by JA Huss
No fucking way is she taking that helmet off.
No fucking way. Because if that message was from Nick, then that dead guy on the ground might be her brother.
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Harper
“Let go of me,” I cry. My heart hurts. Oh, my God, does my heart hurt. Please, please, please tell me I did not just kill my brother! Please God! I slam my bare foot into James’ chest and he stumbles backwards just enough for me to slip away, scramble to my feet and run over to the body. “Nick, Nick, Nick…” I just keep saying his name as I try to pry the helmet off his head. James is on me again, pulling me away, wrapping his arms around me as he talks calmly in my ear.
“Calm down,” he says. “Calm down and I’ll let you go and we’ll check it out together, OK?”
“No, no, no!” I wail. “No!”
“Harper,” James says as he pins me down to the ground, straddles my hips, and then wraps his lower legs around mine so I can’t get him off me easily. He’s learning. “I need you to calm down.” He leans all of his weight on my chest now, and he’s very heavy. Heavy enough to make me stop talking because there’s not enough breath in my lungs.
“Enough,” I beg. “I can’t breathe!”
He eases up slightly, not enough to let me breathe comfortably, but it takes the crushing pressure off. “Now listen to me. You will calm the fuck down or I swear to God, Harper, I’ll tie you up until you do as you’re told. You are out of control.” He leans into me again to make his point, and I whine in response. “Do you understand?”
“I need to know right now, James. I need to know.”
“I’m gonna check, not you.” He eases up again, to test my response I think, but I give up. What’s the point of fighting over checking a dead body? “You OK?”
I nod. And then he’s off me. I sit up and watch. The sun is starting to come up now, so there’s enough light to see a few details. The color of the bike. Orange. The hair sticking out from the helmet in little tufts. Blond. I have to put a hand over my mouth to stop the wail when I realize that.
James grasps the helmet and twists. But the neck is broken, so it jiggles back and forth in a sickening way that makes me lean right over and puke. “I can’t watch, I can’t watch.”
“Don’t watch, Harp,” James says as I cough and gag. And then all I hear is, “Oh, fuck.”
I roll over and press my face in the sandy ground and cry. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him!”
And them James is next to me, his calming hands rubbing my back. “It’s not him, Harper. It’s not him.”
I roll back to look James in the face and sit up to see for myself. “It’s not him!”
James pulls me into his chest and kisses me on the head. “It’s not him, but I know that guy.”
“Who?” Tears of relief are running down my face and I have to wipe my face.
“Someone who should be dead.”
“What?” I ask, still a bit slow from trying to process everything. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” James hesitates, like this isn’t something he wants to talk about. “I mean—”
“He means,” Sasha says behind us, “he killed them all. Or so he thought.”
We both turn around to find Sasha sitting up in the back seat. Her face is all bloody, her arms and legs covered in thorn scratches from the kidnapper riding through a wall of ocotillos.
“It was a setup, James,” she elaborates in a voice so devoid of emotion chills climb up my spine and prickle the skin at the nape of my neck. “I told you it was a setup.” And with those words she cracks and my chills evaporate. Her lips tremble and then she’s crying.
James gets up, pulls me to my feet with him, and then he walks over to the girl. “Hey, it’s the drugs, OK? You’re coming off some drugs. Just try and relax.”
“No, it’s not the drugs. It’s…” She trails off as she wipes her nose.
What a fucked, fucked, fucked-up way to start a day.
“It’s what, Sasha?” James prods in that cool assassin voice. “It’s what? If you’ve got something to say, now is a really good fucking time to say it.”
She drags the back of her hand across her face one more time. “I don’t know much, but”—she points to her kidnapper—“I just want you to know I’m not a part of that. I don’t know what I’m a part of, but it’s not that.” She looks over at me now. “I’m not a part of that, James.”
“Do you know why he’d take you, Sasha?” James asks.
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter who I was working for yesterday, because today”—she looks at me again—“I work for no one. I’m not anyone’s pawn, or killer, or Smurf.” She snarls that last word out as she looks over at James. “I’m just a kid. I’m tired. I want to go home. I want Ford.”
I glance over at James to see what he’ll say but he just nods and leads me over to the Hummer. “Get in,” he says. It’s not his assassin voice, it’s worse. Because even though his words are calm and his volume is soft, it’s a do-not-fuck-with-me command.
I push Sasha until she scoots over the table hump and then James closes the door and jumps in the driver’s seat. He puts the Hummer in gear and does a U-ie, then heads back the way we came.
“What about the body?” I ask as it disappears out the back window.
“Who gives a fuck? He was already dead anyway. Like the kid said, I killed him last year.”
I don’t know what that means, but Sasha snorts and mutters, “Well, that was a huge fail,” under her breath.
James doesn’t hear it, or maybe he pretends not to hear it. He says nothing back to her. When we get to the house he parks in the driveway and sits for a few seconds.
