Page 69 of Girl, Entangled

‘That was silly of you. But anyway, I think it’s time we put an end to this, don’t you?’

‘You won’t… get away. Your DNA.’

‘Is all over this scene? I know. But I’m not going to do the dirty work. My man has a mission to finish and you’ve stupidly inserted yourself into it. So, you have to die too.’ Doyle turned to the door and yelled, ‘Simon! Come on down!’

The basement door fell open and became a square of orange light. A silhouette filled the shape – consumed the shape, and the door shut again. It framed a hulking behemoth of a human being, so wide that he had to begin his descent sideways.

There he was.

The killer of three – possibly four – people.

All orchestrated by a completely different killer.

‘He’s my good boy,’ Doyle said. ‘Simon, come and say hello to Agent Ella Dark.’

Simon Varro reached the basement floor, and now Ella saw that he was dressed in full executioner regalia. Her body wanted to respond in some way, but the drugs still had a hold on her. If someone asked her tomorrow – if she was still alive tomorrow – she couldn’t be sure that all of this was some surreal dream.

‘Simon, did you finish off the man upstairs?’

Varro shook his head.

‘No? He’s still alive?’

Varro nodded.

‘Why?’

Varro pointed to the iron maiden with a gigantic hand. Doyle sighed.

‘Fine. Finish him off afterward. He’s not going anywhere. If you have to put someone in there, this wannabe hero will do.’

Varro shook his head again.

‘What? Just do it.’

Varro kept still, defiantly.

‘Simon, trust me. Just kill her. I spent a long time finding this device for you.’

‘He won’t,’ Ella muttered. ‘It needs to be the man, or his mission isn’t complete. The method isn’t the compulsion. The victim is.’

The coherence of which her comment came out surprised her. She must have purged enough poison from her system to be comprehensible again, and with that revelation came a newfound energy and newfound realization.

She was sharing a room with, amongst other things, the person responsible for the death of three people Ella held dear. Ella had the chance to kill her right now.

All that was stopping her was her own Glock 19 in the wrong hands and a colossal bodybuilder turned serial killer.

Before Ella could make a rash decision, something upstairs took a heavy blow. The whole house felt it. A second came, heavier, the sound of a shoulder or a ram, and then a voice through the floor that Ella would have known anywhere, Ripley calling her name into the dark of the rooms above.

Doyle and Varro looked at each other. Ella couldn’t see Varro’s face, but his body language did the talking for him. He possessed a child’s fear; the look of a boy who’d been promised it would all work out and was only now learning it wouldn’t. He took a step back toward the stairs. Doyle laughed, and the sound of it had no nerves in it at all.

‘Time to wrap this up,’ she said, and brought the Glock up level with Ella’s chest.

She silently apologized to Varro’s three victims because they weren’t the faces that flashed up in what Ella guessed would be her last moments alive.

She thought of the three people who’d died at Doyle’s hands, three people who’d died because they’d been unfortunate to be in Ella Dark’s social orbit.

Julianne Cooper, Jenna Bradbury, Ben Carter.