Page 124 of Dual
“They can’t come to the phone right now,” she says, tilting her head the other way. “They’re busy.”
“Busy with what?” I demand, though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
“Hiding.” The word is matter-of-fact, like she’s commenting on the color of the sky. “They don’t like what I do. It makes them queasy.” She examines her blood-stained fingernails with academic interest. “Funny how the mind works, isn’t it? They can watch movies about murder, read books about serial killers, but when I actually clean up our messes...” She shrugs. “Suddenly they’re delicate flowers.”
My stomach lurches. “What messes? What did you do?”
But she’s already moved on, her attention drifting likesmoke. “Now they’re arguing about you,” she says, pressing her ear toward her shoulder as if listening more closely. “Anna wants to come home. Mads says it’s too dangerous. They’re quite passionate about it, actually.”
“Tell them I’m coming to get them,” I say urgently, leaning closer to the screen. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll?—”
“No.” The word cuts through the air like a scalpel, sharp and final. Red’s empty eyes focus on me with laser intensity. “That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Too many people knowing where we are, what we’re doing. Too many loose ends.”
She reaches up and touches the blood on her cheek. “I don’t leave loose ends.”
The implication hits me like a physical blow. “How many?” I whisper.
“How many what?” she asks innocently, though that predatory smile never wavers.
“How many people did you kill?”
She considers this for a moment, head tilting as she counts silently. “Today? Or in general?”
My vision blurs at the edges. “Today?”
“Just the three,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “Though I suppose you could count the one from this morning as yesterday, technically. Time zones are tricky.”
Four people. In less than twenty-four hours.
“They were following us,” she continues conversationally. “Pavel’s cleanup crew. Very thorough, very professional. It’sactually quite flattering that he sent his A-team after little old us. But as of now, Pavel is permanently shut down.”
“Pavel?” The name is familiar, tickling the back of my memory.
“Oh yes, we go way back. He used to work for Daddy Dearest.” Her expression shifts, something darker and more personal flickering behind those empty eyes. “He never did learn proper manners.”
My mind races, trying to process what she’s telling me. Pavel. The Librarian’s organization. The world Mads came from, the one I’ve been willfully blind to because it was easier than facing the past.
My hand holding the phone shakes, and I fight to steady it even as my stomach churns.
“Tell me where you are,” I say again, more urgently this time. “We’ll run. We’ll hide together. I have resources?—”
“Oh, Donny,” she interrupts, and for just a moment, I hear something familiar in her voice. Not Mads, not Anna, but something that echoes them both. “You sweet, naive man. You still don’t understand, do you?”
She leans closer to the camera, close enough that I can see the flecks of blood in her eyelashes and the way it’s dried in the hollow of her throat.
“We can’t run from this. We can’t hide. Because it’s not about location—it’s about information. About what’s locked up in here.” She taps her temple with one blood-stained finger. “What Daddy taught us. What we know. What we’ve seen. There will always be someone else coming for us.”
Her head jerks again, and she frowns. “Anna’s crying,” she reports clinically. “She wants to go home. She wants her fairytale back.” The frown deepens. “Mads is telling her to shut up and be practical. They really should learn to get along better.”
“Let me talk to them,” I plead. “Please. Just for a minute.”
Red considers this, head tilting as she listens to her internal conversation. “They say no. They say seeing you will make them weak. Make them want things they can’t have.”
“They can have whatever they want,” I say desperately. “I’ll give them anything?—”
“What they want is for you to be safe,” Red interrupts. “What they want is for this nightmare to end without you getting hurt. What they want...” She pauses, and for the first time, something almost human flickers across her features. “What they want is impossible.”
I lean forward, gripping the phone so tightly I’m amazed it doesn’t crack. “Nothing’s impossible. We can figure this out together. The three of us—the, uh,fourof us, I mean. Whatever this is, we can handle it.”
