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To unleash what she’d never gotten a chance to unleash all those years ago.
Because the asshole was lucky enough to already be dead.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Scarlet thought with an icy smile. So maybe we’ll meet again in hell when the time comes, you treacherous piece of shit.
Law-school Dean knocks up foreign Third-Year student, then dumps her brown ass when she wants to keep the child. How fucking romantic. A great American love story on par withGone with the Wind, wasn’t it?
Scarlet snorted inwardly at the memory of how that Southern sweet-talker would sometimes call her Scarlet to his Rhett, whisper lines from the classic novel which he said was a holy book in the American South—said it as he fingered her unholy butthole and told her to come for him like the filthy Indian slut she was.
The memories still burned in her, all these years later. She’d been so close to ending that story her way, destroying that bastard along with his bastard child, writing her own happily-ever-after, riding off into the American sunset with a law degree and a reputation that would take her places.
Except she’d been cheated out of that ending, gotten trapped in someone else’s story. This was her place now, thanks to that coyote John Benson.
For one dark moment she wondered what Benson had done with the child’s body. The girl was so tiny, Scarlet remembered with uncharacteristic melancholy, a sadness she sure as hell hadn’t felt all those years ago when she had it all planned out, written the script to her own drama, chosen her own fate, decided on her own destiny.
Shaking away the memories that had been popping up more often these days, she stabbed the badge-pin through her uniform just above the swell of her left breast.
And for one startling moment Scarlet had a vision of that doomed child’s tiny lips closed tight around that left breast, tiny fingers clawing at her bare brown skin, tiny eyes looking up at Mama with awe and wonder, anticipation and adoration, demands and expectations.
Expectations that Scarlet knew she could never meet.
She’d known it then and she knew it now.
But she’d been at peace with it then.
So why wasn’t she at peace with it now?
Why now, after lying dormant for decades, were those memories forcing their way into her consciousness, coming more often with each passing year, like a countdown leading up to something, a ticking time-bomb that felt ominously close to going off?
Maybe it’s just your fucked-up brain warning you there’s an aneurysm coming, Scarlet told herself with dark amusement as she stepped lightly to where a harried-looking young clerk with a plastic-wrapped stack of freshly laundered-and-pressed clothes under his armpit was squinting at a thumbprint-stained touchscreen computer monitor. The Raj Palace Hotel’s laundry room seemed to run on a self-service basis, with each attendant logging in their dirty-clothes bundles and then being responsible for picking up the same clothes when they were ready.
And Scarlet was cutting in line.
She wasn’t going to actually take those clothes up to the room, of course. Her handler's instructions said she was to be discreet, stay off the radar, definitely off the security cameras. But Scarlet needed to get to those laundered clothes first, just for a few seconds, just long enough to do what she’d come to do.
She wasn’t worried about being caught down here in the laundry room. It would be a different matter if she had to sneak into the kitchens where the Room Service carts were being loaded with breakfast for the hotel’s early risers. The Raj Palace took food safety very seriously, and Scarlet would have needed to be more careful, which would mean she’d have needed more time. Time she didn’t have.
But luck had smiled on her. While prepping in her sprawling empty flat perched high in one of Mumbai’s glass-and-steel towers, Scarlet had deployed the handy technology spyware-tool on her phone to snoop inside the Raj Palace Hotel’s computer systems. Immediately she’d noticed the open laundry-service ticket tagged with O’Donnell and Wagner’s room number. She’d drilled down on the logged entry, her heart speeding when she saw a list of women’s clothes—pants, top, bra, panties.
It felt like a gift, one of those coincidences which signaled things were flowing her way, going her way, just like they always seemed to go on a mission, thirty years and counting, defying so many odds that she’d still be here, still alive, still hunting.
Hunting for something that always felt just out of reach.
Back at her apartment Scarlet had put down the CIA-issued phone, smiled tightly to herself, then hurried to her walk-in closet and found the “Uniforms” section and pulled out a perfectly pressed and sublimely sized set that matched the Raj Palace colors well enough that she could breeze in and out of the laundry room unseen like a ghost in the mist.
She’d have no trouble slipping into the Raj Palace in the wee hours of the morning. She was intimately familiar with the majestic hotel, even more familiar with its security provisions.
Still, while the open laundry ticket was a welcome break, things would get trickier from there, she’d known. The Room Service area would have been harder to get into but easier to pull off once she made it to the right cart. Alas, it was not to be. O’Donnell and Wagner hadn’t ordered breakfast yet.
What a shame.
Because there weresomany exotic poisons Scarlet would have loved to use on silly-named India O’Donnell.
Instead she’d have to improvise, use the freshly laundered clothes to deliver the payload.
And that would be tricky.
She couldn’t just lace the clothes with anthrax or cyanide or some other potent toxin that could be absorbed via the skin. Those poisons were so volatile and deadly Scarlet might kill herself applying them to the clothes. She would use transparent polyurethane gloves, but to handle the hardcore chemicals Scarlet would also need a gas-mask, and that would most certainly attract attention from the other laundry workers—not to mention the security cameras. Even if she pulled it off, the fumes might kill the hotel attendant unlucky enough to pick up the lethal bundle. And then there was a risk that Wagner would open the door, even unwrap the clothes himself. Anthrax or cyanide might kill Wagner instead of O’Donnell.
