Slow Agony (28 page)

Eventually, the water went cold.

I turned off the shower.

“It was fun,” I said, bent down, my hand still on the knob to control the water pressure. I’d participated in mutilating and torturing a man. I’d carved my name into his skin. I’d cut off pieces of his body. And it had been fun.

Griffin pulled the shower curtain aside. “Now you know what it’s like.”

I straightened. “What it’s like?”

He stepped out of the shower. “Turning off.”

Later, after raiding the stocked kitchen in Naomi’s house, we were lying on a bed in one of the bedrooms with the curtains drawn against the sunlight. I was too tired to breathe or move, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept shifting in bed, trying to get comfortable. Nothing worked.

Griffin’s voice, quiet and rumbling. “He deserved it, doll. He was a monster.”

I rolled onto my back. “I know.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry I ever got you into this.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “It doesn’t bother you?”

“What doesn’t bother me?”

“What we did to him,” I said. “It was a little excessive, don’t you think?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t know what he did to me. What he did to me was worse.”

I knew that. And I didn’t feel bad for Marcel, not really. Griffin was right. He deserved it. But I was glad somewhere deep down that I’d never had a child. Because I wasn’t particularly sure that I would be a very good mother. Not if I was capable of this.

And Griffin didn’t even have any remorse?

Well, I guessed Griffin was used to it. I remembered that he’d tortured Knox. Conveniently, it wasn’t an aspect of his personality that I thought about very often.

He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “It will be easier tomorrow, doll. The day after that it will be even easier. At some point, you’ll hardly think about it at all.”

I shut my eyes. Maybe that was what I was afraid of.

I awoke hours later to the sound of a woman’s voice.

Griffin was sitting straight up in bed. “Jolene French,” he said, a horrified expression on his face.

I listened. It was French, all right. French was the psychologist from Op Wraith. “Where is her voice coming from?”

He pointed across the room to an open laptop, sitting on a card table.

“Come in, Marcel,” French was saying. “I haven’t heard from you in days.”

Griffin got out of bed and eased across the room to turn the laptop to face us.

French’s face filled the screen. Her eyes widened. “Griffin?”

“You know who I am?” said Griffin. We’d wiped French’s memory. She shouldn’t remember Griffin. She should have complete amnesia.

French laughed. “Oh, you thought you erased my memory, didn’t you? Is that Leigh in the background? Your father will be happy to know you’re all right. He’s been giving me fits about your safety.”

“My father?” I got up, walking across the room to get closer to the laptop. “But I injected my father with—”

“Yes, well, honestly, did you really think that we’d work in a facility where we’d discovered a serum that made people invincible and not use it on ourselves? How stupid do you think we are?” French pursed her lips.

“You and my father both had the serum,” I said. “It healed your memory wipe?”

“A pleasant surprise,” said French. “Even Thorn didn’t know it would protect us.”

“So, you and my father are working together?” I said. “Why?”

“I suppose Marcel’s dead,” said French, looking vaguely disappointed. “Did you by any chance video tape yourself killing him, Griffin? I think watching that would be extraordinarily intriguing. Insight into your damaged psyche and all of that.”

“You sent Marcel after me,” said Griffin. “Why?”

French tapped her lip with one finger. “Let’s think about that, shall we, Griffin? I used to be a woman who was part of a very lucrative organization. I provided bullet-proof assassins to people who paid me a lot of money. But now all my assassins have been scattered far and wide. You ever think that might have annoyed me just a little bit?”

Griffin gritted his teeth. “Revenge? Really? What about Knox? He’s the one who actually took you down.”

French smiled. “Oh, I have plans for Knox.”

“No, you don’t,” said Griffin. “You don’t, because I’m going to find you, and I’m going to kill you.”

French’s laughter floated out of the computer. “Oh, Griffin, you’re so adorable when you’re angry.”

Griffin slammed the laptop shut. “Motherfucker,” he muttered.

I swallowed. “I guess that’s what Wolfman meant when he said that Op Wraith moved.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Griffin said. “French knew where Marcel was. She knows where we are. I don’t know what kind of resources she’s got these days, but there could be a team headed here now.”

