Nenia Campbell's Blog - Posts Tagged "teaser"
Armed and Dangerous Teaser!
(c) 2013 by Nenia Campbell (do not copy or reproduce without author's permission)
I said when my 99-cent sale was over, I'd post a teaser for my fans to read! The votes were all for Armed and Dangerous (LOL, I guess I know which of my stories people like best) so here is an excerpt from chapter one!
***TEASER***
My psychologists suggested that it might be therapeutic to write about what happened. That it would be beneficial, as they put it, for me to confront my demons head-on. They failed to take into account the fact that I might not want to confront the horrors of my recent past, let alone document it all in the written word, for any and all to see. Whatever you say can, and will, be held against you, and with the IMA, it would be at gunpoint.
They were terrifying people, and took no prisoners if they could help it.
One visit to the psychologist was all it took for me to realize that these sessions would be a complete waste of both time and money. I wasn't too disappointed. My mother had selected Dr. Linden. My expectations had been low to start. I already knew that she did not hold my best interests at heart. Mamá, that is, not the therapist—although Dr. Linden probably didn't give a fig about my interests, either, beyond what was compelled for by the session bill.
Considering that I had been the one to be kidnapped and held hostage by hardened criminals, if anyone had a right to be traumatized, it ought to be me. But no, at the urging and endorsement of Dr. Linden, whose motives I now questioned, my mother was in the process of writing a memoir about her “three months of terror.” Critics were already singing her praises in anticipation of the book's success, calling her “brave” and “inspirational.”
I had been forced to endure unimaginable cruelties—and had I gotten out of it? A temporary prescription for sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. My mother, who had chosen to save her own life instead of mine, thereby forcing me to pay for the mistakes made by her and my father, had a book deal. I ask you, in what universe is that considered fair?
My mother's egocentric one, apparently.
Worse, I was convinced that my mother's memoir would put me on another hit list. Despite stealing from large corporations by hacking into their computers as though he thought he were Neo, my father hadn't realized what he had been messing around with until it was too late. My mother was just foolish. If she revealed some detail that the IMA did not want revealed, we were both dead. Or they might kill us just to err on the side of caution.
“Don't you think you should quit while you're ahead for once?” I asked her. “You have your fashion line. Think about fall—winter ball—prom,” I concluded, a little desperately.
She had converted her walk-in closet to an “office,” and because she never did anything by halves, she had purchased a vintage Royal Arrow typewriter with glass keys. Her closet-office shared a wall with my bedroom, and I heard her pinging away well into the night.
“Christina, in today's economy, people do not want to buy fashion. They want to buy sob stories that will make them feel better about their own miserable lives.”
“That's great. Write about your own life—not about mine.”
“I cannot work with you standing there pestering me. Go change into something nice for dinner. John is coming over at six.”
“Really? But I hate John. Why would you invite him over while I was staying here? You know I can't stand him.”
“You are upsetting me, Christina.”
“You're upsetting me.”
“John is the only reason I have been able to get through these past few months.”
“Does he have time-traveling powers, too? Because I thought you'd only been going out for one month.”
“Out,” she said, jabbing a finger at the door.
“Fine,” I snapped. “But when I'm coming down it'll be because I want to, when I want to, and I'll be wearing an old ratty t-shirt.”
She slammed her closet-office's door shut with a resounding thud that shook the walls.
Ever since she and my father had divorced my mother had had a series of boyfriends, each as unlikable as the last. Dr. Linden, on our one and only session, had proposed that perhaps I felt “threatened” by these men I perceived to be “taking my father's place,” and that I still felt “angry” about my parents' separation. No. Freud said it best, I think, when he said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes your mother's loser boyfriend is just a loser.
This current model was named John—an irony that went over my mother's head. John was twenty-nine—younger than the typewriter she was using to write her memoir—and an aspiring actor. “Aspiring” in this case meaning that he wasn't enrolled at a film college, wasn't looking for an agent, and didn't have any work lined up. He seemed to be operating under the belief that if he spent enough time in our bathroom oiling his hair like a 1950s greaser a talent scout would drop out of the sky like the finger of God Himself and say, “You, with the oil-slick cowlick, I want you to be in my next movie.”
Maybe that was why my mother liked him—he shared her delusional style of thinking.
In addition to being a loser, he was also a total creep. I found him prowling around in the hallway outside my bathroom sometimes when he knew I was taking a shower. Once, he'd asked me if my mother and I ever did threesomes. I asked him if he knew about my ties to the mob and whether he'd ever had a bullet go through his penis, casually adding that if I spoke to the right people, he could easily find out.
Michael wouldn't do that, though. He was only cruel when he was paid to be. He wasn't a sadist—and he also wasn't around, and therefore wasn't worth thinking about. In any case, after that conversation John stopped creeping around outside my bathroom.
* * *
Mamá made good on her threat and six o' clock found found the three of us in the conservatory of her newly renovated Victorian. Eating wilted green things that could have been anything from asparagus to arugula. John whining about how he needed meat to build up his muscles. Mamá by turns consoling and condescending. Just one fucked-up happy family.
I snorted, and she turned the full-force of that punishing look one me. “Do not make the noises of a barn animal, Christina, or you will be eating your dinner outside like one.”
“I'm sorry.” I bowed my head.
She pursed her lips, looking at me closely, then shrugged it off. I could see her making the conscious decision to ignore me. “I finished twenty pages of my memoir today,” she informed us, speaking to John as she laid her hand on his bicep.
John looked up from his stare-down with the mystery greens. “Fantastic, babe.”
“I was so inspired. The words just flew out of me.”
So does diarrhea. And what a coincidence; they're both crap.
“It feels so good to unburden myself from the horrible events I was made to endure by those heartless men. But God works in mysterious ways, no? And now I can share His wisdom with others. To give them solace where I had none.”
Provided that they're willing to shell out the $9.99 for your poorly edited eBook. I slammed down my fork. “May I be excused?”
“Christina—don't be rude in front of our guest.”
“He's not a guest. He practically lives here!”
“Christina!” My mother gritted her teeth. “You will stay seated and you will eat your kale!”
“The memoir sounds great, babe. Fantastic.”
“You said that already,” I informed him.
Mamá snapped at me in Spanish, telling me not to ruin her chance at happiness by being a pettish brat. “I bet they'll make it into a movie.” John shoveled a mouthful of the kale into his mouth, and she beamed at him. Like he'd just said something exceptionally profound instead of talking with his mouth full and spattering bits of chewed food on the tablecloth. “And if they do,” he added, “I can play as myself.”
“God help us,” I muttered.
“Naturally, Penelope Cruz will star as me,” my mother said. “Though she is a little heavy in the hips.”
And just what did that make me? I glared at her and stabbed at one of the green spears. “Don't you think you're being a little overly optimistic? Your book hasn't even been published yet.”
“Christina, I find your negative attitude to be extremely hampering.”
I drew in a deep breath—count to three, Christina—and said, “I'm not being negative. I'm being realistic.”
She sniffed. “You are being difficult. You should be more focused on your own personal advancements. Dr. Linden informed me that you terminated your sessions with her prematurely. Do you realize that she does not give refunds? You wasted hundreds of dollars.”
“Dr. Linden is a quack. And just what the hell do you think you're doing, talking to Dr. Linden behind my back? Haven't you heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“I am your mother.”
“In name only.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“It did not sound like nothing.”
“Well, it was.”
“Are you gonna take that, babe?” John butted in.
“No.” My mother set down her wineglass. “I am not. Christina, go to your room.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no. I'm not going to my room. I'm more adult than anyone sitting at this table, and I'm not going to be treated like a child. I'm going to Dad's.”
“At this hour?” my mother squawked. “I forbid it!”
“You can't forbid it. If you don't let me leave, that would be unlawful imprisonment. Which is, as you might have guessed, against the law.”
My mother's shoulders tensed. I could hear her and John conversing worriedly as I stormed up the stairs. We both knew the real reason she didn't want me to go. Being kidnapped had put things into a new perspective for my father, who belatedly realized that the fantasy woman he'd been married to for all these years had been exactly that—fantasy.
Dad and I didn't have the perfect relationship, but we had far more in common than either of us did with her, and my mother knew this and despaired about being left out of the loop, convinced that we spent every minute gossiping about her.
“I do not like it when you and your father conspire against me.”
“Please.” I grabbed a light sweater from my closet and shrugged it on. “We have better things to talk about.”
“You should talk to a therapist about this hatred you have against your mother!”
“Why don't you do that? Go tattle to your precious Dr. Linden.”
“Perhaps I should. And while I'm at it, perhaps I should tell her how self-centered my daughter is. That she is, como se dice, una sociópata.”
“It's sociopath,” I snarled. “Which, by the way, is heritable—and I wonder which side of the family I got that from, hmm? Here's a hint—not Dad's!”
“How dare you!”
“Why don't you ask Dr. Linden how she feels about you making diagnoses on her behalf?”
My mother scoffed. “You know nothing about psychology.”
“Which is still a hell of a lot more than you know! Go on—ask her. Call her right now. Better yet, put her on conference call. John can talk to her, too.”
“You are a horrible wretch!”
“And you are a horrible mother,” I said quietly.
“See if I help you move into your college apartment, then, if I am so horrible.” With a cry of frustrated anger, Mamá stormed down the stairs, muttering about ingrates and how children who spoke to their parents the way I did would get the attitude beaten out of them when she was a girl.
I did my best to ignore her, and tingling flood warnings of my eyes welling up. I threw my things into my ratty old backpack and trudged out to the car, letting the door slam behind me. Nobody came out to stop me. I hadn't been expecting anyone to, but I still felt a tiny bit disappointed.
You'll never learn, will you?
