Page 73 of Girl, Entangled

The hood was the whole of him, she thought. It was the only self he’d ever managed to hold onto. Strip a man of every other way to say who he was, leave him mute and copying strangers and in the end he’d sewn himself an identity out of black cloth and worn another man’s life.

‘I haven’t seen his face.’

‘You’re not missing much. He’s got Henry Cavill’s body but not his face.’

Ella laughed, despite the circumstances. It wasn’t funny. Nothing about this was funny.

‘Simon Varro was a harmless guy. He hadn’t offended in – how long?’

‘Ten years, according to his file. And then Doyle comes along and convinces him to do… all this.’

Ripley nodded. ‘It’s a real shame. He did all that good with his workshops. And now his whole life has gone to hell. All that hard work’s been undone.’

Ella took in the admittedly surreal scene. Gym equipment, including a now-bloody weight plate. A toppled medieval torture device. The bones of a long-dead man who may or may not have committed murder in life.

‘The good that men do gets buried with their bones, but the evil that men do lives on.’

Ripley raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s nice. What’s that, Shakespeare?’

Ella looked at the iron thing wrecked on its side, at the spikes gone dark and wet, at the scattered blood of a man who’d loved a dead murderer enough to wear his skin. She climbed to her feet, stretched off the pain and helped her partner up.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s Iron Maiden. Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

EPILOGUE

Midnight, and the parking lot behind HQ had gone down to a handful of cars and the orange wash of the sodium lamps. Ella stood by the passenger door of Ripley’s car with her arms folded against the cold and the bandage on her brow pulling at her hairline every time she moved her face. She’d come here because she needed something – a replacement.

‘Vernon’s still up there,’ Ripley said eventually. ‘Dever too. I saw the lights on the fourth floor when we pulled in. They’re not going home tonight.’

‘At this hour?’

‘They’re standing up the search. Doyle’s real now. They’ve got an agent who fought her, and a giant in a hospital bed who’s going to talk somehow. They’ve finally got something to chase. So no, they’re not sleeping. It’s the first time I’ve ever been glad Dever doesn’t know when to quit.’

‘Great.’ Ella pushed herself off the wall. Her ribs filed a complaint and she ignored them. ‘Then I get to go up there and have the conversation I’ve been dreading since the basement.’

‘Which conversation’s that?’

‘The one where I walk into Slick Rick’s office at midnight and ask him, very nicely, for another gun.’ Ella tipped her coffee into the planter by the door. ‘Because Lindsey Doyle stole mine.’

She’d taken two steps toward the doors before she registered that Ripley hadn’t moved.

She’d taken a third before she registered why.

Ella stopped.

She turned around.

Ripley was looking at her, and the tiredness had gone clean out of the older woman’s face, and what had come into it instead was the look of someone watching a thing fall into place that should have fallen into place an hour ago.

‘Dark,’ Ripley said. ‘Your gun. Your Glock 19.’

And then Ella heard it too, heard her own voice from a meeting room a few days ago.

Miss Dark, would you like to be a guinea pig?

‘Oh shit! The prototype!’

‘Doyle ran out of that basement carrying a homing beacon. We need to track it right now. Let’s go.’