The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (5 page)

“Not that we saw,” Phillip said.

“I didn’t see her at the Date
Auction either,” said Helena.

“Has anyone tried to call Gia?”
Phillip said. “I know we’re not supposed to, but--”

“Straight to voicemail,” said
Jill. “Her phone, Dante’s, and Kendall’s are all the same. Like they’re turned
off.”

“Maybe I should go by the house,”
Phillip said. “I could keep a safe distance. Bring some binoculars.”

“We’ll watch the footage first,”
said Jill. “Have a seat.”

Phillip and Helena sat on either
side of Jill and the three of them watched the screen. Jill sped through the
first two hours of video, hitting play when they saw Kendall and Dante take up
attack positions in the floor, and Gia open the front door for a guest.

They watched in stunned silence
as Melissa Mayhew killed their friends. Too shocked to speak, to cry, or to
even move, Jill left the footage running. Onscreen, they saw Melissa roaming
the mansion, having killed everyone inside.

“She’s calling someone,” Phillip
said. “We need to find out who it is.”

“Alvin only uploaded the video,”
Jill said.

“But there are microphones in
the house,” said Phillip. “We should have the audio.”

“They’re probably blown after
all that gunfire,” Jill said.

“It doesn’t really matter who
Melissa is calling. We know what we have to do,” said Helena.

“Code Orange,” said Phillip. “We
need to get in touch with Nicky.”

“Code Orange,” Jill whispered in
agreement. It was a Network term that meant undercover agents were in imminent
danger of being discovered. It meant the mission was over and everyone needed
to flee.

She opened a text message to
Nicky and typed:

Code Orange. Have the pilot
to take you to a different airport. You may have trouble waiting for you when
you land.

The wrought iron gate stood
eleven feet from the ground. A coil of barbed wire added another foot at the
top.

Renata leapt over it with ease,
landing so delicately on the other side that any sound from her feet was lost
in the cacophony of frogs and crickets all around.

Inside the gate was a courtyard
full of young slaves tending to their tasks. It was night, after all, and these
children were conditioned to be awake at the same time as their masters. To
Renata’s left was a garden of spinach and carrots where a dozen teens were
removing worms, weeds, and mold. To her right was an orchard where workers were
picking apples of all varieties. Beyond the orchard, she could hear activity in
the barns. Cows were being milked. Chicken coops were being cleaned. Pigs were
being fed.

The Farm was churning along, the
slaves working to grow thousands of human beings for slaughter.

She walked slowly now, taking a
moment to enjoy the night air. It would be gone soon. In less than an hour, the
horizon would begin to glow. She needed to be on a plane to Italy by then.

I have to work quickly
,
she thought.

She approached the dreary
concrete building at the center of the Farm. Two glass doors in the front slid
open for her. Not for the first time, these doors made her think of a grocery
store.

Twenty humans were waiting to
greet her inside. Two long rows of young men and women, stretching from the
front of the room to the back, a clear pathway between them. They were slaves,
like everyone else on the Farm, but with automatic rifles that made clear their
purpose. They stood at attention like so many soldiers, their rifles at the
ready. Their faces blank, their eyes lacking any emotion, including fear, it
was safe to assume that these slaves were programmed to turn on any enemy of
the Farm, even a member of the family, like Renata.

She took a slow, deliberate
step. In unison, the slaves raised their rifles and aimed at her face.

“Oh Good Lord,” she said.
“Dominic, are you in here?”

Her voice echoed in the open
room.

“Stop right there, Renata,” came
a voice from behind her.

She turned and looked high up
the back wall. Dominic was crouched between two of the rafters.

“What are you doing up there?”
Renata said. “What is all this? Tell your guards to stand down.”

“Say what you came here to say
and get out. I am in no mood for games,” said Dominic.

Her hope was to walk through the
front doors and kill Dominic before he had any idea what was coming. She wasn’t
expecting him to be ready for her. She wasn’t expecting even the slightest bit
of suspicion from him. What was going on here? What did he know?

“I need to speak with you.
Please come down,” Renata said.