I turned on the radio. Released the parking brake. I couldn't keep from glancing back at my mother's house in the rear-view mirror. Couldn't stop myself from making the deceptively warm lights now blurred by tears. No, I supposed I never would learn my lesson.
I thought I might understand how a kicked puppy feels.
***TEASER***
I said when my 99-cent sale was over, I'd post a teaser for my fans to read! The votes were all for Armed and Dangerous (LOL, I guess I know which of my stories people like best) so here is an excerpt from chapter one!
***TEASER***
My psychologists suggested that it might be therapeutic to write about what happened. That it would be beneficial, as they put it, for me to confront my demons head-on. They failed to take into account the fact that I might not want to confront the horrors of my recent past, let alone document it all in the written word, for any and all to see. Whatever you say can, and will, be held against you, and with the IMA, it would be at gunpoint.
They were terrifying people, and took no prisoners if they could help it.
One visit to the psychologist was all it took for me to realize that these sessions would be a complete waste of both time and money. I wasn't too disappointed. My mother had selected Dr. Linden. My expectations had been low to start. I already knew that she did not hold my best interests at heart. Mamá, that is, not the therapist—although Dr. Linden probably didn't give a fig about my interests, either, beyond what was compelled for by the session bill.
Considering that I had been the one to be kidnapped and held hostage by hardened criminals, if anyone had a right to be traumatized, it ought to be me. But no, at the urging and endorsement of Dr. Linden, whose motives I now questioned, my mother was in the process of writing a memoir about her “three months of terror.” Critics were already singing her praises in anticipation of the book's success, calling her “brave” and “inspirational.”
I had been forced to endure unimaginable cruelties—and had I gotten out of it? A temporary prescription for sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. My mother, who had chosen to save her own life instead of mine, thereby forcing me to pay for the mistakes made by her and my father, had a book deal. I ask you, in what universe is that considered fair?
My mother's egocentric one, apparently.
Worse, I was convinced that my mother's memoir would put me on another hit list. Despite stealing from large corporations by hacking into their computers as though he thought he were Neo, my father hadn't realized what he had been messing around with until it was too late. My mother was just foolish. If she revealed some detail that the IMA did not want revealed, we were both dead. Or they might kill us just to err on the side of caution.
“Don't you think you should quit while you're ahead for once?” I asked her. “You have your fashion line. Think about fall—winter ball—prom,” I concluded, a little desperately.
She had converted her walk-in closet to an “office,” and because she never did anything by halves, she had purchased a vintage Royal Arrow typewriter with glass keys. Her closet-office shared a wall with my bedroom, and I heard her pinging away well into the night.
“Christina, in today's economy, people do not want to buy fashion. They want to buy sob stories that will make them feel better about their own miserable lives.”
“That's great. Write about your own life—not about mine.”
“I cannot work with you standing there pestering me. Go change into something nice for dinner. John is coming over at six.”
“Really? But I hate John. Why would you invite him over while I was staying here? You know I can't stand him.”
“You are upsetting me, Christina.”
“You're upsetting me.”
“John is the only reason I have been able to get through these past few months.”
“Does he have time-traveling powers, too? Because I thought you'd only been going out for one month.”
“Out,” she said, jabbing a finger at the door.
“Fine,” I snapped. “But when I'm coming down it'll be because I want to, when I want to, and I'll be wearing an old ratty t-shirt.”
She slammed her closet-office's door shut with a resounding thud that shook the walls.
Ever since she and my father had divorced my mother had had a series of boyfriends, each as unlikable as the last. Dr. Linden, on our one and only session, had proposed that perhaps I felt “threatened” by these men I perceived to be “taking my father's place,” and that I still felt “angry” about my parents' separation. No. Freud said it best, I think, when he said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes your mother's loser boyfriend is just a loser.
This current model was named John—an irony that went over my mother's head. John was twenty-nine—younger than the typewriter she was using to write her memoir—and an aspiring actor. “Aspiring” in this case meaning that he wasn't enrolled at a film college, wasn't looking for an agent, and didn't have any work lined up. He seemed to be operating under the belief that if he spent enough time in our bathroom oiling his hair like a 1950s greaser a talent scout would drop out of the sky like the finger of God Himself and say, “You, with the oil-slick cowlick, I want you to be in my next movie.”
Maybe that was why my mother liked him—he shared her delusional style of thinking.
In addition to being a loser, he was also a total creep. I found him prowling around in the hallway outside my bathroom sometimes when he knew I was taking a shower. Once, he'd asked me if my mother and I ever did threesomes. I asked him if he knew about my ties to the mob and whether he'd ever had a bullet go through his penis, casually adding that if I spoke to the right people, he could easily find out.
Michael wouldn't do that, though. He was only cruel when he was paid to be. He wasn't a sadist—and he also wasn't around, and therefore wasn't worth thinking about. In any case, after that conversation John stopped creeping around outside my bathroom.
* * *
Mamá made good on her threat and six o' clock found found the three of us in the conservatory of her newly renovated Victorian. Eating wilted green things that could have been anything from asparagus to arugula. John whining about how he needed meat to build up his muscles. Mamá by turns consoling and condescending. Just one fucked-up happy family.
I snorted, and she turned the full-force of that punishing look one me. “Do not make the noises of a barn animal, Christina, or you will be eating your dinner outside like one.”
“I'm sorry.” I bowed my head.
She pursed her lips, looking at me closely, then shrugged it off. I could see her making the conscious decision to ignore me. “I finished twenty pages of my memoir today,” she informed us, speaking to John as she laid her hand on his bicep.
John looked up from his stare-down with the mystery greens. “Fantastic, babe.”
“I was so inspired. The words just flew out of me.”
So does diarrhea. And what a coincidence; they're both crap.
“It feels so good to unburden myself from the horrible events I was made to endure by those heartless men. But God works in mysterious ways, no? And now I can share His wisdom with others. To give them solace where I had none.”
Provided that they're willing to shell out the $9.99 for your poorly edited eBook. I slammed down my fork. “May I be excused?”
“Christina—don't be rude in front of our guest.”
“He's not a guest. He practically lives here!”
“Christina!” My mother gritted her teeth. “You will stay seated and you will eat your kale!”
“The memoir sounds great, babe. Fantastic.”
“You said that already,” I informed him.
Mamá snapped at me in Spanish, telling me not to ruin her chance at happiness by being a pettish brat. “I bet they'll make it into a movie.” John shoveled a mouthful of the kale into his mouth, and she beamed at him. Like he'd just said something exceptionally profound instead of talking with his mouth full and spattering bits of chewed food on the tablecloth. “And if they do,” he added, “I can play as myself.”
“God help us,” I muttered.
“Naturally, Penelope Cruz will star as me,” my mother said. “Though she is a little heavy in the hips.”
And just what did that make me? I glared at her and stabbed at one of the green spears. “Don't you think you're being a little overly optimistic? Your book hasn't even been published yet.”
“Christina, I find your negative attitude to be extremely hampering.”
I drew in a deep breath—count to three, Christina—and said, “I'm not being negative. I'm being realistic.”
She sniffed. “You are being difficult. You should be more focused on your own personal advancements. Dr. Linden informed me that you terminated your sessions with her prematurely. Do you realize that she does not give refunds? You wasted hundreds of dollars.”
“Dr. Linden is a quack. And just what the hell do you think you're doing, talking to Dr. Linden behind my back? Haven't you heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“I am your mother.”
“In name only.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“It did not sound like nothing.”
“Well, it was.”
“Are you gonna take that, babe?” John butted in.
“No.” My mother set down her wineglass. “I am not. Christina, go to your room.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said no. I'm not going to my room. I'm more adult than anyone sitting at this table, and I'm not going to be treated like a child. I'm going to Dad's.”
“At this hour?” my mother squawked. “I forbid it!”
“You can't forbid it. If you don't let me leave, that would be unlawful imprisonment. Which is, as you might have guessed, against the law.”
My mother's shoulders tensed. I could hear her and John conversing worriedly as I stormed up the stairs. We both knew the real reason she didn't want me to go. Being kidnapped had put things into a new perspective for my father, who belatedly realized that the fantasy woman he'd been married to for all these years had been exactly that—fantasy.
Dad and I didn't have the perfect relationship, but we had far more in common than either of us did with her, and my mother knew this and despaired about being left out of the loop, convinced that we spent every minute gossiping about her.
“I do not like it when you and your father conspire against me.”
“Please.” I grabbed a light sweater from my closet and shrugged it on. “We have better things to talk about.”
“You should talk to a therapist about this hatred you have against your mother!”
“Why don't you do that? Go tattle to your precious Dr. Linden.”
“Perhaps I should. And while I'm at it, perhaps I should tell her how self-centered my daughter is. That she is, como se dice, una sociópata.”
“It's sociopath,” I snarled. “Which, by the way, is heritable—and I wonder which side of the family I got that from, hmm? Here's a hint—not Dad's!”
“How dare you!”
“Why don't you ask Dr. Linden how she feels about you making diagnoses on her behalf?”
My mother scoffed. “You know nothing about psychology.”
“Which is still a hell of a lot more than you know! Go on—ask her. Call her right now. Better yet, put her on conference call. John can talk to her, too.”
“You are a horrible wretch!”
“And you are a horrible mother,” I said quietly.
“See if I help you move into your college apartment, then, if I am so horrible.” With a cry of frustrated anger, Mamá stormed down the stairs, muttering about ingrates and how children who spoke to their parents the way I did would get the attitude beaten out of them when she was a girl.
I did my best to ignore her, and tingling flood warnings of my eyes welling up. I threw my things into my ratty old backpack and trudged out to the car, letting the door slam behind me. Nobody came out to stop me. I hadn't been expecting anyone to, but I still felt a tiny bit disappointed.
You'll never learn, will you?
