“The letter,” I suddenly acknowledged. “You sent the letter after all, didn’t you?”
Hannah merely smiled.
“So smart you are,” she replied condescendingly. “It was an easy way to slide back into your life… I knew that you’d be preoccupied with trying to figure that shit out out, and it would keep you from asking questions when I needed to get close…
“A lot of things were me, Hunter,” my sister chuckled menacingly. “All seemingly random, scattered pieces that distracted and occupied you, helping me drive Sarah towards chasing the case… I needed you in California. I couldn’t have done this without you, brother…”
“Hannah,” I growled. “You could have asked me for your help and I’d have given it. I need to know why you pulled all of this bullshit.”
“Why?” She laughed. The sound sent goosebumps trailing across my skin. “You want to know why? I’ll tell you why…
“It was because of you.”
I didn’t – couldn’t – understand the logic.
“Hannah… what happened to you?” I pleaded, desperate to find out what happened to my beloved older sister. “I signed my life into servitude to save you… I broke into another country and assaulted a sex-trafficking cartel to pull you out of Hell… why the fuck are you doing this?”
The eyes that fixated on my gaze belonged to my sister, but the burning hatred behind them spoke of something else… something darker inside her, uncoiling near the surface.
“I never asked to be saved, Hunter.”
I was dumbfounded. “You can’t be serious.”
Her lips curled into a smile that inspired a level of fear I hadn’t felt in ages. “I am serious, little brother,” she cooed mockingly. “You think you know everything… But you don’t even know what you fucking did to me.”
The tension in my body released. I wondered how long I had been holding my breath.
“When I was kidnapped by those Mexican fucks, they wasted no time in sedating me. I spent most of my time barely functioning, handcuffed to a bed in a filthy fucking house with only a bedpan for company. They used me for their own pleasure. They did things to me that you could never imagine…”
“I remember,” I agreed, closing my eyes to relive that painful memory – something I never allowed to focus on. “That’s how we found you.”
“Right,” she continued, “but you weren’t supposed to find me. Did it even occur to you that I might be right where I wanted to be, Hunter?”
“What?”
“They had a very special guest coming… someone who could supply them with the weaponry needed to expand their operations. They were funneling all their money from the sex trade into this single deal…”
“…Soroka Sarkonov,” I realized aloud.
“No, Hunter. A competitor. A dangerous man who desperately needed to die… Someone who stood on the wrong side of Soroka Sarkonov.”
“You were there to fucking kill someone? We found you half drugged out of your damn mind Hannah. They were going to sell you to the highest bidder!” I shouted angrily.
“Exactly. And the special guest was the highest bidder. I was going to be inside the deepest reaches of his organization, picking him apart piece by fucking piece… This was my one chance to get close to the asshole, and I gave up my fucking dignity to do it! I gave up everything!
“You can guess what happened next.”
“…We came in and wrecked the place,” I answered. “I rode down there and saved your ass.”
“You kidnapped me from my future, Hunter. You let my biggest competitor live, and focused all your attention on a piss-ant little cartel. Do you have any fucking idea how many people died because of what you did? Friends, associates, business relationships scattered to the wind… The man I was going to kill has done terrible things that I could have stopped! It took me years to get back what you’d taken from me. Years to strike back at my enemies…”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” I asked, my mind swimming.
“I’m talking about death and destruction, Hunter. I’m talking about the men I’ve so carefully destroyed in the years since your little rescue effort. I’m talking about the men who fear me… the ones who respect me… I’m talking about the men who shake in their fucking boots when someone speaks my name,” Hannah replied viciously.
“No,” I whispered. “No, it… it can’t be…”
“In your misguided fucking generosity, you destroyed my life once, but I won’t let you make the same mistake twice, Hunter…”
Hannah stepped forward from the deepest shadows, but it wasn’t my sister standing here. Yes, it was her face, her features, her voice… But the girl I thought I knew was nowhere inside this woman.
How long had she been hiding her true identity?
How long had my sister been keeping this from me?
