THREE
Evan
I slammed the door to the basement, taking the narrow, time-worn stairs up two at a time, my heels a frantic clicking sound, needing to get above-ground, needing air that wasn't stagnant, needing a couple minutes to pull it back together.
It wasn't that I had lost it in there.
Actually, I was pretty proud of how well I kept it together.
Kidnappings weren't exactly my forte.
The poisons? Well, I learned that at my daddy's knee. Twenty some-odd years of studying which ones did what. I was a walking encyclopedia of poisons. That being said, I hadn't been in the poisoning people field like my father was; I was just all about the facts.
I knew what I was doing, of course, but there were always factors that could screw up the outcomes. Like preexisting conditions, the level of panic, and therefore adrenaline the person might feel, sometimes it was even as simple as the type of food they did (or didn't) eat that day. The variables were what had my heart thundering in my chest from the moment of injection to seeing the effects finally starting wearing off in the basement.
Hitting the landing, I stormed right outside the side door, collapsing back onto the side of the building and taking a long, slow breath, deep enough for my chest to feel like it was burning.
I tried to tell myself that the hard part was over.
I mean, I had been watching him for weeks, hiding out in those godforsaken, bear-filled woods trying to figure out his moves, what might be the best time to take him down. Then I had had to do the bashing-of-the-head thing and the drugging thing. And then, as proven by the screaming ache in my arm muscles, the dragging of him into the woods where I had a vehicle parked. Then dragging him again out of the car and down the basement stairs.
But there was no convincing myself it was all downhill from here.
Because from here, I had to question him.
And then kill him.
So, yeah.
That was where I was at.
That was why my heart was as frantic as hummingbird's wings in my chest. That was why I had a cold sweat all over my body. That was why I needed to get away from the notorious Luce for a while.
I don't know what I had been expecting when I finally got a close look at him.
See, while I had been following him, he had this hardcore dedication to his black hoodies, with the hood almost always pulled up. I had only gotten small glimpses of his features. Not even enough to pick him up out of a lineup.
I had expected a face as ugly as his soul.
I guess it often never worked that way.
Most serial killers were good looking.
Luce was no exception.
He had dark hair, dark eyes, and this amazingly chiseled, sharp jawline, dark brows, a ton of lashes, and the slightest cleft in his chin.
What freaked me out most were those eyes, though. They were set deep and heavy-lidded, giving him an almost sleepy look, completely hiding the evil that lay underneath.
Body-wise, he wasn't a big guy. Tall? Sure. But he wasn't overly wide or muscular. In fact, he might have been called thin by some.
If he were anyone else, he would have been attractive.
Just my type, actually.
But that was obviously completely beyond the point.
The point was, things were finally in the works.
The plan had been in place for almost a year. I had worked out every possible little kink. I had plotted it to the most minute detail. I had made sure there was no chance of me getting caught, or him escaping. Both were equally important in my opinion. First, I was not the kind of woman who would do well in prison. I liked long showers, private bathroom visits, and very specific skincare products. Second, if he got free, I was pretty sure I was dead. There was nothing about Luce that said he was the kind of man to let people go.
If he set his sights on you, you no longer existed.
Case closed.
That was why I spent three months in a plumbing class, learning how to drop my own bathroom into a basement, so I didn't have to hire anyone who might think it was odd that I was putting in a prison-style toilet and sink combo in my basement. Then I spent a couple long, exhausting, sweat and blood-soaked weeks painstakingly installing the prison bars. I had actually broken a finger trying to get the cement dug up enough to sink in the bars, then re-cement it.
It had all been worth it when I grabbed a sledgehammer and went to town trying to make the bars budge... to no avail.
I had a steady prison just waiting for an inmate.
I pushed off the wall, and made my way back inside, walking through the garage which led to the basement, through the small, very stark white laundry room, then in through a door that led into the dining/ kitchen/ living space I had been calling home for the past ten months.
It didn't feel like home. I was maybe half-convinced it never would feel like home. But it was nothing to do with the house. I really liked it. It was small and secluded. There were warm, pale yellow walls, charmingly scuffed and worn hardwood floors, cabin-style cabinets in the kitchen, a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, and three bedrooms. Two of which were all but useless to me and, in fact, I hadn't actually stepped foot inside of either since I officially moved in.