“I can hear you just fine from
here,” said Dominic.

She could kill him now. Dominic
was weak. He was some three decades younger than Renata and had never known
anything but the soft life of a vampire who was spoon-fed off the Farm.

Although, there were a lot of
rifles pointed at her head. What kind of ammunition was in those rifles? What
would those gun-toting slaves do if she jumped up at Dominic?

The fact that Dominic had the
high ground, and the possibility that he had been planning for this encounter
with even more defenses than she saw now, gave Renata pause. She would have to
improvise. She needed to find out what he knew.

“It’s about Melissa,” she said.

“I know it is,” said Dominic.

“You do?”

Dominic let out a single,
pretentious laugh. “You take me for a fool. I should kill you now.”

“But why, Dominic? What has
happened to you? I am your sister. I come to you in friendship.”

“You killed Melissa,” Dominic
said. His voice cracked as he spoke the words, and Renata knew she had him.
Grief was consuming him. He had no will for a fight.

But how did he know? Who told
him that Renata killed his lover?

She looked at him and asked the
question with her eyes.

“You don’t think I felt it the
moment it happened?” Dominic said. “You don’t think I felt my heart split in
two the instant she died?”

Spare me
, Renata thought.
Dominic and Melissa had always been
that couple
.
Lovey-dovey-our-hearts-beat-as-one-and-I-knew-it-when-she-died.

Bullshit. Someone told Dominic
that Renata was coming.

Someone knew.

She’d worry about that later,
after she killed him.

“Okay, I admit it,” Renata said.
“It was me. And I’m here tonight to kill you. There. My cards are out on the
table. Why don’t you be a good sport and share yours? How did you know it was
me who killed her? How did you know I was coming?”

“Who else could have killed my
love? We all know Daciana isn’t coming back. The clan is waiting for a new
leader. It was you or Melissa. In our hearts, Melissa and I knew there wasn’t
room for both of you. But it wasn’t until the Masquerade--”

“Ah, yes. The Ceremonial Hunt. I
nearly killed Melissa that very night. You’ll be happy to know she and I had a
good chat about that before I ripped her heart from her chest.”

“Melissa was the rightful heir!
The clan will not unite behind you.”

Renata smiled. Dominic was
speaking like a man who knew he was about to die.

“You want something from me,”
Renata said. “You don’t want to live now that Melissa is gone. You are ready
for me to kill you. But you’re up there because you want something first. What
is it?”

Dominic let out a mournful
sound. It was meant to be a laugh, but it was so weak it came out as nothing.

“I have no wants left,” he said.
“We would do better to speak about what it is that you want. You are here for a
reason. If it is solely to kill me, you would have acted already. There is
something you want from me first. What is it?”

“May I come up there?” Renata
said.

“You’ll be hit with a flood of
bullets if you try.”

“This is silly, Dominic. Your
little pets with their guns. I could kill them now if I chose. It would take me
less than a minute.”

“Do it then.”

Renata studied his face. It was
hard to make clear what he was thinking. There was some sort of deception at
play, something she hadn’t seen yet.

“Before she died, Melissa paid a
visit to the Evans family in Brazil. She took a file from their house,” Renata
said.

“There it is,” said Dominic.
“Now we know why you stand there, helpless. You can’t kill me because, if I
die, knowledge of the file’s whereabouts goes with me.”

“We could make this simple,”
Renata said. “Your death could be painless. Just tell me where it is and I’ll
spare you any agony. I want you to know, when I killed Melissa, I did it
respectfully. She was a good woman, Dominic. She deserved to die with--”

“Shut up!”

With a speed that startled her,
Dominic jumped down from the rafters. Landing half a foot in front of her, he
grabbed her shoulders and threw her across the room. She skidded to a stop in
the center of the floor, the rows of armed slaves keeping their rifles trained
on her the entire time.

“If you want anything from me at
all, you will not speak her name again!” Dominic cried.

Renata looked up at the barrels
of twenty guns. Their tips were like eyes that followed her as she moved. She
was tired of them.

