CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The man sat on a bench, coffee in hand, Panama hat shielding his face. He had a stunning view, despite it being devoid of natural beauty. He could see a police precinct, lines of parked vehicles, and an endless stream of cogs in the law enforcement machine coming and going.
Pennsylvania. Last time he’d been in the Keystone State, he’d been here to meet a terrorist cell known as the Jester Brotherhood. He’d consulted with the Brotherhood on how best to plant explosives inside the United Nations building, and it required three months of careful planning, undercover infiltration, and a decent amount of corruption. The latter was his area of expertise, and he’d managed to convince two officials to allow access to the below-ground level where the Brotherhood eventually laid the explosives.
But of course, he hadn’t revealed the Brotherhood’s true plans to these corrupt parties, and so the two unlucky officials happened to be inside the building when the blast went off. Three could keep a secret if two of them were dead, they said. Loose ends were always a risk, and like he learned from the magicians backs in his carnival days, every routine had to finish clean. No one should see your secret preparation and the messy aftermath should be tucked out of sight.
No glimpses. No slip-ups. No apparatus left on the table. Clean or nothing, that was the golden rule.
And that was why he’d made the short trip to Pennsylvania, because one of his loose ends was right here in front of him.
He’d been mistaken when he said there was no natural beauty in his vision. There was indeed, and it came in the form of two young, vibrant, pristine women. One was a tall blonde creature, golden and ravishing, like an angel who’d wandered into the wrong afterlife. The other was the girl he hadn’t stopped thinking about since he’d met her back in winter. When he’d first seen her through the bars of his prison cell, he’d felt something akin to lust, an alien sensation that he couldn’t quite comprehend. He’d always thought he was incapable of such an emotion, especially after all the years of trying, but Miss Dark had undoubtedly squeezed his cold dead heart and pumped his nervous system with fresh life.
The young girl was much different than her beaten, more seasoned partner, or at least he perceived them very differently. Mia Ripley was the woman who took years off his free life. The only woman who’d ever bested him. While Miss Ripley had a certain charm about her, not repulsive by any means, her sole existence shook him to his core. The fact he shared a universe with that woman angered him every second of his waking life, and he wouldn’t rest until Ripley was no more than a name etched in stone. While he was trapped in his underground cell in Maine State Prison, he had realized that his reason for being, his only reason to continue existing, was to outlive Mia Ripley. Once Ripley was confined underground, like she’d done to him for so many years, he’d grave rob her corpse and display it in his personal museum.
Then Miss Dark had wandered into his life, unaware of the horrors she’d willingly invited in. Miss Dark had been forged in Ripley’s image of course, but she bore none of Ripley’s unpleasant traits. Flexibility replaced stubbornness, curiosity replaced apathy. Miss Dark was Mia Ripley without the poison.
What happened to Mia Ripley, exactly? They’d battled two nights ago in the Deadlands of Washington, D.C., and both had sustained serious injuries. He’d managed to escape, fleeing into the night, fully believing that death was imminent. He’d left Ripley behind, ideally to die, but he refused to die alongside her. If they found their corpses together, his ghost could never rest.
However, his sources told him that Mia Ripley was alive, sitting somewhere in a D.C. hospital. Now that she was weak and vulnerable, a strike was imminent, but apparently the old agent was guarded like a king’s gold. His troops could easily breach the perimeter, but no one was going to kill her but him. That was his number one rule. He would be present when Ripley’s life came to an end, and God help anyone who tried to take that ultimate pleasure away from him.
But Miss Dark. What of her? What part did she play in this game?
His fondness for her had grown over the past few months. She was inquisitive, dedicated, troubled, but overall naïve. Every day, she chased down the world’s most dangerous offenders out of a futile longing to save innocent lives. That’s what she’d told him, anyway, but he knew that Miss Dark’s real motivation was to avenge the death of her poor father. Little did she know that even if she caught every single villain the universe had to offer, that trauma would still claw at her every single night. Her gullibility was almost charming, and for that reason, he found her a fascinating soul.
So when one of his sources in the FBI told him that Ella was in Pennsylvania, he had to come out here and see her again in the flesh. Besides, it was probably for the best he escaped D.C. for a while since, by now, every law enforcement in the city would be on his tail.
He’d been watching Miss Dark come and go all day now. Thanks to a backstreet doctor on his books, his injuries were on the mend. The poor girl. He couldn’t let her go on like this, living a lie, fighting demons, putting herself through the wars out of some misplaced sense of heroism. If only she saw the world through a real sage’s eyes, then she’d know that everything she was doing was all for nothing. She was killing herself to heal a world that was long beyond repair. It was best to let it go and resign yourself to the ground.
Pretty soon he’d be back to full health, and that’s when he’d express his love to Miss Dark once and for all.
And he’d do it in the purest, most passionate way of all.
By putting his hands around her neck and choking her until she passed out of existence. When they’d first met in his underground prison cell, Tobias Campbell had told Miss Dark that he was going to teach her the lessons of the world the hard way.
It was time for her to learn the hard way that, sometimes, death was better.