NINA
S he was making good progress back through the rooms until she reached Burial of the Dead. She hears the noises before she sees the light, the gunshots, blunt and unmistakable from the house above, the sound of something smashing into glass and then, in the room ahead, she sees a flashlight swinging wildly in the darkness.
She slips into the now defunct glass coffin and waits. There is only one flashlight, one person, but there are more upstairs and Nina is not going back down into the rooms. She is not going to die down here. The man who entered has a weapon as well as a flashlight, some kind of long baton.
The plate and cheese knife from the meal she ate hours ago lie in the coffin beside her. She feels for them in the darkness, her hand clenching quietly around the small bone handle. Then she waits until he has passed her and slipped into the next vestibule to rise from her hiding place and follow him into the corridor on silent feet.
She creeps toward his hunched, wary back, his eyes clearly not as adjusted to the darkness as hers.
She has almost made it to him when a call sounds back through the rooms, a woman calling someone. The man turns, his light shining directly into Nina’s face, blinding her as he cries out in shock.
Nina braces for an impact. But the impact does not come. So she lunges, she lunges hard and fast for the phone, knocking it to the ground, and then she thrusts the knife harder into the unseen flesh of the figure in front of her.
His cry of pain echoes through the empty rooms as he sinks to the floor, dropping his stick. Nina kicks the phone away from him and moves to grab it.
But before she can swing the light back onto him, she hears a familiar voice come from the injured man: “Nina?”
It takes her addled mind a moment to make sense of it, of what is happening—then…“Joe?” her voice rattles in answer.
“What the hell did you do?” he asks, his voice strained. When he speaks again there is no mistaking the severity of his injury. “Oh Jesus Christ. I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding a lot. Fuck, I need a hospital, I need—”
Nina swings the light at him. He lies prone on the ground, a hand clutched hard to his stomach, his white shirt now dark, and that darkness still spreads across it as she watches.
“Oh fuck, Joe. Oh my God. Okay, don’t worry, don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here. I’ll get us both out of here.” Nina cannot stop the surge of adrenaline that explodes inside her—and with it a resurgence of her lightheadedness, but she does not have the luxury of indulging it now.
Just before Joe loses consciousness, he feels her arms envelop him and begin to drag him out of the darkness.
The unmistakable sound of smashing glass reverberates from the house above them.
CHAPTER 48
NINA
Two years later
N ina looks out at the dark diner car park through the glass. The warm glow of humanity buzzes around her in the small-town establishment, a heated slice of cherry pie waiting untouched on the plate in front of her. The waitress has left two forks.
She needed to order something from the girl in the pale-pink uniform gliding among the busy tables, she hadn’t considered that. And the pie looked nice, though right now, she can’t risk pulling her eyes from the darkness outside.
She doesn’t recognize the waitress; she doesn’t recognize anyone here, which feels odd after two years of steering clear of strangers. They moved her to Charlotte, North Carolina—well, Belmont to be exact, a small town outside Charlotte—shortly before the first trial began.
She has been living under a new identity in sleepy Belmont for almost twenty-six months. She has friends there, a job in the local library, she volunteers with the historical society, her neighbors know her—she’s made sure of it.
But no one knows her here in Davidson, the town three over. It isn’t a huge misdirection, but she thought it best to meet here, just in case. Everything is always just in case these days.
She knows they aren’t supposed to meet at all, even though the trials are over, even though everything is in the public domain now and she has told everything she knows many times over. They are theoretically safe by now, but they have been told they can never go back to their old lives, that they should never attempt to reconnect.
They could easily lead any leak right back to the other and after giving evidence, after being involved in bringing down a network that stretched across many continents perhaps, they were sensible to start over.
The American government has worked together with the UK’s National Crime Agency to relocate and patriate her pre-trial. They moved her twice in the early days to protect her. A brief stint in Pennsylvania, followed by even less time in Delaware, but fears over her safety were raised in both locations though she herself had noticed nothing. Perhaps that’s the way bad things happen to you, they just do, and then that’s it.
But she needs to see him and he has to see her; they can’t just live their lives waiting for the worst to happen. Besides, she needs to apologize and to thank the man who tried to save her.
They emailed a few times since the last trial connected with the house on Gorda. There were other trials after theirs, there were other houses, but they were not required in those cases.
The flash drives Lucinda created containing information pulled from the house’s hard drives enabled the FBI and the British National Crime Agency to track and locate several of the servers on which clients had watched the enslavement and murder of the four previous victims at the house on Gorda. And given them leads to other houses and connected networks.
Nina learned early in the case that while her father had built Anderssen’s Opening, it had been repurposed after its sale to another buyer. Her father’s house was just an elaborate parlor game, limits set that meant the homeowner could attempt to beat the odds without the fear of meeting their end. But part of her game had been to make her believe her father was responsible for the house as it was. She learned about the fabricated deeds, James’s involvement, and Lucinda herself.
