by Rachel Caine
Table of Contents
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OTHER TITLES BY RACHEL CAINE Stillhouse Lake Series Stillhouse Lake The Great Library Paper and Fire Ink and Bone Ash and Quill Weather Warden Ill Wind Heat Stroke Chill Factor Windfall Firestorm Thin Air Gale Force Cape Storm Total Eclipse Outcast Season Undone Unknown Unseen Unbroken Revivalist Working Stiff Two Weeks' Notice Terminated Red Letter Days Devil's Bargain Devil's Due Morganville Vampires Glass Houses The Dead Girls' Dance Midnight Alley Feast of Fools Lord of Misrule Carpe Corpus Fade Out Kiss of Death Ghost Town Bite Club Last Breath Black Dawn Bitter Blood Fall of Night Daylighters Stand-Alone Titles Prince of Shadows
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Text copyright (c) 2017 by Rachel Caine, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781542046411 ISBN-10: 1542046416 Cover design by Shasti O'Leary Soudant
CONTENTS 1 GWEN 2 LANNY 3 SAM 4 GWEN 5 GWEN 6 CONNOR 7 GWEN 8 SAM 9 GWEN 10 CONNOR 11 GWEN 12 SAM 13 LANNY 14 GWEN 15 LANNY 16 GWEN 17 SAM 18 CONNOR 19 GWEN 20 SAM 21 CONNOR 22 GWEN 23 LANNY 24 SAM 25 GWEN 26 SAM 27 GWEN 28 GWEN SOUNDTRACK ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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1 GWEN On the twelfth night since my ex-husband escaped prison, I am in bed. Not sleeping. Watching the play of light and shadow on the curtains. I'm lying on a narrow foldout cot and feeling every twinge of spring poking through the thin mattress. My kids, Lanny and Connor, occupy the two full-size beds in this midpriced motel room. Midpriced is the best I can afford right now. The phone is a new one. Another disposable, with a brand-new number. Only five people have the number, and two of them are asleep in the room with me. I can't trust anyone outside that vanishingly small circle. All I can think of is the shadow of a man walking through the night--walking, not running, because I don't believe Melvin Royal is on the run, though half the police in the country are hunting him--and the fact that he is coming for me. For us. My ex-husband is a monster, and I thought he was safely contained and caged, awaiting execution . . . but even from behind bars he ran a campaign of terror against
2 LANNY My little brother, Connor, is too quiet. He's barely said a word all day, and he keeps his head down. He's gone behind those walls he builds up, and I want to kick them all down and drag him out and get him to scream, hit the wall, do something. But I can't even exchange two words with him without Mom's radar picking up trouble . . . at least, not until after the door closes behind her, and she's outside on the motel balcony. I know my mother. Mostly I love her. But sometimes she doesn't help. She doesn't know how to let her shields down anymore. Connor's awake. He's good at pretending to be asleep, but I know his tells; for two years when Mom was away--in jail and at trial, accused of being my dad's accomplice--we'd shared a room because Grandma didn't have much space, even though I was ten and he was seven and we were too old to be sharing a room. We'd had to be each other's allies, watch each other's backs. I'd gotten used to knowing when he was really out, and when he was jus
3 SAM Gwen is still too quiet, an hour out onto the road. I can feel the pain vibrating the air around her. "You okay?" It's an inadequate question, but I have to try. There's something haunting in the blank way she's staring out the window at the flickering trees, like she's trying to hypnotize herself into something like peace. "I just abandoned my kids," she says. Her voice sounds strange. I shoot her a quick look, but the road is narrow and curved, and I can't spare much focus from keeping the SUV on the road. "Left them with . . . strangers." "They aren't strangers," I say. "Come on. You know they're good people. They'll do everything they can to keep the kids safe." "I should have stayed with them." I can tell that she's aching to ask me to turn the car around. "I just want to take my kids in my arms and never let them out of my sight again. I'm terrified . . ." Her voice fades out for a few seconds, thin as fog, then comes back stronger. "What if I never come back to them? What
