Page 53 of Villains Series

FIVE HOURS UNTIL MIDNIGHT

THE ESQUIRE HOTEL

SYDNEY was perched on the couch with Dol at her feet and the folder of executed EOs open in her lap when Mitch came in. The sun was setting beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, and she looked up as he pulled the carton of chocolate milk from the fridge. He looked tired as he leaned his elbows—they were dusted with something chalkish and white—on the dark granite counter.

“Are you okay?”

she asked.

“Where’s Victor?”

“He went out.”

Mitch swore under his breath.

“He’s crazy. The area is crawling with cops after that stunt.”

“Which stunt?”

asked Sydney, shuffling the papers in the folder.

“Killing the cop or answering Eli’s phone call?”

Mitch smiled grimly. “Both.”

Sydney looked down at the face of a dead woman in her lap.

“He can’t mean it,”

she said quietly.

“About meeting Eli at midnight. He doesn’t mean it, right?”

“Victor means what he says,”

said Mitch.

“But he wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t have a plan.”

Mitch pushed off the counter, and vanished down the hall, and a moment later Sydney heard the bathroom door shut, and the shower snap on. She went back to reading the profiles, telling herself it was only because there was nothing good on television. The truth was, she didn’t want to think about what would happen at midnight, or worse, what would happen after. She hated the what-ifs that crawled into her head the moment she lost focus. What if Eli won, what if Victor lost, what if Serena … she didn’t even know what to think about her sister, what to hope for, what to fear. There were these traitorous parts of her that still wanted to feel Serena’s arms around her, but she knew that now she had to run away from—not toward—her sister.

Sydney forced her eyes over the profiles in the folder, tried to focus on the EOs’ lives and deaths—tried not to picture Victor’s photo in among them, a black x across his calm, clear face—and guessed at what their powers were, even though she knew they could be anything. Victor had explained that it depended on the person, on their wants and wills and last thoughts.

The last profile was her own. She’d reprinted it after Victor took the first copy, and now her eyes wandered over the photo of her face. Unlike the other candid shots that filled the folder, hers was staged: head up, shoulders back, eyes leveled directly at the camera. It was a yearbook photo from last year, taken a week or so before the accident, and Sydney had loved it dearly because the camera had somehow, magically, caught her the moment before she smiled, and the proud upturn of her chin and faint crease in the corner of her mouth made her look just like Serena.

The only difference between this copy of the photo and the original was that this one had no x drawn through it. Eli knew by now that she was here, alive, and she hoped he felt sick when he’d heard about Barry’s body walking back into the bank, when he’d put the pieces together and realized that it was her doing, that a few shots fired into the woods didn’t equal a dead girl. Maybe it should have upset her, to see her own profile in the dead EO folder, and it had at first, but the shock had worn off, and the profile’s existence in the digital trash bin, the fact that they’d underestimated her, assumed she was dead, and most of all the fact that she wasn’t, made her smile.

“What’s got you grinning?”

Sydney looked up to find Mitch freshly showered and dressed, a towel draped around his neck. She didn’t realize how much time had passed. That happened to her more than she liked to admit. She’d blink, and the sun would be in a different position, or the show on TV would be over, or someone would be finishing a conversation she’d never heard them start.

“I hope Victor hurts him,”

she said cheerfully. “A lot.”

“Jesus. Three days and you’re already taking after him.”

Mitch sagged into a chair, ran his hand over his shaved head.

“Look, Sydney, there’s something you need to understand about Victor—”

“He’s not a bad man,” she said.

“There are no good men in this game,”

said Mitch.

But Sydney didn’t care about good. She wasn’t sure she believed in it.

“I’m not afraid of Victor.”

“I know.”

He sounded sad when he said it.