THE RENTAL CAR sped down the country road, frequent potholes jarring Dess and me in the backseat. It was obvious not many people drove down this way, which made sense if the Maliks had set up some kind of torture home out here.
As soon as Dess had come rushing back to report on her conversations with the Hunter and her brother, Blaze had identified the only Eckleberry Lane remotely in the vicinity. From there, it’d taken a matter of minutes for him to skim through satellite footage and identify a house just off it with a footprint and roof that appeared to match the Maliks’ photograph.
With the threat to Garrison in mind and the knowledge that Dess’s brother could alert the rest of the family to her likely arrival, we’d jumped into the car without much preamble—though of course we’d paused long enough to grab some necessary equipment. Dess and I were quickly and efficiently loading up the assortment of guns we might need to bring to bear. I had my usual knife strapped to my hip, and I knew Dess had at least a couple of blades concealed on her body.
If our brother-at-arms was hidden away on that property, there was no way in hell we weren’t bringing him back, no matter how many bodies we had to drop along the way.
Julius jerked on the wheel and swerved around a turn, and Dess swayed with the movement. My hand instinctively rose to her back, but she continued loading one of the semi-automatics, hardly even seeming to notice the movements of the car or her own body. She was so far in her own head that I wondered if any of us could really get through to her.
Garrison was usually the one who could break her hard exterior, even if sometimes he did it by heckling her until he got a rise. I had no idea what to say. Out of all of us, I was the worst choice as an emotional support guide. I barely knew how to feel my own emotions, as few of them as I noticed having at all.
“I’m going to kill all of them,” she murmured as she set the last gun atop the pile between our seats. She paused for a second, her hands flexing, and reached for one of the earlier ones to give it a brisk cleaning.
“We’ll kill them together,” I replied firmly. It shouldn’t need to be said that I’d have her back—that all three of us would. These people were worth nothing to me after what they’d done to our crew and to her. Seeing them dead would bring me a shitload of satisfaction.
That emotion I’d definitely feel when it came.
Blaze let out a triumphant sound in the front passenger seat where he’d still been hammering away on his laptop. Both of our heads jerked in his direction.
“I’ve got it. Fucking finally!” he crowed, and swiveled for a second to catch our eyes. “It was the parents, not the kids. That’s what threw me for so long.”
“The parents what?” Julius said gruffly. “Why don’t you back up a bit for those of us who weren’t code-breaking alongside you.”
Blaze blinked at him as if it hadn’t occurred to him that we couldn’t read what was going on in that restless brain of his and then launched into an energetic explanation. “The code in the documents the Maliks have in Damien’s office and their secret basement room. I suspected they had something to do with the murdered kids, and I was right. But I was expecting the symbols to match up with the kids’ names, and that was a dead end. I finally realized there’s a parent named for each date instead.”
Dess leaned forward in her seat, the weapons momentarily forgotten. “What do you mean?”
Blaze held out his laptop so we could see it from the backseat. He zoomed in on part of one of the parchments and ran his finger along a line of data that still looked like scribbles to me. “The part on the right is a full date. This one is May 27th, 2019. The name next to it is Harvey Little. He’s the father of one of the kids in those pictures that I found a police report on.”
I frowned. “Why would they have listed one of the parents when it’s the kids who were murdered?”
“I’m not sure,” Blaze said. “I have the computer automatically translating the rest of the entries now. I’ll look up the other names and see what I can make of them.”
We waited in tense silence while he tapped away, the rumble of the car’s engine filling the cramped space. Dess didn’t tear her eyes away from the back of Blaze’s head. He sucked a breath slowly through his teeth, tapped some more, and then let out a thoughtful noise.
“What?” Julius prodded.
“I’m finding a bit of a common theme,” Blaze said. “Some of these people appear to be ordinary citizens, but at least half of them so far have had criminal records. Significant ones. Armed robbery, extortion, multiple counts of assault, that kind of thing.”
“Oh,” Dess said, that single syllable so pained that my gaze shot straight to her. She’d turned to stare out the window now, her face pinched with tension, her jaw tight.
