The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) Page 4

  The furnishings inside the home hadn’t been touched in decades. Creaky, battered floorboards broken by metal grates that spat dusty warm air from the ancient furnace, a sofa and chairs that belonged in a dumpster, stains on the walls, and a persistent odor of mildew—it was a disgusting, uncomfortable place made worse by the circumstances of Jill’s arrival.

  She put her laptop on the wobbly platform that served as the dining room table and opened the link Alvin sent her. Footage from the security cameras was rolling on her screen when Phillip and Helena came through the front door.

  “You’ve viewing it already?” Helena said. “Alvin told us everything. What have you seen?”

  Helena was wearing a black evening gown. Phillip was in a tux. While Jill had gone to a party for students after the Date Auction, they had gone to a gala for parents.

  “Was Melissa Mayhew at the gala?” Jill asked.

  “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.

  Chapter 4

  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.

  As she looked at him, she remembered a scene from her memory—a traitor to the clan, roasted on a spit in Daciana’s backyard.

  And look at me now, she thought. A new traitor to the clan, cooked in the oven like…

  It was a single line of flame, right through the center of the floor. That’s why Dominic looked like a shish kabob. His body lay over the centerline of the flame, which started above his skull and continued beyond the ashy remains of his feet.

  She reached down and wrapped her fingers around the metal grate beneath her. She saw the smoke coming from her hand, but she didn’t feel the pain. Her nerves were already dead. With what little strength she had left, she pulled.

  A square panel of the grate came loose. She couldn’t see underneath. Too hot. Too bright with flame. But she knew what was down there. The flames burned in a straight line under Dominic’s body because there was a single gaspipe running the length of the floor. This furnace had the same design as the oven her father bought from the Sears Roebuck catalog in 1933.

  She had a vision in her head of what she would do, but she had no idea what would happen when she did it. Her thought process was simple. This furnace is a contraption. Contraptions break if you hit them hard enough.

  She didn’t think about the gas running through the iron pipe below. She didn’t think
about the way hot air expanded, how the furnace was designed for a maximum air pressure.

  With a single downward thrust, she smashed the metal grate onto the iron pipe, and it cracked. Gas came pouring out like dragon’s breath, becoming an explosive fireball that lifted Renata from the ground ,threw her hard into the ceiling….

  And blasted the door open.

  Renata was a melting, oozy mess when she crawled out of there, but she made it, and when she collapsed on the floor outside, with smoke and fire pouring out of the open furnace behind her, she was seconds away from death.

  But the healing began right away.

  Dominic’s slave, a boy no more than fourteen, clearly not programmed for this, stood by and watched as Renata’s organs healed, her skin regrew, and her life force came back. She was naked when she stood up.

  The boy looked at her.

  “Go in and cook yourself, like you tried to cook me,” Renata commanded.

  Without a word, the boy walked past Renata and into the fire.

  Her own phone having turned to ash, she had to use the land line at the Farm to call Falkon.

  “Change of plans,” she said. “I won’t be leaving tonight.”

  “Your visit with Dominic took longer than expected?” Falkon said.

  “Yes. And he never did tell me where the file was.”

  “Ah well. I have no doubt you’ll find it eventually. Do you know where to look?”

  “There are a thousand slaves here,” Renata said. “I’m sure they’ll be happy to look around for us. I expect to be on a plane tomorrow with the file in-hand. You will have the girl waiting for me when I arrive.”

  “Yes. A crew is on the way to the airport now.”

  “And no one looks in her mind before I get there.”

  “You have my word, Renata. You will be the first to get a look at Nicky Bloom.”

  Chapter 5

  Nicky and Ryan sat together in a queen-sized bed at the back of a private jet. A movie blared on a 50-inch screen that hung on the opposite wall of the plane.