I turned on the radio. Released the parking brake. I couldn't keep from glancing back at my mother's house in the rear-view mirror. Couldn't stop myself from making the deceptively warm lights now blurred by tears. No, I supposed I never would learn my lesson.
I thought I might understand how a kicked puppy feels.
***TEASER***
CROWNED BY FIRE TEASER
*********WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR BOOKS 1 & 2**********
********Don't say I didn't warn you********
“You were born a killer, and you'll die a killer. Fight that, and you'll die sooner,” he said.
“I don't believe that.”
“I've watched you narrowly avoid death four times now,” said Finn. “What does that tell you?”
“That you're bad luck.”
He slammed his fist against her car. “You are going to die.”
She turned around, and seemed surprised to find him standing so close to her. She was so vulnerable, this shape-shifter. Her large, hazel eyes were so innocent, they were almost naked.
“Are you planning on killing me yourself, witch?”
He had tracked down hundreds of shape-shifters, hauling them in to meet their fate—and their deaths. But in all those years of hunting, he had never met a shape-shifter quite like this one. She was a Glamor, and they made a point of assimilating to humankind, which perhaps explained why. She was very good, but couldn't quite hide the instincts that boiled beneath the surface.
And she was devastated over the loss of her family. Shape-shifters were social animals; even though they were territorial, they were fiercely protective of their families and their mates, and felt such losses acutely. Catherine had lost both her mate and her family in one sweep.
It would be so easy, he thought, to get her to let down her defenses, to let him get close. As much as she hated him, she had no one else. When she had been trapped by that Slayer, she had even called for him by name. He reached out, and she flinched when his fingers touched her lip.
“I should.”
********Don't say I didn't warn you********
“You were born a killer, and you'll die a killer. Fight that, and you'll die sooner,” he said.
“I don't believe that.”
“I've watched you narrowly avoid death four times now,” said Finn. “What does that tell you?”
“That you're bad luck.”
He slammed his fist against her car. “You are going to die.”
She turned around, and seemed surprised to find him standing so close to her. She was so vulnerable, this shape-shifter. Her large, hazel eyes were so innocent, they were almost naked.
“Are you planning on killing me yourself, witch?”
He had tracked down hundreds of shape-shifters, hauling them in to meet their fate—and their deaths. But in all those years of hunting, he had never met a shape-shifter quite like this one. She was a Glamor, and they made a point of assimilating to humankind, which perhaps explained why. She was very good, but couldn't quite hide the instincts that boiled beneath the surface.
And she was devastated over the loss of her family. Shape-shifters were social animals; even though they were territorial, they were fiercely protective of their families and their mates, and felt such losses acutely. Catherine had lost both her mate and her family in one sweep.
It would be so easy, he thought, to get her to let down her defenses, to let him get close. As much as she hated him, she had no one else. When she had been trapped by that Slayer, she had even called for him by name. He reached out, and she flinched when his fingers touched her lip.
“I should.”
Crowned by Fire Teaser!
I wrote 15,000 words today! Most of that was editing what I'd already sent off to my beta (Wart), but a lot of it was new material.
Anyway! Here is a teaser. No killing the author, now! *runs and hides just in case*
---
She was standing in a ring of flames as the ground around her crumbled away into unseen water. She could hear the splashes the chunks of granite made, loud, like a tidal roar. Or maybe that was the screaming she heard. Hundreds of voices, perhaps thousands, shrilling their collective agony as the city was razed around them.
Dead, barren, swathed in darkness. Only the glow of the fires provided any light. And then, even that was extinguished as a heavy rain began to fall.
Someone was holding on to her as the ground split away. Tightly, as though afraid to let go. Or just afraid. She could hear another chorus now, just below the screams. A high, keening that reminded her of recordings of whales she'd once heard.
But no whale on earth had ever managed to sound so sinister, so inherently evil.
No, the sound frightened her, and sent all the animals inside her, predator and prey alike, clamoring for safety. Because whatever creature it was that was making those sounds, it was insanely powerful, and it was hungry, and it was hunting—hunting her.
Thunder filled her ears, and she thought it was the storm rolling in until she felt the tremor beneath her feet, the splitting crack, and then the ground was yanked out from beneath her feet, and she and her unseen companion were falling into a black abyss.
Splash.
The water ripped her protector away. He—it was a he, now, she realized—cried out only once before the water silenced him. She dove, as graceful as a dolphin in the black water, searching desperately, blindly, beneath the surface.
Where had he gone? It had been seconds—ten at most. There was no way he could have sunk so far, so fast. But he had vanished without a trace, leaving her alone.
Not quite alone.
(If one fails, then so shall all—
Bring death to those of Evenfall.)
She heard a laugh. There, in the darkness, someone was declaiming.
A wave crashed over her head, plunging her beneath the violent waves. It was dark, so dark she couldn't see her nose in front of her face, and cold. So, so cold. All the heat was leaving her body, and she could no longer fully breathe. She thought she might be dying.
“Beast of shadows, touched with sight.” It was the voice from before, louder now, and all the more menacing because of it. “Come to me.”
The water wrapped around her limbs. It was a water spell, she realized, similar to the one the witch had used on her what seemed like a century ago. She jerked violently, and sucked in a frightened breath as something brushed against her throat, halfway between a caress and a threat. “No,” she said weakly, shivering. “No.”
“Blood will flow like wine.”
She thought it could not possibly get any darker than this.
She was wrong.
“The Shadow Thane will lord over all.”
The last thing she saw was the sky.
“And the world shall be slave to his dragons.”
There were no stars.
Fleeting pain, a quiet snap. Her throat had been pierced, her spine broken. And as her eyes began to fill with the milky glaze of death, the darkness began to flake and crumble, swallowed up by a golden light as the heavens crashed to earth.
And then, she saw nothing more.
Anyway! Here is a teaser. No killing the author, now! *runs and hides just in case*
---
She was standing in a ring of flames as the ground around her crumbled away into unseen water. She could hear the splashes the chunks of granite made, loud, like a tidal roar. Or maybe that was the screaming she heard. Hundreds of voices, perhaps thousands, shrilling their collective agony as the city was razed around them.
Dead, barren, swathed in darkness. Only the glow of the fires provided any light. And then, even that was extinguished as a heavy rain began to fall.
Someone was holding on to her as the ground split away. Tightly, as though afraid to let go. Or just afraid. She could hear another chorus now, just below the screams. A high, keening that reminded her of recordings of whales she'd once heard.
But no whale on earth had ever managed to sound so sinister, so inherently evil.
No, the sound frightened her, and sent all the animals inside her, predator and prey alike, clamoring for safety. Because whatever creature it was that was making those sounds, it was insanely powerful, and it was hungry, and it was hunting—hunting her.
Thunder filled her ears, and she thought it was the storm rolling in until she felt the tremor beneath her feet, the splitting crack, and then the ground was yanked out from beneath her feet, and she and her unseen companion were falling into a black abyss.
Splash.
The water ripped her protector away. He—it was a he, now, she realized—cried out only once before the water silenced him. She dove, as graceful as a dolphin in the black water, searching desperately, blindly, beneath the surface.
Where had he gone? It had been seconds—ten at most. There was no way he could have sunk so far, so fast. But he had vanished without a trace, leaving her alone.
Not quite alone.
(If one fails, then so shall all—
Bring death to those of Evenfall.)
She heard a laugh. There, in the darkness, someone was declaiming.
A wave crashed over her head, plunging her beneath the violent waves. It was dark, so dark she couldn't see her nose in front of her face, and cold. So, so cold. All the heat was leaving her body, and she could no longer fully breathe. She thought she might be dying.
“Beast of shadows, touched with sight.” It was the voice from before, louder now, and all the more menacing because of it. “Come to me.”
The water wrapped around her limbs. It was a water spell, she realized, similar to the one the witch had used on her what seemed like a century ago. She jerked violently, and sucked in a frightened breath as something brushed against her throat, halfway between a caress and a threat. “No,” she said weakly, shivering. “No.”
“Blood will flow like wine.”
She thought it could not possibly get any darker than this.
She was wrong.
“The Shadow Thane will lord over all.”
The last thing she saw was the sky.
“And the world shall be slave to his dragons.”
There were no stars.
Fleeting pain, a quiet snap. Her throat had been pierced, her spine broken. And as her eyes began to fill with the milky glaze of death, the darkness began to flake and crumble, swallowed up by a golden light as the heavens crashed to earth.
And then, she saw nothing more.
Crowned by Fire Playlist
Here is the playlist for my new book, CROWNED BY FIRE!
For information on where to purchase the book, refer to the previous post or just click here. ♥
♫ Asylum // Chantal Kreviazuk
♫ Good Behavior // Plumb
♫ Sundrenched World // Joshua Radin
♫ Potions // Late Night Alumni
♫ Primitive // Roisin Murphy
♫ Dark Carnival // Vanessa Carlton
♫ Dreaming // Goldfrapp
♫ Murder // Within Temptation
♫ Stargazing // Tinashe
♫ Prince // Vanessa Carlton
♫ Stairway to the Skies // Within Temptation
♫ Starring Role // Marina and the Diamonds
♫ Familiar Taste of Poison // Halestorm
End credits:
♫ Animal // Ellie Goulding
Get your groove on here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
Enjoy! :)
For information on where to purchase the book, refer to the previous post or just click here. ♥
♫ Asylum // Chantal Kreviazuk
♫ Good Behavior // Plumb
♫ Sundrenched World // Joshua Radin
♫ Potions // Late Night Alumni
♫ Primitive // Roisin Murphy
♫ Dark Carnival // Vanessa Carlton
♫ Dreaming // Goldfrapp
♫ Murder // Within Temptation
♫ Stargazing // Tinashe
♫ Prince // Vanessa Carlton
♫ Stairway to the Skies // Within Temptation
♫ Starring Role // Marina and the Diamonds
♫ Familiar Taste of Poison // Halestorm
End credits:
♫ Animal // Ellie Goulding
Get your groove on here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
Enjoy! :)
Summary for THE DARKEST NIGHT
I'm currently working on book #3.5 in my Shadow Thane series. It's called THE DARKEST NIGHT and features a new narrator.