That was fine with me. I had no desire to stay in this place for one second longer.

Griffin handed the laptop across the table in the booth to Sloane. “We haven’t opened it yet, but I was hoping you could work some magic there, maybe figure out where French is. I managed to get a screen capture of the video.”

We were all in a diner. Griffin and I had been driving for hours to rendezvous with the twins. After talking to French, contacting them was the first thing that he did. He and I talked about bringing Knox in on it, but we decided against it. French wanted to hurt Knox, so maybe it was better that he stay in hiding with his daughter.

“Yeah, Sloane will get it,” said Silas. “She’s a computer whiz.”

Sloane opened the computer. “I’ll do my best.”

“You’ll be happy to know that your mother is home from the hospital,” said Silas. “We’ve been keeping our eyes on your family.”

“Thanks for that,” said Griffin. “I figured that once Marcel had me, he’d leave them alone.”

Sloane tapped away at the keyboard. “I’m disabling the wireless so that French can’t track the computer.” She stared at the screen for a second, clicked with her mouse, and then turned the picture toward us. “This the screen capture?”

French’s face was filling the screen again. She was frozen in mid laugh, and she looked demented.

Griffin nodded. “That’s it, all right. I know you can’t see much behind her, but it looks familiar to me.”

Silas cocked his head. “Yeah, you’re right. Those walls. I’ve seen that color paint before.”

I raised my eyebrows. “It’s gray, right? There something special about it?” It looked nondescript to me.

Sloane turned the computer back to face her. “It’s the AXU.”

Griffin’s eyes lit up. “You’re right, it is.”

“AXU?” I said. “That some kind of weird university?”

“Auxiliary Unit,” said Silas. “It was a backup station for Op Wraith. A place to evacuate to if stuff went wrong in the main facility.”

“Guess we’re heading north, then,” said Sloane.

“Is it outside of Boston too?” I asked.

“Nah, it’s out in the middle of nowhere in New York state,” said Griffin. “All the assassins had to memorize the latitude and longitude coordinates in case something bad happened.”

“Why do you think she’d go somewhere so completely obvious?” said Silas.

“She probably wants us to come,” said Sloane. “She’s so arrogant, I bet she thinks she can reprogram all of us into being good little assassins again.”

Griffin smiled tightly. “She’s got a surprise coming.”

“So, spill,” said Sloane from the driver’s seat of the car. “Something’s not right.”

I turned away from the window. I’d been watching the headlights on the interstate, my mind blank. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. “Everything’s fine.”

She snorted. “Yeah, right. Look, if Griffin didn’t come around, maybe you should think of moving on. There are other men out there, you know.”

We’d split up into two cars, ostensibly because it would be harder to track both of them. But I had a feeling it was mostly because no one liked sitting in the back seat. I’d volunteered to keep Sloane company since we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. I wasn’t avoiding Griffin. Not really. “Actually, we’re engaged,” I said. “I think.”

“Engaged?” she said. She glanced at me, grinning. “That’s good, right?”

I smiled. “Yeah, it’s awesome.”

She faced forward again. “You’re not excited. And why don’t you have a ring?”

“Oh.” I dug it out of my pocket. “I took it off. It was getting... messy, and then I just didn’t put it back on.” Which didn’t mean anything. I slid the ring back on my finger. I’d scrubbed it as best I could. The red stone winked at me. Would I be able to tell if it still had Marcel’s blood on it?

“I can’t really see it, but it looks pretty,” said Sloane. “So, you guys are back together. Really together?”

“Really together,” I said. Hell, the couple who tortures together, stays together, right? I grimaced.

“So, then, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Okay, then, don’t talk about it,” she said. “You can let it fester and boil inside you and overtake everything. That’s cool with me.”

I sighed. I toyed with my engagement ring. “You ever torture anyone, Sloane?”

She shot me a sharp glance. “Why would you ask that?”

I looked back out the window. “Just... have you?”

