Nita rose too. Hesitantly, she said, “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
Diana nodded. “Anytime.” She smiled, cleared her throat, then looked away. “I should go back downstairs and keep trying to crack that encryption. Maybe it’ll put Adair in a better mood.”
Nita nodded. “Okay.”
Diana gave her a tentative smile. “If you ever want to talk . . . I’m here.”
“Thanks,” Nita said, and didn’t mention that she’d never be taking Diana up on that chat. Nita valued her secrets far too much to give them away so freely.
Diana nodded once and slipped out the door and down the stairs.
Nita sat back on the bed, and looked down at her phone, still glowing and open to the police wanted poster featuring her face.
She was going to have to do something about that.
Twenty-Four
NITA WAS FINALLY ALONE, and she sank down on the bed for a moment, just to process. She closed her eyes, but the lights from the ceiling made the back of her eyelids pink. She opened them after a moment and pulled out her phone. She needed to know more about the wanted poster on her.
Nita scrolled through the information, but instead of finding more details about herself, she found three stories about girls who’d been murdered or kidnapped today.
They all looked like her.
Her stomach bubbled with nausea, and her hands shook as she tabbed through the stories. Everyone had a doppelgänger, or more than one. In a city as big and diverse as Toronto, there was bound to be a twin or two of Nita’s.
There were. And they were disappearing.
According to the story, the wave of disappearances had started yesterday, shortly after Nita had come to Toronto. One girl was getting off the streetcar when her friends saw a dark sedan pull up and yank her in. One was a college girl who vanished from the bathroom of a coffee shop. And the last was only fourteen, stolen on her way to school.
The last two were taken after Nita had made her statement to the black market.
The hunters hadn’t been discouraged at all. Adair was right.
They might not be able to track her by phone, but they had something better.
The internet.
The whole city was looking for Nita and Gold, tweeting, talking, texting. And the hunters were jumping onto the police search to mount their own.
She hadn’t fixed anything. She’d made everything ten times worse.
She looked down at the pictures of the missing girls, wondering if they’d already been chopped up and dissected for the market, sold as pieces of Nita.
She should have expected this. Any high-end product on the market was bound to attract lower-quality forgeries.
But it still made her shake, to imagine these random girls, alive one day, dead the next because of a conflict in a world they didn’t understand. She could almost hear their screams as the scalpel sank into their flesh, as their bodies were torn apart and put into glass jars.
Nita shivered at the thought of a scalpel, body tingling with a hunger, the cool metal in her hand as she pressed down on flesh. How long had it been since she dissected something?
She choked on her own disgust. Why did this happen every time? Why couldn’t she think of bad things without wanting to do them herself?
She covered her face in her hands. She was so fucked up.
She wanted to dissect someone. She wanted to carve them up, to take them apart piece by piece and see how they worked. She didn’t care who, she just wanted a body to fulfill her craving.
It would be even better if she could dissect something new. Something no one else had ever dissected before.
Like a kelpie.
Nita stilled. Then licked her lips. If Adair tried to hurt her, if he cut his losses and tried to sell her to the black market . . . Well, if there was a body, it would be a shame to waste it.
Her mouth curled up in a vicious smile.
Below, there was a small crash, and Diana’s voice trickled up. “Damn chair! I know he’s doing it on purpose.”
Nita blinked, and the image of dissecting Adair vanished. Diana would never forgive her—not that Nita really cared what Diana wanted or thought. But it made him more human, and it was less easy to think about taking him apart knowing there was someone who counted on him.
Nita sighed. She didn’t have time for these musings. She needed to get that wanted-for-questioning ad down.
She pulled the card from Quispe out of her pocket. Her phone number was printed on the back. Nita hesitated, looking down at her phone. She despised calling people on the phone. She didn’t like talking and interacting in general, but she especially hated it on the phone. She much preferred texting. But this wasn’t the kind of situation where she really wanted to wait around for Quispe to check her email.
So Nita punched in the numbers and waited.
The phone rang twice before Quispe picked up. “This is Special Agent Ximena Quispe.”
Nita swallowed, and cleared her throat. “Hi, Agent Quispe, it’s Nita.”
“Nita!” Her voice rose slightly. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“You too,” Nita lied. “Um, are you still in Toronto?”
“No, I’m in New York at a conference right now.”
“Oh.” Then she hadn’t seen the news. “Well, um, there was an issue here. A crazy black market hunter tried to kill me, and it was filmed, and now the police have my picture on a wanted-for-questioning poster.”
Quispe was silent for a moment before she asked, “Are you okay?”
Nita blinked, and startled herself when she touched her face. Tears trickled from her eyes, and she wiped them away. It was such a simple thing to ask, but no one else ever asked. Her mother hadn’t asked when she’d gotten out of the market. Diana hadn’t asked.
Only Kovit had cared enough to ask.
And now Quispe.
Nita had tried so hard to be tough, to be confident, that she hadn’t realized just how uncertain, how scared, how shaken she was by everything.
She’d been so sure the answer was killing the black market dealers. It had worked in Peru, it would work here too, right?
But everything had just gotten more and more messy, and nothing was going the way that it should. Her reputation hadn’t been built with their deaths, the police were on her tail, Adair was going to kick them out or kill them, and Kovit’s Family was in town, which could ruin everything if they found out he was here.
She choked back the tears and said, “No. I’m not okay.”
Quispe’s voice was firm. “I’m coming back to Toronto. We’ll go to the police together and explain the situation. I’ll try and get the wanted pictures taken down for now, but I don’t know how much influence I can have on them. They’ll need to speak with you.”
Nita shook her head, then realized Quispe couldn’t see it. “No. I’m not going in.”
“Nita—”
“No. I’m not going to the police.” Nita hesitated, the millions of reasons it was a bad idea running through her head, before settling on one Quispe would understand. “I’ve seen too much news. I’m scared of what they’d do to me.”
Quispe understood. “You’re in Canada, not the States. Canadians have a different attitude toward Latin America. There’s fewer issues.”
Nita had noticed that she hadn’t received many strange looks on the street. Her memories of the States were fuzzy, but she remembered people noticing her distinctly Chilean features. They rarely said anything, but she could see the judgment in their eyes as they made assumptions about her. No one here except Bronte had given her a second glance. Yet. Maybe because Toronto was a lot more diverse than her Chicago suburb.