Authors: Ashley Rhodes
Now was that case.
Calmly, he watched the upload finish, and then turned the laptop over and removed the battery and the hard drive. The hard drive he cracked open, shattered the disks inside with the butt of a pistol, and then disposed of on his way out of the motel in pieces—some here, some there, some in an alley in a different direction from Cassandra’s place before he made a turn and headed toward her to intercept.
If he was quick, he could have Cassandra out of Newark, maybe out of the country, in no time at all. A few days at most. All he had to do was convince her to come with him.
Right. Because nothing could be simpler than
that
conversation.
The cash was enough for a night at a hotel and a plane ticket. Both required the use of Cassandra’s fake ID and the fake credit card she’d gotten to go with it. Those she would have to toss when she got to the next city, but this was what they were for.
She paced the hotel room, checking the clock every few steps as though it might speed up if she paced fast enough. It didn’t.
The plan was simple. Same as before. Go to a new city. Flash her eyelashes and pick up a job as a waitress—it was the easiest job to get in any city, if you were a pretty girl, that didn’t involve getting paid for sex. Use the local homeless shelter to take cover and have an address until she could get the cheapest apartment that would take cash and not require a lease.
Cassandra had done it eight times, and she would do it a ninth. She would keep doing it, again and again, as often as she needed to. What other choice was there? This was the way it had to be.
But something bothered her about this time. Initially, she had panicked and run but if someone could take out three targets from cover in an urban landscape then surely, if she was on the list, the killer could have taken her out too. Hell, she’d stood more or less perfectly still while she came to terms with what she was seeing. So what had happened?
It was possible that she hadn’t been the target. That was her first thought, once she settled into the hotel room. Maybe she’d jumped to conclusions. It could have been some kind of sniper vigilante coming to her rescue and moving on.
Like a scared rabbit, she’d bolted without a thought.
Still, she’d been here too long. In the end, it didn’t matter. It was time to start over. This time, maybe she could stay put, but not here. Not in Newark. Now that Papa was at rest, maybe she could rest too; just not in the last place she’d been while he was alive. It was the prudent choice.
She sucked in a breath and jumped when a knock at the door startled her. That breath stayed in her lungs as she pulled her can of bear mace out of her purse and crept up to the door to wait.
“Miss Aroja?” A polite, clipped voice came through the door. “I hate to disturb you, but I’m afraid there was a problem with your credit card.”
She could have pretended to be out, but he’d just have unlocked her door to collect her things and put them in the lobby. It had happened once before. So she sighed, set the mace down, and put her eye to the peep hole. The man on the other side wasn’t one she recognized from the front desk but he was holding a slip of paper and had that slicked-back Jersey style that was getting to be popular again.
She leaned her forehead on the door and breathed.
“Miss Aroja?” The man asked.
“Just a sec,” Cassandra said. She unbolted and unchained the door and pulled it open.
The man took a single step over the threshold and raised a hand. There was a gun in it.
“Very sorry, Miss Gonzales,” he said, “if my colleague hadn’t gone rogue, you wouldn’t have seen it coming. My condolences.”
Cassandra snatched the bear mace from the little table she’d set it down on and attempted to empty the can into the man’s face.
Immediately, he fired. There was a muffled, high pitched sound, and the air next to one ear snapped at her as a bullet narrowly missed. The next one went wider, into the wall. A third pierced the window.
Cassandra gathered herself to tackle the assassin—when it came to guns, you didn’t want to be far away—and empty the rest of the mace into his mouth directly, but she didn’t get the chance.
Someone rounded the door frame—a man, tall, wide shouldered, and perfectly calm—reached out almost casually and broke the flailing gunman’s neck, and then caught him as he slumped backwards.
“Pardon me,” he said as he dragged the dead man into the room. Cassandra stepped aside, still gripping the can of mace.
When the body was nestled between the two small twin beds in the room, the newcomer glanced at the duffel and nodded. “Smart. You had a bag ready. Good.”
“Who,” Cassandra stuttered out, “the f-fuck…? He’s dead?”
The man nodded slowly and glanced at the corpse. “He is. I’m Nick. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Who sent you?” Cassandra asked suspiciously, and raised the mace. “What do you want with me?”
Nick sighed. “I was paid to kill you. I took out the young men last night that were going to…”
Cassandra had started to creep toward the door.
