Hush - Anne Malcom Page 0,86

running through her brain.

Orion had only meant to watch him.

This was only meant to be another surveillance exercise. She still hadn’t organized the right location. She had already figured out how to navigate the Dark Web, and she’d also spent hours making sure her movements and IP address could never be traced to her.

It was interesting, how quickly she was picking up all of these nefarious skills. She wondered if it was something in her nature, something dark, that had always been lurking inside her. Like fate. Like what she had told April about that night over tequila. Something lurking in her veins. In her genes.

Or maybe it was just the burning need for revenge. She needed to learn this stuff quickly in order to get what she craved.

It didn’t quite matter why she was good at this stuff, why she understood it, it just mattered that she did it.

Because she was good at it, she knew that time was important. The Dark Web, she discovered, was full of dark things. You could hire a hitman, but she wouldn’t contract out her revenge. You could find fake documentation—which she had done in case things went bad and she had to disappear. You could order drugs—which she didn’t do, for obvious reasons. You could even order women, and that made her furious. That made her feel like that little girl with the chain on her ankle again.

Orion had tried to track these sites and the people on them, tried to get any kind of information. But her skills were rudimentary at best, and it was obvious this was an organized and sophisticated network. She could waste hours in front of a computer trying to find a scrap of information, or she could take what she had and do something with it.

She had to plan, to cover her tracks, to make things perfect. Patience. Knowledge. All those years ago, she’d thought about knowledge being power.

But it didn’t matter how much she knew about monsters. As long as they held the key to the chain around her ankle, they had all the power.

But that was in a dark basement where dark needs had no gatekeepers, no laws, no witnesses. This was the real world, or at least enough people believed it was. So, Orion had to play by different rules.

She’d known this. She’d understood it to her bones, that everything depended on her willpower. Her self-control.

She’d had it thus far, hadn’t she?

But something snapped inside her that night. The crack was so loud, so resounding, it blinded and deafened her. She was simply supposed to tail him again that night, watching him as he walked to the parking lot from his favorite strip club a few blocks away. The good doctor happened to have more vices than only young girls, and when Orion first saw the place and discovered his habitual visits, she knew it’s where the murder had to take place. Her best opportunity. The darkened streets and little foot traffic made it perfect. But she didn’t feel ready that night, didn’t feel right. She was just supposed to solidify the plan. The next thing she knew, as if driven by her inner demons and all that hatred, she was shoving him into a darkened alley and striking out with the flip knife she always carried with her.

It wasn’t smart.

The alley wasn’t private. Anyone walking past would see what was happening, though it was late and she hadn’t seen anyone else. There could be cameras. And he wasn’t the smallest guy in the world.

He turned around, his hands up and eyes wide, obviously suspecting someone much larger than the woman who stood before him.

As his face first turned from shock to disgust, she plunged the knife in his gut. His disgust turned to fury as she pulled the knife out, and he swung at her, hard, connecting his fist with her chin, and she saw stars for a moment.

He reared back again with one hand, his other clutching his gut, but Orion wasn’t about to take another punch. She stabbed the knife into him again, forcing his arm down in defense, and then she kept stabbing.

She wasn’t sure how many times the knife had sunk into his flesh, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Not enough to stop him from fighting.

He wasn’t a large man, not overly muscular, which was why he usually liked his girls underage and strapped to a bed. But that didn’t mean he didn’t have sixty pounds