Her earliest memory was hunger.
After a day without food, hunger woke with
soft growls, not very threatening at all, maybe like a cat that sat heavily on your stomach.
After two days, the dull pain came.
The stomach cramps didn't start until the third day.
But when her mother left Kate locked in the filthy one-bedroom apartment for a week at a time, hunger roared like a tiger, clawing at her little baby body, threatening to eat her from the inside.
The first foster home she could remember was the Pederios when she'd been around four or five.
The Pederios had food in the refrigerator
all the time.
They didn't hit.
They were churchy people.
Kate had her first piece of chocolate ever after a children's service at church, and forever associated chocolate with heaven, and with everything that was good and right.
Her time with the Pederios didn't last long.
Too soon, she had to go back to her birth mother.
Beyond the hunger, Kate most remembered the beatings and the screaming.
“I'm gonna snap your neck, you little shit.”
“Shut up or I'll stomp your stupid guts out.”
“I'm gonna smack you so hard, your head will snap off, you hear?”
All delivered from the screaming, wild-eyed face of death.
By the time she was ten years old—her birth mother all big and even moodier because she'd forgotten to get rid of a pregnancy in time—Kate had been threatened with violent death a million times.
And she believed she would die.
She was small, weak and hungry, while the screaming monster was strong and all-powerful.
Kate
knew
she would die—starved or beaten to death—it'd be just a matter of time.
So she shouldn't have been shaken, nearly two decades later, to find herself at her own funeral.
The priest continued his eulogy in the chapel.
“The length of our lives has little to do with the impact we make, and this has certainly been true with Kate.”
She blinked her burning eyes.
She hated making her family go through this.
But if her loved ones were hurt because of her, it would be much worse.
If Emma had been in the car with her when that bullet crashed through the window—
“Although, she is gone from among us....”
the priest went on, and Emma turned in the first pew, so Kate finally caught a glimpse of her sister’s face in profile.
More than a decade younger than Kate, Emma sat ramrod straight, her long black hair cascading down her shoulders in waves, nothing like Kate’s short, blond pixie cut.
They had different coloring, Kate pale, Emma a shade darker.
They had different fathers.
Nobody would guess that they were sisters.
The priest began to pray.
Kate swallowed as she watched her mother cry.
“Are you going to make them go to the cemetery?”
she asked without taking her eyes off the monitor.
“Things shouldn’t come to that.
If Asael comes, he’ll come here.
He’ll come before the coffin is closed.”
To make sure Kate was inside.
Then the FBI could grab him, and all the pretending could end.
As mad as her family would be at her for this setup, Kate hoped they’d be so happy that she was alive that they would forgive her.
When she’d agreed to this miserable charade, she hadn’t thought it would ever get this far.
A break-in at the funeral home had been anticipated; the FBI kept the “body” under constant surveillance.
But in the end, it seemed the killer was going to take the easy way and come to the chapel, slipping in among family and friends.
The priest was finishing his brief closing prayer.
“We ask you this in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Amen.”
Kate shivered.
The air conditioner in the van was cranked to the max.
As ridiculous as her lucky Christmas sweater looked in July, she was glad she’d brought it.
Emma had made it for her.
If she’d miscounted the rows so the reindeer’s left hind leg was a little bent and a little high and made him look like he was happy to see Mrs.
Reindeer, neither of them mentioned it.
Agent Cirelli leaned closer to the monitors.
“Do you see him?”
The longer they waited, the more the agent's shoulders tightened.
She was going to need a massage to work the knots out, Kate thought and scanned the pews again, looking for the face that haunted her dreams.
A few seconds passed, the bitter taste of disappointment bubbling up her throat.
“I don’t think he came.”
Inside the chapel, Emma stood and walked slowly up front to the coffin.
Her shoulders slumped into a tired angle, hurt etching her face.
She looked more somber than a teenager should ever have to look.
“The strange thing, you know, is that I don’t feel like Kate is gone.
I don’t feel it in my heart.”
She shook her head, big brown eyes brimming with tears.
Kate blinked in unison with her, wanting more than anything to break out of the van, bust into that chapel and shout, “I’m here!
This is all a big mistake.”
She glanced sideways at Cirelli.
The agent was watching her.
“Almost over.”
Emma, standing close enough to the coffin to lay a hand on it, cleared her throat.
“My first memory of Kate is when I talked her into helping me set a trap for the tooth fairy.
I was six, just lost my first tooth.”
Tears flooded Kate’s eyes at the same time as a smile tugged at her lips.
God, the tooth fairy incident.
She couldn’t believe her sister even remembered that.
Kate pressed her fingers to her mouth and listened as Emma gave a slightly different version of the story than she recalled.
As Emma went on, recounting their mad caper, their father slumped in his seat.
Their mother laid her head on his shoulder, raising a tissue to her face.
An invisible fist squeezed Kate's heart.
She had to be the most heartless bitch in the universe to let them go through all the grief.
Or a woman without a choice.
