the brush, but fell as my ankle turned over in the hidden ditch.
I screamed in agony when my shoulder took the brunt of the impact. My vision blurred and I shook my head trying to clear the fogginess. I took my hand off my shoulder and crawled, but every movement was so painful that I was afraid I was going to pass out.
Footsteps sounded behind me. The crackle of twigs snapping under his weight.
I tried to gain my footing, but lost my balance and fell again.
“Are you done?”
I heaved breaths while lying on my side. Blood soaked into Kai’s shirt, his nice expensive white button-down shirt. He had so many of them and I hadn’t taken them off. I wore one every day just so when I breathed in, it was him who sank into my lungs.
“I’ll never be done,” I retorted. They may be able to take my body, but like Kai said, never let anyone take my mind.
He bent over and grabbed the arm with the bullet in it and yanked me to my feet. I gritted my teeth trying to stop the scream from emerging, but it came out as a moan.
“You ready to go home now, London? Or do you prefer to be called Raven?”
I glared up at him and spit in his face. The glob of saliva hit his cheek and slid down the surface of his skin to drop off his jaw, soaking into his black T-shirt. “Fuck you.”
He hauled on my arm and I had no choice but to stumble after him or have my arm dislocated. I realized I hadn’t made it very far from the driveway; although at the time, it felt as if I’d been running forever.
He opened the passenger door. “Get in.”
“Where are you taking me?”
Not even a flicker of an expression. God, he was a machine. “A new home. One you’ll appreciate… in time.”
“Vault.”
That got a mild lowering of his brows before he leaned over me and did up my seatbelt. Then before I knew what was happening, he had my wrist in a handcuff. He yanked my arm up and attached the other end of the cuff to the handle on the ceiling.
I didn’t bother pulling on it because it was my wounded shoulder and there was no point except to cause me pain.
“I’m going to bleed to death.”
“Doubt it. We’ll see.”
He slammed the door and I watched him walk around the front of the SUV. He was terrifying, not like Kai had been when I met him; this was different because it was like I was talking to a wall of blackness. Soulless.
He folded in and buckled his seatbelt before starting the engine. Then he looked at me, his eyes roaming the length of me before settling on my wound. “Put pressure on it.”
I glared and didn’t want to do what he said, but I wanted to live, so despite the agony, I applied pressure. “Kai is going to be pissed. He’ll come after me.”
He gave an abrupt nod. “Yes. But I suspect he’ll spend months looking for you, thinking you ran away—again.” No. Kai wouldn’t believe that, would he? He’d know I didn’t leave willingly. “And when he does find out, we will then know where his loyalty lies.”
I gasped. This was a test. A test of Kai’s loyalty to Vault. Oh, God.
He threw the car into gear and started down the driveway. “And my name is Connor.”
THE MOMENT I opened the door to the house, I knew. The grin tugging at my mouth that had been there since the plane landed faded, and my stomach dropped.
I didn’t need to look around or call her name, I fuckin’ knew London wasn’t here. Coldness enveloped and the rift split open again filling with black tar and suffocating me.
I took my time, checking room by room, hand on my knife, but the precaution was unnecessary because I knew no one was here. And hadn’t been in a while.
She hadn’t been.
“FUCK!” I shouted and slammed my fist into the drywall leaving a large dent. The mirror hanging above the hallway table crashed to the floor and shattered.
Rage was an emotion that had played with me, taunted, over the last few years as emotions crept back into me. I’d kept it controlled. I’d kept it blanketed because I’d seen what it did to other men—they made mistakes.
I had been able to smirk through the anger with my casual calm because I never gave a shit.
Now I did.
Now I fuckin’ did.
And now I couldn’t grin through the anger pulsating through my blood. It had control of me as I strode through the house, a house I spent years building. A house that meant something to me because it lived and breathed London now.
I didn’t know why I bothered looking for her. Maybe I was hoping for once my gut instinct was wrong and she was lying in our bed naked waiting for me. Hope. Fuck. Never have fuckin’ hope. I knew better.
I kicked open the bedroom door and my eyes locked on the empty bed.
The sheets were tucked into the mattress. London didn’t tuck the sheets in. When we went to bed, she always pulled them out from under the mattress so if she made the bed, she didn’t tuck. I tucked.
Meaning she hadn’t slept in the bed since I left thirteen days ago.
I’d been in Toronto finding info on Chaos’s new assignment, Lionel. Vault’s email stated Chaos was to get the files on his computer, meaning she had to get an invite back to his place and since he liked to hang out at Avalanche, a bar Chaos knew well, she was going to get his attention and get that invite.
I’d also looked further into Tristan Mason because it didn’t sit right that he happened to start showing up at Chaos’s coffee shop at the same time as Vault asked to have him looked into.
I hated coincidences.
Fuck, thirteen days. Thirteen days I’d been gone and without contact with London. How long had she been gone? But the bigger question was had she run? Did she regress? Had I left her too soon? Or had she gone home to see her father? I knew she was worried about him, but I’d told her about Vault. She knew how dangerous they were.