WARNING: It contains a huge spoiler from book #3 so do not read unless you are okay with spoilers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
I'm also posting it here, too.
*** SPOILER ***
bear with me
*** SPOILER ***
THERE IS NO TURNING BACK NOW.
---
David Tran is back from the grave.
When the girl he was in love with asked him to do her a favor, David didn't think twice. Yes, he knew they could get caught, but it was only a simple, childish prank. With his grades, he thought he'd get a slap on the wrist at most.
He was wrong.
Marked for death, tortured, then sold into slavery and tortured some more, David has been through it all, and has the t-shirt to prove it.
The atrocities he has committed would drive any mere human mad. But David isn't a human. He used to be a shape-shifter once, but he isn't that anymore, either.
He's a monster.
And his life has become...THE DARKEST NIGHT.
WARNING: It contains a huge spoiler from book #3 so do not read unless you are okay with spoilers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
I'm also posting it here, too.
*** SPOILER ***
bear with me
*** SPOILER ***
THERE IS NO TURNING BACK NOW.
---
David Tran is back from the grave.
When the girl he was in love with asked him to do her a favor, David didn't think twice. Yes, he knew they could get caught, but it was only a simple, childish prank. With his grades, he thought he'd get a slap on the wrist at most.
He was wrong.
Marked for death, tortured, then sold into slavery and tortured some more, David has been through it all, and has the t-shirt to prove it.
The atrocities he has committed would drive any mere human mad. But David isn't a human. He used to be a shape-shifter once, but he isn't that anymore, either.
He's a monster.
And his life has become...THE DARKEST NIGHT.
Star Crossed Teaser!!!!
Teaser from Star Crossed (Shadow Thane, #4).
“I'm surprised you didn't make me beg.”
“I suspect you would starve before you surrendered your pride.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “Pride goeth before a fall?”
“Exactly.” The witch tore into an apple, and with his glowing aura and serpentine eyes, she thought he looked like the very embodiment of everything that had caused mankind's fall from grace. He smiled, as though reading her mind. “So don't tempt me.”
“Or what?” She tried for blasé, though she found his words bewildering. She drew herself up haughtily, looking down her nose at him. “You'll make me fall?”
“You're already falling,” he said, turning over the core in his long fingers, “it's a merely a question of whether I'll let you hit the ground on your way down.”
Add the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
:D
“I'm surprised you didn't make me beg.”
“I suspect you would starve before you surrendered your pride.”
“Let me guess,” she said. “Pride goeth before a fall?”
“Exactly.” The witch tore into an apple, and with his glowing aura and serpentine eyes, she thought he looked like the very embodiment of everything that had caused mankind's fall from grace. He smiled, as though reading her mind. “So don't tempt me.”
“Or what?” She tried for blasé, though she found his words bewildering. She drew herself up haughtily, looking down her nose at him. “You'll make me fall?”
“You're already falling,” he said, turning over the core in his long fingers, “it's a merely a question of whether I'll let you hit the ground on your way down.”
Add the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
:D
Star Crossed Teaser
Well, it's more of a quote, but it was too long for me to post in a status update so here you go.
His answering smile was a cruel, beautiful smile that made her certain he was going to both break her heart and watch her choke on the sharp pieces as he made her eat it; it promised pleasure followed speedily by pain, and vice vice versa, and a profound sense of absence borne of atrophied satisfaction; he would fill her up with a bouyant emptiness, and leave an even bigger void when he'd left, forcing her to come back, again and again, and each subsequent time would be worse than the time before. He was elusive, he was elemental, he was cruel.
Loving him, she realized, would be a lot like drowning.
His answering smile was a cruel, beautiful smile that made her certain he was going to both break her heart and watch her choke on the sharp pieces as he made her eat it; it promised pleasure followed speedily by pain, and vice vice versa, and a profound sense of absence borne of atrophied satisfaction; he would fill her up with a bouyant emptiness, and leave an even bigger void when he'd left, forcing her to come back, again and again, and each subsequent time would be worse than the time before. He was elusive, he was elemental, he was cruel.
Loving him, she realized, would be a lot like drowning.
FIRST CHAPTER OF CEASE AND DESIST SNEAK-PEEK!!!!!
So I said that when CLOAK AND DAGGER broke 1,000 ratings, I'd post a sneak-peek of the first chapter of CEASE AND DESIST. I didn't forget! I've just been really busy with work and haven't had a chance to get on my computer.
Here is the first chapter. It's still rough and will probably change a bit in the final draft, but here you go!
SOMETHING TO PROVE THAT I AM DEFINITELY WORKING ON THE SEQUEL.
Also, don't read this if you haven't read books 1-3 because spoilers.
Chapter One
Michael
Most animals are put down once they get a taste for human flesh — and why not? It makes no sense to keep around a dog that's quicker to bite than to heel. The moment a tool becomes a health risk, it ceases being useful and instead becomes a liability. Would you use a gun that had a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in your face? I wouldn't.
Someone should have neutralized Adrian Callaghan years ago, as soon as he began to show signs of that same propensity. But human beings, it seems, are the exceptions to that rule; we make blood lust, especially the cannibalistic form of it, lucrative. And true to form, instead of putting Callaghan down, the fools put him into power.
Nothing had been the same since.
He had taken over the IMA through a series of carefully executed coups, a group of highly trained mercenaries of which I was once a part, and turned it into a feudal mob. Powerful men bowing to him, with their tails tucked between their legs. Too afraid to say boo, even when they should have. Especially when they should have. Now his organization had fragmented and grown corrupt; Callaghan thought little of loyalty, except when it could be used as a weakness.
When he had grown bored with his playground, he branched out into the media. There was less blood to be had in this sector, but controlling the news fed into his ego. When he attempted to make his conquest live six months ago, I had cut transmission, branding him a failure. Now, it seemed he had turned his attention elsewhere once more.
“Here is the dossier you asked for.” Angelica handed me a thick folder.
“This is practically a fucking book.”
“It is,” she said. “It's a biography.”
I flipped through the thick stack of papers. “You put this together quickly.”
That earned me a very white smile. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”
Once, a man named Kent would have done this. But he had been killed in an explosion rigged up by Callaghan. Kent had survived the rigors of being a field agent at MI6, and the thought of him dying because of a stupid fucking mistake filled me with anger.
Anger, and a deep, yawning regret that I felt like a bullet wound.
Angelica was the next best thing. She had been his protegee, and sometimes I could see faint shadows of his personality in her. Odd, since they were nothing alike. He had been a chip off the British upper-crust, florid complexion, watery eyes; he was the type of man who looked most at home in tweed. She was young, attractive, dark-skinned. Her accent was constantly morphing: one minute, she sounded French, the next, Nigerian.
Today, she sounded Azerbaijani. It was impressive.
I stopped toying with the folder and began to read. It was a bit redundant. I didn't need to read the files it contained to know the man they were describing.
Once, Adrian had been a lowly agent, who paid his bills in human lives. The IMA stood for Integrated Military Affairs, and while it still existed, it was no longer recognizable as the privately contracted group of mercenaries that it had once been.
Richardson, with his paranoia and weakness for women, had been a shit boss, but until he had branded me as a traitor, I had never had cause to complain. Most of the men and women I killed probably deserved it. Those that hadn't, well — their deaths hadn't bothered me enough to prevent me from sleeping at night. People died every day. I liked to think I just hastened the process. It wasn't as if I'd been born innocent.
No, Richardson's scouts had pulled me out of the Louisiana slums and given me the education I never had cause to believe I'd ever need, let alone possess. If they hadn't, I'd probably still be in a gang, selling drugs, fighting in the streets, and stealing from the prone and naive. A conscience was a luxury I couldn't afford. Growing up, there was only one golden rule, and it wasn't the one they tacked up in school rooms.
Them, or me.
Unfortunately for him, Richardson had hired on Adrian Callaghan as well. Callaghan's history was a little more convoluted, and since he was a liar, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. I had heard many things about him. He almost certainly had roots in the IRA, that much I believed. He was a little young to be in the thick of it, but I wouldn't put a grassroots revival behind the shit-fuck; he loved to stir the pot.
I would not have been surprised to learn that he had killed his parents. I'd seen him torture people with little recourse. He loved causing pain. Death was only a means to an end; if there was a way for him to maim without killing, then he would do that.
Callaghan had come close to killing me once, when he had been my trainer. I'd been young, in my late teens, and Richardson had paired the two of us together for reasons that still escape me. One day, instead of beginning the lesson, he simply told me to run. And when he caught me, he slashed through my gut and walked away leaving me to crawl to our on-site hospital, clutching my innards like a penitent seeking absolution.
Given his colorful history, I couldn't believe Richardson didn't see his death coming. He sat across from it most days, listening to its Irish brogue, looking it dead in the face.
All of this was in the folder, and more. I flipped through it, keeping my face composed as the accompanying memories surfaced in my head with vivid clarity. Christina's chart was in here, from when Callaghan had beaten her so badly that the IMA had been forced to treat her to keep her from dying until they were ready for him to finish her off.
And he'd come close to doing just that.
Too close. My hands tightened around the folder, leaving divots into the cream colored surface. Too fucking close. I started to close the folder, when a highlighted chunk of text towards the end caught my eye. Prostitution leaped out at me, as did human trafficking.
