The Lies That Bind

38: Checkmate

Calla Parker was dead.

Well. Legally.

"I look pretty good for a dead bitch," Calla mused, gazing at her reflection in the shitty bathroom mirror of the shitty motel she'd been living in for three long, shitty weeks.

She couldn't stop staring at herself, and not out of vanity. Well, not entirely out of vanity, she amended. It was the shock, more than anything, that kept her sneaking a glance each time she passed the mirror.

The hair would take some getting used to, she supposed, running her fingers experimentally through her short black curls. The chop had been a complete hack job on her part, but she'd done well enough with that odious hair dye—certainly well enough not to recognize herself.

Would Cooper recognize me? she wondered, and then immediately shut the thought down with a vicious snarl. She wasn't allowed to think of...him.

Frustrated, she combed her hands through her hair. Serenity Gates. That was her new name.

Calla Parker was dead. A killer and a fraud and dead, dead, dead.

Serenity Gates was her future. An innocent girl with a respectable credit score and a social security number and every other thing that made a person a person, at least on paper.

Cooper Daniels did not know Serenity Gates. And if Calla had her way, he never would.

"It's for the best," she told her reflection firmly.

Her reflection just stared back. Unconvinced.

"Oh, shut it, Serenity," she muttered. The irony of that name was not lost on her. In fact, when her dealer—the same man who'd gotten her the poisoned pills—first slipped the envelope beneath her motel door and she'd gotten a good look at her new passport, she'd laughed and laughed. Even now she scoffed as she turned away from the mirror.

She supposed she could use some serenity in her life. She deserved that much. Then again, maybe deserved was too strong a word...

Calla—she couldn't quite think of herself as Serenity, not yet, pretty speeches be damned—squeezed through the bathroom door and gazed over at the motel bed she so loathed. Or, more precisely, at the backpack on the bed. 

Her world had narrowed down to that silly little piece of baggage. Everything she owned and everything she was had been stuffed in that bag, and now that she had her identity papers—driver's license and passport and birth certificate, the works—she could leave this hellscape of a motel and start her new life across the sea.

So why was she still standing here, staring at the damn bag, when she should be grabbing it and running?

Huffing, Calla threw herself down on the bed, one arm draped over her eyes. All her hard work. All her sleepless nights. All of it was about to go to waste because she was a dithering, hopeless idiot.

"Let him go," she muttered to herself. "Just let him go. Let him go and let Calla go, too. You're Serenity Gates now. Act like it."

It had been no easy feat, either—becoming Serenity Gates. Identities didn't come cheap. Calla was lucky, in some respects; the scholarship she'd ridden in on had covered her tuition and then some, so every spare dollar and dime she'd earned over the years in those pesky internships had gone straight to that shoebox under her bed, a secret stash of cash she'd set aside to eventually purchase the papers she'd need to buy her freedom, if it ever came to that, and she'd known deep down it would.

Even then, all that saving had meant very little in the end. Calla's personal fund had fallen short some several thousand dollars, and that was that. Despite her careful planning, Serenity Gates and the future that name entailed was beyond her grasp.