I had spent hours looking for furniture that I thought would fit the space. There was a spacious off-white tufted headboard queen-sized bed in the master, along with white dressers, and a very pale robin's egg blue on the walls and my comforter. There was a small dark brown sectional in the living room with a wide glass-top display coffee table before it on top of a multi-color rug, facing the brick fireplace. There were three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves where I stored some books, but mostly just keepsakes from my travels.
It was the homiest home I had ever been in.
Therein, I guess, lay the problem.
I had never actually had a home before. Home, for me, had always been RVs or the backs of vans or tents in the woods. Home was dozens of countries I had visited, had immersed myself in all my life.
Hell, I had never actually slept in a real, stationary bed until I was seven years old when we stopped into the States for a brief visit, and stayed in a hotel since the RV was in the shop, and you generally weren't permitted to just pitch a tent anywhere you wanted in the US.
I hadn't been able to sleep.
I had taken my blanket and curled up on the floor instead.
For twenty-six of my twenty-seven years on the earth, I had been a nomad, a gypsy, a traveler. I had taken tokens when the vehicle we were in was getting too full, and shipped them to a friend of my father's in the States for safekeeping.
When I had shown up just shy of a year before, I had found a sprawling ranch in the south with its own food taking up almost three acres, and animals from horses, goats, and cows, to pigs, chickens, and rabbits taking up the rest of his twenty acres.
"Can't be trusting the government to be feeding us real food anymore," he had explained to my questioning look.
Having not spent more than a couple weeks of my life in the US all my life, I had no idea what he had meant, but had nodded as he led me to a huge barn where he stored all my mementos.
"Saved it all," he told me as he led me into a stall piled high with boxes. Not one had been opened. The first one I reached for was in handwriting from when I couldn't have been older than eight or nine.
He had saved it all too. Not one single item was missing. Items I had completely forgotten about, a tribal figurine of an owl from New Guinea, an intricate beadwork collar from Saraguro, a Dia de los Muertos skull from Mexico.
My entire life in boxes.
Taking them back to my new house and opening them had been a painful experience. Not because the memories were bad. Far from. But because they represented a part of my life that I could never have again. They represented a loss that cut so deeply that I was sure there would always be a hollow feeling inside.
But I had taken them, and the pain associated with them, and displayed them proudly on my shelves. They were a part of me. They were the endless memories that I thought about at night before the misery would set back in. They were pieces of the life I wanted again but knew I could never have.
The places I had walked before, the life I had led, it wasn't safe for me to try it alone. That reality was a bitter and metallic taste on my tongue. No matter how much scrubbing, it wouldn't go away. I had led such a carefree life, had enjoyed such freedom, that the prison that was living inside a female body that was weaker, that could be invaded, was absolutely bone-deep infuriating. I wouldn't trek the rainforest again. I wouldn't walk into tribal land without fear. I wouldn't be able to move through the most dangerous areas of Colombia or Mexico with the carefree ease of a woman flanked by a man so feared that no one would even think twice about staring at his daughter.
Until that man was taken away from her.
From me.
And for that, I would do whatever was necessary to exact vengeance.
On the man one floor below me who was, if he had even a single working brain cell in his head, drinking his body weight in water to try to get the last dregs of poison out of his body.
Yes, Luce No-last-name was going to pay.
Dearly.
An eye for an eye.
Or, a life for a life as it were.
"Diego, shush," I demanded half-heartedly, knowing it was a useless battle. Diego was all I had left of my father. He had outlived his owner. Hell, he could possibly even outlive me.
Diego was a thirty-inch-long blue-and-gold macaw who my father had owned since before I was born. He was messy, oftentimes aggressive, and his calls could be heard for miles in the wild. Which would tell you how loud he was inside the house. But he was family. He might give me splitting migraines several times a month, and maybe he chewed the edges of my coffee table, and used positively everywhere for a bathroom seeing as he had always been kept fully flighted, but I was, for all intents and purposes, used to it.
