"If I were cleaning for Op Wraith, I"d probably paint over it," he said. "Just hose it down and leave it."
I stood up. My legs shook. Suddenly, I realized I was exhausted. We"d barely slept after escaping, and then we"d been up all night with Marcel. I was hungry too. I picked up the hose again. "You turn on the water for me?"
Griffin walked across the bas.e.m.e.nt, his footsteps echoing through the room. He turned on the hose.
I washed all the bleach and Comet down the drain. It was tinged with pink.
The water turned off. "That"s good."
I let the hose drop.
He was next to me again. He caressed my upper arm. "We need to get cleaned up."
I shut my eyes.
His hand found mine. "Come on." I let him lead me up the steps. When we got to the top, we closed the door on the bas.e.m.e.nt. I never went down there again.
I kept turning the water in the shower hotter. I felt like I couldn"t get it hot enough. I wanted it so hot that it would scald off a layer of my skin, so that I could emerge from beneath it clean and pure, and that everything else that had happened would wash down the drain with Marcel"s blood.
If Griffin didn"t like the temperature, he didn"t complain. We were in the shower together, but it wasn"t particularly s.e.xy. We were just scrubbing. Both of us. I think we each washed ourselves three times.
Eventually, the water went cold.
I turned off the shower.
"It was fun," I said, bent down, my hand still on the k.n.o.b to control the water pressure. I"d partic.i.p.ated in mutilating and torturing a man. I"d carved my name into his skin. I"d cut off pieces of his body. And it had been fun.
Griffin pulled the shower curtain aside. "Now you know what it"s like."
I straightened. "What it"s like?"
He stepped out of the shower. "Turning off."
Later, after raiding the stocked kitchen in Naomi"s house, we were lying on a bed in one of the bedrooms with the curtains drawn against the sunlight. I was too tired to breathe or move, but I couldn"t fall asleep. I kept shifting in bed, trying to get comfortable. Nothing worked.
Griffin"s voice, quiet and rumbling. "He deserved it, doll. He was a monster."
I rolled onto my back. "I know."
He sighed. "I"m sorry I ever got you into this."
I wrapped my arms around myself. "It doesn"t bother you?"
"What doesn"t bother me?"
"What we did to him," I said. "It was a little excessive, don"t you think?"
"No," he said. "You don"t know what he did to me. What he did to me was worse."
I knew that. And I didn"t feel bad for Marcel, not really. Griffin was right. He deserved it. But I was glad somewhere deep down that I"d never had a child. Because I wasn"t particularly sure that I would be a very good mother. Not if I was capable of this.
And Griffin didn"t even have any remorse?
Well, I guessed Griffin was used to it. I remembered that he"d tortured Knox. Conveniently, it wasn"t an aspect of his personality that I thought about very often.
He leaned over and kissed my forehead. "It will be easier tomorrow, doll. The day after that it will be even easier. At some point, you"ll hardly think about it at all."
I shut my eyes. Maybe that was what I was afraid of.
I awoke hours later to the sound of a woman"s voice.
Griffin was sitting straight up in bed. "Jolene French," he said, a horrified expression on his face.
I listened. It was French, all right. French was the psychologist from Op Wraith. "Where is her voice coming from?"
He pointed across the room to an open laptop, sitting on a card table.
"Come in, Marcel," French was saying. "I haven"t heard from you in days."
Griffin got out of bed and eased across the room to turn the laptop to face us.
French"s face filled the screen. Her eyes widened. "Griffin?"
"You know who I am?" said Griffin. We"d wiped French"s memory. She shouldn"t remember Griffin. She should have complete amnesia.
French laughed. "Oh, you thought you erased my memory, didn"t you? Is that Leigh in the background? Your father will be happy to know you"re all right. He"s been giving me fits about your safety."
"My father?" I got up, walking across the room to get closer to the laptop. "But I injected my father with-"
"Yes, well, honestly, did you really think that we"d work in a facility where we"d discovered a serum that made people invincible and not use it on ourselves? How stupid do you think we are?" French pursed her lips.
"You and my father both had the serum," I said. "It healed your memory wipe?"
"A pleasant surprise," said French. "Even Thorn didn"t know it would protect us."
"So, you and my father are working together?" I said. "Why?"
"I suppose Marcel"s dead," said French, looking vaguely disappointed. "Did you by any chance video tape yourself killing him, Griffin? I think watching that would be extraordinarily intriguing. Insight into your damaged psyche and all of that."
"You sent Marcel after me," said Griffin. "Why?"
French tapped her lip with one finger. "Let"s think about that, shall we, Griffin? I used to be a woman who was part of a very lucrative organization. I provided bullet-proof a.s.sa.s.sins to people who paid me a lot of money. But now all my a.s.sa.s.sins have been scattered far and wide. You ever think that might have annoyed me just a little bit?"
Griffin gritted his teeth. "Revenge? Really? What about Knox? He"s the one who actually took you down."
French smiled. "Oh, I have plans for Knox."