This is new, I thought. And then, fuck. I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until I caught Angelica looking at me questioningly. “I wasn't expecting this,” I said.
Angelica arched her pretty brows. “Does it surprise you?” she wanted to know.
“That he got in on the skin trade like so many other corrupt businessmen? No, that doesn't surprise me.” What surprised me was his choice of venue. He was a fastidious prick who generally washed his hands of sex. I knew he'd raped people before, but rape wasn't about sex; it was about power, and causing pain.
Actually…this made a lot of sense now.
I skimmed this new printout but this was a tale even older than the tale as old as time. Bringing in young girls from the Balkans and Mainland Southeast Asia to a land where they couldn't speak the language on the pretense of job opportunities. These women came to the U.S. thinking that they would be employed as a maid or a cook, an honest living, with an honest wage they could send back to their families. Instead, they were subjected to abuse that bordered on torture, and promised more if they didn't behave. The traffickers employed the use of the middleman to keep the money out of the hands of the girls, although they did encourage girls to send for their sisters and their mothers and their friends. More girls meant more bodies, and more leeway to keep them in line.
I'd been contracted by men in the human trafficking industry before, and I'd been contracted to kill men of that same industry. As long as I got paid, I never asked where the money came from. It was a brutal trade, but no more than mine had been at the time, and since there was a ready market for sex, as well as death, the enterprise persisted.
But dealing in it firsthand? I wondered if even I would have stooped so low. There had been a time I was capable of anything — killing small children, rape, maybe even this.
I rattled the folder, shaking myself as I did. Dwelling in the past offered no solutions for the present and this was not a productive line of thought. It was time to focus on the problem at hand. Clearing my throat, I said, “How did you discover this?”
“Read — ”
Angelica slid her hand under mine and yanked out one of the pages, flipping it over so that it covered the manila envelope, and almost gave me a fucking paper cut in the process. I was irritated by her cute behavior — until I began to read.
“Maudit,” I breathed. One of the 'shipments' had been intercepted by the local authorities. The man who'd been charged with the crime was a patsy if I'd ever seen one. Overweight. Sweating. Well into his fifties. Just the kind of pervert society liked to condemn. There was no way he'd done it. “Who's this clown?”
“He was a member of the IMA.”
I noted the past tense. “Was? Is he dead?”
“No,” she said, “although they don't care much for rapists and sex traffickers very much in prison, so he might as well be, yes?”
Yes. And incarcerated in a prison where he might well be killed before the year was through, this Kevin McCarthy would be as effectively silenced as if Callaghan had placed the gun to this man's head and pulled the trigger himself.
“He was an older member,” Angelica said, reciting the facts from memory, “with seniority over you. He was recently stationed in Scotland — ” my mouth thinned at this. In the same “reeducation facility” as me? I wondered — “it seems he had not kept his displeasure with the recent changes in management quiet.”
Callaghan knew that I would see right through this smokescreen. This was his way of flipping me the bird. I didn't like that. Not one fucking bit.
Christina wouldn't, either. She popped into my head, unbidden, as she did so often these days. I could visualize her reaction as easily as if she were standing in front of me.
Schooling my expression, I asked in a bland voice, “Does anyone else in AMI know?”
Did you tell Christina?
When she smiled, it revealed small white teeth. “I left that distinct pleasure to you, of course.”
Of course.
Fils de putain.
I wasn't looking forward to this.
Christina
Three months. They could slip by in a breath. They could span an entire lifetime. Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.
Six months had passed since my mother's death.
No, that wasn't quite right — my mother's murder. Death was a passive, natural thing; my mother had been forcibly removed from this world by a cold-blooded killer.
I was hacking into the computer of a member of the IMA. I'd forgotten his name, It wasn't important. He was low-ranked, and not particularly careful, but still, information can be waiting where you least expect it.
I stared at the scrolling cryptograms — he was that careful, at least — unseeingly. Numbers, letters, special characters: they blurred together in wavering lines, forming a road map of exhaustion. I hadn't slept in days. The coffee that sat beside me on the desk was ice cold. I had knocked it over several times, the dark spills spattering the carpet were testament to my clumsiness. They looked like dried blood. I would know.
Murder.
I closed my eyes. The inside of my eyelids rasped against my dry corneas like sand.
Mamá and I had never been close. In life, she had caused me untold pain. She was constantly criticizing my weight (I was too fat), and my interests (baseball and computers were indicative of hidden lesbian proclivities); when my father had landed on the IMA's radar screen she had thrown me to the wolves so they could escape, and when I had been threatened, she took a gamble no mother should ever make; she assumed that my captor would not have the stomach, or the motivation, to hurt me.
On that, as with so much else in life, she was mistaken.
My father told me that she was a very troubled woman, haunted by her own demons, and while this did not make her past actions any easier to accept, it did make them easier to understand. Even before the incident that changed my life, all of our lives, she had been as removed as a statue, never showing affection or offering words of praise. Other mothers hugged and coddled their daughters, sewed prom dresses, and had mother-daughter spa days. Mine could only offer criticism and condemnation.
This wellspring of grief that had spurted up in the wake of her passing was unexpected; I had never anticipated that her loss would hurt so much, but it did. I felt it every day, like a thorn in my heart, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever go away.
Along with that hurt was hate — a hate so caustic, it could sear on contact. I hadn't known I had the capacity for so much hate.
I hated the man who had my mother killed. His name was Adrian Callaghan, and he had done it to get back at me for putting a bullet in him. He was also the man who had tried to buy me like a slave; the man who had once beaten me so badly that I had nearly died from the ensuing wounds; the man who had made damn sure that Michael and I could never go on living for as long as he was still alive.
Oh, I hated him so much, I vibrated with it. When I closed my eyes, I could see his mocking smile. He was in my nightmares, and I often awoke from my dreams with his laughter ringing in my ears like a death knell.
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Until I met him, I hadn't truly believed that people could be evil. I had believed that everyone had a little of both in their hearts, and that it was up to God to measure the scales. I had been mistaken: Adrian Callaghan was evil in every sense of the word.
Keys clacked. Cliff was studying the screen of the computer as it spewed out printouts of the code I had managed to crack. His eyes were as red-rimmed as mine felt, his face a mask of concentration.
Cliff had once worked for Adrian alongside a man called the Sniper. The two of them had captured me when Michael and I had tried, ineffectively, to lie low after our escape from Target Island. He was a big man, with a bronze complexion and dark hair. I knew next to nothing about him, except that the changes Adrian was imposing under his new regime frightened him enough that he had looked elsewhere for employment.
It said something that Adrian could bring even this great monolith of a man to fear.
He was aware of being watched. When his eyes started to slide towards mine, I looked away. It still felt strange being on the same side as the man who had hauled me in to Adrian. I wasn't sure I could trust him, although it looked like I might have to.
Suraya was in the other room with her young sister, Jatinder. I could hear the two of them talking softly in Hindi. They had been conversing for the last hour. I hadn't been trying to eavesdrop but in the silence that stretched, I couldn't help it.
“Dhana rahe,” she said, “Dhyana rakhana.”
I heard Jatinder say something in response.*double-check translation
I frowned. I wasn't sure I could trust Suraya, either, although Michael seemed to think she was trustworthy. Yes, she had driven the getaway car that helped us escape from Adrian's soiree, and, by proxy, helped save Michael from death, but she didn't do much for AMI now—at least, not that I could see. Mostly, she spent her time standing around and looking sullen or sequestered away with her sister. It made me think she was a spy.
What she had done for Michael couldn't carry her forever and I would have liked to see more concentrated effort on her part. Loyalty was all we had, and if we couldn't count on that, we had nothing, nothing at all.
“This coming from you?” Michael said, when I went to him with my suspicions, “if you recall, in the beginning you thwarted me each and every time I tried to save your ass.”
Anger flooded me in a hot rush. “Because you kidnapped me. You held me hostage.” He had done terrible things to me in the name of money. To me. To my family. His indifference had encased him in a shroud of ice; sometimes I still had nightmares of what he had been.
Of what he still might be.
“You're not the only one bad things happen to,” he said. “But c'est la vie. Life goes on.”
Life goes on? “Is that really what you believe? I didn't realize you were so…zen.”
Michael gave a Gallic shrug, and went back to whatever it was that he'd been doing before I came along, leaving me fuming in the process. Since she saved his life I'm sure he felt indebted to her. That gave me a strange feeling I didn't like. When you owed someone a favor, it was like they owned a part of you — forever.
The door opened. As if my thoughts had summoned him here, Michael stood in the doorway, casting a shadow that reached the monitor of the computer I was working on. I wondered if that was symbolic, then scoffed at my fancifulness. This wasn't some silly story; this was life, and life was never as simple or dramatic as fiction. Life was a study in contrasts, and a constant source of misery. What good parts there were happened so quickly that you could miss them if you blinked. I hadn't had any good parts in a while.
Michael's face was drawn. That was never a good sign. He rarely smiled, rarely showed any kind of expression at all. When he did, that almost always meant trouble.
I watched him carefully but his expression revealed nothing about his inner state, apart from the fact that he wasn't pleased. Wasn't he in a meeting with Angelica? Why had it ended early? Had they fought? Or did they discover…something?
Cliff noticed me tense and his hands stilled on the keyboard as he glanced over his shoulder. I saw his shoulders relax slightly, but not a whole lot. It seemed I wasn't the only one who was put on guard by the abrupt change in sides.
Michael's eyes flicked to Cliff and me. He arched an eyebrow. In the other room, the faint strains of Hindi had stopped. The door opened and Suraya came out, arms folded over her chest. Michael cleared his throat, shifting something under his arm. A file folder.
Uh oh.
“We have a problem,” he said, and he handed the envelope to me.
Big uh oh.
