Living Wilder Read online

  Yeah, as if that were a real thing.

  They were silly, romantic books, and at twenty-two, she was way too old and entirely too jaded to be reading them. But she did it anyway. These days, for Charlotte.

  Noting the time, she quickly gathered the books and knelt in front of the cabinet beneath the sink. She carefully pulled out the square of sheetrock at the back wall, placing the books between two studs. After replacing the piece of plaster and moving bottles of shampoo and conditioner to help camouflage the frayed edges, she wiped her hands on her shorts and sat patiently on her small bed.

  The books had been given to her years ago by a sympathetic attendant who was fired the following day for providing non-approved reading materials to patients at the Center, a serious infraction.

  Ava had managed to hide them before they could be confiscated, claiming that someone had already disposed of them.

  The digital clock on her screen moved to 10:00 AM. Her throat clogged with shards of glass as the door to the suite whispered automatically open.

  She held her breath as her heart rate sped up, and then exhaled with relief.

  No one was on the other side.

  No guards, no handcuffs, and no indication that her soul-damning deed had been exposed.

  She followed the calendar’s instructions to go directly to the viewing room overlooking the lecture hall. She worked her way through the familiar labyrinth of corridors, well aware of the restricted access to certain rooms. Rooms that had been securely and remotely locked, supported by biometric devices requiring fingerprints for the final entry.

  She’d learned from eavesdropping on conversations between the staff, that there were others housed in separate annexes of the campus; she could only guess for what purpose and for how long. What she did know was that her and her sisters’ isolation was by design. The less interaction with others, the higher the level of control.

  And the doctor was all about control.

  But not anymore.

  Ava took a deep breath as she placed her finger on the biometric reader to the observational room, hoping for the same outcome.

  The pneumatic door whisked open.

  And again, nothing to trigger combat position.

  Mara, two years younger than Ava, lay on her back on one of the conference room tables, repeatedly throwing a stress ball against the ceiling, while fourteen-year-old Charlotte hummed subconsciously, her arms propped on the audio console, observing the funeral beyond the wide expanse of windows overlooking the lecture hall.

  The doctor lay in repose, his arms crossed over his chest inside a vulgar gold-leaf lacquered coffin. The inside was tufted in a garish green-satin lining, with bright orange carnations cascading over the sides. He lay so quietly and at peace, it was hard to believe he was in the same lecture hall where he had once blustered and pontificated before his staff.

  Ava raised an eyebrow and grinned. “They sure did a shoddy job on his makeup.”

  Hearing her sister’s voice, Mara kicked off the table to stand beside Ava with unrestrained enthusiasm. “Omigod, can you believe it? How much you wanna bet the old geezer is knee-deep in the fiery pits of hell?”

  “We can only hope,” Ava said.

  Mara grabbed Ava’s arm and moved her closer to watch the proceedings. “It’s like watching a train wreck. I mean, look at his face. Whoever applied his makeup must have suffered a seizure mid-application and failed to blend. Check out those rosy cheeks and his snow-white pompadour. And I’m not sure, but I think he’s wearing lip gloss. Who do you think authorized that?”

  “Good question,” Ava said, a tilt to her head and wearing an unrepentant grin. “If I’m not mistaken, this whole setup appears to be the complete opposite of the scrupulously laid-out plans detailed in his personal file titled ‘Guidelines to Follow Upon My Death.’”

  Mara smirked as she nudged her shoulder. “So, what’s the probability of one delinquent genius hacking into the doctor’s funeral plans and making a few alterations?”

  “I’d say statistically low, Mara,” Ava said, fighting a grin. “Why, it would take a veritable genius to lift the doctor’s personal laptop, hack into his encrypted files with the nefarious intent to change his specifications for an austere and tasteful service.”

  Mara shook her head. “What I would give for him to see this. He looks more like Liberace having a bad hair day than an internationally renowned neuroscientist. This is so fucking great.”

