Equal Parts (11 page)

Achilles didn’t meet the hug. Instead he clasped one of the outstretched hands and shook it politely. “Maxim,” he said with a very Achilles smile. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you caved to my offer.”

“And who’s this?” The sunglasses turned in my direction and I could
feel
eyes perusing every inch of me. “Sister, I hope.”

My face crinkled in repulsion and Achilles laughed, clapping a hand to my shoulder. “My date for the afternoon, actually. Said she wanted to go out for lunch, so here we are, right darling?”

“Well,” said Maxim, not giving me a chance to answer my ‘date’, “this is men’s business, babe. How about you go occupy yourself elsewhere, hmm?”

Achilles’s hand clamped down tighter, preventing me from moving, even if I wanted to. “She stays.” And that was it. No explanation given or needed.

Maxim stared at me for a long moment before taking up the single seat across from us. Achilles squeezed my shoulder and sat as well. It didn’t escape my notice how his other hand had gone to the weapon tucked into the back of his pants, nor how two beefy guys had appeared behind Maxim, watching our exchange carefully.

A small Chinese woman appeared a few moments later. “Ready to order yet?”

“The usual for me. Darling?” Achilles asked me.

“Uh…” Well, this was an unexpected turn. “Dumplings?”

“Get me some of that honey chicken you guys do. That’s some good shit.” Maxim sniffed and pushed his sunglasses up his nose, looking every bit the mentally unstable criminal that he probably was.

The woman disappeared and the silence that ensued was uneasy.

“So, what brought on the change of heart? Midlife crisis? Midnight epiphany?” Achilles stirred the drink in front of him – some kind of coffee in a whisky glass.

“Came into a fair bit of a money lately, decided it was time for a change of …
tastes
, if you catch my meaning.”

“I don’t, I’m afraid.”

Maxim grinned, and it showcased a set of entirely false teeth. Creepy, in someone relatively young. “You know as well as I do, Achilles – sometimes, you gotta hit hard to win big.” He took a swig of Achilles’s drink, who looked as though he’d predicted the move. “Found out about this bitch a while ago – some widow of an army prick, I dunno. Just moved to Carova, into this fucking mansion by the lake, I kid you not. No kids, so she’s just living off her dead husband’s pension or whatever it is they get.”

I didn’t like where this story was headed. As though Achilles could sense my distress, he leaned into me slightly, the pressure of his shoulder on mine weirdly comforting.

The food arrived, but Maxim wasn’t finished. As he wolfed down the honey-battered chicken in front of him with his fingers, he spat out, “I tell you, man, it was like she fucking
wanted
to get done. Left the front door unlocked and everything.”

The smell of the dumplings suddenly made me feel sick.

“So, what? You robbed the house?” Achilles asked, cutting his meal up into very equal portions across his plate.

Maxim’s grin widened. “Robbed it, took the fucking loads of cash in the safe – around a hundred grand, mind – then she comes home and finds me, starts getting all catty, throwing knives at me and shit. Fucking hot, though, dude.”

My hand unconsciously gripped the knife on the table before me. Achilles reached across to gently remove it from my grasp, eyes still on Maxim.

“Is that it?” Like me, Achilles must have sensed there was more to the story.

“Well, like I said, she was hot. Wasn’t like I was gonna leave without getting a piece for myself. Had to fucking slit her throat to keep her from screaming – and not in the good way.”

Bile rose in my throat, and I gulped down the glass of water in front of me to quell the sickness. Achilles’s shoulder dug further into mine, but it no longer helped. I wanted to kill this man. I wanted to stab him in the eye and watch the life bleed out of him.
This
was what evil was.
This
is what I knew to be villainy.

But Maxim just kept chewing that chicken, sucking on his fingers with a horrible smacking sound, as if what he’d said held no problems at all.

Achilles actually smirked, and the sight made me feel worse. “So, just to get this straight, you raped and murdered a war widow for a hundred grand?”

“Yeah. Plus more in the stuff I took, too.” He wiped his greasy fingers on his shirtfront. “But I happen to know she’s got a hundred more in her bank account – that’s where you come in.”

“Enlighten me.” I could hardly believe Achilles was sitting there,
listening
to this guy. I was one second away from ripping his throat out with my bare hands, and I was hardly a violent person.

“You help me get into her account, I’ll give you half. That’s the deal.”

My captor laughed in a wholly dry way. “Well, you’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. You got the bank details?”

Maxim passed over a piece of paper. “You agree to this and you won’t regret it, dude. We’d make a good team.”

“Hmm.” Achilles pocketed the paper, and a frown creased Maxim’s brow.

“So you’ll do it?” he asked.

“What do you think, darling? Sound like a good deal?” Achilles asked me, looking thoroughly bored.

I couldn’t even form words, I was so enraged and disgusted.

“My thoughts exactly.” Achilles turned back to a confused-looking Maxim and sighed. “This is where it gets awkward. You see, I like a challenge, Maxim. Give me a word puzzle or a so-called ‘impenetrable’ vault over a petty robbery or killing any day. Give me, say, Felicity here,” he gestured to me, “over someone as transparent and weak as, say, you.”

“I don’t –”

“I honestly thought you’d be a little more original. Less …
predictable
. You make yourself feel bigger by overpowering those weaker than you – you’re like the fat kid of the class who goes home and beats up a puppy. So. Damn.
Boring
.”

“You can’t –”

“But I gave you a chance anyway, because hey, you have money. Unfortunately, your money isn’t as clean as I’d like it to be. In fact, I’d say it’s downright filthy.” Achilles tossed his napkin onto his unfinished meal. “So here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to give you your just rewards, and you’re not going to do a thing about it.”