When Michael said there was a problem, that usually meant someone was trying to kill us. I stared at that manila envelope, running my trembling fingers along the stiff edges. I knew that I wasn't going to like whatever was inside.
My eyes were burning. Sweat had dripped down my forehead and gotten into my eyes. It had gotten suffocation hot under the flickering fluorescent lights. Why had he given the folder to me in front of everyone? Couldn't we discuss it in private?
Maybe it's because he trusts you.
I sneaked a look at him. Was that what it was, trust? Or was this a test?
I flipped through the folder that Michael had given me, trying to get a grasp of what I was dealing with before I was forced to acknowledge it publicly. My first thought was that it would involve blood, blood and death. I was half-right. There was plenty of blood.
It took me a moment to process the images I was looking at. I had never seen anything like them outside of movies, and that had been toned down for a viewing audience. This was uncensored reality, in all its gritty, gory glory. I swallowed wetly and shook my head, feeling ill. Those poor girls. Because they were, without a doubt, girls, and not women.
Adrian had told me in our last meeting that he had trouble getting women to come home with him. I'm afraid I've developed somewhat of a reputation, he'd said, slyly, as if he were joking about the weather, or sports.
For what? I'd asked him. Sending girls home in boxes? I hadn't been joking, but I hadn't expected that I'd be so close to the truth, either. The spaces to which these women had been confined were coffin-small. There was no room to move, to even breathe; they must have been entrenched in their own waste. My skin crawled at the thought.
I knew what that was like. Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
I studied the faces that were so painfully, heartbreakingly young beneath their murky veneer of blood and grime and sweat. Some of them wore scraps of soiled clothing. Many were naked. On many I could not tell where the dirt ended and the bruises began.
My stomach cramped in unease. I passed the folder on. I couldn't stand to look at their eyes anymore. They were the eyes of people who have glimpsed a world without hope, and I was all too familiar with that feeling. There had been a point, not long ago, where I had been forced to come to terms with what I wholly believed was my impending death. I could be killed before the week was out, even now. Many powerful men out there wanted me dead, and this world was ruled by powerful men who were all too used to getting their way. I closed my eyes briefly. Adrian had taught me that lesson all too well.
Oh, but hell, like many things, exists on earth. It's only a matter of finding the right path to get there, and believe me, Christina, I know the way. I can take you there.
He was Satan with a human face, and I wanted to put him back where he belonged.
In hell.
Michael's eyes met mine for a moment. He had incredible eyes—cat-like one moment, and then forest green the next. The color was dependent on luminescence and shadow, affected by something as small as the tilt of his head. Up close, in the light, they were even more stunning, with yellow flecks caught in the iris like beads of honey.
They were dark now, foreboding, and even though I knew that had everything to do with his facing away from the light source and nothing to do with his state of mind, he still cut an imposing figure. His jaw was tense, and I had the expression that he wanted to speak, to me, in private. But of course, he wouldn't. Not here. Not now.
What have you gotten us into this time?
My own face, never stoic no matter how hard I tried, must have revealed my despair. I saw his mouth relax slightly, the lip soften as he unclenched his teeth. I knew from experience that he was attempting to look reassuring, and instead of consoling me it had the opposite effect because if he felt he had to protect me, we really were screwed.
Suraya cursed aloud, shattering my train of thought. I twisted around to look at her along with everyone else. The folder had reached her. One of the papers had fluttered to the ground, but she didn't seem to notice. Her face was flushed, and there was a spark of animation in her eyes that I'd never seen so vividly.
“Something you'd like to share with the rest of the class?” Michael drawled.
“This man is a demon.” She smacked the folder violently with a cracking sound that made me flinch. Michael noticed that, too. I saw his eyes flick towards me again before returning to Suraya. Spittle flew from her lips as she added, “He is a scourge upon humanity. This is the fate he promised my sister if I did not cooperate with his plans.”
Me too.
I bit my lip, hard. That could have been why Michael had looked at me in that odd way, with the slight softening that wasn't quite pity. He knew what Adrian had suggested to me because I'd told him, and once his rage had dissipated he had told me that that would never happen, not as long as either of us breathed. I remember wishing that he hadn't used those exact words, as it seemed like tempting fate.
An odd thought occurred to me: was this why he'd given me the folder to open? Had he been curious about my reaction? Why?
Maybe it is a test. To see if you're strong enough.
“He has been very quiet of late.” That was Angelica. She was standing in the doorway Michael had only recently vacated. I hadn't even heard her come in. “Now we know why.”
Adrian Callaghan isn't quiet, I wanted to say. He bides his time.
When he wasn't speaking, that's when you needed to watch out, because it meant he'd decided to hurt you, hurt you badly, and was best planning on how to go about it as ruthlessly and as painfully as possible.
Michael gave her a slow, measuring look, but there was no surprise in it. They must have discussed it earlier. I wondered why I hadn't been included.
“Well?” Suraya's voice smacked of impatience. “What are you going to do about it?”
Fear uncoiled deep down in my gut. Taking the initiative meant facing him again, and I didn't want to do that because I knew that the next time I did, I might not walk away. What can we do? I wondered. We're already living on borrowed time, all of us.
I wanted somebody else to take my hand, and make the bad man go away.
I was pathetic.
And then, as Suraya's words circled through my head, mocking my lack of drive, I couldn't help but notice the structure of her words, her odd choice of pronoun. Not 'what are we going to do about it?' but, 'what are you going to do about it?'
“It will cost too much time and resources to pinpoint each shipment.” Angelica dehumanized the women, turning them into objects, like something that could be sent through FedEx. I had never borne any ill will against her, but in that moment I hated her a little for being so cool. One look at Suraya told me she felt the same exact way.
As she glanced our way, discreet diamond studs in her ears caught the light and winked. “If we do succeed in cutting them off,” she continued, purposefully, “another operation will simply sprout up elsewhere — and the girls will be killed.”
I thought of the pictures, of those frightened human faces, and wondered if I was going to be sick. I steeled myself against the nausea and tried to think of it in the abstract. This wasn't real. I was reading a novel — a badly written novel by some hack novelist who was trying to titillate her audience through the degradation of human beings.
If this was a story, I asked, how would I resolve the conflict?
“All you're succeeding in doing is going around in circles.” Suraya's face hardened. “I ask you again—what are you going to do about it?”
Still no we, I noticed. But I had an answer. My ridiculous thought experiment worked.
“Infiltration,” I said, and the moment I spoke, I saw Michael's head whip towards me. I faltered briefly. “Maybe — maybe we can't do anything about it from the outside, but if one of us could figure out a way in, we could find out more details — the hows and whys and wheres — and maybe do more than shut down a single, tiny branch.”
Michael nodded, so imperceptibly that I'm not sure anyone else noticed. I did, and my heart fluttered a little under the sheer weight of his attention. “How?” he asked.
The way he looked at me, it was as if we were the only two people in the room. He is testing me. There was only one possible solution, though. I wet my lips. “Go undercover.”
The slight hitch in my voice made Suraya narrow her eyes. “You mean…prostitution?”
“Not exactly.” Michael leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “If we were going to do this, it would have to look authentic. One of us would have to sell another.” His eyes fell into shadow. “One of us would have to be trafficked to Adrian Callaghan's men.”
Here is the first chapter. It's still rough and will probably change a bit in the final draft, but here you go!
SOMETHING TO PROVE THAT I AM DEFINITELY WORKING ON THE SEQUEL.
Also, don't read this if you haven't read books 1-3 because spoilers.
Chapter One
Michael
Most animals are put down once they get a taste for human flesh — and why not? It makes no sense to keep around a dog that's quicker to bite than to heel. The moment a tool becomes a health risk, it ceases being useful and instead becomes a liability. Would you use a gun that had a fifty-fifty chance of blowing up in your face? I wouldn't.
Someone should have neutralized Adrian Callaghan years ago, as soon as he began to show signs of that same propensity. But human beings, it seems, are the exceptions to that rule; we make blood lust, especially the cannibalistic form of it, lucrative. And true to form, instead of putting Callaghan down, the fools put him into power.
Nothing had been the same since.
He had taken over the IMA through a series of carefully executed coups, a group of highly trained mercenaries of which I was once a part, and turned it into a feudal mob. Powerful men bowing to him, with their tails tucked between their legs. Too afraid to say boo, even when they should have. Especially when they should have. Now his organization had fragmented and grown corrupt; Callaghan thought little of loyalty, except when it could be used as a weakness.
When he had grown bored with his playground, he branched out into the media. There was less blood to be had in this sector, but controlling the news fed into his ego. When he attempted to make his conquest live six months ago, I had cut transmission, branding him a failure. Now, it seemed he had turned his attention elsewhere once more.
“Here is the dossier you asked for.” Angelica handed me a thick folder.
“This is practically a fucking book.”
“It is,” she said. “It's a biography.”
I flipped through the thick stack of papers. “You put this together quickly.”
That earned me a very white smile. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”
Once, a man named Kent would have done this. But he had been killed in an explosion rigged up by Callaghan. Kent had survived the rigors of being a field agent at MI6, and the thought of him dying because of a stupid fucking mistake filled me with anger.
Anger, and a deep, yawning regret that I felt like a bullet wound.
Angelica was the next best thing. She had been his protegee, and sometimes I could see faint shadows of his personality in her. Odd, since they were nothing alike. He had been a chip off the British upper-crust, florid complexion, watery eyes; he was the type of man who looked most at home in tweed. She was young, attractive, dark-skinned. Her accent was constantly morphing: one minute, she sounded French, the next, Nigerian.
Today, she sounded Azerbaijani. It was impressive.
I stopped toying with the folder and began to read. It was a bit redundant. I didn't need to read the files it contained to know the man they were describing.