  “Language,” Charlotte sing-songed, still watching the service below.

  Mara leaned closer to the window, turning her head to the side and squinting her eyes. “Is he wearing a gold satin smoking jacket?”

  Ava nodded. “With a ruffly pirate shirt.”

  Charlotte paused her humming to look at Ava with wide eyes. She pointed below. “You did that? Jeez, Ava, what if you’d gotten caught?”

  Her younger sister was a strict rule-follower, always fretting that their visitation hours would be reduced because of her older sister’s shenanigans and unbridled irreverence for the doctor and his research.

  Ava waved her hand. “Please. I’ve been hacking into other systems on behalf of the doctor for years. He just made the mistake of thinking he’d taken the necessary measures that would keep me from hacking into his. Big mistake. Huge,” she said, looking down at Charlotte with round eyes, opening her arms as if she had shopping bags in both hands.

  Charlotte glanced up excitedly. “After this is over, can we go to your room and watch Pretty Woman?”

  Ava sighed. Nothing like watching contraband movies to help you to forget you were a virtual prisoner in a highly secure, state-of-the-art research facility.

  Those moving through the processional made their way one-by-one to the casket, some stricken with grief and in a trancelike state and others weeping into their handkerchiefs. A few of the younger staff members appeared bored, going through the motions and waiting their turn to pay their respects with their eyes glued to their phones.

  Charlotte yawned, also losing interest. “They say he died in his sleep.”

  The official cause of death: Natural causes.

  Ava pulled at her lower lip, contemplating why the Center would lie about the cause of death, but she knew for a fact that he went down for a dirt nap eating a pastrami on rye covered in questionable condiments.

  There was nothing natural about it.

  But her sisters didn’t need to know the gruesome details.

  Plausible deniability and all that.

  She wondered, with admittedly sick fascination, what had run through his mind as he choked on his fat-laden sandwich with extra mayo and Dijon mustard.

  Such a plebeian way to go for one of the world’s most venerated scientists.

  Ava had spent the past few hours visualizing his death.

  He glibly begins to eat his sandwich and then becomes inexplicably dizzy. He grabs the sides of his desk as nausea sets in, followed by foam dripping from his mouth.

  Realizing, with his last dying breath, that he’d been poisoned.

  Oh, how she hoped during that moment in time, he thought of her as the culprit. What she would have given to watch him take his last breath, knowing without a doubt that she was the one responsible for extinguishing it.

  Patricide: the Latin word for the killing of one’s father.

  Just another karmic checkmark to add to her long list of transgressions.

  With zero regret.

  She leaned on the console, overlooking the ostentatious memorial service with intense satisfaction and maybe a little self-doubt. Did her stark lack of remorse substantiate his claims against her? Claims that she was insane and a harm to herself and others. Was it wrong that after years of lies, experiments, and blackmail, all she felt was relief?

  For the first time that she could remember, she was able to relax and exhale now that the man who stood between her and her sisters’ freedom had finally met his just reward.

  She took another deep breath, he
r solar plexus expanding, and released her pent-up anxiety.

  There was still so much to do.

  Mara began bouncing the stress ball against the wall and catching it. “I have this intense desire to dance around his casket singing ding-dong the mad fucking scientist is dead.”

  Charlotte turned, giving Mara the stink eye for her cursing.

  Ava pushed herself onto the console, sitting with her back to the window. “An event which would, ironically, fail to raise an eyebrow. We are crazy, after all.”

  Charlotte paused her humming as she leaned over the audio console with her chin in her hands. “Why weren’t we invited to the funeral? Not that I mind, he didn’t seem to like us very much. But still, we’re his legal daughters, right?”

  “They would never allow Mara and me to mingle among the staff. No telling how we might react, being so mentally imbalanced.”

  Mara snorted. “Couldn’t risk the chance of us cackling like hyenas, wearing prom dresses covered in pig’s blood.”

