weeks ago, rented a hut and settled down. But perhaps it was time to go home. Calliope asked him every week when he was coming home. He still didn’t have an answer for her. If Elle was still on the run, he’d given her an eight-month head start to hide. And perhaps Søren had gotten the hint that Kingsley wouldn’t do his dirty work for him this time. Kingsley turned around. He’d make a call. See what the flight options were for the week. Maybe it was time to go back. Or at least go somewhere else. Martinique? St. Croix? Miami? Manhattan? He would miss Haiti. After all it was beautiful, peaceful, restful.
And boring.
Kingsley heard a scream.
He whipped around, all senses on high alert. The scream had been loud, high-pitched and pained. He raced a few steps deeper into the trees and saw a boy—pasty white and still wearing his baby fat despite being twelve or thirteen—squealing in agony. Another boy next to him dropped a coconut-sized rock on the ground.
“Pick on someone your own size,” Kingsley heard a woman yell at the boy in a strong French accent.
Then a rock whipped through the air and hit the boy again on the back of his Ludacris T-shirt.
“Crazy bitch,” the boy shouted. The woman picked up another rock and threw it at him, hitting him in the thigh.
“Tu n’es qu’une merde, tu ne sais à rien,” she shouted.
“You’re psycho,” his friend yelled, and he picked up a rock as big as a fist. The woman had thrown rocks the size of walnuts which would leave nothing but bruises. This boy was out for blood.
“Do it,” she said. “You murdering little bastards.”
Kingsley stepped between the woman and the boys.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Kingsley said in English to the boy with the big rock.
The boys took one look at him and made their first smart decision in their young lives.
“Come on. Let’s go,” the other, smaller boy shouted at his friend. The older boy dropped his huge rock and ran off as fast as his pale, hairless legs could carry him.
“Casse-toi,” came the woman’s voice again. She cursed in French but switched back to English when she saw him standing there. She must have assumed he was American. How insulting. “I should have killed them.”
She bent down and picked up a soccer ball.
“You forgot your ball,” the woman shouted, this time in English. “Want it back?”
She made as if she would throw it at them. Kingsley stopped her.
“I’ll take it,” Kingsley said. He grabbed the ball out of her hands, dropped it on the sand and kicked it with the perfect blend of force and precision. A hundred feet away, the ball hit the older boy in the back of the legs and sent him tumbling to his knees. He scrambled up and ran off again.
Kingsley looked at the woman. She looked at him.
“You have good aim,” she said.
“You’re not the first woman who’s told me that.” He waited. The woman got the joke. He could see that in her eyes. She did not, however, find it funny. She turned from him and knelt on the ground.
“What were they doing?” Kingsley asked her.
“Killing babies.”
Kingsley looked down and saw a bird’s nest on the ground, eggs shattered and oozing on the sand. A small bird with yellow on its wingtips danced in distress around the branches of a flowering bush. The woman studying the broken nest had dark skin and large black eyes. She looked much closer to twenty-eight than eighteen, thank God. Her long straight hair was pulled back in an elegant high ponytail. She wore a white ankle-length skirt and a white halter top that left her flat and muscled stomach bare. She was tall, too. Almost as tall as he. Her eyes were full of fury and her hands had balled into fists. She had the bearing of Cleopatra, the face of Venus and the wrath of God. And whoever she was, she’d attempted to stone two boys to death for the crime of throwing rocks at a bird’s nest.
“Little monsters. Look what they’ve done.”
“Do you want me to kill them for you?” Kingsley asked, almost sincere in his offer. He could hardly imagine a good man growing up out of the sort of boy who’d crush bird eggs for pleasure. “I didn’t pack my gun, but I can use my hands. I can drown them and make it look like an accident. Oui? Non?”
Her dark eyes flashed in his direction.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Not at all,” he said. Pas du tout. If this woman had asked him to bring him the heads of those boys to her on a platter, he would have done it.
“No,” she said. “Let them go. They’re in God’s hands. We all are.”
It could have been a platitude—in God’s hands—but the way she said it made it sound like a fearful threat.
The woman knelt in the sand in front of the bush that the boys had attacked with their rocks. She studied the scene of carnage—the shattered eggs, the broken nest.
“Men destroy everything,” she said, talking to herself. “Why do they have to destroy everything?”
Carefully, as if the nest was made of glass, the woman lifted it off the ground and tucked it into a tree. Then she bent down again and covered the broken eggs with sand. She did so quietly, reverently, as if performing a sacred burial ritual. The mother bird flitted down to the sand, looking for her lost babies.
“Try again, Maman,” the woman said to the little bird. “Try again for me.”
He looked at her face, and saw tears on it. Tears over a broken nest and a baby bird.
Fuck Manhattan. And fuck the entire world.
Haiti had just got very interesting.
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