Once, Adrian had been a lowly agent, who paid his bills in human lives. The IMA stood for Integrated Military Affairs, and while it still existed, it was no longer recognizable as the privately contracted group of mercenaries that it had once been.
Richardson, with his paranoia and weakness for women, had been a shit boss, but until he had branded me as a traitor, I had never had cause to complain. Most of the men and women I killed probably deserved it. Those that hadn't, well — their deaths hadn't bothered me enough to prevent me from sleeping at night. People died every day. I liked to think I just hastened the process. It wasn't as if I'd been born innocent.
No, Richardson's scouts had pulled me out of the Louisiana slums and given me the education I never had cause to believe I'd ever need, let alone possess. If they hadn't, I'd probably still be in a gang, selling drugs, fighting in the streets, and stealing from the prone and naive. A conscience was a luxury I couldn't afford. Growing up, there was only one golden rule, and it wasn't the one they tacked up in school rooms.
Them, or me.
Unfortunately for him, Richardson had hired on Adrian Callaghan as well. Callaghan's history was a little more convoluted, and since he was a liar, it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. I had heard many things about him. He almost certainly had roots in the IRA, that much I believed. He was a little young to be in the thick of it, but I wouldn't put a grassroots revival behind the shit-fuck; he loved to stir the pot.
I would not have been surprised to learn that he had killed his parents. I'd seen him torture people with little recourse. He loved causing pain. Death was only a means to an end; if there was a way for him to maim without killing, then he would do that.
Callaghan had come close to killing me once, when he had been my trainer. I'd been young, in my late teens, and Richardson had paired the two of us together for reasons that still escape me. One day, instead of beginning the lesson, he simply told me to run. And when he caught me, he slashed through my gut and walked away leaving me to crawl to our on-site hospital, clutching my innards like a penitent seeking absolution.
Given his colorful history, I couldn't believe Richardson didn't see his death coming. He sat across from it most days, listening to its Irish brogue, looking it dead in the face.
All of this was in the folder, and more. I flipped through it, keeping my face composed as the accompanying memories surfaced in my head with vivid clarity. Christina's chart was in here, from when Callaghan had beaten her so badly that the IMA had been forced to treat her to keep her from dying until they were ready for him to finish her off.
And he'd come close to doing just that.
Too close. My hands tightened around the folder, leaving divots into the cream colored surface. Too fucking close. I started to close the folder, when a highlighted chunk of text towards the end caught my eye. Prostitution leaped out at me, as did human trafficking.
This is new, I thought. And then, fuck. I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until I caught Angelica looking at me questioningly. “I wasn't expecting this,” I said.
Angelica arched her pretty brows. “Does it surprise you?” she wanted to know.
“That he got in on the skin trade like so many other corrupt businessmen? No, that doesn't surprise me.” What surprised me was his choice of venue. He was a fastidious prick who generally washed his hands of sex. I knew he'd raped people before, but rape wasn't about sex; it was about power, and causing pain.
Actually…this made a lot of sense now.
I skimmed this new printout but this was a tale even older than the tale as old as time. Bringing in young girls from the Balkans and Mainland Southeast Asia to a land where they couldn't speak the language on the pretense of job opportunities. These women came to the U.S. thinking that they would be employed as a maid or a cook, an honest living, with an honest wage they could send back to their families. Instead, they were subjected to abuse that bordered on torture, and promised more if they didn't behave. The traffickers employed the use of the middleman to keep the money out of the hands of the girls, although they did encourage girls to send for their sisters and their mothers and their friends. More girls meant more bodies, and more leeway to keep them in line.
I'd been contracted by men in the human trafficking industry before, and I'd been contracted to kill men of that same industry. As long as I got paid, I never asked where the money came from. It was a brutal trade, but no more than mine had been at the time, and since there was a ready market for sex, as well as death, the enterprise persisted.
But dealing in it firsthand? I wondered if even I would have stooped so low. There had been a time I was capable of anything — killing small children, rape, maybe even this.
I rattled the folder, shaking myself as I did. Dwelling in the past offered no solutions for the present and this was not a productive line of thought. It was time to focus on the problem at hand. Clearing my throat, I said, “How did you discover this?”
“Read — ”
Angelica slid her hand under mine and yanked out one of the pages, flipping it over so that it covered the manila envelope, and almost gave me a fucking paper cut in the process. I was irritated by her cute behavior — until I began to read.
“Maudit,” I breathed. One of the 'shipments' had been intercepted by the local authorities. The man who'd been charged with the crime was a patsy if I'd ever seen one. Overweight. Sweating. Well into his fifties. Just the kind of pervert society liked to condemn. There was no way he'd done it. “Who's this clown?”
“He was a member of the IMA.”
I noted the past tense. “Was? Is he dead?”
“No,” she said, “although they don't care much for rapists and sex traffickers very much in prison, so he might as well be, yes?”
Yes. And incarcerated in a prison where he might well be killed before the year was through, this Kevin McCarthy would be as effectively silenced as if Callaghan had placed the gun to this man's head and pulled the trigger himself.
“He was an older member,” Angelica said, reciting the facts from memory, “with seniority over you. He was recently stationed in Scotland — ” my mouth thinned at this. In the same “reeducation facility” as me? I wondered — “it seems he had not kept his displeasure with the recent changes in management quiet.”
Callaghan knew that I would see right through this smokescreen. This was his way of flipping me the bird. I didn't like that. Not one fucking bit.
Christina wouldn't, either. She popped into my head, unbidden, as she did so often these days. I could visualize her reaction as easily as if she were standing in front of me.
Schooling my expression, I asked in a bland voice, “Does anyone else in AMI know?”
Did you tell Christina?
When she smiled, it revealed small white teeth. “I left that distinct pleasure to you, of course.”
Of course.
Fils de putain.
I wasn't looking forward to this.
Christina
Three months. They could slip by in a breath. They could span an entire lifetime. Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last.
Six months had passed since my mother's death.
No, that wasn't quite right — my mother's murder. Death was a passive, natural thing; my mother had been forcibly removed from this world by a cold-blooded killer.
I was hacking into the computer of a member of the IMA. I'd forgotten his name, It wasn't important. He was low-ranked, and not particularly careful, but still, information can be waiting where you least expect it.
I stared at the scrolling cryptograms — he was that careful, at least — unseeingly. Numbers, letters, special characters: they blurred together in wavering lines, forming a road map of exhaustion. I hadn't slept in days. The coffee that sat beside me on the desk was ice cold. I had knocked it over several times, the dark spills spattering the carpet were testament to my clumsiness. They looked like dried blood. I would know.
Murder.
I closed my eyes. The inside of my eyelids rasped against my dry corneas like sand.
Mamá and I had never been close. In life, she had caused me untold pain. She was constantly criticizing my weight (I was too fat), and my interests (baseball and computers were indicative of hidden lesbian proclivities); when my father had landed on the IMA's radar screen she had thrown me to the wolves so they could escape, and when I had been threatened, she took a gamble no mother should ever make; she assumed that my captor would not have the stomach, or the motivation, to hurt me.
On that, as with so much else in life, she was mistaken.
My father told me that she was a very troubled woman, haunted by her own demons, and while this did not make her past actions any easier to accept, it did make them easier to understand. Even before the incident that changed my life, all of our lives, she had been as removed as a statue, never showing affection or offering words of praise. Other mothers hugged and coddled their daughters, sewed prom dresses, and had mother-daughter spa days. Mine could only offer criticism and condemnation.
This wellspring of grief that had spurted up in the wake of her passing was unexpected; I had never anticipated that her loss would hurt so much, but it did. I felt it every day, like a thorn in my heart, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever go away.
Along with that hurt was hate — a hate so caustic, it could sear on contact. I hadn't known I had the capacity for so much hate.
I hated the man who had my mother killed. His name was Adrian Callaghan, and he had done it to get back at me for putting a bullet in him. He was also the man who had tried to buy me like a slave; the man who had once beaten me so badly that I had nearly died from the ensuing wounds; the man who had made damn sure that Michael and I could never go on living for as long as he was still alive.
Oh, I hated him so much, I vibrated with it. When I closed my eyes, I could see his mocking smile. He was in my nightmares, and I often awoke from my dreams with his laughter ringing in my ears like a death knell.
The Lord teaches forgiveness, but some things are unforgivable.
Until I met him, I hadn't truly believed that people could be evil. I had believed that everyone had a little of both in their hearts, and that it was up to God to measure the scales. I had been mistaken: Adrian Callaghan was evil in every sense of the word.
Keys clacked. Cliff was studying the screen of the computer as it spewed out printouts of the code I had managed to crack. His eyes were as red-rimmed as mine felt, his face a mask of concentration.
Cliff had once worked for Adrian alongside a man called the Sniper. The two of them had captured me when Michael and I had tried, ineffectively, to lie low after our escape from Target Island. He was a big man, with a bronze complexion and dark hair. I knew next to nothing about him, except that the changes Adrian was imposing under his new regime frightened him enough that he had looked elsewhere for employment.
It said something that Adrian could bring even this great monolith of a man to fear.
He was aware of being watched. When his eyes started to slide towards mine, I looked away. It still felt strange being on the same side as the man who had hauled me in to Adrian. I wasn't sure I could trust him, although it looked like I might have to.
Suraya was in the other room with her young sister, Jatinder. I could hear the two of them talking softly in Hindi. They had been conversing for the last hour. I hadn't been trying to eavesdrop but in the silence that stretched, I couldn't help it.
“Dhana rahe,” she said, “Dhyana rakhana.”
I heard Jatinder say something in response.*double-check translation
I frowned. I wasn't sure I could trust Suraya, either, although Michael seemed to think she was trustworthy. Yes, she had driven the getaway car that helped us escape from Adrian's soiree, and, by proxy, helped save Michael from death, but she didn't do much for AMI now—at least, not that I could see. Mostly, she spent her time standing around and looking sullen or sequestered away with her sister. It made me think she was a spy.
