He swallowed. “Like how they sold your location online.”
Nita’s mind raced. “I thought that was you.”
Fabricio frowned, confused. “Why would I sell your phone GPS and hire Henry? They’d just get in each other’s way. I only hired Henry. Besides”—he shrugged—“how would I have even got access to your phone to bug it, anyway?”
He couldn’t have. INHUP had sold her location online. How had Nita not seen it before? She’d been so focused on Fabricio, so laser set on him, that she’d ignored the fact that INHUP had always been the only one who could have planted the bug.
She gritted her teeth and thought of Quispe starting what Nita had assumed would be a fruitless hunt. How foolish she’d been—even Quispe had realized it had to be her own organization.
Nita had more enemies to hunt down and eliminate.
She let out a breath. Later. She’d deal with INHUP later.
“So, Fabricio.” She raised an eyebrow. “If INHUP is so corrupt, why did you even go there in the first place?”
“I just needed a doctor from INHUP and a place to hide out while I had my own fake documents made.” His eyes beseeched her. “I knew I couldn’t use any fake documents they gave me—too easily compromised. I needed money to escape, and selling you was the only thing I could think of for fast cash.” He swallowed. “I really thought your mother would kill the dealers. If it makes any difference. I never thought they’d actually succeed.”
Nita’s face was hard as stone. “If my mother had been there, it might’ve made a difference. But she wasn’t.”
Fabricio wept. “I’m sorry.”
“Then tell me what you’re running from.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Nita thought about Diana, and how she couldn’t get her vengeance because she kept thinking about what was going on in the head of the boy who killed her family.
She thought about Adair and how he refused to get revenge because it caused more problems. About how Nita had let him go, had chosen to let him survive betraying her.
She thought about how poisoning Fabricio out of vengeance had started a chain reaction that had led to more chaos and death than she’d ever wanted.
And she thought about how she’d decided that her one rule would be not to hurt people simply for the pleasure of it.
“Kovit?”
He looked up at her over Fabricio’s head, his eyes a question. “Yes?”
Nita met Fabricio’s huge blue-gray eyes, the tears falling from his cheeks and redampening the drying blood on his face, coloring his tears pink.
Nita pocketed her gun and handed Kovit her scalpel.
“Make him scream,” she hissed.
Then she turned and left the room.
Fifty-One
NITA CLOSED THE DOOR behind her, just in time to hear the opening chords of Fabricio’s screams before they cut off.
She leaned her back against the door and breathed out. She thought about what was happening on the other side of the doorway. She didn’t weep. She didn’t shake. She didn’t feel much of anything, except a slow, steady calm. People said vengeance was something you’d regret, that it would make you feel ugly inside, that the guilt would eat you up.
But Nita had felt far worse when Kovit was torturing that INHUP man she didn’t know. Now she just felt . . . victorious.
She didn’t care why Fabricio had betrayed her. She didn’t care about whatever sob story he came up with. He’d sold her out so he could survive, and she wasn’t going to forgive and forget.
She would still use him, though.
She walked away and marveled that she was the exact opposite of Kovit in many ways. He couldn’t hurt people he knew—only people he didn’t. She struggled hurting strangers, but could easily consign her enemies to eternal pain.
She wondered which one of them was more fucked up.
She left Kovit and Fabricio behind and went back into the main reception room, then across to the other recording studio. She opened the door.
The room was filled with hard suitcases, and two cots had been set up, blankets mussed. Gold sprawled on one of them, staring at the ceiling. She looked up when Nita entered.
“Hey,” she whispered.
“Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?” Nita asked.
Gold snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah. This is me sleeping.”
“Different definition of it than I have.”
She shrugged. “Even if I did want to sleep, it’s not like I could. Kovit took my phone, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to sleep without an hour of scrolling aimlessly through social media first.”
Nita snort-laughed. “I guess you’ll have to figure that out.”
Because there was no way she was getting that phone back. Gold was too much of a wildcard. Kovit had been right to take her phone. Better to make sure she couldn’t call INHUP or anyone else in the Family.
Though what they were going to do with Gold after this, Nita had no idea. And she was far too tired to think about it right now.
Nita sighed to herself and looked around at the room, full of half-open suitcases and piles of dirty laundry. “All of this is—”
“Our stuff. Mine and Daniel’s.” There was a slight pause as both of them remembered Nita cracking open his skull. Though Gold didn’t know about the dissection that came after. “Henry had a private room he rented with a bed next door, but Daniel and I had to sleep here.”
Nita frowned. “So Henry’s stuff isn’t here.”
“No.” Gold sat up with effort. “What are you looking for?”
“His laptop. I want to find out where all that blackmail against Kovit is and destroy it.”
Gold frowned. “Henry has everything backed up in the cloud. You’ll need to get all his stuff there too.”
Nita rubbed her temples. “I suppose no one knows his password?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s not like he can get to it anymore.” She crossed her arms. “So I suppose we can just leave it there to gather dust.”
“The internet doesn’t gather dust.”
“You know what I mean.”
Gold shrugged, then winced. She rubbed her shoulder. “You might be able to access some of it from his phone?”
Nita pulled out the phone. It had a four digit passcode lock, but it was obvious from repeated screen smudging which numbers went in. Nita tried several combinations until she found the one that unlocked the phone.
She changed the passcode to something easy for her to remember, in case she needed to open the phone again. She opened his cloud account and scrolled through the files until she found one labeled Kovit.
It was absolutely full of videos.
Nita shivered, too scared to click on any of them. She knew enough.
She looked up at the permissions, to see if she could delete the whole whack of them, and froze.
In the permissions was another person’s name.
Nita swore. Then calmed herself. So there was someone else with the files. Okay. Fine. One person wasn’t the end of the world. She could find a way to delete their files.
“Gold, who is Nathan Rand?”
“The Family lawyer.” Gold frowned. “Why?”