It had cost me a small fortune to smuggle him into the country. The laws regarding moving around exotic birds were absurd and unfounded, but wholly unavoidable. So, I had needed to employ and trust five different people with his wellbeing. I had spent two weeks with my heart in my throat waiting for him to finally cross into the US so I could look him over and settle him in.
"Yummy," he demanded back, about ten decibels higher than he had been when I shushed him in the first place.
Oh, the joys of bird ownership.
"Alright, alright," I said, reaching into the fridge for a bowl of fruit and veggies I had cut up for him, pouring it into a dish heavy enough for him to not be able to flip, and set it on the table. "Here's your food. Now, I need to feed the prisoner," I said, moving back to the fridge to throw together dinner.
I wanted him to suffer, sure.
I wanted him dead, eventually.
But until then, I needed to keep him well enough to get the information I wanted out of him.
Namely... why.
Why my father? Was he a good man? By general standards, maybe not. He had killed people. He had offered up information about dangerous poison to people who would use it to inflict pain on their enemies.
But he had standards.
He only killed men who had it coming, men who threatened him or me, men who he caught abusing animals in public forums, men who had tried to steal something of ours.
And he never operated on US soil.
So why would Luce have been after him?
Why had Luce sought him out when there were more deserving candidates much closer to home?
Questions that needed answers.
I would get them.
And to do that, I had to keep him fed, mostly-conscious, and relatively healthy.
I piled the beans, corn, rice, meat, and salsa onto the counter and set to cooking them up and rolling the burritos for both myself and the so-called vigilante in my basement. Maybe a part of me wanted to be petty and force-feed him something truly disgusting and borderline inedible. But the fact of the matter was, I was too lazy to cook twice. Plus, burritos would fit through the bars without me having to get too close to him and risk him yanking me against them and knocking me out.
It wasn't like that would do him any good. I wasn't an idiot; I didn't carry the keys on me. But still, I would prefer to avoid the massive headache it would cause.
I sat down beside Diego and ate my food, taking my time, trying not to rush the process. I would have plenty of time to spend with him. He wasn't going anywhere.
I got up, rolling his food in foil, then taking a deep breath before going back down the stairs.
"You know, you never did give me your name," he greeted me as soon as my foot hit the bottom landing.
"You can call me God," I offered as I walked toward the bars, finding him standing back from them several feet, head ducked to the side, watching me.
"Because you decide when I live or die," he assumed, looking down at the foil-wrapped cylinder as it rolled into his cell.
"Something like that," I agreed, lifting my chin.
Cool, collected, and detached.
That was how I wanted to present myself to him.
Let him believe I was some hired expert, just a cog in a wheel, that it was business.
If he knew how personal it was, he could use that against me. I didn't know how capable he was at things like emotional manipulation. In fact, I didn't really know much about him at all.
This was likely because no one seemed to know much about him.
There was a huge online fan club dedicated to him. Some insane chick wrote crazy, twisted, violent, and explicitly sexual erotica starring Luce.
Luce, the vigilante, was a shining star.
Luce, the man, was a complete enigma.
In fact, I could not find a trace of a man named Luce anywhere in New Jersey. Granted, cyber sleuthing was not my forte. In fact, very little was in the way of the internet. I had basic knowledge, but I spent most of my life off-the-grid in places that didn't even have wireless towers. So I wasn't even at the 'jealous ex-girlfriend notices her ex has a new girlfriend" stalker level. Social media as a whole was a complete enigma to me. Why does anyone care that you 'checked-in' at a local coffeeshop, or that you are going to such-and-such concert next month?
Banal drivel.
If people wanted to connect with other people, why didn't they go out and do it?
I digress.
Anyway, yeah, maybe Luce wasn't a complete ghost to a trained professional. But I was no trained professional. So, to me, he was a wild card. Maybe he was a master manipulator. Maybe he was just a violent asshole.
Who knew.
