Page 40 of A Light in the Darkness
“She headbutted me,” Dom says, holding his bleeding nose. “Grabbed the gun I holstered and pointed it at someone.”
I look through the fray for whoever Kaia would have shot, and for who shot her. Harley and Michael are holding another woman down a few feet away, and all around us, everyone has scattered to make space. I turn my attention back to Kaia, seeking an explanation, but she’s faded too fast. Her lips move, but I can’t hear what she’s saying, so I drop my ear closer to her mouth, trying to hear her final words.
Her blood soaks the white shirt that I gave her and it’s splashed upon her lips, which just brush my ear as she makes out a single word.
Mistress.
“Mistress?” I ask, pulling away to see her face, checking for any signs that I heard her right. But her eyes are rolling back, losing life. When Victor slumps and takes his hand from her neck, realizing it’s too late to help her, I move forward, trying to shake her awake.
“Remy.” Dimitri says, placing a hand on my shoulder to give me pause long enough to realize there’s a plane full of people watching me with terror in their eyes. But they’re used to being scared. They can tolerate a moment more while I get to the bottom of what just happened.
I stand, closing the distance to where Harley and Michael are holding back a squirming woman, who looks positively desperate to get away from them. Her eyes go wide as she sees me approaching, and her fight doubles, desperate to get away from me.
“She shot her.” Harley says definitively, answering the question I didn’t have to ask. The little revolver on the floor next to her tells me all I need to know. It’s a gun much like the one Natalia tried to pull on Kent.
“Mistress?” I say, appraising her to see if she reacts to that.
“I think it was self-defense.” Michael says, looking bewildered at Harley and then me. “Right?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Kaia was going to shoot in self-defense. Wasn’t she,mistress?”
The woman snarls at me, muttering in a guttural foreign language. I pull her forward, my crew moving away to let me haul her up by a handful of her dirty hair. The blanket falls away from her, revealing her soft nude body, mostly unmarred, and not at all as sharp as most of the others.
“This is your mistress?” I ask, waiting for any of the stunned captives to make eye contact long enough to give me an answer. When no one does, I spin her around, making sure everyone gets a good look. “Is this one of your captors?”
“Yes.”
It’s a man who speaks up, his voice shaking like he’s afraid of what this woman will do to him for admitting that.
I scan the crowd, looking for someone else to confirm what I already know to be true. We only foundoneof the masters because we were foolishly looking for men. We didn’t anticipate one of them being a woman, and we didn’t anticipate one of them hiding among their prey and posing as their own victims.
My eyes fall on the girl I carried from the cells, who’s standing with a blanket wrapped around her that looks thick enough to make her lose balance. “She is one of them.” She confirms, her voice quiet but unwavering.
There’s an eruption of whispers that I don’t stop to listen to. Everyone parts ways as I drag the mistress through the plane, toward the raised cargo door. We’ve lifted off the ground a little and I can feel the climb as the pilot pushes us higher, eager to get us into open air and out of a war zone.
The mistress attempts to appeal to me, pleading in a fusion of languages, begging, her tears spilling down her face as she twists and turns in an attempt to free herself from me. But as I push her ahead of me, I see the tattoo… the same one Wes wears, the one my father had, the one tattooed on the back of my upper arm so I never have to look at it.
The bird with a crown poised in its talons.
She’s one of them.
Or, shewas.
Because she’s gone as soon as I heft her over the side of the door, throwing her out by her skinny neck.
We’re too high up to hear the sound she makes when she hits the ground. But I know it comes when her scream is abruptly cut off, and a moment later, Rich pulls the pin on the grenade.
Chapter twenty-five
Claire
I left the house when it was still dark out and was on the plane before the sun even rose. I left a note for Rhea on my bed, figuring I had hours until she woke and read it. And when she reads it, I’m hoping she doesn’t do anything rash.
Moose leaving so abruptly is the best thing that could have happened to me, given that I finally have an address from my mystery benefactor. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about him… or I guess, more appropriately, his sister.
I sent him a text before I turned my phone off, just asking him to let me know if everything is okay once he gets there. I’ll likely never even get an answer since I intentionally left that phone stashed in the seatback pocket of my first flight. I have the burner from Dimitri, which he gave me so that I wouldn’t be tracked, but I’m not putting it past him to have some sort of tag on that one, too. I also don’t trust myself to turn it on without calling Rhea to assure her I’m fine. Her number is the only one I have memorized; I could call her right now and make sure she isn’t pulling her hair out. I’m sure she’s already called four or five times—at least once for every hour she’s been awake.
But I have to do this for myself. I can’t move on when I’m still stuck in the past, even just a little. It’s why I’ve been hunting Wes down—or rather, why I’ve been paying someone to hunt Wes down for me.