It was only then that I realized the distinct lack of the men who had been behind Maxim earlier. Where they had stood, two big bodies were now strewn across the floor, no blood or mess. Achilles’s men, however, stood right behind them.

Maxim noticed the corpses the same time I did. “You punkass kid!” His hands shot out to grab Achilles’s head, but before he even touched him, my nail-file was embedded in his neck.

And it was me who’d put it there.

“That’s to keep
you
from screaming, and not in a good way,” I snarled at him in a voice that didn’t sound at all like me. His fingers tore at the now-bloody file, trying to wrench it from his jugular, but Achilles pushed him back into his chair before he could do so.

“Now
we
,” Achilles said to Maxim, gesturing between himself and me, “
we
make a good team.” His eyes flashed to me. “Turn away, darling.”

“But I want to…”
Want to
what? Stay? Watch? Be a part of it? I knew what was coming, and the worst thing was, I didn’t see a thing wrong with it.

“
Turn away
,” he repeated. “No way I’m giving you nightmares.”

Too late for that. Maxim’s story had planted black, insidious seeds in my subconscious that I was sure would crop up in my dreams somehow.

But I did as Achilles asked anyway.

“You made an innocent person suffer,” I heard him say in a low, deadly voice. “Not only that, you have a history of depravity, not enough money to sway even the likes of me, ruined our meal, and upset Flick.” I flinched at the sound of my name. I didn’t want this man to know it, even if he was seconds away from death. I already felt tainted enough.

A horrible gargled sound came. Achilles laughed. “Too late,
dude
. But thanks for the money – I’ll take good care of it.”

A
thud
, then silence. Pure, sickening silence.

My breath felt so heavy in my lungs, like the air was turning to lead as I inhaled. I had just murdered someone. Even if I hadn’t struck the killing blow, I had still put the damning nail in Maxim’s coffin. My eyes were glued to the table in front of me, the spots of blood peppered along its white lace edging, the
perfectly cut
, untouched meal in front of Achilles. Such a casual thing in this otherwise macabre tableau.

Hands suddenly pried at my shoulders, turning me slightly, and my breath rushed out of me in what sounded pathetically like a whimper. “Come on, darling. Let’s get you home.”

Home
. Like I had a home to go to.

I kept my eyes firmly above all the bodies in the room, not even glancing in their direction as we headed out. Achilles exchanged a wad of cash and a quick conversation with the restaurant owner in the front while I was
herded outside into the crisp
afternoon air.

Nobody talked on the return journey. The two thugs sat in the front of the car, Achilles and I in the back. Eventually the blindfold was tied over my eyes again, and I didn’t bother protesting. There was a horrible, hollow feeling in my chest – I’d run out of sunshine, it seemed. No question as to why.

More hands guided me out of the car when it came to a halt, into a building, and the blindfold was taken off when we were in the staircase back at … wherever we were. When we reached Achilles’s quarters, the two thugs seemed to disappear, and Achilles led me straight to the bathroom.

“What are you…?” The question faded out when he shoved my hands under the running faucet and began to wash the blood from my skin. I hadn’t even realized it was there. Red was wedged under my fingernails, in the cracks of my palms.

“Needless to say, that’s not how it usually goes,” he told me in a strangely soft voice. “Most of the people I deal with aren’t so…”

“Sick?”

His lips quirked. “Yeah.”

Silence again. Good. Silence, I could deal with.

He pulled out a lemon body scrub and gently rubbed it around my fingers, making me suppress a laugh. “I didn’t think you were the type to exfoliate.”

His eyes shot to mine, trademark smirk returning. “How do you think this paint gets washed off? Magical face-washing elves?”

“Oh. Don’t you find it annoying, having to paint your face every day?” I knew I was pushing the envelope, but I didn’t care. It was about time I got
some
answers – if only to take my mind off recent events.

His shoulders heaved in a shrug. “Gets me attention.” He dried my freshly-clean hands with a towel. “Up for another movie?”

In two simple sentences, he’d given away a few vital parts of his personality: what he did, he did for attention; and when the going got tough, he turned to film. That would explain the massive collection of movies in the living area.
And
why he’d chosen to watch one last night with me instead of talking further about his rendezvous with that horrible orange girl.

It wasn’t until two days later that I found something that revealed even more to me about Achilles, tucked under a stack of paper on his chest-of-drawers. Something that made my heart both tighten and expand:

A receipt for a check already donated, made out anonymously, for the sum of a hundred thousand dollars, addressed to the War Widows Association.

Chapter Eight

Powers of Deduction

“What are you guys doing here?”

The two thugs from the other day stood in the living area when I emerged from the bathroom, three days after the Maxim incident. I had a feeling there was something weird about today, something I was supposed to remember. Someone’s birthday?

I looked at the clock, and suddenly realized the significance of the time – and why these two were standing in front of me. It had been on the news, all those days ago: 2 o’clock, at a wedding chapel in the city.

“We’re going to meet Finn, aren’t we?” I asked them, well aware I was right.

“Don’t make us take you there by force, honey,” said the biker one in a gruff voice.

I could have put up a fight, but I knew there were at least half a dozen other thugs out in the office, probably waiting to back these two up if need be.

So, like the idiot I was, I went with them. I didn’t even require bonds – I was compliant to the point of resembling a vegetable.

Once outside, it took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the blinding sunlight. Of course, it was only a matter of seconds before a blindfold blacked out my vision.

“I know where we’re going,” I told my guard. “You don’t have to blindfold me.”