“Oh, don’t worry about that. I learned my lesson with Matt, you won’t have to touch her.” Henry waved a hand. “I’m going to kill her, send a picture of her body to the Tácunan brat, and sell the body.” He sighed. “I’m sure I could sell her for more alive, but Fabricio has been insistent that she has to be dead, and I can’t risk offending his father. So she’ll be dead soon enough.”
Kovit’s voice was flat and cold. “I will never work for you if you harm Nita. Or sell her.”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’ve grown a conscience or something? You’re not going on some angsty teen emo self-hate spiral, are you?”
“Of course not.” Kovit snorted with such derisiveness that Henry relaxed. Then Kovit smiled, wide and creepy, promising a darkness only he and Henry knew. “But I won’t bend on this. Hurt Nita, and I’ll never work for you.”
Henry’s smile fell. “Kovit—”
“No.” His eyes were fierce, and Nita felt the fluttering in her chest grow stronger until she thought butterflies might choke her.
It took a special kind of brave to say that, with the threat of INHUP hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. He was always doing this. Putting friends first. Henry or Nita, Matt or his internet friends. Nita always put herself first, her quest for her own safety over everything. Over her relationship with Kovit, over the lives of people in her way.
“Kovit, Kovit.” Henry rose from the bed. “Please, enough with all these emotions. I know you get attached to people easily, but this has gotten out of hand. I admit, I made a mistake with Matt. Six years of friendship can’t be wiped out so easily. But this? You can’t have known her for more than a month! If that!”
“She’s my friend.” Kovit’s voice was calm, composed.
Henry threw his arms into the air. “Why couldn’t you just be satisfied with your internet ones?”
Kovit’s eyes narrowed. Suspicion confirmed. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew. You really think I was going to let you online without supervision?”
“So what, you spent hours scrolling through a bunch of tweens talking about a video game?” Kovit frowned. “I find that hard to believe.”
Henry brushed him aside. “Of course not. I don’t have time for that. The head of the Family and I found a much better solution.”
And his eyes turned to Gold.
Gold stiffened, and her fingers tightened on her gun. She worried at the piercing in her lip.
Kovit turned to her, uncomprehending. “Gold? What does Gold have to do with this?”
Henry laughed. His shoulders were back, posture radiating arrogance. “You still haven’t figured it out?”
Kovit was frowning, but Nita’s mind had already skipped several steps ahead.
“You’re one of the people in the chat group.” Nita’s voice was soft.
Kovit’s eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. He turned to Gold with a soft, horribly vulnerable expression.
“I didn’t know.” Gold couldn’t meet his eyes. “I didn’t know it was you. I was just told to keep an eye on one of the younger members of the Family.” She shuddered, and when her eyes came up, they were full of rage. “I never knew I was supposed to be keeping an eye on a zannie.” She practically spat the word.
“You . . .” Kovit’s voice was soft and hurt. “When I logged back in, you turned me in?”
“That she did!” Henry laughed. “And my, was I surprised to hear about it. It took me days to even believe it.”
When Kovit and Nita had met up days ago, it had already been far too late. Henry already knew. Kovit was already doomed. He’d unwittingly dug his own grave.
Kovit closed his eyes, and she could see him coming to the same conclusion.
He took a deep breath and turned to Gold. “Who are you? In the chatroom, who are you?”
“May.” Her gun shook in her hand. “I’m May.”
Hadn’t Kovit said he was closest to May?
Kovit was shaking all over. “And it was all lies? Everything?”
“Are you kidding me?” Gold’s face twisted in a snarl. “You’re asking me that? You pretended to be human, you pretended you were a real person with real feelings and emotions!” Her voice caught, choked. “I thought you were my friend.”
Kovit’s voice was sad. “We were friends.”
“Don’t lie to me!” Gold snarled, but it looked like she was close to tears. “Zannies don’t have friends. You’re monsters, all of you. You can’t feel anything except joy at hurting others.”
Kovit jerked his head away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Gold for one more moment.
Nita closed her eyes, heart breaking for Kovit. She’d seen how much his friends meant to him. To be betrayed that way, to not even be thought of as a real person, was the worst kind of crime.
“Oh, Kovit, don’t be so hard on her.” Henry smiled. “You know she thought Matt had risen from the dead when she first saw you back online. She’d thought it was Matt all this time.”
Kovit stared at Henry, face slowly breaking apart, one muscle at a time. “Matt is dead?”
Gold’s face crumpled, and Henry snorted. “We caught Matt. A week or so after you were sent away. In Toronto, actually! He’d tried to cross the border, he’d enlisted some local to try and get him new papers.”
Nita’s mind flitted back to the conversation Adair and Gold had in the shop, and more and more pieces began to slide together. That was how Gold and Adair had met—trying to smuggle Matt out. And failing. Adair had known Matt was dead from the start. He just had kept that information from Kovit. Probably waiting for the right price.
Nita replayed more of the conversation with her new knowledge and wondered if he’d also known about Gold and Kovit and the chatroom. What other secrets had he kept to himself?
“Of course,” Henry continued, “whoever tried to get him his new identity hadn’t realized we’d tagged him with a tracker.”
“No.” Kovit was shaking all over. “No. What did you do to Matt?”
Henry smiled softly. “Well, let’s just say I put your old tools to good use.”
Nita leaned away from the scene, horrified. There was something obscene about a human talking about torture in such a casual way. She hadn’t realized she’d been desensitized to Kovit, but she had. He ate the pain. He needed the pain. He didn’t need to get the pain the way he did, but in a twisted way, she could understand him.
This was different. Henry’s clear obsession with torture was wrong on so many levels.
Kovit fell to his knees on the ground and clutched at the ugly green rug. “No. No, please, you didn’t . . .”
“He’s quite dead now, not to worry.” Henry smiled, smooth and clean and predatory as he leaned in to the wounded and battered Kovit for the killing blow. “And I thought, as punishment for hiding from the family and hiding the lovely Nita here from us, I could do the same things to one of your little internet friends.”
Kovit’s head snapped up and Gold gasped.
Henry waved dismissively at Gold. “Obviously not you.”