What she had done for Michael couldn't carry her forever and I would have liked to see more concentrated effort on her part. Loyalty was all we had, and if we couldn't count on that, we had nothing, nothing at all.
“This coming from you?” Michael said, when I went to him with my suspicions, “if you recall, in the beginning you thwarted me each and every time I tried to save your ass.”
Anger flooded me in a hot rush. “Because you kidnapped me. You held me hostage.” He had done terrible things to me in the name of money. To me. To my family. His indifference had encased him in a shroud of ice; sometimes I still had nightmares of what he had been.
Of what he still might be.
“You're not the only one bad things happen to,” he said. “But c'est la vie. Life goes on.”
Life goes on? “Is that really what you believe? I didn't realize you were so…zen.”
Michael gave a Gallic shrug, and went back to whatever it was that he'd been doing before I came along, leaving me fuming in the process. Since she saved his life I'm sure he felt indebted to her. That gave me a strange feeling I didn't like. When you owed someone a favor, it was like they owned a part of you — forever.
The door opened. As if my thoughts had summoned him here, Michael stood in the doorway, casting a shadow that reached the monitor of the computer I was working on. I wondered if that was symbolic, then scoffed at my fancifulness. This wasn't some silly story; this was life, and life was never as simple or dramatic as fiction. Life was a study in contrasts, and a constant source of misery. What good parts there were happened so quickly that you could miss them if you blinked. I hadn't had any good parts in a while.
Michael's face was drawn. That was never a good sign. He rarely smiled, rarely showed any kind of expression at all. When he did, that almost always meant trouble.
I watched him carefully but his expression revealed nothing about his inner state, apart from the fact that he wasn't pleased. Wasn't he in a meeting with Angelica? Why had it ended early? Had they fought? Or did they discover…something?
Cliff noticed me tense and his hands stilled on the keyboard as he glanced over his shoulder. I saw his shoulders relax slightly, but not a whole lot. It seemed I wasn't the only one who was put on guard by the abrupt change in sides.
Michael's eyes flicked to Cliff and me. He arched an eyebrow. In the other room, the faint strains of Hindi had stopped. The door opened and Suraya came out, arms folded over her chest. Michael cleared his throat, shifting something under his arm. A file folder.
Uh oh.
“We have a problem,” he said, and he handed the envelope to me.
Big uh oh.
When Michael said there was a problem, that usually meant someone was trying to kill us. I stared at that manila envelope, running my trembling fingers along the stiff edges. I knew that I wasn't going to like whatever was inside.
My eyes were burning. Sweat had dripped down my forehead and gotten into my eyes. It had gotten suffocation hot under the flickering fluorescent lights. Why had he given the folder to me in front of everyone? Couldn't we discuss it in private?
Maybe it's because he trusts you.
I sneaked a look at him. Was that what it was, trust? Or was this a test?
I flipped through the folder that Michael had given me, trying to get a grasp of what I was dealing with before I was forced to acknowledge it publicly. My first thought was that it would involve blood, blood and death. I was half-right. There was plenty of blood.
It took me a moment to process the images I was looking at. I had never seen anything like them outside of movies, and that had been toned down for a viewing audience. This was uncensored reality, in all its gritty, gory glory. I swallowed wetly and shook my head, feeling ill. Those poor girls. Because they were, without a doubt, girls, and not women.
Adrian had told me in our last meeting that he had trouble getting women to come home with him. I'm afraid I've developed somewhat of a reputation, he'd said, slyly, as if he were joking about the weather, or sports.
For what? I'd asked him. Sending girls home in boxes? I hadn't been joking, but I hadn't expected that I'd be so close to the truth, either. The spaces to which these women had been confined were coffin-small. There was no room to move, to even breathe; they must have been entrenched in their own waste. My skin crawled at the thought.
I knew what that was like. Death was not the scariest thing out there; no, the denial of it could be far worse.
I studied the faces that were so painfully, heartbreakingly young beneath their murky veneer of blood and grime and sweat. Some of them wore scraps of soiled clothing. Many were naked. On many I could not tell where the dirt ended and the bruises began.
My stomach cramped in unease. I passed the folder on. I couldn't stand to look at their eyes anymore. They were the eyes of people who have glimpsed a world without hope, and I was all too familiar with that feeling. There had been a point, not long ago, where I had been forced to come to terms with what I wholly believed was my impending death. I could be killed before the week was out, even now. Many powerful men out there wanted me dead, and this world was ruled by powerful men who were all too used to getting their way. I closed my eyes briefly. Adrian had taught me that lesson all too well.
Oh, but hell, like many things, exists on earth. It's only a matter of finding the right path to get there, and believe me, Christina, I know the way. I can take you there.
He was Satan with a human face, and I wanted to put him back where he belonged.
In hell.
Michael's eyes met mine for a moment. He had incredible eyes—cat-like one moment, and then forest green the next. The color was dependent on luminescence and shadow, affected by something as small as the tilt of his head. Up close, in the light, they were even more stunning, with yellow flecks caught in the iris like beads of honey.
They were dark now, foreboding, and even though I knew that had everything to do with his facing away from the light source and nothing to do with his state of mind, he still cut an imposing figure. His jaw was tense, and I had the expression that he wanted to speak, to me, in private. But of course, he wouldn't. Not here. Not now.
What have you gotten us into this time?
My own face, never stoic no matter how hard I tried, must have revealed my despair. I saw his mouth relax slightly, the lip soften as he unclenched his teeth. I knew from experience that he was attempting to look reassuring, and instead of consoling me it had the opposite effect because if he felt he had to protect me, we really were screwed.
Suraya cursed aloud, shattering my train of thought. I twisted around to look at her along with everyone else. The folder had reached her. One of the papers had fluttered to the ground, but she didn't seem to notice. Her face was flushed, and there was a spark of animation in her eyes that I'd never seen so vividly.
“Something you'd like to share with the rest of the class?” Michael drawled.
“This man is a demon.” She smacked the folder violently with a cracking sound that made me flinch. Michael noticed that, too. I saw his eyes flick towards me again before returning to Suraya. Spittle flew from her lips as she added, “He is a scourge upon humanity. This is the fate he promised my sister if I did not cooperate with his plans.”
Me too.
I bit my lip, hard. That could have been why Michael had looked at me in that odd way, with the slight softening that wasn't quite pity. He knew what Adrian had suggested to me because I'd told him, and once his rage had dissipated he had told me that that would never happen, not as long as either of us breathed. I remember wishing that he hadn't used those exact words, as it seemed like tempting fate.
An odd thought occurred to me: was this why he'd given me the folder to open? Had he been curious about my reaction? Why?
Maybe it is a test. To see if you're strong enough.
“He has been very quiet of late.” That was Angelica. She was standing in the doorway Michael had only recently vacated. I hadn't even heard her come in. “Now we know why.”
Adrian Callaghan isn't quiet, I wanted to say. He bides his time.
When he wasn't speaking, that's when you needed to watch out, because it meant he'd decided to hurt you, hurt you badly, and was best planning on how to go about it as ruthlessly and as painfully as possible.
Michael gave her a slow, measuring look, but there was no surprise in it. They must have discussed it earlier. I wondered why I hadn't been included.
“Well?” Suraya's voice smacked of impatience. “What are you going to do about it?”
Fear uncoiled deep down in my gut. Taking the initiative meant facing him again, and I didn't want to do that because I knew that the next time I did, I might not walk away. What can we do? I wondered. We're already living on borrowed time, all of us.
I wanted somebody else to take my hand, and make the bad man go away.
I was pathetic.
And then, as Suraya's words circled through my head, mocking my lack of drive, I couldn't help but notice the structure of her words, her odd choice of pronoun. Not 'what are we going to do about it?' but, 'what are you going to do about it?'
“It will cost too much time and resources to pinpoint each shipment.” Angelica dehumanized the women, turning them into objects, like something that could be sent through FedEx. I had never borne any ill will against her, but in that moment I hated her a little for being so cool. One look at Suraya told me she felt the same exact way.
As she glanced our way, discreet diamond studs in her ears caught the light and winked. “If we do succeed in cutting them off,” she continued, purposefully, “another operation will simply sprout up elsewhere — and the girls will be killed.”
I thought of the pictures, of those frightened human faces, and wondered if I was going to be sick. I steeled myself against the nausea and tried to think of it in the abstract. This wasn't real. I was reading a novel — a badly written novel by some hack novelist who was trying to titillate her audience through the degradation of human beings.
If this was a story, I asked, how would I resolve the conflict?
“All you're succeeding in doing is going around in circles.” Suraya's face hardened. “I ask you again—what are you going to do about it?”
Still no we, I noticed. But I had an answer. My ridiculous thought experiment worked.
“Infiltration,” I said, and the moment I spoke, I saw Michael's head whip towards me. I faltered briefly. “Maybe — maybe we can't do anything about it from the outside, but if one of us could figure out a way in, we could find out more details — the hows and whys and wheres — and maybe do more than shut down a single, tiny branch.”
Michael nodded, so imperceptibly that I'm not sure anyone else noticed. I did, and my heart fluttered a little under the sheer weight of his attention. “How?” he asked.
The way he looked at me, it was as if we were the only two people in the room. He is testing me. There was only one possible solution, though. I wet my lips. “Go undercover.”
The slight hitch in my voice made Suraya narrow her eyes. “You mean…prostitution?”
“Not exactly.” Michael leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. “If we were going to do this, it would have to look authentic. One of us would have to sell another.” His eyes fell into shadow. “One of us would have to be trafficked to Adrian Callaghan's men.”