  “Pig’s blood is so nineteen-seventies,” Ava said. “I’d like to think we could be more creative than that.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Please, if you two were so dangerous, why would they allow me to be alone with you? Not to mention, send you to math conferences and art showings.”

  With Charlotte’s back to them, Ava and Mara glanced knowingly at one another.

  Through the window, they watched one of the staff members break down in tears, clutching a photo of her mentor to her chest. Not only had they passed out 8x10-inch glossies of the doctor, but they also hung a 10x12-foot portrait from the wall of curtains overlooking the bereaved.

  Photoshopped, of course, giving him extended jowls and bushy eyebrows. Ava had to stop short of fake eyelashes and chandelier earrings. She didn’t want them to become too suspicious.

  Charlotte asked, “If you didn’t know him, wouldn’t you think he looked like your everyday grandpa?”

  “If your grandpa was the spawn of Satan,” Mara said, popping her gum and catching the ball.

  “He was always nicer to the people who worked for him than his own family,” Charlotte commented.

  “We weren’t family,” Mara refuted. “We were lab experiments turned cash cows.”

  The crying woman was led out of the room ahead of the casket by one of her sympathetic peers. How ironic to watch two opposing reactions to the doctor’s passing: those following his casket who’d willingly helped him to realize his scientific vision, and his three adopted daughters, who were the unwilling recipients.

  Ava closed her eyes, pushing back on the pixelated geometric lines surrounding the casket. Lines that typically made sense out of chaos and allowed her to see the beautiful symmetry in the mundane.

  Not today.

  Today, they were harsh reminders of why she and her sisters were in this jacked-up familial mess. She took a deep breath and compartmentalized the guilt. There wasn’t time for ruminating about the past. Her plan was in place. She had gotten them into this, so she’d get them out.

  Clearing her throat, she said, “Okay, here’s the deal.” She caught the ball on the return to grab Mara’s attention. “We’ve talked about getting out of here. Now’s the time, but we have to move quickly. We leave tomorrow.”

  Charlotte turned toward Ava, staring at her with furrowed eyebrows. “What? How?”

  “She’s right,” Mara agreed. “They’re distracted. “Everyone’s attention is on the funeral.”

  “Exactly,” Ava said. “And honestly it couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s rare when we’re all three at the Center at the same time.” She nodded toward the slow procession. “Look at them. They’re grief-stricken. We can use it to our advantage. This is it. This is our time, our time is now, right here.”

  Mara nudged Ava’s shoulder. “Way to misquote The Goonies.”

  Charlotte sucked in and looked up. “Oohh, such a good movie. Can we watch that after Pretty Woman?”

  The door to the viewing area whisked opened, catching them off guard.

  Mara grabbed a nearby microphone sitting atop an audio-control panel, and pulled it behind her back as a makeshift weapon.

  Ava observed that Mara’s reflexes were getting sharper, but sometimes, she was a bit of a hair-trigger.

  Case in point, they were in the Center, not on assignment, and standing inside the door was Dr. Jasper Bancroft, Halstead’s personal lackey. He wore a lab coat buttoned to his throat, carrying his ever-trusty iPad.

  Chapter Two

  “A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the larger the fraction.”

  —Leo Tolstoy

  Russian author, War and Peace

  * * *

  Although a cog in the intricate system that kept them under the doctor’s control, Jasper was certainly no physical threat. Rather, he instructed others to perform his muscle work for him.

  But after years of sparring and combat training, the security guards and orderlies the size of double-wide trailers were of little consequence. These days, very few even bothered to get close enough to exact any power over them.

  Just wasn’t worth the pain from an unexpected knee to their junk or a side kick to the head.

  And as a result of the girls becoming stronger and more lethal, Dr. Halstead’s power and control came in the form of extortion as opposed to physical force, with Jasper being his go-between when it came to dealing with his troublesome adopted daughters.

  God, how many times had Ava fantasized about shoving that iPad up his unspectacular backside?

