Hellbent (Orphan X #3)(43)

Her name had been Halya Bardak?i. She visited Candy in the late hours, her sweet, almond-shaped face a salve for the pain. She could have been fifteen or twenty—it was hard to tell with these too-attractive-for-their-age streetwalker types—but Candy had felt her death differently.

Like a part of herself had died in that alley, too.

A craven sentiment, unbefitting an Orphan.

She shuddered off the notion, turned her thoughts to stepping through her faux-Tuscan iron front door. She loved heading out into the community. She got so much attention here.

She stretched down and touched her toes, feeling the tight fabric cling to her, a second skin more beautiful than her own. Then she walked outside, putting on her best divorcée prance and twirling her tongue around the sharp point of the candy cane.

The entire street alerted to her presence. The snot-nosed fifteen-year-old across the street rode his hoverboard into a tree. Long-suffering Mr. Henley swung to chart Candy’s course to the driveway, watering no longer the begonias but his wife’s comfortable shoes.

Candy reached the RYNO one-wheel motorcycle she’d parked in the driveway. Before putting on the helmet, she took the candy cane’s length down her throat and held it there. She was good like that.

She straddled the electronic bike and motored down to the club. It took a bit of balance, but not as much as you’d think. It moved at the pace of a stroll, ten miles per hour.

Whereas all the other Orphans strove to blend in, Candy preferred to stand out. When people looked at her, they weren’t really seeing her. They were seeing their fantasy of her. At a moment’s notice, she could bind her chest, change her hair, alter her dress, and transform into someone else. And all those gawkers would realize—they’d never really seen her at all.

Right now she was interested in creating an alibi. Which meant being noticed.

At that she excelled.

She parked the RYNO at the country club between a yellow Ferrari and the tennis pro’s beleaguered Jetta. She unscrewed her head from the helmet and shook her honey locks free. The curve of the candy cane rested snug against her cheek. She produced the red-and-white-striped length from her throat and got back to sucking.

The towel boy did a double take, his jaw open in mid-chew, the dot of his gum glowing against perfect molars. An elderly foursome paused on the facing tennis court, the ball bouncing untouched between two of the partners. A trio of wattle-necked women sipping iced tea tsk-tsked to one another as Candy blew past.

Three seconds, eight eyewitness.

Not bad.

Candy entered the club, breezing by reception, and walked down a rubber-matted hall into the eucalyptus-scented women’s locker room. She locked herself in the spacious handicapped toilet stall.

A toilet stall that happened to have a window overlooking the back of the golf course’s little-used eighteenth hole.

She squirmed out the window, hit the grass silently. Moved twenty yards behind the building to a familiar white picket fence.

She hurdled it.

She walked up to the rear sliding door, her luscious lips making an O around the stalk of the candy cane.

Her target sat at a sun-drenched workstation off the kitchen. He was shirtless, horizontal parentheses of untanned skin delineating the paunch of his hairy belly.

She leaned toward the glass. “Knock-knock.”

She didn’t want to touch the pane and leave prints.

He caught sight of her and found his feet in a hurry, fumbling at the lock.

“Hi, hello, welcome,” he said. “Wow.”

She floated inside. “Wow yourself.”

She glanced at his workstation, where two monitors ran stock-price tickers, an endless stream of industry. A financial titan like him would have so, so many enemies, which meant so, so many convenient investigative trails.

“You’re renting the house on Black Mangrove Street,” he told her.

She leaned close. “You’ve been keeping tabs on me?”

He was sweating. She had that effect on men.

“Why are you in my backyard? I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m delighted, but…” He lost the thread of the sentence.

She had that effect, too.

She slid the candy cane out of her mouth. “It’s more private,” she said, shaping her lips around the word, making it something dirty.

He blinked several times rapidly. His own meaty lips twitched. He scratched at a shoulder. “Okay. Um. That’s nice. Private’s nice.”

A billion-dollar hedge-funder reduced to a teenager at a school mixer.

She placed a hand on his cheek, which was sticky with sweat. A breath shuddered out of him. He closed his eyes. She moved her hand up to his hair, grabbed his thinning curls, and tugged back his head.

He gave a little groan of pleasure.

Then she rammed the sharpened candy cane into his jugular.

The first gush painted the monitors. Arterial spurts were always mesmerizing. He went down fast, hand clamped to his neck, legs cycling on the cool tile floor. Then they stopped cycling.

She stared down at him. Dead people looked so common.

She removed her flask, poured hydrofluoric acid into the wound, the familiar scent rising as it ate through flesh. That would take care of any DNA from her saliva. She crossed to the kitchen sink, dropped the candy cane down the disposal, and ran it, pouring in a dose of hydrofluoric acid for good measure.