I wished I could peek past her guarded expression into her head, but she made it so difficult to see anything that she didn’t want to show us. It’d been obvious before that she was unsettled by all the information we’d been uncovering related to the Maliks, though. The fact that she was withdrawing even more meant she was under increasing strain.
The only way she knew to survive was by hiding herself.
Finally, she glanced at the rest of us again. “That’s the missing piece. The motive. They’re killing the children of criminals. I’d be willing to bet that even the ones you didn’t turn up a record for, the Maliks found out they were involved in some illegal stuff. I guess, in their eyes, murdering their kids must be some kind of punishment or revenge, or balancing the scales—an eye for an eye…” She shuddered. “Or maybe they think the kids will turn out the same as their parents and that it’s better to cut it off at the root. I could believe it from the way they’ve talked.”
Blaze let out a low whistle. “That’s fucking psychotic.”
“It’s sick,” Dess spat out. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “They’re sick.”
And they were her family by blood. The more we learned about them, the more this had to hurt her. The cuts from this revelation, I realized, would go deep and never completely fade. She’d witnessed and dealt out a lot of violence in her time, but clearly nothing on this level.
Maybe the household had done her a disservice in more ways than one by sending her after businessmen and politicians rather than criminals. She wasn’t totally prepared for how depraved the worst of society could get.
I wouldn’t deny that the Malik family was a rare breed, but it was one that I recognized. I’d met plenty of psychopaths who justified beating up on the most fragile members of society. Hell, I’d been raised by two of them.
Had my life gone a little differently, I could have become one of them.
Julius continued the drive without a comment, but I knew he was silently processing the information, marking it to his memory as he drove. Blaze was occupied with tracking down the other entries on the coded lists. I was the only one who could see how off-balance Dess looked. It didn’t fit the woman I knew at all.
How could I get her back on track?
“It’s awful, but we’ll put an end to it,” I told her in the most reassuring tone I could offer. “We’ll end them, and not one more kid will die at their hands.”
Dess completely buried her face in her hands and gave a shaky sigh. “It’s not just that. If it was just that, I wouldn’t feel like this.”
I hesitated and then forced myself to ask, “How are you feeling?”
Her shoulders drooped, but the muscles in her arms flexed at the same time. “It’s just—” She took a deep breath. “I hate them with everything in me. I hate that the Malik family has apparently been killing innocent children for a century, and I hate that they’ve gotten away with it. I hate that they’re sick and demented, and I want to kill them for taking Garrison from us.”
She stopped again, almost as if she was done speaking. I could tell she wasn’t really finished, though.
“But?” I prompted.
She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t want to be heard or if it was because she felt guilty saying whatever was about to leave her lips. I leaned forward, intent on hearing every word of it.
“I just found them,” she whispered. “I thought I’d get a chance at having an actual family, the way I was supposed to if the household hadn’t kidnapped me, and it almost happened. They welcomed me, they were so happy to have me back… and the whole time they were monsters. It’d give anyone whiplash, wouldn’t it?”
“Of course it would,” Julius said in an even voice.
I studied Dess’s face, sensing that she hadn’t quite finished spilling her guts. She looked too agonized still.
She dropped her hands into her lap and looked down at them. “They’re not that different from me. I go out and kill criminals, and say it’s fine because those people were hurting innocents. They’re killing in order to hurt criminals.”
“It isn’t the same,” I said with a rare surge of anger. “We attack the people who are the actual problem. Those kids couldn’t have done anything wrong. They torture and murder the innocents we would be protecting. It’s the opposite.”
“I know. It’s just… a lot to take in. And I have to deal with them as soon as possible, I have to look at them after everything…” She growled to herself.
If it’d been anyone else responsible for those deaths, I was sure she’d have been ready to mow them down without any hesitation. But she’d been drawn in by the dream of having a loving family, and it had to be hard not to want to try to put the pieces back together even after that dream was shattered. She’d finally found her relatives after more than twenty years, and now she had to kill them to stop something even more horrible from continuing.