But Nick held up both hands in surrender and peace, and jerked his chin toward the dead man. “I decided not to do it,” he said. “Which is going to mean trouble for both of us. This one won’t be the last. My boss has a reputation to maintain. They monitor our vitals by a chip in our wrists. They’ll know he’s out when his chip goes dark. When his nerves die. Takes a few minutes. Look, see?” He pointed to his own wrist, which was bandaged. “I cut mine out.”
“Why?” Cassandra asked.
“So they couldn’t track me,” Nick said.
“No,” she waved the can at him, “why were you sent to kill me? I didn’t do anything. I don’t want to be a part of my father’s world. I just want to be a good person and live quietly.”
“I know that,” Nick said softly. “It’s why I changed my mind about the assignment. You remember me? From the diner?”
“From the…” And then, like a light switching on, she did. He looked different now but not drastically. “I knew someone was following me. Jesus Christ, you were… you could have…”
“But I didn’t,” Nick said. “And I’m not going to. But we have to leave. Newark, I mean. Maybe the country.”
“I already have a flight booked,” she said. “I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
“That’s… not soon enough,” Nick said. “We’ve got contractors as close as Manhattan. They could be here in a few hours. Plus, if I know you booked a flight under Amelia Aroja, so does anyone else who wants to find you. They’ve kept tabs on your fake identities. They aren’t very good. I’ll make sure you get a solid one, with an anglo name they won’t be looking for.”
“Stop!” Cassandra snapped. “Just stop. Why should I trust you? You tried to kill me!”
“I didn’t try to kill you,” Nick said. “I don’t
try
to kill anyone. If I want someone dead, they die. I
chose
not to kill you.” He lowered his hands, and frowned at her. “You don’t have to trust me. But they’re not going to stop coming for you. Not unless you disappear entirely. I can help you do that if you’ll let me. Please, Cassandra. I need to do this. If I have a soul, it probably needs saving.”
“Everyone has a soul,” she muttered. She lowered the can. If he did mean to kill her, it was a strange way to go about getting to the point. If he didn’t, then she needed his help if what he said was true. If it wasn’t true… well then he was a crazy person but she couldn’t see why someone would lie about a thing like this. It was just too much to bother with.
“It would be nice if that were true,” Nick said.
“So what do I do?” Cassandra finally asked.
Nick moved quickly, gathering her bag as he led her to the door. “First, get to a different city. One with an Amtrak stop. I know someone who can get you a new identity. We’ll find a place for you to hide, get you set up with a low profile job. Maybe change your hair. Put the do not disturb sign on the door.”
As Cassandra followed him out, she’d started to close the door but reached inside to for the courtesy sign and slipped it into the lock.
“Do you have an arrest record?” Nick asked as they walked down the walkway to the stairs and parking lot below.
“No,” Cassandra said.
“Have you given blood?”
“Once a month,” she said.
Nick sighed. “Of course you have. Well, prints are more important anyway. We’ll have to get you in the system under a new identity later.”
“What does that mean?”
Nick pulled open the back door of a car which no longer had an ignition in the steering column, just a tangle of wires. It was older, the sort with manual locks, some version of a boxy Lincoln town car.
“Is this car stolen?” Cassandra asked. She took a step away from it, as though this might be Nick’s idea of ‘getting her in the system’—just a little grand theft auto.
“Yes,” Nick said, “I had to ditch mine. And we’ll get you some little misdemeanor, after you have new papers. Are you a legal US citizen?”
Cassandra shook her head.
“Good,” Nick said as he pulled the driver side door open and slipped in. Cassandra got into the passenger side cautiously. “That’ll make it easier to get you a domestic identity. Nothing else to get rid of.”
“Shouldn’t I like… I don’t know, leave the country?”
“No,” Nick said. “You need to
look
like you left the country. I’ll handle that. It’s what I would do if I was trying to get away from these people.”
“Except you’re not doing that?” Between the confusing questions, a course of action she didn’t understand, circumstances that made no sense to her, and Nick’s strange, flat, almost unconcerned way of answering her questions… Cassandra was well and truly lost.
“We’re not doing that,” Nick explained, “because that’s what they’ll be looking for. They’ll look at every flight, every passenger list, leaving the States in a window after me and Carter went off grid, and look for breadcrumbs. They’ll find them. It’s what they do.”
Cassandra frowned. “Who is Carter?”
