13

Russia Dock Woodland, London

A steady drizzle fell.

The air smelled like the color gray, like rock dust and damp and cold, like rejection.

Salem walked, her shoulders clenched up around her ears, hands shoved deep in her pockets, shivering. The Campus was four kilometers from the pub; Charlie had assured her of it on the ride over. She could walk four kilometers.

It was a chance to walk off the shame.

Ooh boy.

What was she, a horny teenager? Who lunges at a colleague outside a bar? Especially when he had something going on with Nina. The farther she walked from the Mayflower, the clearer that became. Little looks they’d tossed each other. How Stone had been mad when Salem had monopolized the conversation. She may not be good at reading people, but she wasn’t blind.

Well, there was one more reason to leave the FBI.

Quitting would mean living with her mother, and her mother’s disappointment that Salem hadn’t taken up the mantle, but Salem could survive that if it meant being safe at home with Bel and Mercy.

Mercy.

The mercy stone.

The mystery of it scraped at the edges of her attention like an annoying child.

She ignored it.

Her wet hair clung to her cheeks. She wished she had a cap to yank snug over her cherry ears, and mittens to tug onto her cold-swollen fingers. Could she see her breath? She stopped, swiveling to study her surroundings, a nudge of worry worming its way into her chest. She’d been walking for almost an hour. Her surroundings should look familiar by now as she neared the Campus. The streets had started out well-lit, crowded, but the farther from the river she walked, the sparser humanity became. She was the only person on her current street, the front of the businesses all leaden and wet, her world painted black and white by the predawn rain.

She mentally retraced her steps.

Dammit.

She’d covered at least two miles, but she hadn’t crossed the Thames, which was what she would need to do to reach the Campus. She must be walking the exact wrong direction. Her eyes burned, but she wouldn’t let the tears fall. She wouldn’t be warm anytime soon, and there was no use crying over it. She had no choice but walk back the way she’d came.

She’d left the B&C in Charlie’s car, but the reassuring weight of her phone pushed against her chest. She was tempted to pull it out and call a cab, but a woman staring at her phone in an isolated street in the middle of the night was a target. She’d get somewhere more populated, and then she’d call.

London was one of the world’s largest cities, she reassured herself. There were people around, even at two in the morning, even if she couldn’t see them. It couldn’t be more than forty-five minutes that she’d been out here, far less than that since she’d seen people. In fact, hadn’t she passed a quiet neighborhood bar several blocks back? She could tuck in, use her phone to call a cab, and be in her toasty bed inside of an hour.

Shoulders set, she started back down the street.

A dark alley was ahead and to her right. She hadn’t noticed it the first time she’d passed, but now that she realized she was lost, the whole world seemed a danger. The sliver of darkness, ink against charcoal, was narrow, maybe four feet across. Surely no one was hiding in there. Still, she stepped in the middle of the street to put distance between herself and the unknown.

She stumbled on the uneven terrain.

She was nearly abreast of the alley when she heard the whimper creep out of it.

Her skin rippled down her spine. She wanted to keep walking, no, she wanted to run, but what if someone was hurt?

“Hello?”

No answer.

“Is anybody in there?”

Still nothing. The whimper had stopped. She must have imagined it. Her hands felt powerless in her pockets, so she tugged them out despite the cold.

“Help.”

The baby hairs on her neck stood up. There was no mistaking the plea. It was soft, a breath formed around a word, and it had come from the alley.

She stepped toward it, reaching for her phone.

“Hold up, love.”

An average-sized man stepped out from the alley and into the dim ambient light of a London evening. He walked toward the center of the street, not glancing her direction. He wore his collar up, his trench coat open at the waist to reveal hands deep in his pants pockets. He approached close enough that she could smell his drugstore cologne, sweet and chemical-based. His slow pace, his refusal to look her way, was darkly soothing, hypnotizing, in the way it must be to encounter an apex predator. This will be over soon, his movements whispered.

When he stood dead center in the street, ten feet in front of her, a second man, this one a giant, loped out of the alley. She recognized him immediately as the ape who’d slammed into their table at the Mayflower, the one Salem had brought to his knees with her little Krav Maga move. He had more curiosity or less intelligence than the first man because he stared straight at her.

Now it was she who was whimpering.

A third man emerged from the shadows immediately behind the second, this one lean and dry-looking, his furtive movements reminding Salem of a lizard darting out from beneath a rock. He couldn’t decide who to look at, his eyes scurrying between the leader, the ape, and Salem. A dirty little smile flickered across his mouth.