4 GWEN After a full day at the public library ransacking their shelves and the Internet--and paying robber-baron rates for printouts--we have a folder that's remarkable for its thinness, but it's all the info we've found on both Markerville and Arden Miller. There are fourteen Arden Millers that we've located, but only two in Tennessee, and one of them is in a nursing home--not likely to be the one we're looking for. The Arden Miller that's left is a tall redhead, thirty-three years old, who for someone that age has a strange absence of social media. We've found a few photos tagged with her in them, but not many, and in none of them is she plainly visible. In the best one, she's wearing a floppy sun hat and giant sunglasses and is partly turned from the camera, holding the hat against a breeze. I have no idea why we're looking for her, or why in God's name she'd be living out in the middle of nowhere in a town deserted for forty years. Or, for that matter, why Mike Lustig wants us to look
5 GWEN I come conscious again, coughing, with someone pouring water on my face. The water's cold, and I'm shivering, and I roll over and cough helplessly for a few moments. Awareness starts somewhere in me, reporting pain in my back, in my leg, in my arm. My brain's good at analyzing these things, and it tells me it's nothing too serious. I hope it's not lying to me. My head hurts as well, and that seems of more concern. My mouth tastes like an ashtray, and I grab blindly for the water bottle that's been splashing my face and rinse out my mouth. I spit it out on the ground, then chug thirstily. That's probably a mistake. The thick weight of water hits my stomach hard. I roll up to my knees, sway a little, find my balance, make it to my feet. I'm in the clearing, near the tree line. Sam is kneeling next to me, and he looks worse than I feel--bloody from a cut on his head, shaking, favoring one side as he tries to get up. I help him. He winces and presses a hand to his ribs. "How did we--"
6 CONNOR Officer Graham told me, Never tell about this, and I haven't. Not because I don't know Officer Graham was a bad guy--I know that. He scared the hell out of us. He hurt us when he dragged us out of our house, too. But I'll never tell because of what he gave me. I know Mom would take it away, and I'm not ready for that to happen. I leave the phone Lancel Graham gave me turned off. I tried to use it back in the basement in that cabin where he was holding us, but there wasn't a signal. I turned it off and removed the battery when Mom found us because I didn't want it ringing, and I didn't want anybody tracking us with it. I don't really know why I haven't just thrown it out, or buried it, or told someone I have it . . . except that it's mine. Officer Graham said, This is from your dad, and it's just for you, Brady. Nobody else. My dad sent me something, and even though I know I should get rid of it, I can't. It's the only thing I have from him. I sometimes imagine him standing in a
7 GWEN Sam's tourist pamphlet is worth its weight in gold. There's a perfect candidate for our stop for the night, and when I check the folded paper map, I find that it's about twenty miles away--far enough to be off the radar, and couples oriented enough to be the last place Melvin--or Absalom, for that matter--would look. Desperately charming, I think. When we arrive there, we find that's exactly the right description. It's lovely and neat and perfectly trimmed, with a small parking lot. It's too dark to see beyond the lights mounted outside, but I imagine the mist rises heavy in the mornings to give the whole place a magical look. It looks like a typical B and B sort of establishment, an expensive hobby for ret
ired financial analysts who sink a fortune into renovating an old but magnificent house in the middle of nowhere. They've certainly spared no expense, I find as we walk inside: it's clean, gracious, full of well-kept antiques. It smells of fresh oranges. The lady standing behind
8 SAM Why the fuck did I push her? I say Gwen's name, but she doesn't respond. I want to say all the things bouncing around inside my aching head, like I need you and I'm not going to hurt you, but the fact is that although both those things are true right now, I can't guarantee they'll be true in the morning. The need part, probably. I've felt that since . . . since when? I'd memorized her face from the online photos first, and I damn sure hadn't needed her then. She'd been an empty set of pixels, something to pour my rage into. I'd looked at a thousand pictures of her and felt nothing but contempt and blind hatred. This woman helped kill Callie. I remember thinking that, over and over again. I remember wanting to hurt Gina Royal, pay her back for every wound my sister had to suffer. I dedicated the better part of two full years to tracking her, paying for intel, following just behind her until finally she settled at Stillhouse Lake with the kids, and I could slip into the landscape.
