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Championship in 1972. She’d studied everyone from Paul Morphy to Garry Kasparov.
    Her dad called her fucking nuts. He didn’t say that to her face, of course, but she heard him yell it to Mom one night when he was beating her up. Somehow her chess games made him mad, but she never understood why.
    Now she tried to play at night or when he was at work.
    “I’m moving my pawn to block you,” she said with delight. “You can’t just have free reign in the center of the board, you know.”
    She moved her own king’s pawn up two spots.
    Juicy apparently had been expecting that, because Avril followed her own move by immediately moving the bunny’s king’s knight to land two squares in front of her bishop.
    Avril didn’t hesitate with her own move, moving her queen’s knight in the same fashion.
    “I know what you’re doing,” she said. “The old Ruy Lopez opening.”
    Juicy moved her bishop out past the space that had opened up with her first two moves.
    “See! I told you!”
    Avril stood and looked out the window. After hesitating, she grabbed Juicy and held her up so they could both stare out the window together.
    “I know it’s silly to talk to a stuffed animal,” she whispered, “but sometimes it feels like you’re the only friend I’ve got. Only you know the truth.”
    She hugged the rabbit tightly as she kept looking outside.
    “One day we’ll live somewhere else, Juicy. We’ll run away, and we’ll be able to go someplace where nobody knows us and we can be happy. We just need to be a bit bigger.”
    Avril looked back at the chess game and frowned. She’d never really liked that opening. She moved the pieces back to their starting position and decided to read a book in bed about mid-game strategies instead. Juicy lay in bed beside her, keeping her company.
    She read for about a half hour before falling asleep.
     
     

 
     
     
     
Chapter 5
July 6
     
     
    It’s the day , Cindy decided.
    DarkNet had been calling to her all day, vague rumblings rolling through her mind. Drugs, gun running, child pornography, livers available to purchase . . .
    Assassins for hire.
    There was still a part of her who refused to believe that what she was looking at was real. How was it possible to actually hire somebody to commit murder? How in God’s name could they actually advertise their services?
    But they did. She clicked back and forth between a couple of the sites.
    Why don’t the police shut these places down?
    By now she knew the answer. It was the magic of encryption. She’d done her fair share of Googling over the past couple of days and learned more about security and secrecy than she ever imagined she’d need to know.
    She wanted to be sure nobody could trace what she was doing, and now she was convinced. It was why killers hid in the deep web, accessible only by Tor, which took care of its users.
    Including me.
    She surfed over to Assassins Inc.
     
    * * *
     
    Got a problem you need taken care of? We’ll do it for you! No blood on your hands and no clue who ordered the hit.
    We are a full-service professional firm that specializes in total eradication of your problems. Just check out our references.
     
    * * *
     
    Of course the references were anonymous and there was no way to be sure they were real, but they sure sounded like it.
    There were more than a dozen testimonials listed on the website.
    It was another late night visit to DarkNet for Cindy. She’d come down to her office at 3:00 a.m., limping.
    The evening’s terror had started after she and Tony had watched the late news. Cindy was a news fanatic, wanting to keep up to date with the world because she needed a good understanding of current events to properly run her radio show. Her listeners expected she’d always know what they were talking about when they called, and she always did.
    Tonight the lead story was about a woman who’d been found dead the night before. Her husband was missing and so was their two-year-old son. The