She rolled across the floor,
taking out the feet of the slaves to her right. They toppled like bowling pins,
so dumb and confused they didn’t even bother to shoot. It wasn’t until Dominic
snapped his fingers that the fireworks began, but by that point, it was far too
late. Half the slaves were a jumble on the floor, their rifles pointed in a
hundred different directions. The concrete walls chipped and splattered, but
didn’t absorb the shots, and bullets bounced around the room like balls on a
billiard table. Renata took shots to the back, to the shoulder, on her kneecap,
and in her chest. She ignored the pain and went after the shooters, grabbing at
arms and legs and guns, ripping them loose, throwing them aside. She swiped at
faces with strikes that killed instantly. In a matter of seconds, the room was
quiet, littered with body parts, corpses, and expended shells.

Behind her she heard footsteps,
too light and swift to be human. She turned to see Dominic ducking out of the
room. She ran after him, her body expelling bullets as she moved, her bones,
muscles, and skin healing at a near-instant pace.

He led her down a maze of short
corridors. Sharp turns, left and right, down a staircase, around a curve, past
countless rooms and hallways breaking off on either side. He was fast; she
would give him that. It took her full powers of concentration just to keep up,
and when she made the final turn, a hard left around a sharp concrete wall, she
did so only because she saw his shadow.

But after the turn…

“Pathetic,” Renata said, as she
came to a stop in front of him.

Dominic had run into a dead end.
They stood in a small room with a metal grate on the floor and thick concrete
walls painted black all around. Dominic looked on either side of him,
nervously.

“Give it up,” Renata said. “With
all the advantages in the world, you still couldn’t get away from me. I mean,
for Christ’s sake, Dominic. Do you even know the layout of your own house? You
ran right into a dead end.”

There was a flash in his eyes—a
change in his demeanor so sudden it caught Renata off guard, and by the time
she figured out what was happening, it was too late.

Movement behind her. A boy. She
smelled him before she saw him. Where had he been hiding? The boy jumped into
the hallway and slammed a door shut. Whatever this room was, Dominic and Renata
were locked in it together.

And Dominic was laughing.

The fire came from beneath them,
blasting up through the metal grate in the floor. Purple and instant and raging
hot, Renata’s reaction was to jump up and seek a foothold in the walls or the
ceiling, but there were none to be found. What she had thought was black paint
turned out to be something different when she touched it. Ash. Her fingers slid
through it like snow and she came crashing down, landing hard on the glowing
metal grate.

She jumped up. Her shirt was on
fire. She ripped it off. Her pants were burning too. Her shoes were melting.

Dominic was still laughing.

“How many corpses have we put in
cremation furnaces like this, Renata?” he wailed. “How did you not recognize
this room the instant you stepped inside?”

She caught only a brief glimpse
of him through the rising waves of heat. Fire consumed his legs beneath the
knees. His face was bubbling with blisters.

“Are you mad? You mean to kill
us both?” she shouted.

“I’m already dead, Renata. See
you in hell!”

Still laughing, Dominic thrust
his arms out and fell back-first into the flames. Renata ran with all her speed
at the door, crashing her shoulder into the smoldering cement.

Something gave. Was it the door,
or the bones in her shoulder? The pain in her legs was excruciating now, the
fire tearing at her flesh faster than it could heal. The sweet smell of
blackened skin was so familiar to her, so many bodies had burned in the furnace
at her own home, but now, to think that it was her own flesh, that the ashes in
this furnace would be her own remains…

She turned and threw her other
shoulder into the door. The crash was loud, and jarring, but with it came a
tiny sliver of light. The top corner of the door was like a ray of sun from
heaven above. An opening. Could she make it grow? She threw her back at the
door. Her skin sizzled on contact and she screamed. Had it opened more? She
couldn’t tell. If it had, the movement wasn’t nearly enough. She didn’t have
enough strength for another blow at the door like that. She was delirious from
the pain. Her hair was on fire. Her clothes had entirely burned away. There was
no flesh left on her feet. On the ground, Dominic’s body was already blackened
and still, too far gone for even a vampire’s powers of healing.