9 GWEN Inside the perimeter fence, it feels like we're alone on the face of the earth, and I instinctively check around me for escape options. It's not good. One exit, behind us. I prefer multiple ways out. If I have to, I can scale that fence, sacrifice the jacket to provide some protection from the cutting wire edges. What if he's in there . . . He isn't, I tell myself firmly. Though, honestly, what better place for Melvin Royal to be holed up? A deserted warehouse, with his followers to bring him food and comforts and victims. It's so eerily possible that I slow, nearly stop, and earn a look from Sam. He doesn't see it. He's intent on finding clues. I'm terrified we're about to find something much, much more dangerous. It feels like the zombie apocalypse has arrived inside this yard. The Atlanta sky has grown cloudy above us, and the coverage is low enough that I can't see jets cutting through to remind me that the world still turns. I hear nothing but the wind hissing through the f
10 CONNOR The Rice Krispies treats truce between me and my sister lasts until afternoon, and then I screw it up. By then, Lanny's already moody and grumpy and snapping at me every time I breathe. Glaring at me like I'm personally to blame for the fact she's stuck here in this cabin without much to do. I'd try to get her to read, but the last time I did, she threw the book at me and called me a nerd, which is a name I usually don't mind, but not the way she said it. She begs, seriously begs, for Internet permission, which Mr. Esparza finally, reluctantly grants, but only for thirty minutes, and he warns her he's set up the parental controls just the way Mom requested. Not surprised; Mom's serious about that stuff, and she has good reason. I drift over and watch what she's doing, because Lanny's in a weird mood, and I don't know why. She just pulls up pictures, that's all. School pictures of her friends, out of her secret cloud account Mom doesn't know about. After about two minutes of s
11 GWEN After leaving the warehouse, we head back to the coffee shop. Nursing more caffeine, and I ask for a phone book from the counter lady, who gives me a disbelieving look and finally unearths a water-stained copy that must be nearly ten years old from the back of a cabinet. I don't tell her why I'm such a Luddite, and she doesn't ask, thank God. The directory gives me the phone number and street address for Rivard Luxe. I work through six choose-a-number menu options before I reach the cool, disinterested voice of an operator, who calmly informs me that Mr. Rivard is not available for calls. I expect that. I say, "Please send a message to him and ask him if he's missing an investigator he hired a few months ago. If he is, I've found his man. He's dead." There's a short silence while the operator parses that out, and she doesn't sound quite so serene when she replies. "I'm sorry, did you say dead?" "Absolutely. Here's my phone number." I read it off to her. I'll have to buy a new d
12 SAM I can't look at her. Gwen. Gina. Her. After all the horrors we've seen, I thought I knew her. I thought she was . . . someone I could trust. And now, sitting in the same car with her is hard to take. I want to scream and pull the ejection lever and get the hell out of this, because everything is poisoned and toxic and wrong. The sight of Callie's face has destroyed my world. Last time I saw her it was on a Skype call. I was in Afghanistan, getting ready to fly a mission. She was excited about something mundane--a new job she'd just landed, I remember now. A job she didn't even live to start. I hadn't known my sister, not for many years; we'd been separated when our parents died, adopted out separately. I'd never even seen her until I was deployed. I'd never seen her in real life at all. Only on video screens. This was another distant picture of her, light from a dead star, and suddenly I remembered how her lips curled when she smiled, and how her eyes shone when she laughed, and
13 LANNY When I asked for the Internet, I really just wanted to check social media, see how everybody was doing. I wasn't going to post or anything, just lurk. Because I was bored. And then I saw Dahlia's picture, and all of a sudden, I felt something crushing me inside. I missed her so much it hurt. I wanted to call her. I wanted to hear her voice and tell her what's happened, and I wanted . . . wanted all kinds of things, wild things that raced through my head while staring at her picture that made me uncomfortably warm inside. I'd been feeling that way before everything blew up out at our old house, and I'd been trying to figure out what it meant, and what to do about it. Now I think I know. But I can't do anything. I'm so close. But not close at all. Connor making fun of me is the last straw, and when I blow up at him, I mean it so hard. I race off to my room and cry into a pillow for a good fifteen minutes. By that time, I still feel wretched and alone, but I also am too exhausted
14 GWEN When we land in Wichita, it's late afternoon, and the sun's already sinking low. It's cold, with the icy bite of snow in the air, though the sky's still clear. I remember this kind of weather, how it meant to lay in a good supply of wood for the fire, and salt for the steps, and make sure the winter tires were good to go. Stepping off that Rivard Luxe jet, I feel like I'm hallucinating, stepping into the wrong decade of my life. The smell of this place makes me dizzy. My phone buzzes. I've had it off for the flight, and it's just connected to the new roaming network. I check it, and see a text that says 911. It's from Lanny. I also have a voice mail from Javier, but I don't bother to listen. I stop right on the tarmac, two steps off the plane, and dial my daughter's number. I feel sick, and I get a surge of false relief when I hear her say, "Hello?" "Sweetie, what's wrong?" I ask. I hear nothing. "Are you there? Honey? Hello?" "You bitch," she says, and then she hangs up on me.
