Silas (24 page)

I cast my glance away from
her.

“
What the hell does that
mean, Silas?” she said.

“
Nothing,” I said. “It
doesn’t mean anything, because I’m not going to let him get his
hands on you.”

She shivered, hugging
herself. “And this is all because you slept with his
wife.”

I was sick of the way they
all kept blaming me for Sylvia. “You know, I didn’t really have a
choice. I
had
to
sleep with his wife.”

She raised her eyebrows.
“What are you talking about?”

I shook my head. “Nothing.
Never mind.”

“
No,” she said. “You’re
going to tell me what the hell you meant by that.”

“
We need to find someplace
to hide,” I said. “They may have gone, but they’ll be
back.”

She folded her arms over her
chest. “You’re infuriating.”

“
Yeah, we’ve established
that,” I muttered.

* * *

Eventually, we found another
cave. It didn
’t have nearly as large of an
opening as the last one. It was just a tiny three-foot wide circle
near the ground. We had to crawl inside. But once we got in, it was
actually pretty spacious inside.

We could both stand up, and
it was warm and dry. We were relatively close to water, so one of
us could run and fill up the canteen. We both thought that it would
be a tough place to find us. We felt safe there.

It was late. I’d been shot
at and dehydrated and threatened. I was exhausted.

I threw myself down on the floor of the
cave. I needed rest.

My stomach growled. Damn it.
We hadn’t had anything to eat except the berries earlier. Food
would have been nice, but I knew it wasn’t going to
happen.

“
Are you hungry?” whispered
Christa.

“
Starving,” I
said.

“
Me too.” She sounded sad
and beaten.

I reached out for her in the
darkness, finding her hand. “We’ll eat tomorrow. We’re near the
stream. We can get fish.”

She crawled closer, and her
body was against mine. “You’ll teach me how to catch
them?”

“
Yeah,” I said. “We’ll make
spears like Emmett taught me.”

“
Oh god,” she said.
“Emmett’s gone.”

I rolled away from her.
“Before you got to fuck him. Such a tragedy.”

“
Fuck you,” she muttered. “I
wasn’t going to sleep with Emmett. If you’d listened to anything
I’d said, I explained to him that I didn’t think he could share. I
said it to shock him. To throw him off balance. I didn’t want you
guys arguing anymore.”

“
Whatever,” I said. “You’d
sleep with anything, wouldn’t you?”

“
Funny,” she said. “That’s
what everyone says about you.”

“
Hey,” I said. “I have
standards. I only have sex with young, hot, willing chicks. In safe
situations. Not out in the wilderness when I need to stay sharp
because I’m in a lot of fucking danger.”

“
Don’t worry,” she said.
“I’m too hungry right now to try to jump you. You’re safe from my
disturbing feminine wiles.”

“
Good,” I said.

It was quiet. I lay alone in the
darkness of the cave. My stomach rumbled again. It hurt. I was
really fucking hungry.

“
Silas?”

“
What?”

“
Did something happen to
you?”

“
What are you talking
about?”

“
Is that why it freaked you
out that I gave you that hand job the other night? Because it
reminded you of something bad?”

“
No,” I said. “No, it was
only that it was weird.”

“
Why’d you say that
thing about Rolf’s wife? That you
had
to sleep with
her?”

“
Go to sleep, Christa.” My
stomach rumbled again.

“
Maybe you
really
don’t
want
me,” she murmured. “Is that really all it is?”

I sighed. “I want to go to
sleep. That’s all I want.”

I felt her get closer to me
again, tentatively. “It’s cold,” she said softly. “If I promise to
keep my hands off of you, can I—”

“
Whatever.” I wrapped my
arms around her, pulling her into my chest. Truth was, I was kind
of cold myself, considering I had no shirt. It had been riddled
with bullet holes. “Now, shut up.”

Her stomach made noises.

Mine answered in return.

And I had to admit that it was nice to
have her in my arms like that, safe and close and
secure.

Sleep began to tug at me.
Dreams bled into reality, and I was running through the woods
again, only this time, I couldn’t see Christa, and I was afraid to
yell for her, because then Rolf would know she was
alive.

* * *

“
Like this?” Christa was
working with a sharp rock to try and whittle a sharp end on the
long sticks we’d gathered. It was morning, and we were sitting
outside the cave.

I peered at her handiwork.
“Yeah, that looks pretty good. You got it.”

“
So, this is going to take a
while, isn’t it?”

“
Yeah, probably.” And I was
even more damned hungry now than I’d been last night.

“
So, we’ve got time. Tell me
about Rolf’s wife.”

I sighed. “You really want
to know about that?”

“
I want to understand why he
hates you so much,” she said.

I busied myself with my own
stick, dragging the sharp rock over the bark. “It’s not actually
something I like talking about.”

“
Yeah, I can tell that,” she
said. “But I think I need to understand everything. So, if you had
to do it, then why? Did someone force you?”

“
Basically,” I
said.

“
Who? Rolf’s
wife?”

“
No,” I said. “Not exactly.
Her name was Sylvia, incidentally.”

“
Then who?”

I peered down at the stick.
Would it really hurt to talk about it? “There was this woman named
Jolene French. She was one of the people who headed up Op Wraith.
She was a psychologist, but she was kind of psychotic.” After
Griffin had gone after Marcel, we’d blown her to smithereens, at
least we hope we did. No one had heard from her in a while. “She
was awful. And she used the assassins in Op Wraith for other jobs
besides killing people.”

“
Other jobs?”

“
Well, at first it seemed
innocent enough,” I said. “Like, she had Sloane and me work at
servers at this soiree for all the big investors in
Dewhurst-McFarland. We had to dress up in white button-up shirts
and black ties and carry around trays of champagne. I guess that’s
how Sylvia saw me in the first place. I don’t remember talking to
her, but I had to be polite to a bunch of people that
day.”

