Page 45 of Edge of Secrets (The Edge Trilogy #2)

Chapter One

Vivi

I had to just grit my teeth and face it. My van was stuck in the mud.

I’d been spinning the tires in the slop for over fifteen minutes now, and my poor old Volkswagen van was groaning and lurching with the strain.

I had to come up with an adult solution, probably one that required spending money I could ill afford, and looking stupid and feckless and ridiculous in front of a bunch of people that I had never even met.

Which made me wince and cringe. Alas, poor me.

I killed the engine, shoved my tangled red hair back behind my ears, and pounded on the steering wheel with a grinding shriek of frustration. I was alone, aside from my long-suffering dog, Edna, so I could afford a little tantrum. Edna would never tell.

It didn’t make me feel any better, though. The world outside the rain-sluiced windshield was a wavering blur of greens. Lightning flashed. I braced myself for the huge crash ...

Edna yelped when it jolted us, and scrambled frantically into my lap. I petted the quivering dog. “Easy, honey girl,” I crooned. “It’ll be over soon. We’ll get through it.”

A hopeful thought, but I would still be in a very sticky jam when the storm was over. Perhaps an even stickier jam, depending on how much water was still in the sky, still getting ready to fall on top of me. This road could slide right off the mountain and bury us under tons of mud.

Which struck me as a train of thought to carefully avoid right now.

It had seemed like a good idea late last night, to just push on, rain and all. The truth, if I was being honest, was that I’d been simply too scared to stop driving.

Too much tragic, horrible, terrifying shit had happened recently. The most horrific being that my adopted mom, Lucia, had been murdered some weeks before.

That calamity had knocked me and my two sisters all onto our asses.

Then, to make matters worse, my two sisters, Nancy and Nell, had both been attacked, multiple times.

We had finally managed to conclude, mostly based on the meager crumbs of information the attackers had let drop when they kidnapped Nell, that our enemies were looking for some mysterious art object, something hidden decades ago in Italy, before the Second World War.

As far as we could tell, everyone who knew where it was, or hell, even what it was, had long since died.

The killers had tried to get information about it from Lucia, but they had failed. Lucia had died without giving it to them, because she was a boss. Fierce. Indomitable. My role model, my hero.

After that, infuriated, the murdering assholes turned their sights on us. Lucia’s clueless adopted daughters, who knew jack shit about any of Lucia’s mysterious past.

It was hard to argue with stomach-churning fear when I was all alone, no one to act tough and fearless for.

Only Edna knew the truth, and bless her sweet heart, she did not judge me.

She just panted her hot, fishy breath heavily into my face and offered her solid, comforting presence like the very good, loyal girl that she was.

Edna’s silky, chocolate brown fur had soaked up many tears I wouldn’t show to anyone else.

But even with my trusty dog at my side, I hadn’t been able to face a roadside motel with a single door lock between me and the night, which was all I could afford.

I was the only D’Onofrio chick left without a big, vigilant, protective guy, giving the hairy eyeball to every stranger within shouting range of his new lady.

That made me the obvious soft target. Good old Vivi was on her own, as always.

Not that I begrudged my sisters their good fortune.

They both deserved to have a tough, devoted, foxy guy worshipping at their shrines.

In fact, Liam and Duncan still didn’t know how lucky they were in their fabulous new fiancèes.

They were going to be discovering it for the rest of their lives.

Those men had been tongue-kissed by Fate.

I was intensely grateful for those guys, and what they had done for Nancy and Nell.

Both men were both tough, vigilant, battle-tested.

My sisters were as safe with Duncan and Liam as they could possibly be in these strange days.

But as for me, well. I was feeling very solitary and unworshipped.

I had been feeling that way even before Ulf Haupt and John the Fiend, a.k.a.

Snake Eyes, started attacking the D’Onofrio women.

I was a generally cheerful person, and I made a real effort to keep it positive.

But under these conditions, it was almost impossible to keep my chin up.

Both of my sisters had tried to persuade me to stay with them until we figured out what to do about our bloodthirsty enemies. But who knew how long that would take?