“Carter was the man who tried to kill you,” he said, put the car into gear, and pulled out of the parking lot headed toward the highway. “We were friends. Sort of.”
As Nick drove them away from the hotel, Cassandra reached up and touched her cross. Had God sent the Devil to save her? “What do you want for all this?” She asked quietly.
Nick glanced at her, and then turned back to the road. After a moment he shook his head. “Nothing. Just that you survive. I… I can’t really explain it better than that. Someone is worried you’ll go back home and take over your father’s cartel. I don’t think you will.”
“I wouldn’t,” Cassandra assured him. She planned to stay far, far away from that world whether Papa was part of it or not. It wasn’t him she hated; it was the death, the drugs, the greed and the constant paranoia. The taint of it infected her life even now, but maybe it could still be cured. If she went back, it never would be.
“I know that,” Nick said. “It’s why you’re still alive. You should rest. We have a long drive.”
Cassandra nodded, and leaned her seat back. She didn’t imagine she could actually sleep, but she could withdraw, organize her thoughts, maybe try to make sense of all this.
As she did that, she watched Nick’s expressionless face as he watched the road.
Maybe he was the Devil. But maybe he wanted to be more than that. She understood that need. It was why she’d left home in the first place. One day, you just got tired of all the darkness.
So she made the choice to trust him. Trust in the kindred nature of their spirits. After all, what other choice did she really have?
Nick dumped the car two miles from the train station and got them a cab to go back. He picked up a burner phone outside the station, bought two tickets to Pittsburgh, and then made a call to his contact in Newcastle. Pete Porter had a particular talent for making false IDs and backdoors into several key databases throughout the country. If you needed to be a new person, he could hook you up.
He didn’t answer the phone, of course—it was an unknown number. That wasn’t needed, though. Nick left a voicemail. “One man, thirty one years old, white, brown hair, brown eyes, six foot three. One woman… Venezuelan… black hair, brown eyes, five foot… eight. Twenty four. No… twenty six. Anglo name. Something pretty. Offer code event horizon.” He checked the time on the tickets. “Twelve hours. Cash.”
The phone he cracked open, broke the sim card, and disposed of in various trash cans around the station.
After that he got himself and Cassandra a bite to eat. She ate quietly, rarely looking at him at first. Eventually, though, she started to watch him.
Nick wasn’t sure what kind of conversation they could have. Most of what needed to be said was already said and his usual interaction with women was restricted to whatever he had to say to get them into bed. It was far more extensive than his typical conversation with men, which normally involved a bullet and no words at all.
“How many…” Cassandra started, and glanced around them at the sparse but nearby crowd. “…have you… you know…?”
“One hundred and seventy one after yesterday and this morning,” Nick answered.
“You keep count like that?” She put her sandwich down, her face paling just a bit.
“Of course,” Nick said. “I know almost all their names. The boys last night… they’re exceptions.”
“That’s a lot of death for one man to carry with him,” she said. Not disgusted, not afraid. Sad. “It must get heavy.”
Nick watched Cassandra’s eyes, trying to figure how she must see him. It was difficult to tell by looking. That she might actually pity him was how it seemed but he didn’t see how that could be possible. “It does,” he answered quietly.
“So… what next? I mean, after we get to where we’re going?”
“I’ll get you a new life, some cash, and you’ll pick a place to go,” he said. “Anywhere you want. In the US. Passports are harder to manage but you won’t need one.”
“I mean for you,” she said. “I imagine it’s against company policy to save me and just quit the job.”
“You could say that,” Nick said. “I don’t know yet. I’ll disappear, too. I’m resourceful.”
Cassandra nodded once, her eyes dropping to her sandwich. She managed another bite, and sighed as she chewed and swallowed. Finally, she looked at him again. “Um… I haven’t said thank you yet.”
“You don’t need to,” Nick said.
“Okay,” she chuckled. “I still want to. So… thank you. For not… you know… and then for saving me.”
Nick just nodded once, and scanned the crowd for signs of impending retribution. He suspected he’d be doing that for a while.
“Can I ask another question?” Cassandra asked.
“After we’re on the train,” Nick said. “Eat. We may not have much time in Pittsburgh.”
She did so, and left the questions for now.