My gaze slid to the chair I’d sat in the day I’d brought London here and waited for her to wake. Then to the bathroom where I saw her toothbrush sitting in the holder on the counter. I walked across the room, into the bathroom then ran my thumb over the bristles—dry.
The idea that Vault had found my house, found London…
I swiped my arm across the counter top sending everything flying into the wall then crashing to the floor. I stormed out of the bathroom, pulled my cell from my back pocket and tapped the code then contacts then went to hit Dr. Westbrook’s number.
I stopped.
Mistakes. That was exactly what rage did. Reacting without thinking and that was what I’d nearly done. Calling her father was a mistake. Vault knew every incoming number and every outgoing number on his phone.
“Fuck, London. Where the hell are you?”
I switched phones, tapped, and then held it to my ear. He picked up on the first ring. I interrupted his ‘what’s up’ with, “She’s gone. Need eyes on the street.”
“Okay. How long?” Ernie asked.
I walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out the milk and read the stamped date on the top. Expired six days ago. I tossed it into the sink. “I left thirteen days ago. Could be gone since then.”
“She have wheels?”
“No.”
“Take me five hours to fly there.”
I frowned. “Where the fuck are you?” Since London had been with me, I hadn’t spoken to Ernie. He’d said he was taking some time, meaning he was going somewhere hot and lying on the beach doing fuck all except women. “Just get here. I’m calling in my marker with Deck on this.”
I hung up.
Deck suspected Connor was alive. Deck, who Chaos was in love with. Deck, who had been a pain in my ass. But Deck had skills and I’d use them. I’d use anyone and anything to get her back.
I walked into the living room, pushed the couch aside and crouched. My
palms slid over the hardwood until I felt the slight indent. I pulled out my knife, stabbed it between the two pieces of hardwood where the dip in the floor was and peeled back one of the boards.
I reached inside and pulled out the leather satchel that held my numerous fake passports and all the paperwork I hid from Vault, including the deed to the house. I grabbed the larger knapsack that had a few of my knives, and cash. It wasn’t my only cash because I didn’t like it all in one place, but it was enough.
Then I grabbed the last bag. A bag I never wanted to use, but the reality was London may not have run away or gone to see her father. There was a third possibility. Despite there being no indication of a struggle, Vault could’ve found my house. Found her.
I unzipped the last bag and carefully pulled out the device.
No attachments.
No ties to anything.
But it was too late for that. Maybe a couple of months ago this would’ve been easy, but as I set the device and placed it on the coffee table, tightness gripped my chest.
She lingered here and part of me didn’t want to destroy that. No, not part of me—all of me.
I stood, snagged the two bags, the heavy one slung over my shoulder and started for the door.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
I threw open the door and walked out.
The sound of my steps on the patio stones were steady and casual, matching the thump of my heart. This is what I needed to do.
I folded into my car, turned the key and the engine came to life. Then I slowly drove down the driveway.
I glanced once in the rear-view mirror just as the ground rumbled beneath the car and there was a loud boom.
Pieces of the house lifted into the air with flames. Black smoke billowed into the sky. I stopped at the road and watched in the mirror as the house burned.
It was the destruction of the rage. Destruction of what one girl made me feel for the first time in my life.
I had to burn the emotions and find the calm again.
Because if I didn’t, the rift was going to split and there’d be nothing left of me. The darkness would be all consuming and even London’s lightness wouldn’t be able to bring me back.
Present Day
France
MOTHER WAS DEAD.
I killed her and all I felt was relief and satisfaction.
Fuckin’ dead and maybe I was just as bad as her because I’d enjoyed watching her flounder as she struggled to breathe with the wire tight around her delicate throat. I liked how her fingernails dug into the backs of my hands as she clawed and raked at me, at the wire, at her neck, her eyes begging.
I’d begged at one time, too. As a kid, I’d begged for the pain to stop. Begged her not to kill my father. Begged night after night for my sister to be saved from the farm. Begging did fuck all.
Mother destroyed what a child was born with—innocence. The power hungry bitch had turned Vault into an organization about supremacy and control using any means to get it and, in the process, changed the beliefs it was built on. Her vision corrupted its path and I’d been a part of that.
I walked down the darkened corridor. My dress shoes a drum on the hard cement floors, like the music before a death scene in a movie. Echoing. Loud. Solitary.
It reminded me of the day I walked the corridor in Vault’s Toronto house after Deck, his men, and me rescued Georgie from Tanner in the shed. The day I saw her in the cell. When I heard London’s cries.
Unleashed. The snap unclicked and my emotions set free the moment I saw her in that cell. The matted hair, dried blood on her face, eyes dead. And it was then, that moment, when all my training to be unemotional had a purpose—it was to be able to walk away from her so I could stay alive in order to get her out one day.
I’d stared at her, locking away the emotions that fought to surface and gave her the words she needed to hear. Then I left. I fuckin’ left with my guise of patience fragmenting and my insides catapulted into a war zone of grated rage.
The ‘farmhands’ had it right after all. Emotions were the monsters and I’d become one.
