“Seth? What's... oh my God!”
The killer launched himself with a menacing shout. Seth spun back sideways alongside him, seized his knife arm at the wrist. Wrenched it up, twisted it back, whipped it down. There was a loud snap. The guy let out a gurgling, agonized grunt. The knife dropped.
There was a small cinderblock structure adjoining the cabin, and Seth opted for the simple and handy expedient of wrenching up the guy's broken arm until he shrieked and bent over, and then slamming him into the cement blocks headfirst He hauled him back and gave him another one for good measure before he flung the guy down to the ground like the sack of shit that he was. He stared down at the twitching form, chest heaving, and started to shake with retroactive terror. Wow. That had been way too fucking close.
Raine darted towards him, her bare feet flashing over the muddy ground. “Seth, are you all right?”
His breathing was labored. He was pressing his hand against his side, and it was warm and sticky. He yanked up the sweater, glanced at it. No big deal. His sweater and jeans were slashed, and the cut was long and messy, but it looked relatively shallow.
He pushed Raine's hands away, blocking out her anxious questions. He couldn't even hear her, with the unthinkable thoughts pounding at the door of his mind. He would have welcomed another assassin. A whole pack of them, so they could keep him too busy to mink, to reason. To use his worthless brain for the first time in weeks and ask himself how the rack this guy had found them, with all the tricks he had pulled. All the lengths he had gone to. And right after he had confessed every goddamn secret he had been keeping to his archenemy's only heir.
He hooked his foot beneath the guy's carcass and flopped him onto his back. He leaned over with a hiss of pain and yanked the ski mask off. The top of the guy's head was a bloody mess, but his face was recognizable. Short dark hair, mid-thirties. Average, unnoticeable. Close-set, empty brown eyes, staring up. He put his finger to the guy's carotid artery. Nothing. Just as well, though it would have been interesting to question him. Not the Templeton Street guy. This one had been lighter, quicker. Far more deadly.
He straightened, trying not to wince at the sting in his side. He pulled Raine closer and made her look. “You know this guy?” he demanded.
She shook her head, her hands clamped over her mouth.
“How did he find us?” he asked.
She stared down at the cadaver, her eyes wide and blank. He slapped her hands down from her mouth, grabbed her shoulders and gave her a shake. “Answer me, Raine!”
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. She gasped in enough breath to finally voice the words, on one stuttering exhalation.
“D—d—don't... know!” She began to shake violently.
There would be no questioning her until she calmed down.
He retrieved his gun from the bushes and stuck it back into his pants. Raine was standing right where he'd left her, staring down at the hit man, oblivious to the rain beating down on her head and shoulders. She looked lost The corpse’s face was beaded with rain.
He ducked into the cabin to grab his gear, and took her by the arm. “Come on,” he said, pulling her down the path. Raine stumbled beside him like a zombie, her bare feet covered with mud.
He scanned the parking lot and counted the same number and make of cars as there had been when they arrived, with the addition of one black late model Saab sedan, the engine still warm. The bluish light of the TV still flickered from the window of the reception cabin. No faces at the window, no shots out of the dark. No sound, just the rustle of the rain. He unlocked the car, shoved Raine into it and pulled out onto the road, driving as fast as he dared.
His cyborg side was back, cold and effective. He could kill a man and leave the body lying in the mud, no problem. He could drag a shivering, weeping, half-naked woman barefoot over rocks and gravel without a qualm. The bright, shining sensation that had invaded his mind and soul, thanks to Raine, could now be observed from all sides with chilly detachment, like the bizarre, dangerous phenomenon that it was.
A silent half-hour later Rained teeth had stopped chattering. He decided that he had waited long enough.
“That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?” he asked.
“What?” Her voice was soft. Confused. All innocence.
“Me, surviving. Inconvenient, isn't it? Throws off the whole plan.”
“Seth, what are you talking about?”
He had to hand it to her. She was believable down to the last detail.
“Come on, Raine. There's nothing left to be gained by holding back. Tell me how your buddy tracked us down.”
“You can't think that I—” She stopped, shook her head. Tears glittered on her face, worthy of a highly trained actress.
“I'm clean. You're clean. The car's clean. We haven't used any credit cards. We're in the middle of nowhere, signed in with a fake ID. Sure, they would have found us eventually, but how did they find us so soon? Can you explain that to me, sweetheart?”
She shook her head. “Don't do this, Seth.”
“Take a shower, Seth,” he mocked, in a sing-song voice. “It'll loosen up your back. I'll just call out for some dinner. Don't you worry about a thing.”
“I just ordered cheeseburgers, fries and a soda from the diner,” she whispered.
He pondered that. “I should've thought it through,” he said. “You're Victor's long-lost darling, right? They tell me the guy's worth a hundred and fifty million or so. I can almost understand it, even if he did whack your daddy. Let's just let bygones by bygones, shall we? What's a little murder? Happens in the best of families.”
“Stop it!” she protested. “You saw what happened at my house! That was real, Seth!”
“Yeah, that does confuse things,” he admitted. “But a woman like you might have all kinds of enemies. Particularly if you make a habit of treating your lovers the way you treat me.”
She had the tears under control now, assuming they were ever real to begin with. “I never lied to you, Seth,” she said, in a stiff, dignified little voice. “Where are we going?” “Someplace where you can't cause any more damage.”
She flinched. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”
He allowed part of his mind to assess the possibility that she was telling him the truth. He shied away from the thought.
He wanted it to be the truth too badly. It was his weak spot, his Achilles’ heel. He had to overcompensate for it, even if it killed him.
The pattern taking shape, the one in which Raine sold him out and set him up to die, made perfect sense in the world where Jesse had been tortured and killed. It lined up just fine with a world where a mother could deliberately swallow so many pills that she just didn't wake up the next morning. That was the real world, where any horrible thing could happen. There were no rules at all. No limits to how horrible things could get.
He pressed his hand against his side, lightheaded. His sweater was getting soggy, and the slash throbbed and burned.
Raine saw the blood on his hand. “You're hurt!”
“No big deal. We're almost there.”
“Why didn't you tell me? Stop the car, so I can—”
“One more word, and I put you in the trunk.”
She stared with burning eyes at the rain pounding against the windshield. Heat poured from the vent, but it was fake heat, it couldn't touch her. She was lost on a glacier. She would never warm up. Pursued by unknown assassins, and the man she loved was convinced that she had set him up to die. Things couldn't get worse than this.
No, not true. If the man at the motel with the caved-in head had succeeded in killing Seth, that would have been worse. Infinitely worse. That would have been the end of the world.
And he'd come so close. She'd seen the blade flash down but she hadn't seen Seth's response, just a dark blur, a crunch, a thud, and that was that. Not like fight movies, where the eye followed every move as if it were a beautiful dance. There had been nothing beautiful about what she'd seen tonight. Just a brusque, lethal efficiency of movement.