For her not to feel conflicted about that, she’d have to be made of steel and stone. Like me.
I’d been out of my depth for this entire conversation, but suddenly it occurred to me that I might be the best person to tackle her current dilemma. It meant dredging up memories I preferred not to dwell on, let alone talk about, but for her, I could ignore the minor discomfort.
It was just the past. Julius already knew the basics. I didn’t mind if Blaze did too. They were my family now—the truest family I could ever want.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” I said.
Dess peered at me, knitting her brow, and waited.
I leaned back in my seat, holding her gaze. “My parents died when I was a toddler—not much older than you were when the household took you. I was sent to live with my maternal grandfather and his new wife. They were… not happy about being saddled with me. Or maybe they weren’t happy about much of anything.”
“They didn’t treat you well,” Dess filled in, and stiffened. “Your scars.”
A humorless chuckle fell from my lips. “Yes. I don’t think a day went by without them yelling at me and beating on me in some way—smacks and kicks from my grandfather, pinches and cigarette burns from his wife. Occasionally they went off in a wild enough rage that I ended up bleeding or with a broken bone. I’m probably lucky they didn’t kill me.”
Dess winced. “I’m so sorry.”
I shrugged. “It was a long time ago. But it’s shaped a lot of who I am today. They were most often set off by any sign of emotion—if I laughed at a funny TV show. If I cried over a bee sting. Shit like that would definitely mean a beat-down. So I learned not to show what I was feeling.” And after a while I’d stopped feeling much of anything in the first place.
But that wasn’t what I was telling Dess this story for. I pushed onward. “No matter what I did, they used me as a punching bag. The most I could control was just how bad it got. It took me a long time to realize that kind of treatment wasn’t normal. I couldn’t remember being ‘parented’ any other way. But even before I realized just how awful they were, I knew I hated it. As I got older, I threw myself into training—muscle-building, fighting techniques, weapons—anything I could find through videos on the internet or other means that gave me back a sense of power.”
“That makes sense,” Dess said quietly. The compassion shining in her eyes woke up a strange ache inside me that I didn’t know what to make of.
“But it wasn’t just to get a sense of control,” I said. “I wanted to know I was stronger than them, so that—when I was old enough that I didn’t need their support anymore, I paid them back for all the pain they’d inflicted on me for all those years, all at once. They got what they deserved, and that was the end of it.”
I didn’t have to spell out what I’d done any clearer than that. I could tell Dess caught my meaning.
I braced myself for shock or horror. I’d chosen to remove the bastards from my life—carefully enough that I’d never been pinned with the crime—and nothing would convince me that I hadn’t made the right decision. But that wouldn’t make it easy to see her recoil from me.
All she did was shake her head and reach out to squeeze my forearm. “I don’t blame you.”
Those four words cracked open a wall I hadn’t even known I had inside me. My breath came out in a rush. For a second, I was so overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sensations sweeping through me that I couldn’t even speak.
I groped for a steadier sense of calm so that I could finish what I’d meant to say to her. I hadn’t been looking for her sympathy. I wanted her to understand that I wouldn’t blame her either. No one in their right mind would.
“The point is,” I said, “family means nothing. You don’t choose who gives birth to you or who raises you, and sometimes they’re awful people. Sometimes they need to be taken down, just like any other random person might. You didn’t ask to have these pricks as your family, and you’ll be doing the whole world a service by taking them out of it. So feel whatever you feel, but don’t for one second think there’s anything wrong with you for doing what has to be done.”
Dess squared her shoulders. Her mouth still slanted at an uneasy angle, but her eyes held a resolve that hadn’t been there before. “Thank you. It helps knowing you’ve been there before in your own way.”
My lips formed a smile that didn’t often come naturally to them, warmth spreading through my chest despite the lingering awkwardness of my confession. I didn’t know what it meant, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was that I’d given everything I could to make sure this incredible woman made it through the next few hours unscathed.