We sit with him. In silence. And we wait for our orders. Because life just changed. We’re no longer some ex-Company associates playing house. “Harper.” He does not turn to look at me or even glance in the rear-view to see if I’m listening. But I am. “Harper, I’m gonna be honest with you here, OK? I know you took something with you when you left the yacht last summer. Everyone knows you have it.” And now he does turn to look at me. “I need it. Where is it?”
My mind is racing with suspicion. Why now? After all these months, why now? Why are they coming for me now? Is everything he said to me a lie?
“You need to trust someone besides Nick, Harper. Because Nick’s not here.” He studies my face to gauge my hesitation.
I say nothing.
“Is it back in the OC? Just let me know what direction to head, Harper. Because people are gonna die.” He lets out a long breath. “What you have is very important.”
“Important to who? My father? You’re working for him, aren’t you?”
“Do you think this is over? Do you think one twice-dead assassin changes their game? You’ve been playing for years, so let’s cut the shit. You and Nick are doing something. You two managed to get the upper hand and that’s why you’ve been left alone this past year. But they made their move today, Harper. Game starts now. We’re outta here in ten minutes and we’re heading west.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine - James
“Every room has a box, Harper. Check each one, pull out anything we might need, and pack it in the back of the Hummer.” She nods and walks off so I take my attention back to Sasha. “You, come with me.” I walk down the hallway and wave her into the bathroom. “Take a seat.”
Sasha sits on the toilet lid while I grab a t-shirt from the bedroom. I go back to the bathroom and shuffle through the first-aid kit from under the sink. I grab some antibacterial gel, some bandages, and then turn the hot water on and grab a washcloth off the rack on the wall. I start with her legs and wipe them down. She has a lot of tears but no sobs. And that is just sad. I move on to her arms after I finish her legs. Then her face. I get a new washcloth for her face, there’s so much blood. “You’re gonna be really sore, but you’re OK. So try not to think about it.” I look her in the eyes as I wipe her forehead. “Can you do that?”
She swall
ows hard and nods, her eyes never leaving mine. “I’ve been trying not to think about it for months now, James.”
“I know. And you’re doing a really good job.”
Her chin quivers for a moment, but she gets it in check before she loses control.
“And I know you have a secret. And no amount of asking or demanding is gonna make you give it up before it’s time. So I’ll drop it. But I need to know, kid. Are we working for the same guy or not? Because you seem to have a lot of information about me and I seem to have none about you.”
She turns her head away, looking at the blue shower curtain. “I think we are on the same side. Is that good enough?”
The relief I feel at not having to kill this child is almost overpowering. I smack her on the knee and she cries out with a wince. “You can wash up properly when we get to the next safe place.” I dab the antibacterial gel on her wounds. “But this should get you through.”
There’s a gash on her thigh from the bike wreck that needs a bandage, so I fasten one of those on her and then wash my hands.
“James?” she asks quietly as she waits.
“What?” I say as I pack up all the crap and stuff it back into the box.
“If I have to stay with you until this is over, then can you please…”
“Can I please what?” I open the door and wave her forward. The screen door smacks against the house as Harper loads up the Hummer. “If you’ve got something on your mind, spit it out.”
She stares up at me with those blue eyes and she looks eight or ten instead of thirteen. So fucking young. Too fucking young to be doing this shit.
“Can you make sure if I die, then I don’t die for nothing?”
I turn her around and push her towards the kitchen before she sees my reaction. Because nothing… nothing prepares you for words like that coming from a kid’s mouth. “Look, Smurfette,” I say, playing the asshole role. “You work for me now. So there’s no checking out on my dime. You wanna get yourself killed, then you do it on someone else’s time. You got it?”
She nods and keeps walking in front of me. But I catch her wiping tears as she fishes a pair of sneakers out of her backpack and slips them on. I wait patiently as she meticulously laces them up, and then we leave the house, pulling the door closed behind us. Harper’s in the passenger seat, waiting for us. I open the back door for Sasha, and she climbs in and buckles her seatbelt. “You get everything we need?” I ask Harper as I close the door. I catch a nod from her as I walk around to my side, then get in and start the engine.
“Where are we going now?” Harper asks.
“Merc’s got a place in Palm Springs. He’s not there at the moment, so we’ll hole up there today and decide what the fuck we’re gonna do.” Someone did this to the kid and someone absolutely is setting me up. I need this drive to think about it. I need time to put these pieces together. Because this is all wrong. None of this shit is adding up. We had a plan, this… thing this morning was not in the plan.
I get silence from both girls. So I just flip a bitch in the front yard and head on out, taking the back roads into California, then crossing over Interstate 15 into the Mojave National Preserve.
“Turn off your phones and give them to me.” I wait as the girls shuffle through pockets and then three phones are presented in my waiting hand. I chuck them all out the window, then fish mine out of my pocket and do the same. The girls turn around to watch them disappear as I buzz the window back up.
The dash thermometer says it’s a hundred and fourteen degrees outside, but inside we’re all cold and it’s got nothing to do with the air conditioning.
We’re killers. And isn’t that what they always say about us? Cold-blooded?
Like the lizards scurrying across the sand-covered highway.