She hesitated. “Silas usually made me stay back. I’m a good sniper, and he liked to have me as backup. You know, out of sight. I didn’t do a lot of up close and personal stuff. But I watched Silas do it.” Her voice had changed. It sounded farther away and higher pitched. She sounded younger and more vulnerable.

“Did Silas do it a lot?”

“Only when he had to,” she said. “Op Wraith forced us to do stuff like that, you know. We didn’t have a choice.”

“Right,” I said.

“Look, I do my best not to think about things like that. Why are you bringing it up, anyway?”

I twisted my hands together in my lap. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Did Griffin tell you something about me that made you not feel comfortable around me or something? Because what I had to do wasn’t torture. Not really. I made sure it was over quickly, and I don’t think it’s fair—”

“No, Sloane.” I reached over and touched her arm soothingly. “I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. This isn’t about you.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice tiny.

“Griffin and I... We were pretty thorough with Marcel,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath. “That’s what’s bothering you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, that would make sense, then,” she said.

“I keep thinking about it,” I said. “Not all the time, but just out of nowhere. I remember things he said or the way he was screaming or—”

“That’ll happen.”

“And... what? I’m just supposed to deal with it?”

“Well, what else can you do?” she said. “You can’t bring him back to life.”

“I don’t want him to be alive,” I said. “He was pretty much the worst person I can imagine. The things he did to Griffin. To me. To people we cared about... well, he deserves to be dead. I’m
glad
he’s dead.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but it would have been easier if you hadn’t been the person who killed him, right?”

“I... I
liked
it,” I said. “It was a game. When we were doing it...”

“It’s better if you don’t think about it too much,” she said.

“But you haven’t done anything like this. You killed people for Op Wraith. You were following orders. You didn’t choose it. You didn’t enjoy it. Do you even understand how I feel?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

We were quiet.

When she spoke again, her voice was so small and soft, she sounded like a little girl. “Silas and I have done... stuff together. We were recruited into Op Wraith because of what we did. We didn’t have very nice parents. They were going to do... things.” She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “We had to...”

“Sloane,” I said, suddenly realizing she was confessing something to me. “You don’t have to tell me this.”

A tear streaked out of one of her eyes. “Trust me, Leigh, it’s better to bury it.” Her expression grew fierce. “He deserved it. Someone had to do it. That someone was you.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s true.”

“Do whatever you can
not
to think about it,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I could see why she was saying it, and I could see why she felt like she needed to follow the advice she gave me. But I didn’t know if I could simply bury this. I didn’t think—

Sloane’s phone rang.

“Can you answer that?” she said. “Put it on speaker.”

I got her phone out of the center cup holder. It was Silas calling. I answered it. “Hey, Silas.”

“What’s up?” said Sloane.

“Oh good,” said Silas. “You’re both there.”

“Silas just had an epiphany,” said Griffin.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” said Silas.

“What is it?” I said.

“You know how Sloane said that French wants us to go to her? That she thinks she can re-brainwash us?” said Griffin.

“Yeah,” said Sloane.

“Well, Silas was thinking that a personal attack probably plays right into her hands.”

“Right,” said Silas. “I’m thinking we just blow the bitch up.”

“Blow her up?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Griffin. “We’re going to have to make a pit stop for supplies, but we can put together a pretty decent explosive, I think. We’ll level AXU along with French.”

“But my father is working with her,” I said. “He’ll be there too.”

“That a problem?” said Griffin.

I hesitated. I looked out the window. I’d erased my father’s memory, or so I’d thought. He’d been as good as dead. But now they wanted me to participate in killing him for real. Kill my father. I drew in breath. “I guess not.”

“Doll, if you want us to get him out—”

“He’s been helping French. He probably helped her sick Marcel on us. He... doesn’t deserve to be my father. I don’t care what happens to him.” I sank down into my seat and stared out at the headlights flashing by again. I didn’t want to think anymore. The lights were pretty.

Chapter Seventeen

I pushed the leaves out of the way to find a hidden vent, just like Griffin had told me I’d find. I was out in the woods in upstate New York, kneeling on the wet ground. It had rained earlier and the air still smelled like early summer. I took the contraption that Griffin and Silas had put together out of the pack I was carrying.