False Hope

by Meli Raine

  I can’t answer that question. I can’t for many reasons, most of them reasons she suspects.

  But here’s my real problem: my actual boss is dead.

  I’m not sure who I’m working for anymore.

  My paychecks come from Drew Foster’s company, but my orders?

  Those came from someone who isn’t in charge now. Never will be again, either.

  So whose agenda am I following?

  And what if it turns out—it’s my own?

  Chapter 2

  Lily looks over at the building, turning to the left and seeing the small aircraft on the tarmac. A pilot is climbing into a helicopter. “I thought you said we were meeting President Bosworth,” she snaps. Her voice is filled with confusion, the kind that comes from being overwhelmed.

  “We are.”

  Frowning, her eyes dart all over the place, inside the car, outside the car, frantic and worried. “Isn't he here in California? It was all over the news. Why do we need to be at an airport for a helicopter?”

  I tell her, choosing to go into asshole mode. “Security. And speed. But before we go, you need to tell me, Lily: Why are you so afraid to tell the truth?”

  “Maybe I just don’t trust you.”

  “Will you tell the truth to Gentian? To Jane?” I counter.

  Her reaction confirms what I already suspect.

  No.

  “Jesus Christ, Lily,” I say, moving my hand to my forehead, rubbing hard. Two parts of me are fighting for dominance inside. I’m not sure which one is supposed to win, and the battle is epic.

  No–pyrrhic. No matter what, the half that loses is the half that will hurt the most. And no amount of victory for the other part will balance that out.

  “Is there anyone you trust?” I finally ask her. This is the end of the line. Whatever has her in a state of terror so great that she can keep this kind of secret for this long under extraordinary brain-trauma circumstances, it’s got to be bad.

  Imperceptibly, she shakes her head. I pick up on it. It’s so faint, like seeing a butterfly flapping its wings and noticing that it’s out of sync for just a heartbeat.

  “What about your mom and dad?” I probe.

  She lets out a huff, a strangely cynical reaction that sets me on alert.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  We both look up to find my boss, Silas Gentian, standing outside the car giving me a look that says, Why are you delaying?

  I thought we were going separately, but I guess President Bosworth changed the plan. We're flying together. Makes the gravity of this situation feel stronger.

  Lily crosses her arms over her chest, folding her shoulders in. The position is one of protectiveness. The fact that she has to protect herself against me makes this even more frustrating.

  I roll the window down an inch.

  “What’s going on?” Gentian asks, eyes bouncing between the two of us, brow low with irritation. “Bosworth’s waiting.”

  “I know,” I tell him. “Lily was just telling me some vital information about the case.”

  “Which case?” Gentian demands. “The shooting that just happened or the one from two years ago?”

  I look at Lily. “That’s a really good question, isn’t it?”

  She says nothing.

  Gentian rolls his eyes, jaw going tight. “We don’t have time for this kind of bullshit,” he snaps. This isn’t in his nature. Lots of security guys mistake anger for authority. Gentian is not one of them. The fact that his girlfriend was just targeted along with my client in the shooting back at the coffee shop certainly feeds into whatever is going on inside him.

  Again, we’re not robots.

  Even if we’re told that’s our real job.

  “I don’t have anything new to add,” Lily pipes up. Pleading eyes meet mine, begging me not to blow her secrets. How the hell I could do that when she hasn’t even told me those secrets is a whole other issue, but I get her meaning.

  Don’t push.

  Don’t make her go places she’s not ready to go.

  Gentian has his own calculations going on. All these competing interests fly around the space between the three of us like atoms in an electron microscope.

  It’s Lily who breaks first.

  Reaching for the door handle, she pops it open, shoving so hard that Gentian jumps, his hand reflexively moving towards his gun. “Fine,” she says, the single word a slap across the face, a kick in the gut, invective.

  Gentian and I scramble to keep up with her. It’s only because I'm walking behind her that I can detect her limp. It’s more pronounced. Back at that coffee shop, she didn't take a bullet.

  But she did take a beating.

  I catch up to her quickly and walk side by side, turning and surveying her body.

  “How badly injured are you?” I ask, brushing her shoulder with my hand.

  She flinches and pulls away, yanking with a force that makes a part of me cringe. “I’m fine. I told you, I’m fine,” she insists.

  “Just because you say it doesn’t make it true.”

  “Now the things I do tell you are lies? I thought I was only lying by omission, according to you.” The bitterness in her tone makes me want to turn back the clock.

  Makes me wish I’d never kissed her. Makes me wish I’d been able to kiss her differently. Makes me wish we’d met under completely different circumstances.