Not that it mattered, really, if she asked now or later. But the questions were digging in to him, uncovering raw places that he’d forgotten were there. They’d been buried under piles of dead bodies for years now. Anyone else, he would have shut them down. For some reason Cassandra’s inquiries didn’t really feel intrusive. Just painful.
The train arrived. He’d gotten them their own cabin; there was no reason not to, and it ensured they wouldn’t be snuck up on in the event someone managed to track them there. It wasn’t a long ride, a little over eight hours, but it would give Cassandra a chance to actually rest, hopefully. Nick didn’t plan on sleeping until she was safe. Two days at most, and he’d gone longer without.
Cassandra actually smiled when they settled into the cabin. “Is it weird that I’m kind of excited about this trip? Given the circumstances.” She laughed, and ran her hands over the edge of the little bunk with a bed in it, across from the wide bench seat. “I always wanted to take a train ride like this and never have. Papa used to say we’d go to Europe one day and take the Flying Scotsman…”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Nick said when she grew quiet and thoughtful.
Cassandra nodded, and smiled at him. “Thank you. I always knew it wouldn’t be a heart attack that got him, you know. But… I guess it’s just more real, now, is all. That he’s actually gone. Whatever chance we might have had to reconcile is gone. I wish I could grieve. It just won’t come.”
“You should lay down,” Nick suggested.
She took his advice, and laid out on the bunk, but didn’t close her eyes. She laid on her side, her large, liquid eyes observing him as he took out his sidearm from his bag and gave it a quick check before tucking it under a throw pillow for easy access in the event it was needed.
“You said I could ask another question when we were here,” Cassandra said after a while. The train hadn’t taken off yet but it was rumbling as it began to make preparations.
“I did,” Nick said. “Are you sure you want to ask?”
Maybe she wasn’t. She seemed to weigh out whether she wanted to or not. In the end, she decided she did. “Those people that you’ve killed. Were they bad people?”
“Judging good or evil isn’t my job or my place,” Nick said. “I don’t know if they were all bad. A lot of them were. Some of them… I can’t be sure.”
“Is that why you didn’t kill me?” She asked. “Because… I don’t know, you thought I was good?”
“I’ve removed a lot of darkness from the world,” Nick said slowly. “I’m not ashamed of how I did it. Maybe I’ve removed a lot of light and good as well. I didn’t always care. But you…” he paused when she raised her eyebrows and got a certain look on her face. One he wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage.
“What?” Cassandra urged.
At that moment, laying there like she was, her hair pooled around her head, her large eyes watchful and soft, she was beautiful. More than she had been before, somehow, as though a veil had been lifted and this was, now, the true extent of her light shining on him. It was almost uncomfortable, like he didn’t deserve to be in the same room with her.
“If I took you out of the world,” he said, “it might not matter how much bad I’d taken out of it. The scales would be unbalanced.”
Her expression became unreadable. In the next few moments, the train shuddered, and then lurched forward. It took the great leviathan a full ten minutes to get up to speed after it pulled out of the station. Once it had, Cassandra sat up and swung her legs off the edge of the bunk to look out the window at the world passing by. It changed gradually from the city, to the suburbs, to the industrial wastes that abutted the natural world, and then to the still-green land beyond, dotted with farms and empty pastures and stretches of forest.
Cassandra watched this transition quietly. When it all began to look more or less the same, she turned her attention back to Nick.
He pretended not to notice, lost in his own thoughts. There were plans that needed considering. Where he would go. What he would do for work. He had a decent nest egg set aside from everything else—Lester had almost certainly frozen the accounts he knew about by now, it was a trivial matter and they did it all the time to flush out difficult, wealthy targets—but it wouldn’t last forever. He’d have to figure out something to do.
His eyes flicked to Cassandra when he caught movement in the corner of his eye. He didn’t move until she’d gotten close to him, her hands on his thighs, her lip between her teeth as she leaned in to kiss him. Then, he laid his hand gently on hers. “Don’t,” he said. “You don’t need to.”
“I know I don’t need to,” she laughed. “I want to. I’m scared. I’ve been scared forever. But for the moment I feel almost safe and I want to make the most of it while I can.”
“Find someone after you get settled,” Nick told her. “You’ll be safe then.”
She sighed, and turned to sit on the bench seat next to him. “You… must think I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t like sex or something. Because I’m, what, religious? I’m not a nun. When a man saves your life it’s… honestly pretty hot. Can I, for an hour, have a little break from being a damsel in distress and just be a damsel who hasn’t had sex in almost a year and is in a cabin with a handsome man who, for once, is probably actually worth fucking?”
