“Let’s go say ‘hello,’ shall we?” Ken didn’t wait; he strode out the door, heavy footsteps causing the boards beneath their feet to creak.
Rand threw on a T-shirt, wincing as the fabric scraped against his bullet wound. He’d just stepped out onto the boards that passed as a porch when he came to sudden halt.
The woman standing so still in front of them was hands down the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. By the gaping jaws of his men, they felt the same. The fact that she carried a nasty-looking crossbow detracted not a bit from her delicate Asian features and long, ebony hair. A strand lifted with the breeze and teased her cream-colored cheek.
Then she looked directly at Rand, and he lost his breath. Eyes the color of honey gazed back at him, curiosity, and something infinitely
old,
moved in their depths. She cocked a raven eyebrow, the only statement it appeared she would make.
“Who are you?” Ken asked in the silence of the dawn.
“I am no one,” she said and her voice made shivers crawl over Rand’s flesh. If her gaze was old, her voice was timeless. Deep but soft, feminine but strong, it was beautiful.
Even in the burgeoning light of the rising sun, Rand could see the glint of the metal tip on the arrow and the sleek black feathers at the other end. The bow itself was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Deep burgundy-colored wood honed and polished into sleek lines, it was a hunter’s dream.
Adam stepped toward her, and she turned faster than the eye could track, leveling her bow at the man as she widened her stance.
“But I will kill you and leave you to rot beneath the fog if you make a wrong move toward me,” she whispered.
It carried to Rand though, and he wanted to weep. Yet another of Joseph’s assassins. One more of Bullet’s sisters.
“Why are you here?” he asked, unable to keep the anger from his voice.
“Tell your man in the tree to my right that there has been a scope on him for nearly four hours. That he doesn’t feel it tells me he’s probably not a very good sniper, and one of my arrows would find his heart before he got off a shot anyway. Have him lower his weapon and get on the ground.”
No one moved.
“Now.” The command was layered violence coated with the softest velvet.
Ken and Rand nodded at the same time. The man shimmied down the tree and joined the rest of them.
“Who the fuck are you?” Adam asked with no small amount of irritation.
She lowered her weapon from the bead she had on him and looked away before she answered. “Are you deaf or stupid?”
“I am neither,” Adam growled. “Answer the fucking question.”
“She is Arrow,” Rand responded when she didn’t. “And if she is anything like Bullet, she’s a vicious bitch bent on revenge.”
Adam didn’t look away from the woman. The woman didn’t look away from Rand.
She bowed her head once only and said, “I had wondered if she succumbed to a weak one.”
Rand’s vision swam, bitter acid coating his tongue. His head ached and he needed to sit down. “I don’t have time for your fucking word games. You’re all the same. I’ll ask once more, and then my men can do whatever the fuck they want to you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re seriously outnumbered.”
She smiled then, and it almost brought Rand to his knees. Her smile cut into him like Bullet’s had. It wasn’t that it was a mockery—no, it was more an opening into a cold, bleak soul.
“If my sisters and I played the number game, we would never win. But where there is training there is no play. And by the mark on your head, it seems that you’ve encountered this strength already.”
“Get her gone,” Rand said to Ken, and made to step back into the cabin.
He would go home and regroup. Find a way to kill all their asses once his head didn’t hurt so badly.
“You would turn your back on the one who saved you and your men? Perhaps you are weak, maybe selfish, and driven only by vengeance. While the latter is the mark of a warrior, the former are not acceptable in one she’d give her life for.” She paused, the effect rolling through him like a tsunami. What would she say next? Where was she going with this?
“Tell me, Rand Beckett, are you a good man? Are you worthy of Gretchen Dearborn’s life?”
Rand hissed in a breath, sure she’d drawn blood with her words.
“He wouldn’t kill his greatest creation.” He was so sure of himself in that moment, he could taste the truth of this words.
Then she made him swallow them.