“
I don’t understand why this
Jolene person would use assassins as servers,” said Christa. “It
doesn’t seem like the same skill set.”

I laughed. “No, you wouldn’t
think so, would you? French did it because she was greedy. She had
a budget for servers, but if she used us, we were free labor, and
she could pocket that money.”

“
But none of the assassins
got into fights or were rude to the guests?”

“
We did what we were told,”
I said. “It had been illustrated to us, pretty graphically, that if
Op Wraith was displeased with our performance in any way, we’d be
killed.”

“
Oh,” she said. “So you
didn’t have a choice.”

“
Not at all,” I
said.

“
And Griffin didn’t
either.”

“
No. I thought I told you
that before.”

“
It’s just hard for me to
think about my big brother killing people. That’s all.”

“
Well, he was, like, in
jail.”

“
Yeah, but that was all a
big mistake. He robbed a store with a toy gun. He meant it as a
joke, and it went badly,” she said. “He never would have actually
hurt anyone.”

Had I known that? Had I ever
spent much time trying to find out anything about Griffin? He was
probably my closest guy friend, and I’d never really gotten to know
him. I felt a little ashamed of myself. If I got out of this—and I
was going to do exactly that—then I vowed to myself I’d do better.
I’d be a real friend.

“
Anyway,” said Christa, “I’m
sorry. I got you off track. So, you were a server, and you didn’t
screw up because you knew they’d kill you if you did.”

“
Right,” I said. “Well,
French was an opportunist when it came to using us to make money.
There weren’t any moral lines she was afraid of crossing. So, in
addition to making us servers, she had another little side business
going on. And she didn’t want me for it at first. Instead, she
wanted Sloane. But I wasn’t about to let that happen. So, I said
that I’d do it voluntarily as often as French wanted, with whoever
she wanted, as long as we agreed that Sloane was off
limits.”

“
What was this side
business? It sounds bad, but what could be worse than killing
people?”

“
It wasn’t worse than
killing people,” I said. “I mean, it wasn’t worse for me, anyway.
It would have been worse for Sloane. She couldn’t have handled
it.”

“
Okay,” Christa said slowly.
“So, what was it?”

“
She, uh…” How to put this?
“French hired us out to, like, entertain people in very personal
ways.”

“
What do you mean?” Christa
sounded confused.

She wasn’t getting it. I
decided to just put it bluntly. “People paid French money to have
sex with us.”

A little sound of shock from
Christa. “What?”

“
Yeah, she whored us out.
And I knew that Sloane couldn’t have taken that. I mean, I don’t
think she even really knew that French wanted to use her. I kind of
kept it from her. And French didn’t go for my deal right away. She
didn’t think I was much of a substitution. There was really less of
an, um, demand for male… companions.” I sighed. “I guess I was
lucky that most of the people that supported Dewhurst-McFarland, a
company that made weapons, were, you know, straight. Otherwise,
Griffin and I would have a lot in common.”

“
What do you mean by that?”
she said.

Shit. I guessed Griffin
probably hadn’t advertised what had happened to him in jail. I
figured he never would have told me if it weren’t for the fact that
we were up against Marcel, the guy who did it to him. He’d figured
that we needed to know why the guy was after him last
year.

“
Nothing,” I said. “It was a
bad joke.”

“
Joke?”

“
Look, the point is, I never
had to, you know, get in on with a dude,” I said. “Which is good.
Because that would have fucked me up royally. I mean, no pun
intended. Not that it would be funny, if, you know, something like
that happened. It would be horrible.” Okay, I was digging myself a
hole here. “All I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t so bad. I got
sent out to some bored housewives of really rich dudes. They were
all really pretty and really needy and really grateful. And it
wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Christa was quiet. “I don’t
know, Silas. It kind of sounds like a big deal. You were forced
into it. It’s not like you would have done that on your own. Would
you?”

I dug the rock into the bark
as deep as I could. “No, I guess not. Still, it wasn’t that bad.
With Sylvia, it was even… you know, good. I guess I liked
it.”

“
So, you slept with Rolf’s
wife because she was paying French for your services?”

“
Yeah,” I said. “Like I
said, a lot of those women were lonely. Their husbands had married
them as trophy wives. The women’s jobs were to look hot on his arm
when they were in public and to shut the fuck up the rest of the
time. The women had lots of money, and they could buy anything they
wanted. I guessed they figured it couldn’t hurt to buy some time
with a young, attractive guy like myself.”

“
And humble too.” She rolled
her eyes.

“
Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m
a hunk.”

“
Hunk? What is this?
1992?”

“
I’m just saying,” I said.
“People paid to fuck me.”

“
You’re unbelievable,”
she said. “It really doesn’t bother you at all. You were a
prostitute
. Does
anything
bother
you?”

I hesitated. I was used to
convincing myself that nothing got under my skin. I didn’t see the
point in letting stuff hurt me. Generally, I just didn’t think
about it. I brushed it off. But it was harder to do that out here
in the wilderness. There was nothing to protect me. And I heard the
same kind of sharpness to Christa’s tone that I’d heard when she
accused me of not caring about Milo.

“
Look,” I said. My voice was
quieter. “When you have to do stuff like that, it’s better to not
let it get to you. I don’t know if it bothers me or not.” I paused.
“Okay, that’s not true. It does. It… bothers me. It was kind of…” I
squirmed. “But I had to do it. I had to do it for Sloane. And it
could have been worse than it was. So, it’s easier not to admit
that, not to think about that. It’s easier to focus on the parts of
it that weren’t so bad.”