Her Name Is Knight(Nena Knight #1)(8)

David twirled her slowly. He held her waist, pulling her closer. She could tell by the growing bulge in his pants as he held her close and the way he stared down at her with glazed eyes that he hoped to bed her tonight, but hopes were meant to be dashed. What would he do if I let the air out of his hard-on with my dagger?

“You are so beautiful,” David whispered, his eyes glassy and lustful.

His reaction was interesting to her. She wondered what he saw as he looked down at her, hovering over her full lips and the oval outline of her face.

“Thank you,” she said politely, remembering that her shift as Echo was over and she was Nena Knight right now. But even Nena wouldn’t kiss this guy, Tom Cruise looks or not.

Again, she questioned who she was. Nena had worked as her alias, Echo, for so long. Again, she wondered which role was the real her, the rich socialite gliding in the arms of this equally rich Adonis, or the athletic killer who’d ended lives just a few miles away. And what had happened to who she used to be before, when she was Aninyeh? What had happened to that fourteen-year-old girl? Oh yeah, she’d died.

“You could act like you’re actually into the bloody bastard,” Elin taunted, pulling her from her thoughts. “I pulled your vitals up on screen, and they’re dropping,” she cackled. “The wanker is lit-err-ally boring you to death. Like, as I speak, down they go!”

Nena’s mouth tightened, biting back a retort. She hoped Elin had remembered to switch them to a private channel. But she knew her sister, and Elin likely had all of Network listening. She enjoyed launching these small tortures against Nena. Enjoyed it far too much.

Elin snorted gleefully. “Well, we both know you aren’t going to fuck him. Maybe I should? Naturally, if it wasn’t for Oliver. Do you know who David favors? Tom Cruise. It’s why I picked him for you, because you go all doe eyed when Mission Impossible comes on.”

She didn’t. Elin was lying.

“I’d screw him two ways from Sunday, if I could.”

She tuned Elin’s voice out until it was just white noise in the background. Her mind slipped back to the girl in the Cuban’s bedroom. Had she escaped? Was she smart enough to steal the gaudy jewelry to sell and start a new life? Hopefully, the girl wouldn’t be recaptured. Nena knew about captivity too.

David murmured, “How did I get this lucky?” as he nuzzled her, no doubt putting a nose-shaped dent in her beautifully coarse, coily hair. Her hair was one of the few things she took pride in, one of the few things she kept cultivated, just as her mama had taught her before she’d passed.

These three parts of Nena, always at war with each other, always at war with one another for survival. She wasn’t sure which she wanted to be the victor. Nena or Echo. Echo or Aninyeh. Aninyeh or Nena. When the war finally came to an end, she didn’t know who she would be.

Nena willed herself to lay her head against David’s chest. She let the rhythm of his beating heart take her back to a place far away, beyond the Cuban’s torture chamber, across an ocean to a lifetime ago.

David said he was lucky to be with her. But would he still consider himself lucky if he knew the woman in his arms took lives for a living, and that her story began, back home, with the betrayal and decimation of her simple little world?





6


BEFORE


The rat-a-tat-tat draws me farther from my family’s compound like a fish on a reel. Villagers are shouting. Their gut-wrenching cries send riptides of electric fear from my scalp to my toes. These are the cries of my people in pain. The gunfire barely pauses for breath. I force my feet to keep going, one in front of the other, even though all I want to do is run back.

Strange men dressed in camouflage clothing, none of whom I recognize, zoom past in trucks, the odor of diesel trailing behind them. The trucks slow, and some of the men jump out. They run into homes, and screams follow. My hands fly to my ears to blot out the noise. My eyes squeeze shut so I do not see when they begin to drag people from their homes. When I can, I force my legs to move, clinging to the shadows against the walls of homes, hoping I remain unnoticed as these men seek out victims who will better feed their hunger for chaos than I can.

Up ahead, the men are corralling N’nkakuweans in the middle of the village square. They threaten the villagers with an arsenal of weaponry—guns, knives, machetes—which they use to herd our people into a small, indefensible space.

They begin setting fire to homes I thought were empty. Until I see people begin to run out, engulfed in bright-orange flames that no one is allowed to extinguish, screaming in such agony my legs refuse to listen to my brain because my brain can no longer function. I can only stare at the figures in their grotesque dance as they suffer. When the first one drops, my feet move without my even knowing it, the cries of the burning chasing me toward the square. Acrid smells of cooking meat turn my stomach. When my stomach lurches, I vomit everything down the sewer ditch that runs the length of our main roads.

Using the back of my hand and then the hem of my dress, I wipe the mess from my mouth. Where are Wisdom and Josiah? Ofori and Papa? Each passing minute deepens the dread coursing through my veins. And though I try not to, I search the dead for my family. I search the howling mass of my people. One of the aunties’ children is wrenched, screaming, from her arms. She tries running after the child but is clubbed down by an intruder while two others pull the children kicking and screaming toward a line of open-bed trucks. Another uncle is cracked over the skull with the butt of a gun as he begs for the life of his wife, a wife who is already gone from this earth. I spied her body on my way here.