Montaine (19 page)

 The gathering silence
tore at my soul. A lump rose into my throat. Tears clouded my vision.

“I’m sorry.” His voice
was a strangled croak. He shook his head. “We’re finished, Kat.”

“You don’t mean that. I
know you don’t mean that.”

“Yes. I do.”

I backed away, my
shoulder crashing against a sharp metal corner that sank painfully into my
flesh. A choking sob escaped from my lips. I turned and fled from the closet,
blinded by a curtain of tears as I ran through the hallways, past a waiting
room filled with nervous patients and family members and out through a set of
automatic doors into the embrace of a warm summer night.

The air was tinged with
the salty taste of the sea. I wandered block after block, over broken pavements
and past scrawny sidewalk trees growing within rusted steel cages. The whipping
breeze dried my tears and flapped at the edges of my flared skirt. I headed
toward the water, defined at this distance only by an absence of light over its
black expanse. The streets were mostly empty at this hour, only the clip-clop
of a fast-moving set of heels or the rolling thump of a heavy footfall now and
again revealing the presence of another person. I closed my arms over my
stomach and hunched my shoulders against the wind, lost in my own thoughts.
Trent’s words echoed in my brain with a painful finality.

Within minutes, I stood
on a parapet facing the water, a few widely spaced street lamps illuminating
the path in snatches of overgrown weeds and lopsided paving stones. The briny
air was a tonic to my nerves. For the first time since I’d sprinted through the
hospital doors, I felt capable of assessing the situation with a cooler head
and a steadier pulse.

I did not believe that
Trent had tossed me aside easily or casually. I’d heard the anguish in his
voice. He knew this was wrong. We loved each other, and our love mattered more
than the judgment of the world, the schemes of a psychopath like Kill, or the
quest to avenge a past that could not be changed regardless of our wishes or
our efforts. Vengeance would not bring back Rosie. Vengeance would not raise
Oscar from that hospital bed.

A fog horn hooted in the
distance. The ghostly sound carried through the thick night air like a shout
muffled in cotton. The water slapped in a steady rhythm against the wooden legs
of the pier and the hillocks of banked earth. A seagull honked from his perch
atop a nearby lamppost, oblivious to the distresses of the human world. I was
utterly alone, but I felt a safety in the soothing lap of the waves and the
watchfulness of a gauzy, cloud-wrapped moon.

Maybe Trent was ready to
give up, but I most certainly wasn’t. We had been through so much in our short
time together. I was sure that we had entered each other’s lives for a reason. I
also wasn’t ready to sit back and let him ruin his life with this fight against
Peter. As long as Kill hovered in the wings, it would not be a fair fight. Kill
would not rest until he had destroyed Trent, body and soul. Peter was his
weapon to do so.

The breeze kicked up and swirled
around my head, whipping tendrils of hair across my eyes. I plucked them aside,
tucked them behind my ears, and stared out into the smooth abyss of the dark
water. I inhaled deeply, a set of firm resolutions crystallizing as the bracing
air entered my lungs. The water tumbled and spread below. The seagull honked
once more, as if in confirmation of my decisions.

I would defeat Kill. I
would stop this fight on Friday. And I would make Trent realize that our love
was stronger than anyone who tried to tear us apart.

The open garage doors of
the warehouse admitted a steady stream of vehicles into its blazing interior.
This fight was no secret. The entire world of underground MMA combat was on
hand to witness the battle of the year.

I waited on the dirty
gravel edge of the parking lot, my fingers wrapped around a section of chain
link fence. I checked the time on my phone. 9:37. The fight was scheduled to
begin at 10:00. I stuffed the phone back into the front pocket of my denim
shorts.

My stomach churned with
nerves as I thought of Trent inside that warehouse, pacing the edges of the
ring and preparing to take on that beast of a fighter. I had come here with no
definite plan of action, but merely a vague sense that I needed to reach Trent
and talk some sense into him before he made a terrible mistake that could not
be fixed. I unwound my fingers from the fence, squared my shoulders, and marched
toward the beckoning portal of lights and noise.