Nick snorted once, and the corner of his lips tugged up against his will.
When she saw that, Cassandra knew she’d won, and she smiled at her victory as she leaned toward him again, pressed herself against his chest and kissed him.
She was soft all over, and warm, and eager. When she slid off of him and unbuttoned his pants, her mouth was warm around his hard flesh and she took him with aching slowness as her fingers stroked his thighs and trailed over his stomach and chest. For the first time in ages, Nick groaned from pleasure while Cassandra sucked him, his head reeling, his vision blurring until she finally let him go and pulled him toward the bunk.
She took her shirt off, and unsnapped her bra, and both ended up on the floor next to his pants and shirt. When she laid down, Nick relieved her of her jeans and panties, spread her knees gently open, and made a long trail of kisses along her inner thigh until he reached the wet mound that was ready and waiting for him.
The taste of her made him suddenly ravenous, unlocking him from the inside, and he tugged her hips toward him and buried his mouth and tongue inside her. He found the little nub at the peak of her sex, peeking out of its hood shyly, and lapped at it while she danced under him. She squirmed and moaned under his treatment, every noise music in his ears, until she opted to cover her face with a pillow when people began to pass loudly in front of the sliding door to the little room.
When she couldn’t take anymore, maybe—he had found what made her body shudder and twitch and made her beg him to stop before he relented—she clawed at his scalp and shoulders until she dragged him to her and on top of her. She reached down to find him still hard, and guided him into her, pulling him roughly until he was inside her to the hilt and could feel her squeezing him inside.
It was different, somehow, than any time before. The way she moved, the way she kissed him as her hips swiveled and they matched one another for every stroke—the way she held him against her and whispered things in Colombian Spanish that he only understood snippets of.
Normally when he came, he saw it coming a mile off. This time, as Cassandra undulated beneath him, riding him from the bottom with her surprisingly powerful body, her soft inner walls gripping him and sucking each time she rolled her hips back or he pulled out, he was lost in the smell and feel of her and too far gone to realize it was approaching.
One moment his tongue was between her lips, and she was tense and muttering underneath him, the next her fingers dug into his shoulders and her wetness tightened and began to pulse around him. Cassandra’s moan started low, and strained, but as she came it gained in volume and pitch until Nick felt his own orgasm explode out of him, taking him so by surprise that he lost control momentarily, pounding into the warm, wet depths of her as he crushed her against him.
They lay there after for some time, sweaty and breathing hard. Once in a while Cassandra moved her hips, teasing his still-hard cock with squeezes and tiny stroking movements that made him grunt and sigh.
When it seemed clear that he wasn’t losing hardness anytime soon, she rolled him onto his back and took the ride again, this time on her own while Nick stared up at her in disbelief as she diligently wrenched another blinding orgasm out of him and brought herself to peak just moments after.
Only then did they collapse, and when they did, they slept.
They didn’t speak about it afterward, but it lingered between them. Nick had been with hundreds of women, but never longer than it took to get off and send them away. He’d been wary of forming any kind of attachment and he’d always been the pursuer. Having the tables turned felt…
It didn’t matter how it felt. He focused on the mission. They arrived in Pittsburgh, paid cash to take a cab to Newcastle, where he made the exchange with Pete Porter’s proxy, and then returned to the Pittsburgh train station. He gave Cassandra cash to buy another train ticket, enough to get her wherever she wanted to go.
When that was done, she found him again. “I got a ticket to—”
“Don’t,” Nick said. “I don’t need to know.”
“What if you need to find me?” She asked. “Or… if you just want to find me?”
Nick felt a tug at his heart, but shook his head. “They’ll forget about you after a while,” he said. “Lester isn’t likely to forget about me. I’ll be a loose string blowing in the wind for the rest of my life to him. If I come around, it’ll just put you in danger and risk everything that’s meant to keep you safe.”
She sighed, a deep and lonely sound, but bobbed her head in acknowledgment if not in agreement. “Of course,” she muttered. “Well… my train leaves in about fifteen minutes. I should… I should get on it if I’m going to.”
“Read over all your new documents,” Nick said. “Commit them to memory. You can’t slip up on any paperwork anywhere, ever.”