“I raped her. So many times. She was my best victim.” I think of her in the church. Before we drove away in the SUV. Before she decided to be a hero and shoot the colonel for me. Before that, I fucked her, hard and relentless, and she loved it. She was as pink and breathless as a doll when it was over. I focus on the feeling of my fingers between her legs. “It was an international crime. I raped her in several countries and forced her to cross the borders against her will. I forced her to do everything.”
I want to lose myself in thinking of her. It’s too early for that. Saying a confession out loud is only the beginning of the act.
I clear my throat and it brings up fresh blood. Not the most positive sign, but I should have enough time left to do what I have to do to save her. “Write it up.”
Blue Shirt narrows his eyes and glances over to his buddies. He looks like he wants to beat more confessions out of me. A goddamn hammer instead of a scalpel, this guy.
The government is getting sloppy, but it doesn’t really matter. Not when you have billions of dollars in a defense budget and enough nukes to destroy the world ten times over.
Even sloppy wins.
“Write it up and I’ll sign it.” I taste more blood along with the words. It tastes like the truth. I’d sign anything if it means Holly lives. I’d sign anything to let her go free.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Holly
The water has been running in the sink for so long that I’ve lost track of the time.
My kitchen sink. Running. The sound snaps me out of whatever reverie I’ve been in. At some point, I came over here to do something involving the sink. I turned on the water. Something caught my attention out the narrow kitchen window. It has a partial view of the alley next to the building, and a partial view of the street.
I don’t know what I was looking at anymore.
Was it a white van that I saw or a postal truck? I have a hazy memory of both things. But, given the evidence of the sink, I’m not sure my memory is reliable at all.
I reach to turn off the water and find a mug in my hand. Right. That’s why I came here. To pour out tea gone cold and clean the mug and put it in the rack to dry. My plan was thwarted by my still-constant search for Elijah.
He’s gone.
There’s no trace of him in my life. It’s as if he never existed. As if I never hopped on a plane to France to find my sister. As if I never found him in the basement prison of a medieval church. All of it, erased.
Even the marks on my ass that perfectly matched his fingerprints have faded into nothing. I was sure they were there. I looked at them every day in the shower until they were gone.
I put coffee in the machine by the sink and set it to run. Now I’m the robot. I’m the one going through the ordinary movements of an ordinary life. It makes my skin crawl.
Everything about this life is fake, a facade, a charade. Or worse, everything that happened before was a hazard of imagination.
The part about being imprisoned by the government seems real enough. It ended with a knock on the door of the concrete room. The man who had been interrogating me walked out without a backward glance. Another man came in to unchain me from the table. He walked me to the back of the building, where a police car waited, and a cop who didn’t speak to me drove me back to my apartment.
No sorry about the part where we invaded a church and stole Elijah North from you. No apologies for chaining you to a table. It’s protocol. You understand.
Nothing.
Nothing except the days I spent afterward, sobbing into my pillow and shouting into my phone. I was probably on a watch list before but I’m definitely on one now. I’m the crazed woman who sometimes puts on a serious voice as she inquires again and again if there is any way to contact Elijah North. If there are any personnel records for Elijah North. If there is any possible clue that he once existed. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried lying. I’ve tried impersonating a reporter. I’ve tried letting my voice go thick and pretending to be his widow.
I tried for days, then weeks, then months.
The coffee brews and I stare out the window, actively searching for a white van now. Even if he did show up here, he wouldn’t show up in a white van, but I can’t stop looking. They’re the symbol of my former life, aren’t they? A white van brought me to him in the first place.
Search. Wonder. Pour the too-hot coffee into my clean mug. Wonder some more.
Is he dead?
If he’s not dead, where is he?
There are so many days where it seems like I created him wholesale in my mind. It’s not unheard of for a writer to feel like their characters are real people. This is different.
Elijah wasn’t a character. Not one of mine, anyway. Which does call into question my general level of sanity.
A knock on the door pulls me away from the kitchen. I’m a ghost with hot coffee making my way through the apartment. There are quite a few takeout boxes on various surfaces.
I don’t care.
I open the door without looking through the peephole. The worst that can happen is that I get kidnapped again, and what are the odds of that?
Not zero, certainly, but probably not very high at this point.
“Hi.” My sister doesn’t wait for me to answer before she pushes past me, her arms full of two paper grocery bags. “Did you eat today?”
“Yes,” I say automatically, closing the door behind her. This might not be strictly true, but I can’t remember. All I remember is standing in front of the sink. Earlier, I was writing. Or at least I was sitting on my couch, hand poised above a notepad.
The fridge opens and closes in the kitchen, followed by several cupboards. I wander into the living room and look down at the street. No white vans there, either. Paper bags crinkle when London folds them up. In the window I see her reflection emerge from the kitchen carrying something black. A trash bag. She tips several of the takeout containers into it and straightens an abandoned stack of mail on my coffee table.
I swallow hard around a thickness in my throat. “Hey.”
London flicks her eyes up to mine and continues tidying my apartment. “Hey.”
“You’re feeding me. And cleaning my apartment. It’s weird.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, it is weird, Holly. It’s weird when you’re acting like a dead person in your own apartment. It’s weird when I’m the responsible one between us.”
“Dead people don’t leave takeout containers everywhere.”
London gestures at me with a half-empty carton of Chinese food. “I never know what’s going on with you. You don’t even come out. It’s like you’ve disappeared.”
I snort. “I’m right here. The question is, what are you doing here?”
“I got worried when you didn’t answer my calls.”
Turnabout is fair play, sure. I’m usually the one cleaning up after London. Following her to Paris. Getting her unstuck from shady diamond deals. So on, so forth. But I don’t buy that she’s worry-stricken enough to change her entire personality. Plus, I only missed three calls.
“What’s going on with you?”
“You tell me first.” She sticks out her tongue and goes out into the hall to put the garbage in the chute. “Anyway,” she says, breezing back in. “You’re the one who was detained by the government for questioning in an assassination.”