“Well, look who it is,”
said a familiar voice. I jumped with surprise and felt an approaching presence
to my rear, the measured steps of shoes on gravel and a coarse nasal breathing.
When I turned, Kill stood several feet away. He took one more step and stopped,
his head cocked to the side and a sarcastic smirk twisting his thin lips. “Have
you come here to save your lover boy? I think you’re a little too late, my
dear.”

“Stay away from me, Kill.
I’m warning you.” Despite the aggressiveness of my words, my heart flipped with
fear. My voice betrayed a thin tremble.

He tilted his head
backwards and laughed with a raucous shout. “You’re
warning
me? Come on,
Kat, we both know you can’t do shit. You’re just a useless…little…girl.”

With each word, he took one
step closer. I tried to back away in the direction of the warehouse, but the
heel of my canvas sneaker caught on a large rock. I stumbled and fell into the
dirt. My thighs scraped against sharp tones. My palms burned with fresh
scratches as I landed with a skittering slide. Kill was upon me in one long
stride. His cold and bony fingers wrapped around my arm like a steel vise,
crushing my flesh until I gasped in pain.

“Let me go.” I struggled
to free myself, my shoes kicking up bits of gravel and dust at his pant legs.
He held firm, leaning over me until our faces were only inches apart. With his
other hand, he reached into the waistband of his pants and pulled out a dark
object. A brief flash from the headlights of a turning car revealed a glint of
metal on the end of black barrel. Kill held a gun pointed straight into my
chest.

“No, my dear. You’re
coming with me.” His breath carried the sharp medicinal tang of hard liquor.
“You will not get in the way. You will not ruin my plans.”

He hauled me roughly to
my feet and dragged me farther into the shadows along the fence. The gun
remained lodge between my ribs. I wanted desperately to break away. I was
terrified that he would shoot if I raised a struggle. I stumbled again on the
gravel.  He hoisted me upright with a vicious tug. His nails cut into the skin
of my arm. We crossed a dirt pathway snaking around the warehouse and waded
through an overgrown field of spiny weeds that smacked at my bare legs like
knife blades.

As we moved forward,
another structure took shape in the darkness ahead. It was a brick building with
the appearance of having been long abandoned. Grass grew level with the narrow
boarded windows. The metal door was pocked with a layer of ancient rust. Every
fiber of my being told me not to go into that building, to kick and scream and
fight and do anything that I could to prevent Kill from dragging me inside. But
before I had a chance to react, he wrenched open the door with a grinding creak
of long-dormant hinges and tossed me onto a tile floor that was gritty with
decades of accumulated filth. The interior was pitch-black but for a weak shaft
of moonlight that peeked through a broken windowpane. In the pale light, I
spied an opening to my left, a corridor of some kind, and crawled toward it,
pressing my back against a greasy wall.

“Where are you, little
birdie?” Kill whistled a few cheerful notes. The outer door crashed shut with a
bone-shaking thud and a whoosh of stale air.

I knew that I had only
seconds before he found me. I fumbled for the phone in my pocket. Kill’s footsteps
approached. With each step, he tapped a heavy object – the gun, mostly likely –
onto the wall behind me. I opened the voice recorder on my phone, hit the red
button, and stuffed it back into my pocket just as a flashlight beam swung in
an arc along the opposite wall and landed on my exposed shin.

“Gotcha,” he said in the
playful tone one might use while playing hide and seek with a toddler. He
pulled me to my feet and thrust the gun into my side. “Join me for a date, Kat.
I have a lovely evening prepared for us. Everything that once belonged to Trent
will now belong to me.”

His words sent a cold
spike of fear into the pit of my stomach. “I won’t be yours, Kill. Never. I
won’t go any farther.”