A scream jerked up from Salem’s brainstem. Her prefrontal lobe immediately knocked it down, but not before it turned into a grunt that leaked out her mouth. Yelling would not help her now. She looked around for escape, for help, and saw neither. She would need to get herself out of here, and that didn’t seem possible. Her front jacket pocket held her single room key on its plastic band. Threaded through her fingers, it would be the weakest of weapons. She still clutched her phone. She was trembling too much to type, but she could yell a command for her cell to call 999, London’s version of 911, and hope the order got out and was answered before the men were on her.

The leader still hadn’t glanced her way, the ape couldn’t stop staring at her, and the third man kept playing eyeball ping pong.

Salem heard the clacking of castanets. With a start, she realized it was her teeth chattering. Or her bones. This fear was one that every girl, every woman had experienced—a metallic, powerless certainty that she was about to have something fundamental ripped from her. The helpless terror tasted like warm silver poured down her throat, slicing through her blood with the high-pitched wail of a funeral keen, finally settling in her bones, hard and inevitable.

She found herself growing impossibly tired. This was not a fight she could win.

The leader finally spoke, his eyes still pinned to the ground, hands deep in his pockets. His accent was surprisingly smooth, aristocratic. “Out late?”

The ape chuckled. “I think she is. You shouldn’t have touched me, lassie. Hurts a man to be shamed like that, yeah?”

The leaden torpor she felt was the wrong response, but she just wanted to sleep. A soft whooshing sound, almost like water, cut through the chilly air, growing steadily louder. She thought only she could hear it, but when the light changed at the far end of the street, she realized it was a car approaching. The three men stiffened. Salem felt hope for the first time since the men had appeared. If the vehicle drove this direction, she would run toward it, no matter how those men tried to stop her. She would yell at her phone as she ran.

Her pulse soared with hope.

The light grew brighter.

The car was driving this way.

Headlights played across the trees.

The sound of its engine, its tires crunching, grew louder. Salem imagined she could even hear the radio inside that toasty, safe car. Was it playing Bob Dylan?

The leader didn’t look toward the car. He studied his shoes.

It’s going to save me! Salem wanted to yell. She clenched her leg muscles, preparing to run. The front of the vehicle came into view. It was a dark, four-door sedan with only the driver. Those were the only details she could make out because it sped by, not even slowing for the intersection.

No!

All three men stared at Salem now, openly leering, as if the nearness of escape had been a twist they’d planned.

Salem’s bones turned soft. She knew she had strength in her arms, steel in her thighs, that she had to fight, always fight, but it would be no use, not with three against one.

“Who gets her first?” the third man asked.

“Can’t leave any evidence,” the leader said.

“All right, that,” the ape said, “we’ll wear our rain jackets, yeah?” He held out his hand toward Salem, rubbing his thumb against his pointer and middle finger. “Here, pussy, here here, little pussy. Come to daddy.”

The third man laughed, the sound high and creepy.

Salem’s right leg slid back to fighting position without consulting her brain. Muscle memory. The movement recalled more of her Quantico training. The parts that hurt in you, hurt in them, no matter how big they are: eyes, base of throat, genitals. That memory triggered an image of Bel showing her how to punch someone in the throat with her right hand and scoop their eyeballs out with her left, using the weight of one swinging arm as ballast for the other. Stay solid in your center and gouge the fuck out of them.

A heat low in her belly began to burn off the silver fear. She would lose this fight, but they would not walk away in the same shape they’d arrived. The heat was solidifying into a war cry that was pushing its way up her throat. She opened her mouth to release it when a projectile whizzed past her ear, halting the yell on her tongue.

The missile carved a tunnel through the air, tracking directly to the crotch of the third man, the one with the restless eyes of a lizard. It plunged into his groin with a juicy whisk, its hilt protruding, vibrating in the air like a curious antenna. The man fell to his knees groaning and then tumbled onto his side, his hands pawing at the knife like a fishing frog trying to work a hook out of its throat.

A woman stepped forward into Salem’s line of sight. Her thick black hair was piled on top of her head, clasped in a ponytail. She was strongly built, curvy on the bottom and lean above, just like Salem.

Salem recognized her as the same woman she’d locked eyes with in the bar. The shock of the situation jarred loose a memory of why she looked familiar back at the Mayflower: she had also crossed the street in front of Charlie’s car earlier today.

The dark-eyed woman had been following Salem.

And, apparently, was now rescuing her.

She held two more knives in her left hand.

She flicked one of them into her right hand and released it in a move so liquidly efficient, so coolly automatic, that it looked like a heartbeat. The blade hit the leader dead center in his stomach, angling down. His suave exterior fell away in the face of deep distress, his mysterious eyes gone wide and terrified. Gurgles escaped his mouth as he dropped.

The female knife-slinger stepped toward the second man, the ape from the bar, the one who moments earlier had been taunting Salem. His face had gone slack with fear.

She held up the third knife, her voice velvet. “I appreciate the invitation, daddy. You might not like what comes of it, though. See, this pussy has teeth.”