The low light made her silhouette into a shifting creature. A clutching fear grasped at my heart as I sensed nothing but malice in her predatory approach…
Hannah stepped forward again, sending chills down my spine. The woman who I had known as Hannah Hargreaves, my entire life, but who had been living an ominous double-life stretching back more than a decade…
“Thank you for helping to find my box, dearest brother,” came the wicked voice of Soroka Sarkonov. “Now, get out of my fucking way.”
Sarah
Everyone in sight seemed shocked at the revelation, and it was easy to see why. Hunter’s sister wasn’t some victim hiding for all these years… She’d been running one of the largest criminal enterprises in the world!
Hannah was Soroka Sarkonov!
But… HOW?
“What is in that box, Hannah?” Hunter asked, his face still stricken with a confused and angry look.
“Pure vengeance, Hunter… A Dong Feng 31A. China’s finest three-stage ballistic missile. Three hundred kilotons of nuclear hellfire. This weapon is going to allow me to put an end to my competition once and for all…”
“What in the hell are you going to do, Hannah? Blow them all up? These kinds of people don’t live in the middle of fucking nowhere. You’re talking about detonating a nuclear bomb in a fucking city!” Hunter replied angrily.
“I’m talking about sacrifice! You have no idea what this man is planning. You have no idea what he is capable of. A few innocent lives are a price I’m willing to pay.”
Hannah almost looked as if she had a spark of happiness beneath her restrained exterior, but she managed to keep it contained.
I felt sick. My stomach was turning as I struggled against my bindings. I needed to get free. Hunter had a gun, but I had a feeling he wasn’t going to get to use it…
Hannah seemed to notice this.
“Relax, Sarah. Take it easy,” she said, moving closer. The gun was still trained straight at my head as Hannah pulled a knife from her belt with her free hand. I gasped as she brought it up between my hands, cutting them free before bending down and doing the same to the tape wrapped around my ankles.
“She’s lucky to be alive, you know… I could have left her with Talon, and I don’t think she’d still be in one piece, little brother…”
As Sarah stood back up, she wasn’t aiming her gun at me anymore. She was aiming it squarely at Hunter. In the distance, the thrumming sounds of a helicopter began to reach my ears.
“I’m willing to let you have your precious girlfriend back,” she laughed wickedly. “And I’m not even going to make her beg for her life anymore.”
I fought the swirling nausea inside.
“Think about Sarah,” our enemy told him darkly, smiling viciously. “Think about your unborn baby.”
“There’s nowhere to go, Hannah. You’re not driving out of here,” Hunter shouted, the low thump of the helicopter slowly building in intensity.
“I have no intent of driving,” she replied, casting her eyes to the sky. The faint outline of something big was moving our way. It didn’t take me long to realize it was
some kind of heavy lifter.
“You can’t let her do this!” I shouted, but I was immediately silenced as Hannah smacked me hard across the face. Pain seared my cheek, and the uncoiling nausea rose. I knew the rosy outline of her hand would be visible for hours.
“You have no choice, Hunter. You ruined my life once, and I won’t let you do it again,” Hannah said, returning the knife to her belt and pulling a different object from her pocket. This one was a small grey lump of plastic. I recognized it immediately as some kind of old style cellphone, and I watched in horror as she flipped it open.
“One press of this button, and I send us all to hell – you, me, your woman, your baby, and all of your fucking Dragons hiding around us.
“One tiny little slip of my thumb, and everything you’ve worked for is gone, just like what you did to me in Mexico. My only regret is that you wouldn’t live to see it.
“Now back the fuck off!”
My eyes were locked on the phone as I hyperventilated. Maybe it was a mother’s instinct to protect her child… Maybe it was just being a goddamned idiot. With my hands and feet free, I quickly thrust myself forward, smashing into Hannah’s arm and sending the phone flying.
“H-Hunter,” I gasped as Hannah spun, letting my own momentum send me sprawling to the ground. She followed me down, grasping at my hair as we tumbled.
She was trying to bring the gun up against me, but I struggled with strength only adrenaline could provide.
My hands were clawing and grasping, pushing her wrist aside just in time to hear a shot ringing out just inches away from my face. A piercing, ringing deafness hit my ears. Dirt scattered against my cheek as she fired again, my whole body rolling and bringing her gun hand awkwardly down against the ground.