I dug my heels into the
floor and angled my upper body toward the wall, trying to brace myself against
it. The gun poked painfully into my midsection with the jamming crack of a
splintered rib. Kill pushed me hard against the wall and loomed over me. He
pinned his hips against mine. With one hand, he twisted the gun into my
throbbing ribs. Tears clouded my vision. With the other, he grabbed the front
of my flimsy button-down shirt, taking a fistful of fabric and slithering one
cold finger under the lace edge of my bra. He bared his teeth and stroked my
cleavage in a sickeningly slow rhythm.

“You know, Kat, you’re
not the first girl to say that to me.” He breathed another hot cloud of bitter
alcohol into my face. “Rosie said the same thing.”

Terror gripped my throat.
I struggled to breath. “What do you mean?” I gasped between sharp stabs of pain
in my ribs.

Kill chuckled and shook
his head. “I think you know exactly what I mean.” He slammed my body against
the wall and thrust his hips against me, holding me in place as the toes of my
sneakers scratched at the filthy floor.

“You murdered Rosie,” I
said in shock. “It wasn’t Peter at all. It was you. All these years, and it was
you all along.”

“Bingo,” he said. “I
guess you’re not just a dumb bitch.” He snarled in a twisted grimace. His hand
inched lower between my breasts. “Rosie and I were meant to be together. She
just didn’t realize it. See, she planned to break up with Peter. She said that
she was really in love with Trent. She actually confided this shit to me. She
was supposed to be with
me
, not with Trent.” He slammed me against the wall
again for emphasis. “But she didn’t get it. She said she only liked me as a
friend. A fucking friend! I’m everybody’s fucking friend, aren’t I? She wouldn’t
see reason. She wouldn’t listen. I only wanted to love her. She tried to run
away from me. She was going to tell everyone. I would be humiliated. I’d have
to watch the two of them live happily fucking ever after. Rosie and Trent. I
couldn’t let that happen.”

A weighted silence
settled around us, broken only by the soft drip of a pipe somewhere nearby and
the distant whoosh of tires over asphalt on the outer road.

“I strangled her,” Kill
said with a matter-of-fact coolness. “I watched her die. It’s what had to
happen. And I made Trent think Peter had done it. It was all a setup, that
night at the bar. Trent is just so fucking stupid, he never realized it. He
beat up the wrong guy. I should have let him finish Peter off back then. But I
had more uses for Trent. I had something over him. He thought he owed me. He
thought I was his best buddy, dutifully keeping his secrets for more than a
decade. What a fucking joke!” He laughed with a gleefully maniacal grin. “There
they are in that warehouse, fighting each other to the death like a couple of
animals, and they have no idea that I’ve been staging the whole thing all
along. I win. I’m the one in control. Trent always gets everything he wants. I
don’t get shit. Not anymore. Now I will have everything. And you will never
tell anyone.” He pressed his beak of a nose into my cheek. “Because in another
hour or so, you’ll be dead.”

He spread his legs apart
and worked his fingers deeper under the edge of my bra. My thigh was positioned
just below his crotch. I had one chance to do this right. I screwed up all of
my strength and lifted my knee with one vicious jerk that slammed between his
legs. He gasped and doubled forward, the gun momentarily slipping from its
perch between my ribs. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and smashed my knee into
the underside of his jaw with a loud smack of bone on bone. He spit flecks of
blood onto my thigh. I jammed my foot into his chest. He staggered backward,
his arms flailing and shoes slipping.

I turned and ran in the
direction of the exit, my heart exploding with terror. The beam of Kill’s
discarded flashlight provided a hazy glow that was just strong enough to reveal
the outline of the door. I wrenched it open and stumbled into the night. I knew
that Kill’s footsteps must be right behind me, but I couldn’t hear anything
over the pounding of my pulse in my ears. I sprinted through the sharp and
stinging weeds and over the dirt pathway, aiming with every last ounce of
endurance for the open warehouse that shone like a beacon of salvation.