"No, you don"t," said Griffin. "You don"t, because I"m going to find you, and I"m going to kill you."
French"s laughter floated out of the computer. "Oh, Griffin, you"re so adorable when you"re angry."
Griffin slammed the laptop shut. "Motherf.u.c.ker," he muttered.
I swallowed. "I guess that"s what Wolfman meant when he said that Op Wraith moved."
"We"ve got to get out of here," Griffin said. "French knew where Marcel was. She knows where we are. I don"t know what kind of resources she"s got these days, but there could be a team headed here now."
That was fine with me. I had no desire to stay in this place for one second longer.
Griffin handed the laptop across the table in the booth to Sloane. "We haven"t opened it yet, but I was hoping you could work some magic there, maybe figure out where French is. I managed to get a screen capture of the video."
We were all in a diner. Griffin and I had been driving for hours to rendezvous with the twins. After talking to French, contacting them was the first thing that he did. He and I talked about bringing Knox in on it, but we decided against it. French wanted to hurt Knox, so maybe it was better that he stay in hiding with his daughter.
"Yeah, Sloane will get it," said Silas. "She"s a computer whiz."
Sloane opened the computer. "I"ll do my best."
"You"ll be happy to know that your mother is home from the hospital," said Silas. "We"ve been keeping our eyes on your family."
"Thanks for that," said Griffin. "I figured that once Marcel had me, he"d leave them alone."
Sloane tapped away at the keyboard. "I"m disabling the wireless so that French can"t track the computer." She stared at the screen for a second, clicked with her mouse, and then turned the picture toward us. "This the screen capture?"
French"s face was filling the screen again. She was frozen in mid laugh, and she looked demented.
Griffin nodded. "That"s it, all right. I know you can"t see much behind her, but it looks familiar to me."
Silas c.o.c.ked his head. "Yeah, you"re right. Those walls. I"ve seen that color paint before."
I raised my eyebrows. "It"s gray, right? There something special about it?" It looked nondescript to me.
Sloane turned the computer back to face her. "It"s the AXU."
Griffin"s eyes lit up. "You"re right, it is."
"AXU?" I said. "That some kind of weird university?"
"Auxiliary Unit," said Silas. "It was a backup station for Op Wraith. A place to evacuate to if stuff went wrong in the main facility."
"Guess we"re heading north, then," said Sloane.
"Is it outside of Boston too?" I asked.
"Nah, it"s out in the middle of nowhere in New York state," said Griffin. "All the a.s.sa.s.sins had to memorize the lat.i.tude and longitude coordinates in case something bad happened."
"Why do you think she"d go somewhere so completely obvious?" said Silas.
"She probably wants us to come," said Sloane. "She"s so arrogant, I bet she thinks she can reprogram all of us into being good little a.s.sa.s.sins again."
Griffin smiled tightly. "She"s got a surprise coming."
"So, spill," said Sloane from the driver"s seat of the car. "Something"s not right."
I turned away from the window. I"d been watching the headlights on the interstate, my mind blank. I wasn"t sure what she was talking about. "Everything"s fine."
She snorted. "Yeah, right. Look, if Griffin didn"t come around, maybe you should think of moving on. There are other men out there, you know."
We"d split up into two cars, ostensibly because it would be harder to track both of them. But I had a feeling it was mostly because no one liked sitting in the back seat. I"d volunteered to keep Sloane company since we hadn"t seen each other in weeks. I wasn"t avoiding Griffin. Not really. "Actually, we"re engaged," I said. "I think."
"Engaged?" she said. She glanced at me, grinning. "That"s good, right?"
I smiled. "Yeah, it"s awesome."
She faced forward again. "You"re not excited. And why don"t you have a ring?"
"Oh." I dug it out of my pocket. "I took it off. It was getting... messy, and then I just didn"t put it back on." Which didn"t mean anything. I slid the ring back on my finger. I"d scrubbed it as best I could. The red stone winked at me. Would I be able to tell if it still had Marcel"s blood on it?
"I can"t really see it, but it looks pretty," said Sloane. "So, you guys are back together. Really together?"
"Really together," I said. h.e.l.l, the couple who tortures together, stays together, right? I grimaced.
"So, then, what"s wrong?"
"Nothing," I said.
"Okay, then, don"t talk about it," she said. "You can let it fester and boil inside you and overtake everything. That"s cool with me."
I sighed. I toyed with my engagement ring. "You ever torture anyone, Sloane?"
She shot me a sharp glance. "Why would you ask that?"
I looked back out the window. "Just... have you?"
She hesitated. "Silas usually made me stay back. I"m a good sniper, and he liked to have me as backup. You know, out of sight. I didn"t do a lot of up close and personal stuff. But I watched Silas do it." Her voice had changed. It sounded farther away and higher pitched. She sounded younger and more vulnerable.
"Did Silas do it a lot?"
"Only when he had to," she said. "Op Wraith forced us to do stuff like that, you know. We didn"t have a choice."