“He’ll not only kill her, he’ll do so in such a way it will destroy us all. Did you think you could play with the devil and not get burned, Mr. Beckett?” She sneered, and then her laughter rang out loud, painful. Birds took flight in the canopy. It seemed the sun shrank back from her rage. “She’s even now being dragged through mud, bent at odd angles, silent still in the face of her death.”
“You shut the fuck up!” Rand screamed, and then he was off the porch in her face as he towered over her.
Adam stepped forward, but Rand ignored him. Arrow notched her chin in defiance, fury pouring off her in waves of aggression.
“She will not break!” Arrow yelled into his face. Then she visibly calmed herself. “So she must bend.”
Rand took a step back as the tip of her arrow found a resting spot over his heart.
“Do it.” He cocked his head and wondered if she would. “There’s nothing there. She took what was left when she shot me.”
She pushed on the arrow and he felt the tip prick his flesh through the T-shirt. These women did not play, but her words rang in his head, over and over, a loop that refused to be quieted.
“She will not break! She will not break! She will not break!”
“
Kanojo wa anata kara no orokana o shiri o nani mo uketoranakatta,”
she hissed.
“Speak English, goddamn it!” he roared in her face.
“She took nothing from you, stupid ass!” Farther the tip embedded into his flesh. He would have hissed, but it was a minor pain compared to his heart.
“She fucking shot me,” he snarled.
“You are a broken record,” she returned as she shook her head, never relinquishing the pressure on the arrow. “We have heard you say those words many times over the past two days. You are a stupid, stupid man.”
Her eyes blanked then, and she stepped back from him.
For a moment he felt bereft. As if when she removed the arrow tip from his flesh she took his last link with Bullet.
She turned in a circle, her audacity at presenting her back to him speaking louder than words. These women truly feared nothing.
“Are none of you good men? Will none of you stand for the one who saved your lives? Will none of you defend her?” Her voice carried through the small clearing and into the trees beyond.
“I will,” Dmitry said, and stepped forward.
“I will,” Raines chimed in, and he too stepped forward.
Rand looked around, and amazement pierced him as Ken stepped off the porch and forward. “I will,” he said in a strong voice.
Rand shook his head.
“She gave everything of value to Joseph Bombardier to save your life and the lives of these men with you. We warned her that you would be her death, and she refused to listen. She’s always refused to listen. Tell me, Mr. Beckett, did you know that she went rogue long before Seattle? We knew the moment she passed on your assassination, you would be her downfall.” She clicked her teeth together, and Rand had the impression of a mama bear preparing to attack. “And now here we are.” She lifted her hands and turned around again. “Back where it all began for us, but you are here too, and you will not help her.”
Rand couldn’t move. Her words skewered his soul to that spot.
“Bullet will die in the same water pit she was created in. She will find it fitting.” She sighed deeply and began walking to the edge of the forest that surrounded them.
She’d almost disappeared from his sight before the words were ripped out of him. “Why will you not go after her? Why will you not save your sister?”
Arrow stopped, and her spine went ramrod straight. She may have shuddered, but Rand wasn’t sure. She didn’t turn, but called out loud enough they could all hear.
“We all knew the risks. Bullet isn’t afraid of death, and she knows we will return for her in the after.”
“What is the after?”
She did turn then and Rand clenched his hands and locked his knees. He would not go after Bullet. He would not.
“We do not know what the after is but we know it is there,” she pointed up, “in the blue, blue sky. We will see her again.”
She disappeared into the mist, and Rand was left with a gaping hole in his soul. The fear and rage crept up in force, smothering him, choking him, and refusing to let him breathe. He had to move. He had to find her.
His head pounded, but he took off running in the direction Arrow had departed. Ken called after him, but Rand ignored him. He reached the edge of the fog and didn’t see her, but found a piece of paper stuck to a tree with her arrow.
He gently pulled it from the tree and rubbed his chest. Printed neatly on the plain paper were a set of directions into Joseph Bombardier’s compound. Near the center, X marking the spot, was Bullet’s water pit.
Goddamn
.
Rand breathed out raggedly. “We have to get to her.”
“But she shot you in the fucking head,” Ken reminded him ruefully.