I felt fingertips swipe
at my elbow. I was almost within Kill’s reach. I ran faster, nearly within the
safe embrace of the crowd. The warehouse lights glared painfully into my eyes
after the darkness of the surrounding night. I crossed the threshold and ran
straight for the ring at the other end. The fight had already begun to a
thundering chorus of cheers and shouts. I turned once to see if Kill was still
following me. He had slowed to a brisk walk, but his eyes bore into mine from
about twenty yards away. When I turned back to the ring, I ran face-first into
what felt like a solid brick wall.

“Kat? Are you alright?” I
looked up into Eugene’s red beard. I had crashed into the iron musculature of
his chest. After a dazed second, I shook off the stars that tinged the edges of
my vision and grabbed his massive biceps.

“Eugene, I need to get to
Trent. I need to stop the fight.” For the first time since I had escaped from
Kill’s grasp, I thought of my phone. I reached into my pocket to retrieve it.
To my incredible relief, it was still recording. Kill’s full confession was on
tape, right there in my hand.

Without a further word,
Eugene clasped my wrist and pulled me through the crowd, which parted before
his powerful and determined stride. As we drew closer to the ring, I sensed
that Trent was in trouble. The fighters flew past in a whirl of punches and
kicks. Peter appeared to have the upper hand. Trent teetered off-balance. A
gash bled from his forehead. But just when it seemed that Trent might be done,
he turned the tables with a lightning-quick roundhouse kick and an arcing
cross-body punch that landed square on Peter’s jaw and flipped his head back
and to the side.

The crowd roared,
clapped, and stomped on the metal bleachers. A bell clanged, signaling the end
of the round. The referee sent the fighters to opposite sides of the ring.
Eugene placed his meaty hands on my shoulders and pushed me forward the last
few feet to a spot just behind Trent, who squatted on his muscular thighs and
swiped at his bleeding forehead with a towel. His body was coated in a
glistening sheen of sweat. His thick chest heaved with each inhalation.

I stood on my tiptoes and
gripped the cage netting. “Trent!” My voice was lost amid the shouts of the
crowd. “Trent!” I screamed louder.

He turned, his eyes
unfocused and searching. “Kat,” he said once his gaze had landed on my upturned
face. He leaned toward me on one knee.

“Trent, I need to talk to
you.”

“Now? What the hell, Kat?
It’s not really a good time.”

“You need to stop this
fight. You have everything all wrong.”

He shook his head. “We’ve
been through this, Kat. Get out of here. You’re not going to stop me from
finishing what I started.”

I held up my phone. “It’s
not what you think. It was Kill. I have it on tape. He’s the one who murdered
Rosie. It wasn’t Peter. It was Kill. He set up this whole thing. He’s been
lying to you all these years.” I pressed the play button on the recording, but
neither of us could hear it over all of the surrounding noise.

“What are you talking
about?” Trent knit his eyebrows together. He scanned the crowd behind me. He
narrowed his eyes and pressed his lips together.

I turned and saw Kill
only a few feet away. A trickle of blood ran down his chin where I had landed a
vicious knee thrust only minutes earlier.

“Trent, he kidnapped me.
He was going to murder me too, just like Rosie. He confessed. I have it all
right here.”

I waved the phone in the
air. Kill’s eyes widened. His face instantly turned a purplish scarlet.

“Don’t do this, Kat,”
Kill seethed. “Don’t fucking do this, you bitch.” He raised the gun and aimed
it above my head, right at Trent.

“No!” I cried. I climbed
the netting and placed myself between the gun and Trent. I closed my eyes and
braced for a shot. Instead, I heard a tumultuous crash of chairs and the thump
of pounded flesh. When I opened my eyes, Kill’s figure was engulfed in a
heaving mass of punching and flailing arms and legs. Eugene led the pack,
ripping the gun from Kill’s fingers and slamming a fist into his cheek.
Finnegan had an arm wrapped tightly around Kill’s throat. Kill struggled
helplessly, his eyes bulging, his face turning a deep purple, and his mouth
opening and closing like a goldfish.