London was mine. She’d never belong to them—ever. They should’ve never touched her in the beginning. Never ruined her. No, tried to ruin her.
I ran my finger along the blade of my knife, watching for any sign that someone had discovered I’d killed Mother, yet appearing like I was out for a stroll—in a dark, musty dungeon. Mother’s house was an old castle that had stone walls and sconces with candles to light the halls, but they were only used for visual effect.
I probably had twelve to twenty-four hours before anyone discovered Mother was dead. Not much time to fly back to Toronto and get London out, but it was enough. Deck and his men were on stand-by and Tristan had his private jet waiting at the airport to get us out fast.
I’d taken Mother’s cell phone so I’d know if anyone was looking for her and her laptop to hack to try to find the location of the farm, the drug formula, and the anonymous board member. My skills weren’t as good as Chaos’s, and I knew Deck’s man, Tyler, specialized in this shit.
I stopped at the last heavy wooden door on the right with large black iron studs along the edge. Unlike the Toronto house, nothing here had eye scanners and fingerprint access, only old school key and locks granted access, which I’d also grabbed from Mother.
On the other side of the door, I heard my sister’s faint footsteps. There was that subtle limp she had from when she was shot in the thigh when she’d tried to escape.
The memories of Chess had been filtering in lately. I’d even told London about her when I’d never told anyone. It was like I was thawing, the ice congealed around my emotions melting a little each day. The constant conditioning to become emotionless and uncaring since I was seven years old had worked—until London.
I put my knife away, inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the door.
My sister wouldn’t willingly leave with me because she didn’t trust me. And why should she?
“Francesca.” She stood on the other side of the room, stance wide, arms at her side, fingers curled into fists. She was never a fighter and yet she excelled at it.
She was an open book with her emotions, ones that they’d never been able to break her of. No matter what they’d done to her, Chess remained compassionate, but it was now with an edge.
She laughed, but the sound didn’t match her hard, sapphire eyes that had once been soft and gentle. “Dearest brother. Are you here to finally lead me to my death? Did Helena send you to do the honors?”
She called our mother by name, refusing the association.
Chess should be dead already. Being the daughter of one of the board members, she’d been given the privilege of remaining alive after her attempt to escape. They caught her. Shot her in the leg then tortured her before she was to be executed. But I reasoned with Mother that execution was a poor example for others. Chess deserved to suffer for the disloyalty she’d shown Vault and Mother. Death was too simple and kind. Too permanent.
I remember Chess glaring at me, her hatred blazing because she wanted to die. But I’d needed her to hate me, so Mother would believe me. It was always about Mother believing me. I realized that I’d never forgotten our connection and even with it numbed and in the far reaches of my mind, the instinct was still there to protect her.
It was the same look she had now as we faced one another. Her hand went to her back pocket and before she had a chance to pull whatever weapon she had, I threw my knife and it sliced through the arm of her T-shirt and embedded in the wall behind her.
I ducked and rolled at the last second as her makeshift wooden spike skimmed my shoulder. It hit the stone mantel and fell to the floor. But she didn’t stop as she threw another. I reached into my boot and dove behind the bed as I threw my dagger, my aim off to the right like I wanted. She’d know I’d purposely missed. Everyone knew I never missed my mark.
She stopped, the tension easing from her f
ace. “Kai?”
“It’s time, Chess.”
I kept my eyes on her. Despite her circumstance, she still had this magnetic quality about her, with her soft features and eyes that sucked you into her warmth when she wasn’t pissed at you. Her hair was jagged, shoulder-length black strands, which contradicted her facial appearance. She had broad hips and even wearing pants I could tell she’d been working out with her muscled thighs. I suspected it was to strengthen her bad leg.
She walked to the far side of the room where there was a shelf holding a wall of books. My sister had always been a voracious reader. Fictional romance fairy tales and perhaps the reason she was foolish enough to try to escape Vault, thinking it was possible to do the impossible. Although, we were changing that fallacy.
I remained at the door, listening for any footsteps coming down the corridor, but when I checked the security cameras on Mother’s computer, one goon was at the front door and the other was in the garden prowling the grounds. There was also a cook and two maids, but it was highly unlikely they would come down here.
Her head dropped forward and her shoulders sagged. “I don’t understand.”
“Mother’s dead, Chess. I killed her ten minutes ago.”
Her head shot up and she spun around, her mouth gaping. “What?”
“It’s time,” I repeated. She knew exactly what I meant.
As kids at the farm, time had no meaning. There were no clocks, and often we were kept in rooms with no windows so we never saw the sun or moon. Hours, minutes, days, they blended together in the blackness.
After my father was executed, we were taken to the farm and immediately separated. When I did see her, we were unable to speak as the handlers always watched us. They didn’t want us forming any sort of friendships, so separating a brother and sister was essential.
But one day, I was left in a hallway while my farm handler took a piss. She was coming out of a classroom with a boy around her age and it looked like she was talking to him quietly, which was breaking the rules. They didn’t have a handler with them, probably because they were compliant, unlike me who fought them for years.