Rand shook his head, despair nearly driving him to his knees. He may be too late.
“We leave in the next hour.”
Ken clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed. Rand felt the other man’s strength and support. He didn’t question it, and there’d be time to do so later. For now, he’d take what he could get.
“I was going whether you left with me or not,” Ken said with a small smile.
Startled, Rand glanced up. “Why’s that?”
“She is a killer, but even killers deserve a chance to live,” Ken replied and turned away.
Rand accepted the words for what they were. Apology, acceptance, and decree, the words were a promise.
He took another deep breath, tried to push away the nausea, and focused on one thing as he headed to the cabin to change and meet up with the others.
He focused on Gretchen.
Time passed slowly as Bullet waited for death. It had knocked on the door of her heart earlier, and she’d denied it entrance. But she was weakened beyond measure, and there would be no more denying it if she couldn’t get out of the pit.
Joseph had brought her closer than this before. In the Silent Time, she had stopped breathing once, but her mind had fired one last salvo and demanded she live for the sake of retribution. Now there was nothing to live for. Retribution was as cold as the water she couldn’t draw herself out of, and the fire that had once burned inside of Bullet raged no more.
Indigo eyes taunted her when she closed her own, so she tried to never shut them. It was growing harder and harder, lethargy blanketing her muscles and cramping her stomach. Yes, she was close now.
Joseph had laughed when he’d discovered Rand Beckett hadn’t died, and then he’d had more than twenty men take her into the Punishment Room. It had taken that many to overwhelm her, and then they’d only done so because one of them had shot her with a tranquilizer from across the room. Located beneath the shed where the young ones were held, it was in the Punishment Room she’d endured more than two days of constant mental and physical abuse.
The physical could not break her. They punched, kicked, cut, and burnt several places on her body. They’d even cut her hair from her head with a rusty knife that had bit deep into her scalp. Then they’d gotten really nasty, but she’d not even made a sound when they’d snapped her left arm. She had fought, but not uttered even a tiny cry. Pain was her friend. It had caressed and loved her through its virulent tides. She’d welcomed it. It let her know she still lived.
The mental torture had been . . . difficult. They’d taunted her with the young ones, making them suffer as Bullet watched. She’d memorized every face of the ones who had put their hands on the babies. She may not be able to enact vengeance in this life, but in the next those men would be hers. She’d rip their throats out as soon as they passed over. She’d be waiting on each and every one of them.
After long hours spent listening to the children sob and beg for mercy, Bullet had been subjected to the leers of other Collective members. Naked, bruised from head to toe, bleeding with her forearm bent at an odd angle, she’d been carried to the main house and placed on display in the middle of the opulent foyer. Occasionally, someone had ventured too close, and though she’d been tied to a chair, she’d thrashed around like a wild thing, cackling madly, spewing spittle and blood from between her cracked lips.
Fear had shone in their greedy, evil eyes like a bonfire. Bullet had reveled in it and hoped more would come see the assassin who had dared betray Joseph Bombardier and The Collective. Through it all, the black-eyed man watched her. Joseph never left.
And she was not afraid.
The sound of a bird squawking in the night drew attention away from her memories of the last days. Odd, that sound, this late at night. Perhaps a mountain cat had triggered the bird’s alarm call. Whatever the case, her mind moved too sluggishly to contemplate. She was struggling to stay awake, knowing that warmth would bathe her once she closed her eyes.
The pit was the same as it had always been. Six feet deep, it resembled a square grave and the thought pulled a laugh from her chest. One step closer. They wouldn’t have to move her, simply shovel the dirt on top of her.
She had known the moment she’d felt Rand Beckett’s lips on hers in the icy Pacific that this was a probable outcome. She would never be able to live should he die. And now she would give her life for him.
I will not break.
She raised her head and stared up at the pitch black sky pocked with twinkling silver stars. It wasn’t the blue-blue, but perhaps blue bled to black. The air was mild, even though wind whipped and scattered detritus above her. Sometimes it would rain down leaves into her pit, but not many. Even the wind knew not to enter this place of death.