The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(125)

“She’s getting heavy, isn’t she?” Nikki said. “Put her down. Let her go. Let’s end this now. Nobody has to get hurt.”

“No,” he said. “You’re wrong.”

“I’ll stand here like this ’til hell freezes over,” Nikki told him. “Can you hold her that long? Come on. Put her down. We can all walk out of here.”

Come on, *, give me something to work with here, she thought. She had to keep him talking. The longer she kept him talking, the heavier that child was going to feel in his arms.

“What’s your name?” she asked, readjusting her grip on the Glock in her hands.

He laughed again, a sound full of nothing but sadness, and nodded toward Evi. “Ask her.”

Evi was sobbing quietly into her hands, rocking as she kneeled on the floor, just out of reach of her daughter.

Nikki could hear cars pulling up outside. There were no sirens, but someone was running lights. She could see the flash of blue, red, and white through the window.

“Put the child down,” she said softly. “Let’s end this.”

“Let’s,” he said, but he made no move to let Mia Burke go. Instead, he lowered himself and the child to the floor, putting her on her feet and kneeling behind her, the knife still pressed to her throat.

Strange knife, Nikki thought in the back of her mind. Exotic. It was long, maybe eighteen inches, and gently curved from end to end. The soft amber nightlight played over the surface of the blade. The handle was elaborately wrapped in some kind of fine blue cord.

“Give her the gun,” he said, nodding toward Evi.

“No. I can’t do that. You let the little girl go.”

“Give her the gun or I’ll kill this child right now.”

To prove his point, he cut an inch-long line on Mia Burke’s throat. Blood bloomed along the line and ran down the blade of the knife.

Evi screamed, “No!” as her child screamed and cried and called for her mother.

“Give her the gun!” the assailant shouted.

The telephone on the nightstand rang. Nikki thought she could hear the distant whop-whop-whop of helicopter blades beating the air.

“Give her the gun!”

Fuck. She had to buy them time.

Nikki took the Glock in her right hand and moved her arm to the side slowly as she stepped toward the bed.

“I’ll put it right here,” she said, placing the gun on the foot of the bed.

A thousand scenarios raced through her mind. The last thing she was supposed to do was surrender her weapon, but she couldn’t shoot him without endangering the child, and she couldn’t stand there and watch him slit Mia Burke’s throat.

“Get the gun, Evangeline,” he said. “Get it and bring it over here.”

Evi pushed herself to her feet. She was trembling visibly. She looked at Nikki with desperation in her eyes.

“Get the gun!” he shouted. “I’ll cut her again! I swear to God! I don’t care any more about this child than you ever cared about me.”

“Do what he says,” Nikki told her. “It’ll be all right.”

How could she even say something so stupid? What part of this was all right? But she kept her voice calm and strong.

“Do what he says.”

She watched Evi pick the gun up like it was a dead rat, distaste and fear twisting her face. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold on to it.

“Stay calm, Evi,” Nikki murmured to her. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay calm.”


*



EVI LOOKED AT THE GUN in her hands. Stay calm? Every cell in her body was trembling. She had never been so terrified in her life. It felt as if her nerves were wrapped around her throat, growing tighter and tighter. She could hardly breathe.

“Bring the gun over here,” he ordered.

She looked at the weapon in her hands, then at the stranger holding a knife to the throat of her daughter. Both of them her children. His father had died because of him. Now her daughter might die by his hand. None of it should have happened. Her mother shouldn’t have died of an overdose. She should never have put Evi in a position to be taken advantage of by a man she should have been able to trust. Ted Duffy shouldn’t have come to her room that night. Evi shouldn’t have leaned on him. So many decisions by so many people had brought them to this moment, and the result was this battered animal holding a knife to Mia’s throat, a madman with an agenda only he could understand.

Evi walked toward him, holding the gun in front of her like some kind of offering.

“Put it to my head,” he ordered.

“What?”

“Put it to my head,” he said again.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s time to close the circle, Jeager, Evangeline Grace,” he said. “I came here to close the circle. It started with you. It ends with you. I didn’t come here to kill you. I came here for you to kill me.”


*



SHE HAD BROUGHT HIM into the world. She would take him out of it. That was the circle, Charlie thought. She had given him to the cycle of madness that had been his family. He had ended their lives: The father who had tormented them, who would have disowned them. The mother who had never protected them, never nurtured them. Diana. He couldn’t leave her to self-destruct or to be destroyed by a man who only wanted to use her. Charlie had always loved her best. He had always protected her. He had been protecting her even as he cut her throat with the wakizashi he had taken from their father’s collection, the knife he now held to the throat of the child. A quick, painless death. A kiss to take her to the afterlife.