"I'm Luce," he offered after a long silence. "But you already know that," he said as he walked closer toward me, those dark eyes unreadable, but I got the distinct feeling that they were somehow reading me. He leaned down, picking up the food, then standing. "Poisons expert. That bone structure. Your skin tone. This food. The slightest hint of an accent. South American, right? But removed. You're US born, but traveled. Sizable scar on your left wrist, raised, though it's long healed. Burn, most likely. At least five years old. And your hands are covered in scratches. Cat, maybe. But no," he said, squinting. "Not with those crescent shapes. Bird, probably. Given the other hints and the size of that beak impression, I'm guessing a macaw. Not the most likely pet for a woman your age. So, willed to you?"
Jesus.
I literally didn't know his last name or where he was born, but he got a huge chunk of information about me just by being in my presence for a couple of minutes.
"Your middle finger didn't set right and, judging by the blood marks I see on the floor, it was broken when you were putting in the bars. That implies that you don't have a whole crew of men one floor above waiting to come down here and take me out if something happens to you. No, you're working all by yourself. You're either that good... or that stupid."
I wanted to believe I was that good. The longer I listened to him, though, the more I was starting to believe I was perhaps a lot more stupid than I had realized.
I had underestimated his intelligence at least. It went to follow that I maybe underestimated his strength as well. Especially because he was on the thin side. There were plenty of martial artists that appeared skinny but were just as lethal as their more sizable counterparts.
"Are you about through trying to read me, because none of that is going to get you out of here."
"But I'm right, aren't I?" he asked, smiling. Which was, well, completely inappropriate. And maybe a bit telling as well.
He cared more about the facts than his freedom.
"I mean, if you're keeping a macaw here, it's only a matter of time before I hear it and it confirms my suspicions. We have to be closing in on sundown, right?" he asked, unraveling the foil, and taking a healthy bite without even looking at what I made him. "He will be doing his evening calls soon."
God, he was good.
What person who didn't own a parrot knew things like that?
He was a dangerous kind of smart.
And knowing his body count, there was an emphasis on dangerous.
I had no idea how he killed. There was a signature online for all his kills, but there were no details about it. Was he a gun man? Knives? Bare hands?
There were some fresh cuts and bruises on his hands.
"Trying to imagine if I would use them around your throat if given the chance?" he asked, making my gaze shoot up to his face, watching as he brought the food up to take another bite. "To save you the trouble, I don't hurt women. But to save my own ass, I would choke you out to get free. No permanent damage. I wouldn't even need to bruise that pretty neck, doll face."
Whoa.
Okay.
There was not, was absolutely not a weird fluttering feeling between my thighs at that.
Because that would be insane. Certifiable.
And if maybe there was that sensation, it was likely because I hadn't gotten laid in well over a year and a half, when this whole charade started. Hell, this was probably the closest I had been to a man near my own age in that amount of time.
Just hormones.
Stupid animal instinct.
"You should be more worried about your own neck than mine," I offered as he finished up the burrito, and rolled the foil.
"I'm assuming you are going to want me to toss this back," he said, holding up the foil. "You know, because filed down for long enough, it makes a pretty decent weapon."
And I did not know that.
Damnit.
"Of course," I agreed. "Just go ahead and toss it out."
"What? You don't want to come in and... take it from me?" he asked. It was maybe meant to be threatening, but the smirk on his face completely undermined that.
And that move was, well, stupid. If I didn't demand the foil back, he could have done what he said he could; he could make a weapon. Or, he could have threatened to make a weapon which would, rightly, make me go in there and get it from him, giving him a chance to try to take me down.
Why turn that down?
I thought the more time with him I spent, the more answers I would get.
That was proving entirely untrue.
"What's the matter, God, I'm not what you thought I would be, huh?"
That was an understatement.
"I don't particularly care who you are as a person."
"Ah, but that was a lie," he said, looking delighted at the idea. "You're just disappointed because you can't peg me. Tell you what, sweets, I'm in a giving mood. Ask me anything you want," he said, holding his arms out. "I'm all yours."
I wanted to ease into it.
That was the plan.
I wanted to get, and keep, the upper hand.
I wanted to feel him out.
But there was no stopping it.
It burst out of me.
"Why did you kill my father?"