We’re all cold out here.
Chapter Thirty - James
“What did you mean back there?” Harper asks once there’s nothing to look at on this drive but Joshua trees and the occasional flattened snake in the road. “When you said, ‘Someone who should be dead.’”
I glance over my shoulder to see if the Smurf wants in on this conversation, but she’s sprawled out across the central console, sleeping. “Check Sasha’s pulse for me, will you? That opiate antagonist I gave her wears off, and if they dosed her too high, she’ll be all drugged up again.”
Harper leans into the backseat with a loud, annoyed sigh as she grabs the kid’s wrist and a half a minute later she says, “Sixty-eight.”
“OK, she’s pretty good.”
“Well, I’m not, James. I need some answers. Nothing about you makes any sense and I want to know why all this is happening.”
“I could say the same thing about you, Harper.” I give her a sideways glance, then take my attention back to the rough desert terrain. I consider how to fill her in without fucking things up too bad and come up with evasion. “Back when I was just some teenage punk who thought being an assassin would turn me into a better, stronger, faster killer version of Boba Fett, I asked why a lot too. But I learned pretty fast that why was a dangerous question. Why are people after Sasha? Why are you and I together? Why is Sasha with us? I mean, really, besides being Company kids, what do we have in common?”
She’s silent. Maybe thinking, maybe avoiding.
I make it easy for her. “Killing, Harper. That’s what we have in common. Do you know who was at your birthday dinner that day on the boat?”
I glance over and she shakes her head at me.
“You poisoned everyone by lacing the water, some,” I stress, “more than others. But of those thirteen who died, nine of them were section leaders. All ranking officials. Do you know what that means as far as Company organization goes?” She knows. But she’s quiet so I fill it in for her. “Restructuring. Promotions, new ranks, new leaders. Now ask yourself, who benefits the most by restructuring?”
Her silence is starting to piss me off, and I’m tired of babying her. “Your father, Harper. He’s the head guy, he calls the shots, he has enemies, maybe some who think they can run the Company better than he does. He takes them all out in one act. Only he never gets his hands dirty.”
“So he used me to do his killing?” She lets off a snort. “Right.”
“That surprises you? I mean the man was gonna give you away to me when you were six years old—”
“James,” she snarls. “That’s highly unlikely.”
“I agree, it was unlikely he was serious, but he made the offer just the same. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t it enough to use you in that way enough to make you believe he could use you in other ways? Did you hear the offer?” I ask her. “Do you want me to repeat it word for word so you can decide what his intentions were?”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, he might’ve said that to you, but he didn’t really mean it. You said yourself, it was a test. He would never give me to you.”
“Why, because you’re so out of my league, you can’t imagine your father deeming me worthy?”
“I’m not answering that. It’s stupid. You already said you knew that the offer was not real, so why this resistance to admit what you already know?”
“Because you’re missing the point, Harper. The point is that he’s capable, regardless of his intentions.”
“He has nothing to do with my actions on the ship that night. It was—”
She stops short and this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. “It was who, Harper? You and Nick?”
She shakes her head at me. “How would my father know?”
“How would he know, Harper? Come on, who gave you that plan? Who told you to use Visine?”
“It’s just something we had on board.” She shrugs. “Visine and ocean swimming go together.”
“It was a good plan.” I let out a sarcastic chuckle. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic plan. But don’t you think it’s a little convenient that a bunch of old cronies got offed by a poison that points right to Assassin Number Six?”
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“I didn’t know anything about that Tet stuff, James.”
“No.” I look at her. Stare at her. “No, you didn’t. But Nick did because he was one of us. And if he wanted your father dead, well, then your father absolutely would be dead. And since thirteen Company cronies are dead and your father is not, he was obviously in on the plan. So what’s his endgame? What’s your endgame?”
I look over at her as she squares her shoulders and tilts her chin up, then looks back to the road. “Freedom, James. All I want is my freedom.”
“And you need your father alive for that? The person who was gonna enslave you in the first place?”
Harper huffs out a breath and starts shaking her head. “You sure do ask a lot of why questions. I mean, for someone who was taught to shut his face and do what he’s told. And that answer is God’s honest truth. So now it’s my turn. Why was that guy back there someone who should be dead?”
I give Harper a quick glance, then deflect the question for a few more seconds as I swerve to miss a tortoise crossing the highway. Her bare feet are propped up on the dash and she’s leaning back against the door so she can get a straight view of me. “One of my recent jobs, that’s all.”
“So what did he do? To deserve an assassination by you?”
“I have no clue, it was just an order.”
“But you failed. So…”
“I thought he was dead,” I growl at her. “I didn’t fail. Something else happened.”
“Oh.” She sighs, and then mutters, “OK,” at me, tiring of my evasive answers quickly, and for that I’m grateful. I’m not in the mood to talk about what I’ve been doing the past two years.
“So how come you haven’t killed Merc?” Sasha, that little faker, asks from the back.
“Why would I kill Merc?”
“You killed all the rest. So how come not Merc?”
