Nita raised her other eyebrow. “Are you interested in telling me what happened there?”
Kovit sighed. “We were supposed to be up here on a business thing. My . . . services were being loaned out to another group.”
Nita raised an eyebrow. “Just another day at the office?”
“Welcome to my childhood. Matt came because he was”—Kovit’s smile was tight—“good at dramatics.”
Kovit looked away, and Nita remembered Adair’s comment about bodies and blood.
“And what went wrong?” she asked.
“Matt got a little . . .” Kovit made a face. “Into things. He killed an important person in the Family. He said it was an accident.”
Nita kept her expression neutral. “And do you believe that?”
“No.”
Nita raised an eyebrow.
“The man was an evil shit.” Kovit elaborated. “He was the nephew of the head of the Family, and when you’re related to the head of the Family, there’s nothing you can’t do. When I was eleven, he asked me to torture a girl who called him ugly.”
Nita was tempted to ask if Kovit had done it, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
Kovit was lost in memory. “The whole Family—they’re all really fucked up. The head of the Family’s daughter has a grudge against unnaturals, thinks they’re all monsters. Which, given the type of unnaturals the Family hires, isn’t too unbelievable. She once tricked a vampire we hired for an assassination into the sunlight and then lit her cigarette on his body as he burned alive. And the head got famous for murdering families of police officers investigating him.” Kovit looked away. “Mostly children. He always went for the most vulnerable.”
“Sounds like a great group of people.” Nita snorted. “So, you think Matt killed this guy on purpose?”
“Probably. This wasn’t the first time they’d worked together, and there was no love lost between them.” Kovit shrugged. “Anyway, this guy died. So we called Adair and asked him to make it look like the man disappeared, ran off with some money and left us hanging.”
“It seems it worked.”
“Yeah. Adair’s good at what he does. He somehow managed to even fudge security camera footage at the airport to make it look like this guy got on a plane to the Caribbean.”
“Impressive.” Nita considered. “Did you guys get in trouble?”
“For not ‘stopping’ him from running away?” Kovit shook his head. “No. One good thing about the Family is that they don’t have a tendency to blame you for other people’s actions. Not like some of the other criminal organizations I know of.” A bitter smile crossed Kovit’s face. “I was too valuable to punish, anyway, and it would’ve been pointless to punish Matt. He got away scot-free.”
“That time.”
Kovit’s mouth thinned. “Yeah.”
There was a crisp finality to the word, and Nita decided not to press for more details on the incident that had led to Matt’s punishment. She didn’t think Kovit was ready to answer yet.
“Why didn’t you leave?” she asked instead. “You’d killed your supervisor. You were paying Adair, he probably could have faked your deaths. You could have started a new life.”
“I considered it,” Kovit whispered. He lay back and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes far distant. “I wasn’t really happy. But it was a comfortable sort of unhappy.”
“Comfortable?”
“Yeah. I knew how to act and what to do and who to be to stay alive and be myself. I had my online friends when it became too much. And I had Matt for the day-to-day. They fed me. I never had to worry about being arrested for my . . . dietary requirements.”
Nita shivered.
He ran both hands up his face and pushed his hair from his forehead. “And I just didn’t know what I’d do outside of it. I didn’t want to join another criminal organization—that was just exchanging one life for more of the same, except without all the good parts. And I couldn’t fathom what else I would do.”
Nita blinked. “You could have gone to university?”
“And paid with what money? To study what?” He shook his head. “I don’t even have a proper education.” He shrugged. “And even if I did, what’s the point? I’ll just end up outed as a zannie at some point and killed. Any job I get, if there’s people, there’s pain, and someone will connect the dots eventually.”
“Not necessarily,” she protested, but it sounded false even to her own ears. His words rattled around in her head, both fatalistic and undeniably true. What was the point of planning a future if any path you chose ended with you murdered?
It was the same thing Nita struggled with now—she couldn’t pursue her own dreams without risking kidnapping and murder. For Kovit, he’d have to literally change INHUP’s laws.
They both walked along a high wire, and any false step could send them plummeting to their deaths.
He closed his eyes. “I think, more than anything, I was just young. And I didn’t want to deal with the real world. It was simpler to stay where I was. Easy.”
“You have to deal with that now, though,” Nita whispered.
“I know.” His hands fell to his sides, and he stared at the ceiling. “But I feel like nothing’s changed. I still don’t know who I am when I’m not part of the Family.” He hesitated. “And I don’t know what kind of person I want to be.”
She opened her mouth. She wanted to say something profound, something that was wise, that would make him feel better, that would help him discover himself.
But no words came.
So she just lay down beside him, curling close to his body, and rested her head on his chest. He was warm, and her body tingled softly against the heat. His arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her close, and the rise and fall of his chest was slightly erratic. She placed her hand over his heart to still it.
Slowly, his breathing evened out. Nita let her eyes drift closed, and eventually, they fell asleep.
Fifteen
THE NEXT MORNING, Nita woke up with bleary eyes and a soft moan. She pressed her hands over her eyes as shattered pieces of sunlight broke into the room and scattered across the floor like a spreading disease.
The sound of the shower water drumming against the tiles echoed even through the closed bathroom door, and Nita rolled over sleepily. She reached for her phone before remembering it was compromised and she couldn’t use it.
She bit her lip. She really wanted to take Kovit’s phone and download a browser that could connect her to the darknet. She needed to know what kind of chatter was happening.
The internet was not anonymous. Oh, sure, for the average person it was. But to the government, it most assuredly wasn’t. Nor to hackers. Or internet providers. There were a lot of people who had the capability to know what you were doing.
That was how the dark web was formed. Initially, Nita had heard it was designed for journalists to communicate with sources without being traced. She’d even heard that it was designed by the FBI for anonymity. But it wasn’t long before pedophiles, black market dealers, and everyone else who didn’t want the police looking too closely had joined in the fun.