When Villains Rise (Market of Monsters #3) - Rebecca Schaeffer Page 0,65
which makes it more addictive than cocaine to certain personality types. And the media would spin it that way.”
They would. Nita could see the headlines now. INHUP Founder Addicted to Monster Blood. What Has She Been Sacrificing to Get Her Fix?
“So they’ve kept it under wraps.” Nita’s eyes narrowed. She still wasn’t quite sure she believed him. “But how did she end up in a coma in the first place, then?”
Andrej was quiet a long moment. “Your mother is how.”
Nita raised her eyebrows, thinking of her mother using the same hateful, disgusted voice when talking about how Andrej had killed her friend. “Do tell.”
“When I first met Nadya, she’d been hired to kill me, but somehow things worked out differently.”
“I’ll say.”
“She was riding off her fame from killing Bessanov,” he continued, undeterred. “She was getting calls from all over the world asking for her help. But she couldn’t be everywhere, so she was giving the jobs to other hunters she knew, including your mother, and taking the trickiest, most dangerous ones for herself. She loved her risks.”
“And you were a tricky, dangerous job?”
His eyes fixed on hers, eerie and clear. “Yes.”
Nita’s body stiffened in terror, and in that moment, she absolutely believed he was exactly as dangerous as he sounded.
“But, as I said. Things went differently. When she suggested forming INHUP to gather and train people, to centralize everything, I agreed to help. When we realized some of the corruption among the hunters, she decided to start making rules—which eventually became laws—about hunting unnaturals. There’s a big difference between someone who’s trying to get rid of a serial-killing unicorn and someone who wants to try eating a ningyo because they think they’ll gain immortality.”
His eyes assessed Nita, cold and cruel. “But the more rules she put in, the more fame her organization got, the angrier certain elements became. Elements like your mother. They joined to kill things, and they didn’t like being told there were things they couldn’t kill.”
“And things came to a head eventually. Twenty years ago. Your mother decided I had too much influence over Nadya. She couldn’t get rid of Nadya, she was the face of INHUP. But she could get rid of me.”
He closed his eyes. “I want to say I escaped, or that I won the fight, but the truth was I lost, and I’m only alive because your mother was interrupted before she could behead me. The people who interrupted her were under the impression I was human, and I was buried.”
He licked his lips. “It took me a while to get out. I was badly hurt, and weak, and climbing out of a coffin buried six feet underground is hard even when you aren’t starving and nearly dead. By the time I got out . . .”
“What happened?”
“Your mother—she went by Monica then, I don’t know if it was her real name. I don’t think so.” He swallowed. “Monica had confronted Nadya. I guess she thought if I was gone, she’d be able to regain her influence over Nadya. But Nadya knew what she’d done and was furious. They fought, and your mother was banished from INHUP.” His smile was bitter. “Officially banished, anyway. She had too much sympathy among the ranks for it to work, really.”
His voice went soft. “So when she snuck back into the building later, no one stopped her. And she found Nadya and murdered her.”
The grief on his face was so familiar, so much like her own heart-wrenching pain from her father’s death that it stole her breath. She could see the pain in his eyes, and the scars in her own chest throbbed in response. She understood this pain, and she knew, without ever asking, that he’d truly loved Nadya.
Her mother had claimed Andrej killed Nadya. Andrej claimed her mother did it. Both of them looked like they’d genuinely cared about this woman. So what was the truth?
“Why?” she asked. “Why kill Nadya?”
“I’m not in her head. I don’t know.” He met her eyes. “But if I had to guess, it was because she’s a fucked-up control freak who’d rather murder her best friend than let said friend make her own life choices.”
A chill went all the way down Nita’s spine, and she took a step back, heartbeat loud in her ears.
She suddenly saw just how stark the parallels between her own life and Nadya’s were. Her mother had killed Nadya’s boyfriend to regain control of her friend. It hadn’t worked,