  His eyes were murky and his hair was thinning, teetering on a comb-over. Not a good look for a man in his thirties. On top of that, he smelled like a combination of antiseptic and ass.

  He stood straight with his back stiff and one hand folded over the other, holding his precious iPad. “Good to see you girls paying your respects.”

  Mara loosened her grip on the microphone as she nodded her head toward the funeral in process. “We heard Kill Bill was playing in the lecture hall.” She tilted her head with a saucy smile. “And you know how we love us some Uma.”

  He looked her up and down with disdain. “That would explain your poor choice of attire for the funeral of the man who took you in and gave you a home.”

  Mara clucked while batting her eyes, sporting a black corset, cutoff shorts that would only pass a brothel’s dress code, and black combat boots. “The only thing the doctor gave us was a whale of a funeral to watch.” She sighed, nodding her head toward the now slow-moving casket. “Good times.”

  Ava played along. “Who was the decorator for this little shindig? I’m loving the green, orange, and gold combo. It’s so . . . neuroscientist meets white-trash-lottery-winner.”

  Ignoring her, Bancroft said, “You being the oldest of this delinquent threesome, I thought you might try to set an example.”

  Ava glanced down at her red booty shorts, white tank top foregoing a bra, and red patent leather stilettos. “What? I find this ensemble to be the perfect attire given the circumstances.”

  After completing an assignment, Ava and Mara used what little time they had to purchase the most risqué clothing possible to piss off Jasper and embarrass the doctor. Initially, their questionable clothing choices ended up in the incinerator, until the doctor and his minion realized their attire meshed well with the fabricated stories of psychotic deviant behavior.

  Ava turned one stiletto inward. “Dang it, I knew I should have gone with the dominatrix boots.”

  Mara’s eyes widened. “Yaasss, I love those!”

  Nothing short of intense satisfaction surged through Ava. Messing with Jasper was certainly small compensation for their shitty life, but at least it provided a modicum of relief.

  But as of today, the doctor was dead, and there was light at the end of the tunnel.

  Ava turned to share her mirth with Charlotte, and noticed she had di
screetly moved farther to the corner of the room. Oddly, her younger sister’s eyes were downcast, her thin braids hanging in front of her, and she looked scared.

  Like, swallowing-rocks scared.

  She stood hunched over as if to divert attention from herself, wearing her usual plaid skirt that reached her knees, and a white polo shirt. Smaller than most fourteen-year-olds, the doctor had purposely isolated her from the real world, and as a result, she was terribly shy. And now, she appeared to be doing her best to make herself as small as possible.

  Ava squinted her eyes at Jasper. What the hell? Was Charlotte afraid of Jasper?

  Why had she not noticed this before?

  Jasper tapped the iPad on the metal desk. “I have more important things to do than discuss your blatant levels of impropriety. Charlotte has a concert in Prague tomorrow evening and needs to prepare. Madame Garmond is looking for her as we speak.”

  Ava’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  Regarding his iPad, he said in a flat tone, “I’m always serious.”

  Tomorrow was go time. By the time all three of them were back at the Center, things would have settled, and protocols meticulously followed.

  Ava positioned both arms on the table and leaned toward him. “That’s not happening, Jasper.”

  “I’m beyond thrilled to inform you that it’s not up to you, Ava.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Charlotte’s father keels over and you expect her in Prague the next day to play the piano? What will people think? That you’re the boss man now that the doctor’s taken a six-foot nosedive?”

  The iPad slammed onto the table.

  All three women jumped at this uncharacteristic behavior. Ava noted Mara’s grip tightening once again on the microphone.

  Jasper leaned over the table, chuckling eerily, shaking his head. Pushing from the table, he turned toward them. “Spare me,” he hissed. “Like any of you care that he’s gone.” His voice shook like gravel.

  He sauntered toward Ava and she bristled, but it was more with shock than fear. Jasper never got this close to her. He knew what she’d been trained for and what she was capable of, and that she was in an excellent position for a Japanese chokehold.