15 LANNY When we hear the crunch of gravel outside, I grip my brother's hand tighter. I haven't let go for the past hour, and neither has he; we're back to our little-kid days, after Mom and Dad went away--both arrested, the same day. I still remember that more vividly than anything else: me and my brother sitting in the backseat of a police car. It felt like being in a cage, and it smelled like sweat and feet, and we held hands the whole way. We didn't talk. I don't think either of us knew what to say. I remember not being so much terrified as dazed. I kept expecting it to be over, that Mom would come get us, and we'd get ice cream and go home. Brady--now Connor--had been the one who'd cried, and I remember being impatient with him being such a baby. I kept telling myself it was nothing. We would be home soon. But there was no home by then. It had been Brady, not me, who'd asked endless, anxious questions once we were at the police station. Where's my mom? When can we see her? Can we go
16 GWEN Everything's wrong. I feel like I've been cut open and emptied of everything that matters, and I can't even say that it hurts, because what I feel is . . . nothing. No anger, no fear, no rage, no love, nothing but echoing silence from my head and my heart. Not a person, but a shell of one. Maybe I've always been a shell, because if those videos are real, then I've never been who I thought I was. Sam's driving. He says, after a long, rough silence, "Where do you want me to drop you?" It's clear he doesn't even want to say that
much, from the abrupt tone of it. I swallow hard and shut my eyes. "So that's it," I say. "We're finished now." "We've been finished since Atlanta," he says. "Did you honestly think anything else?" God, it hurts, but at the same time I can't deny that he's right. Clearly, he ought to get the fuck away from me; he can't tell who I am anymore, or even what I am. For all Sam knows I could be some secret accomplice of Melvin's, or working against him, or some
17 SAM I can't help but wonder how Melvin Royal keeps finding her, keeps getting her phone number. It doesn't make sense. These are disposable phones, and the number has to be shared out. He can't search through records to find her; not even Absalom is that good, that fast. So how the hell is he finding her? Maybe she wants him to find her. Maybe she texted him the goddamn number and you're the biggest fool in the world for even starting to believe her. I can believe a lot of things about Gwen. I can even believe that, once upon a time, a terrified wife might have done things that she wants to block out from her memory. But I know she's totally sincere about wanting this man dead. So I have to write off the possibility that she's working with him. The first time he called, that had to be Absalom providing him with the intel. But somewhere, somehow, someone else has cherry-picked her number, and it's ended up in Melvin Royal's hands again. How? I can't solve the puzzle. I drive carefull
18 CONNOR Dad said that Javier and Kezia would never figure out what I did, and he was right about that. He sent me all the instructions: how to download the video onto his phone, how to transfer it to the one Mom gave me, how to take off the parental lock that kept me from using the Internet so I could pretend I found it on a message board. He even posted a fake message there so Javier could find a broken link when he went looking. I already knew Mom's code to take the lock off. It wasn't hard to figure out. Dad told me to do all that and hide his phone before I watched the video on the one Mom gave me. He knew it would hurt. He said me it would, and that he was sorry. Dad's been right about everything. He proved it. I'm texting him regularly, whenever I can. I'm sitting in my bedroom now with the door locked in case Lanny decides to check on me, reading his latest message. I wrote to you, kiddo. I sent you letters, birthday cards, presents. Did you get any of them? There's only one a