A movement on the nearest monitor caught her attention—a man about the right height easing in through the side door, stopping just inside, his posture apologetic, as if embarrassed for being this late.
The nose was wrong, and the hair color, but that jaw…the jaw was right.
The breath she was about to take lodged in Kate’s throat, her heart lurching into a desperate rhythm.
She didn’t have to say anything.
Agent Cirelli followed her gaze and pointed at the screen.
“That one?”
Kate nodded, unable to look away, instantly back in Marcos’s penthouse apartment again, blood all over the antique kilim rug, bubbling up Marcos’s throat, coating her hands as she hung on to him and begged him to live.
Cirelli tapped her earpiece, then snapped out orders into her radio unit to the team of undercover agents who stood by.
On the screen, two mourners stood up from the back pew.
A member of the chapel choir stepped away from the rest.
The ceremony went on uninterrupted.
Sam Roecker, Kate’s partner at their rehabilitative massage studio said a few words, his face drawn.
He was a pioneer in developing a special form of therapeutic massage for abused children who might never have been touched in a way that didn’t hurt, kids who were scared of any physical contact.
When Kate had knocked on his door for a job six years ago, all she'd known was that she wanted to use her massage therapy skills to help others.
He’d hired her, trained her, then eventually made her his partner.
He became her friend.
But she couldn’t look at him long now.
She couldn’t look at anyone but the killer.
Her entire body stiffened as he stood up, slid out of his pew and slowly moved toward the side door.
He wouldn’t get far.
Undercover agents were blocking the exits.
He glanced up as he reached the door, right at the camera hidden in the flowers.
His cold eyes blazed through the display screen in the van, making Kate gasp.
The look on his face sent a message as clearly as if he had spoken.
I’m coming for you.
Then he slipped through the door and disappeared from the monitor.
A handful of “mourners” followed him, a few seconds behind.
Agent Cirelli stopped the live-feed and rewound the footage, freezing it on the killer’s face to get a closer look.
Endless seconds ticked by as she listened to her earpiece.
Kate clutched her hands tightly on her lap, telling herself to breathe.
They would have him now.
The whole nightmare was about to be over.
But instead of giving the all clear, the agent’s face darkened as she listened.
“Two agents down,” Cirelli snapped out the words, her face tight with determination as she checked her weapon and reached for the door.
“You stay here.”
And then she was gone, the door sliding closed behind her with a dull thud.
Kate couldn’t hear anything from outside the soundproofed van, so she turned back to the surveillance monitors where her memorial service eerily continued.
But it was the paused screen she couldn’t look away from.
On the frozen screen in the middle, the killer stared right at her, as if he knew exactly where she was.
A cold chill ran down her spine.
She rubbed her arms.
Almost over.
They’d get him.
The trap was fool proof, the FBI had promised her that.
They’d said they wouldn’t grab him in the chapel to make sure none of her family got hurt, but they had a tight net outside the chapel.
He’d have no way to leave the church.
Mindful of her broken collarbone, she maneuvered her way carefully to the black curtain that separated the back of the van from the front seats, opened it an inch and peered through the gap.
The double doors of the church, carved with solemn angels, stood closed in silence.
She liked those graceful angels, liked coming here on Sundays.
Going to church, all of them together, was such a normal family thing, the kind of life she craved, with roots and connections.
The steps, always crowded before service, now stood empty.
But an old woman shuffled through the metal door of the fire exit on the building’s side, wearing a Sunday hat that covered most of her face.
Her back slightly bent, she made her way carefully forward.
She slowed by the real flower delivery van and bent low as if adjusting her shoe.
She bent slowly, but straightened and hurried forward much faster a moment later, then ducked between two cars with a sudden agility that belied her age.
The earth shook when the van exploded the next second, setting off car alarms all around.
Kate stared in shock as the old woman hurried forward and headed toward the FBI van.
Asael.
The realization brought a wave of adrenaline that got her moving at last.
She lunged to the front seat, keeping down, ignoring the pain in her shoulder.
Fingers trembling, she opened the door on the side away from the killer, just enough so she could slide to the ground, never popping high enough so she could be seen through the window.
She closed the door and rolled under the car next to the van, scooted over, rolled under the next vehicle, then the next and the next, hoping to be far enough when the FBI van blew.
Oh, God.
Oh, damn.
Her broken clavicle ground together in her shoulder, the pain—hot pokers stabbing into her flesh—making her see stars as she went.
She gritted her teeth and kept going.
Any damage she caused would be negligible in comparison to the damage a bomb could do to her.
An eternity seemed to pass, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute before the second explosion hit, shaking the ground under her and bringing her to a halt, spraying her with fine gravel.
Dust covered her face, sticking to sweat.
She tried to blink it from her watering eyes.
She had dirt in her nose, in her mouth, in her lungs.
Her chest spasmed, but she didn't dare to cough, even as her insides shook.
Her ears rang.
She couldn’t hear footsteps, but through the settling dust she could see scuffed brown shoes coming rapidly toward her, the feet way too large for an old woman.