That solution struck me as nonproductive, unsustainable, and ultimately embarrassing. How long could a woman realistically sit around like a bump on a log in her sister’s place, bored out of her mind, not working, not making art, being a financial drain and a big fat fifth wheel?

No way. I just couldn’t. I would go mad. I would start to misbehave.

Besides, I really missed my dog. She’d been boarding with a friend of mine who lived out in the country since things got so weird, but my girl belonged with me.

I’d never committed to anything in my life the way I’d committed to Edna.

Every day I had made her wait for me had hurt me just a little bit more.

Nah, I just had to muddle on somehow. Even with all the grief and jealousy and confusion and stalking fiends. I was plenty stubborn. It was a D’Onofrio thing.

I stroked Edna’s floppy, velvety soft ears, and buried my face against her silky fur.

It calmed me down and let me breathe a little deeper.

I peered out at the heavy, swollen gray sky.

I supposed I could call my new mysterious landlord Jack Kendrick, Duncan’s old friend from his stint as a field agent in the NSA.

Kendrick liable to know how to begin solving my complicated logistical problems.

But how freaking embarrassing was that.

I checked my phone. Well, hell. There was no coverage here anyway. That settled that. I was utterly lost out in the ass end of nowhere.

Which was the whole idea, of course. To hide out somewhere remote, lost, trackless, where Ulf Haupt and Snake Eyes John would never think to look for me.

I’d made it to the town of Silverfish, Washington, around two in the afternoon, if one could call it a town. Through the torrents of rain, all I had seen there on the main drag was a convenience store, a gas pump, a bait and tackle shop, and a boarded-up old Dairy Queen.

I had followed the directions, which I’d been advised to print out, since the place was out of the reach of GPS.

I made my way onto progressively smaller roads, finally arriving at a dirt track with a hand-painted sign that read Moffat’s Way.

Nothing further in the directions. At that point, it was straight on til morning, evidently.

But Moffat’s Way wasn’t a driveway, but an old logging road, deeply rutted and frighteningly steep.

By the time I had realized how rough the road actually was, those ruts had become streams, with no place anywhere that was wide enough to turn around.

I had made a sharp turn into a deep puddle, sank into the mud at a terrifying angle, and that was that.

I leaned my hot cheek against the cool window, mind racing. Still procrastinating. Edna stuck her nose into my hand and gave it a sloppy, comforting lick, and then started enthusistically in on the side of my face.

Who knew how much farther this road went on before it came to Jack Kendrick’s land?

I hadn’t bothered to inform myself about such nitpicky details.

I just figured, I’d get there when I got there, since the road stopped at his house, the directions said.

You couldn’t go wrong, the directions said.

Hah. If there was one thing I was unusually good at, it was at taking wrong turns. Everyone had their little superpower.

I spun the tires a few more times, just to torture myself. Time to take action. Self-sufficient, proactive Vivi D’Onofrio could rise to any occasion, I bracingly told myself. Psychopathic kidnappers? Bring ’em on.

A long shudder racked my body. Well. Maybe not.

The rain was no longer a torrent, just a regular shower, so I flung open the door of the van, looking around myself in vain for a solid place to put my feet.

Edna crawled eagerly over my lap, and I clutched at her collar in alarm.

“No way, babe,” I said sternly. “That’s all I need.

A mud-covered dog. Get back inside. In!”

Edna shrank back, looking reproachful. I rolled my pants up, looked at my cheerful, bright-green high-tops regretfully, and jumped out. At least they were old, like most of my clothes at this point. Maybe a run through a washing machine would salvage them.

Cold, sucking mud swallowed my feet to the ankles.

I slogged around the van, and realized that the tires were half buried.

Chilly rain plastered my hair to my scalp and the green T-shirt to my body.

I let loose with a stream of explicit profanity, the foul, biting kind I’d learned in the Bronx as a child, and punctuated by kicking a slimy tire.

Hard enough to make a bolt of pain shoot up my leg.

Yeah, that’s right, Viv. Check me out, yapping like a fishwife at inanimate objects. Very impressive. Very mature.

Farther back, I’d seen what looked like a collapsed shack. Maybe some planks laid down in front of the tires would give them purchase to get out of the muck. Beyond the puddle, the road looked almost drivable.