T.J. Lebbon - The Family Man - An edge-of-your-seat read that you won’t be able to put down

She was always glad.

Leaving Twitter running in the background, she surfed other social media sites from a variety of fake ISP accounts. No name was her own, and none were those she had used in real life. Her net activity left no trail, and every relevant page or search was bookended with several random surfs.

Everything was quiet. That was how she liked it. She could have lived like this for the rest of her life, if her sense of morality allowed. It wasn’t that she was always out for vengeance. She wasn’t sure what it was.

It’s all I can do , she’d think when she mused on things. And considering what she had been, and who she’d had, that was the most depressing thing of all.

When she started scrolling through the news sites and saw the item, and scanned the first paragraph, everything changed. Her stomach dropped, and she felt the familiar sense of change settling around her.

The calm reality of her life at the gîte became a facade. Ever since becoming the person she now was, she’d had the sense of the world beyond her horizons conspiring to draw her out and cut her down.

There were plans, conspiracies, machinations, and sometimes she even imagined vast machines working secretly beyond the hills and past the curvature of the Earth, great steam-driven things that drilled and burrowed through the hollows she could not see, the places she did not yet know. They would connect like massive spider webs, drawing tighter and closer until there she was. Caught. Trapped by circumstance, and unable to look away.

All the horrors she had witnessed and experienced, and the terrors she had perpetuated herself, made looking away impossible.

‘Now here we are,’ she said. She read the whole article, picked up the phone, dialled. After four rings she disconnected, then she dialled again. He picked up after three. That way they both knew that things were well.

But not for long.

‘Have you seen the news?’ she asked.

‘I try to avoid it. Too depressing.’

‘There was a double murder in South Wales. A girl had her lips and nostrils glued shut.’

Silence from the other end.

‘Post office job gone wrong.’

‘So?’

She frowned. It was strange having this conversation in such calm, beautiful surroundings. Over the hills , she thought. Past the trees. Machines turning and steaming, vast cogs grinding, dripping oil, casting lines to hook into my flesh .

‘Don’t you care?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘But you’ve been waiting for something like this for years. Don’t you want to …’ She trailed off. He always steered these conversations even if she started them.

‘Take revenge? And how did that work for you?’

A slew of images flashed across her mind. None of them were nice. Her hip ached where she’d been shot in Wales three years before, stalking and killing the people of the Trail, the shady organisation responsible for her family’s deaths. Her arm was stiff, muscles knotted and hard from another bullet impact. They’d shot her, but she had survived. Perhaps she’d even triumphed. But she didn’t feel like a winner.

‘It’s a lovely morning,’ she said.

‘Beautiful. Anything else?’

She’d tried to get close to Holt over the past couple of years. He’d pulled her out of her alcoholism following the murders of her family, then he’d trained her, preparing her for vengeance. Even so, she knew that he’d shown her only a small part of what he had learned and experienced over the years. His history was deep, and bathed in blood and grief.

And all the time, every moment they were together or apart, Holt seemed totally in charge.

She hung up without saying any more. It was her own attempt to take control of the conversation.

Jane Smith, real name Rose, glanced at her watch and decided it was time for another coffee.

Rose ran.

She had never been a runner. It still felt like a new thing for her. But since that time in the Welsh hills with Chris Sheen three years before, and the Trail, and the violence and pain that had resulted, it had become therapeutic. The Trail had selected Chris for a human trophy hunt, holding his family hostage to ensure he played ball. If he was caught and killed by the hunters, his family went free. If he escaped, they died.

It was the same terrible dilemma that Rose herself had once faced at their hand. She had escaped. Her family had not.

Chris had shown how running could keep you alive, and not just because you stayed ahead of those who meant you harm. It cleared the mind, flushed the veins, worked your systems. It was like a detox of the brain, gasping away accumulated ideas that were growing staid and stale. It drained thoughts that might do you harm. It was a form of freedom and serenity, when Rose rarely felt free, and to be serene was a state she had forgotten years before.

After leaving Wales, she had started with a few miles. She quickly became obsessed. When it was just her and her route, she might have been free. Now, she often ran eighty miles each week, but she never seemed to get anywhere she wanted to go.

Every step she took jolted up through her damaged hip.

Take revenge? And how did that work for you?

Holt knew how it had worked for her. Not at all. Killing the people who had murdered her family had done nothing to lessen the hollowness their loss had carved out inside her.

The grief was not tempered, the rage not calmed. It was something she’d had to do, and he had been partly responsible for her achieving and surviving the task. But so many deaths by her hand had done nothing to make the past more bearable, nor the future more certain.

She dreamed of them less now, at least. Her husband and three children, slaughtered in that basement by the Trail, gone forever without any of them having a chance to say goodbye. But maybe that lessening of dreams was more down to the passage of time than anything she had done.

Sometimes, she wondered whether her killing spree had achieved anything at all.

Rose pounded down the sloping woodland trails towards the lake. There were public footpaths through here, but they were rarely trodden, and she let herself run free. She wore shorts and a vest, knobbly trail shoes, and brambles and nettles scratched and stung her legs, tree branches lashed at her bare arms and shoulders. She welcomed the pain. She never actively hurt herself, but whenever pain came she relished it. It was one thing she’d never talked about to Holt. Partly because it frightened her, but she was also terrified that he would nod, understand, and tell her that she was now just like him.

She didn’t want to be like that. She didn’t want to descend so far, become so lost. They had worked together several times since the hunt in Wales. She took jobs for people who needed her help, innocents who were suffering or naive people pulled into difficult situations. She liked to think she still had morals, and that her sense of injustice drove her to do the things she did.

It was more complex than that, of course. Rose knew that well enough, but analysing too deeply scared her.