Page 60 of Roma Queen
It’s always fuckingShelta, messing things up, causing chaos no matter where she goes. Ihateher. The lies; the deceit; the twisted, hateful acts: I hate all of it. But she gave me life, and I owe her a debt for that. The most basic debt there is. The right to exist.
Lazlo retches, coughing so hard that he heaves, and I lean down, wrapping my arm around this throat this time. It’s better this way. I can feel the give in his wind pipe as I begin to apply pressure, closing off his air supply all over again. “Where is she, Lazlo? What the fuck have you done with her?”
The piece of shit claws at my arm again, trying to prize me off him. Instead of answering the question, the psycholaughs. “Let…me go. Release me, or…she’s fucking…gone.”
A long second passes. Fuck. I should let Shelta pay for her sins. I should just snap the fucker’s neck and walk out of here with Sarah, then burn the guts of this evil place.
But I can’t.
I release him, shoving him to the floor. A panicked scramble follows, where Lazlo searches frantically for the gun I knocked from his hands. He doesn’t find it, though. It’s already pinned beneath the sole of my boot. I scoop it up, snap back the slide, and aim it at the back of Lazlo’s head…
…just as the room explodes with light.
It takes a full second to adjust to the intense brightness that floods the room. I shield my eyes, and there, standing at the foot of the ladder, is Zara. She’s paler than Shireen, her skin a ghostly white, eyes dark and tumultuous under the stark, brilliant white light blaring from a huge emergency light to her right. She glances around, taking stock of the nightmare she’s just stumbled into, and when her gaze alights on Lazlo, she freezes.
Suddenly, there’s a gun in her hand and she’s pointing it directly into the man’s face. “You?” she whispers. “How can it beyou?”
Twenty-Nine
ZARA
Archie saidthese exact same words when he stumbled into hisvardoand found me putting my socks on twenty-four hours ago. I steal them from him as I see the man kneeling at Pasha’s feet, hands splayed against the concrete as if he’s searching for a missing contact lens.
I’m transported back in time, to a church in New York.I’m pissed that my father’s made me come here and then abandoned me in a pew on my own. My friends are celebrating after our college graduation, partying like animals up in the Hamptons, and the very last place I want to be is here. The silence settles over me, and I eventually make my peace with my situation. And then there’s screaming, splintering the silence apart, and a man emerges out of the door that leads to the rectory.
He walks toward me down the aisle, rubbing his hands on the front of his pants, smearing the material with…smearing it withblood. He doesn’t even look at me. Not that I notice. I look at him, though. I see the deep-set lines on either side of his mouth. His almost jet-black, thick hair looks out of place on him. His shoulders are pulled back, his chest proud. His skin is sallow and waxy, and his sunken blue eyes are disturbingly void as he stares straight ahead to the church doors.
That very same man is staring up at me now, in the same void, vacant way as he sinks back onto his heels, his chest heaving, and a twisted smile contorts his features.
A priest explodes from the confessional. The woman he was hearing confession for screams as she tears past me toward my father, pleading to use his phone.
My brain shutters as I recall the next part—the medics arriving and carrying the mauled, broken, bloody body of the nun out from the rectory and down the church steps, loading her into the waiting ambulance.
The coppery tang of blood shoves its way up my nose as I aim the gun at the figure kneeling in front of Pasha.
“Hello, Sweetheart,” he says. “At last, here we are, face-to-face. Eye-to-eye.” He coughs, rubbing at the base of his neck. “I see you remember me, then?”
“You raped that woman. That nun. You nearly stabbed her to death.” The words sound alien to my ears. They feel disconnected, as if they aren’t even coming out of my own mouth.
The man—Lazlo, because it’s all so fuckingobviousnow—smiles in the most unnatural, freakish way; he makes my skin crawl. “I saw you sitting there so prettily in that church, and I thought to myself, this is kismet. A beautiful, red-haired angel, sitting there so peacefully, witness to my divine act. I thought you were a vision. But then you were in the paper. Zara Llewelyn, twenty-three, daughter to Stan Llewelyn, attorney at law, and I realized my mistake. You were just a woman with beautiful hair. You said terrible things about me in that newspaper, Zara. You called me some unkind names.”
Is...is he fuckingserious? I open my mouth, and then close it again, unsure how to react. “You…raped…a…nun,”I say, stressing each word. “That wasn’t a divine act. You almost killed her. Those were the actions of a fuckingmonster.”
A cruel grimace sweeps Lazlo’s smile aside, contorting his face and transforming him into some sort of dark, stunted gargoyle. “She was no nun,”he spits. “She was an imposter. She didn’t know the first thing about St. Luke’s. I’d never seen her there before. I knew every single last one of those bitches.”
“She was a novice,” I whisper. “She was young. She was on some sort of exchange from Canada.”
“Bullshit. Iknowwhat they told everyone, but she lied. She was pretending to be a holy sister but she fucked me with her eyes. Don’t you think I know a slut when I see one. She was just some two-bit whore, disrespecting the church, masquerading around in a habit. Well, I showed her something. I taught her a fucking lesson.”
“Him?He’sthe one you saw in the church?” Pasha’s voice cuts through the chaotic haze that’s clouding my mind, bringing everything into sharp, crystal clear focus. There’s blood on his hands and flecked up the side of his face. He looks storm-tossed, his hair wildly standing on end, his jacket pulled back, sliding down one arm. His eyes are more intense than I’ve ever seen them, burning into me, filled with heat and anger, surprise and worry.
“Yes,” I answer. “It was him. I never thought for one second—”
“You should never have given that police statement,” Lazlo says in a sing-song voice. “That was a bad idea. I’m not very good with computers, but Garrett, on the other hand…he’s quite spectacular. He hacked into the cop’s database and got your address. Watching you was easy after that. You fought with your parents every day of the week. Noise carries in a quiet building, you know. I heard you tell them you wanted to leave. I heard you tell them you wanted to move as far away as possible.
“It was simple, planting the seed in your mind to bring you here. A flyer addressed to you in your mailbox—'Come to Stunning Spokane!’” Lazlo begins to laugh, though he ends up coughing and hacking, groping at the base of his neck again. There’s a purple line beginning to form all the way around his throat. I can guess how he got such a bruise.
“I sent emails to your inbox with Spokane in the subject bar. I found your transcripts and applied to Gonzaga University’s Master’s program on your behalf. Everywhere you looked, you were being drawn here.”