  Makes me wish for a lot of things.

  But wishes aren’t reality. What’s in front of our faces is the fact that someone tried to kill her and Jane. They set it up to look like a gang-revenge shooting.

  Now I know that they did it at the exact moment that Jane and Lily were talking about the shooting from almost two years ago. No one on my team is bugging her. No one is bugging Jane.

  Or at least not in the way that Lily thinks.

  It’s obvious, though, that someone is listening. Monitoring these women. But there’s no way that shooting was set up knowing they’d talk like that.

  Jane swallows Lily in a hug. As the door of the building shuts behind us, Gentian leans over to me with a conspirator’s whisper.

  “What were you trying to get out of her?” he asks quietly.

  “You know exactly what I was trying to get out of her,” I reply, giving him a look that says he’s a an asshole for asking when he knows the answer. “What we’ve been trying to get out of her for the last nine months.”

  “Do you really think she remembers anything new?” Gentian asks, incredulity infusing his words.

  He has to ask that question. I understand he has to. And quite frankly, I don’t know how to answer it.

  “I think she knows more than she’s letting on,” I reply.

  “Czaky has been claiming she knows. That the right neurologists and psychologists can get the information out of her. That’s been his fucking mission ever since she woke up.”

  Gentian’s words slice through me. I know it’s true. Romeo Czaky’s been working hard on the case, determined to find the person who tried to kill Lily.

  But there’s something in Gentian’s tone this time that sets my teeth on edge.

  Maybe it’s the combination with Lily’s reaction earlier. Maybe it’s the combination of that and trying to be two different people inside my head at the same time for so long. Maybe it’s the way Jane and Lily are talking, whispering furiously to each other.

  Maybe it’s everything.

  Maybe it’s nothing.

  “Czaky’s been obsessed with this for a long time,” I reply, stalling.

  Doesn’t work on Gentian.

  “That’s a non-answer and you know it, Duff,” he says, looking at me even more intensely. “What the hell are you hiding?”

  I laugh, the sound quick, like a bark. What does he mean, hiding? My feelings for Lily? My actual mission? Pick one, Gentian.

  “I’m an open fucking book, and you know it.”

  “You’re also a liar.”

  “That’s why you pay me the big bucks, bo
ss.”

  His turn to laugh, except it doesn’t sound funny.

  “What do you make of this mess?” he asks, his voice going quiet, the timbre digging into the base of my spine. I know that voice. It’s the voice that lives inside my head every time I think that a client is in more danger than I had previously suspected.

  Hearing it in my boss does not strike a note of confidence.

  “Someone set that whole thing up long before Jane and Lily were talking,” I say.

  Scrutinizing me with a look that only someone with a long history of being shot at can give, Gentian rolls his tongue inside his cheek and stares me down. I stare back. No one needs to train us in staring techniques.

  It comes with the territory.

  “You’re not going to tell me what you know,” he says, voice firm. Decisive. As if it’s not even worth his time and attention to try to argue with me.

  I shrug. That’s all I need to do.

  “Goddammit, Duff,” he says, betraying himself. “That’s my girlfriend they shot at today. That’s my girlfriend they tried to kill two years ago. That’s the goddamn president of the United States’ daughter.”

  “Illegitimate daughter,” I remind him.

  “That doesn’t make any of this better,” he grinds out.

  “No, sir. It doesn’t. Makes it worse.”

  “Bosworth is losing his shit behind the scenes,” Gentian confides in me. “I’ve got Drew freaking out, too. His wife just had a baby. And now the president’s other daughter gets shot at. My girlfriend.”

  “It’s a big mess,” I say, sympathizing.

  “It’s more than that and you know it,” he answers. “This reeks of an inside job.”

  I swallow hard, relieved that he said it.

  Not me.

  “I agree,” I finally spit out, the admission setting my nerves on edge.

  In our business, you don’t admit what you know, unless it furthers your cause. Every scrap of information is a tool. Leverage is more important than reality. But times like this require a certain candor. I’m not laying all my cards on the table, but I’m going to show a couple of the ones in my hand.

  I have to. Because those gunmen weren’t just shooting at Jane. At the president’s daughter.

  They were shooting at my client.

  They were shooting at my Lily.

  We are interrupted by our driver, Mike, who turns to Gentian and says, “Chopper’s ready.” The guy looks like every invisible agent you could possibly imagine. Dark hair. Short haircut. Sunglasses, even at night. Black suit. Burgundy tie. Concealed weapons. Always—concealed weapons.

  “Destination confirmed?” Gentian asks him.

  The guy just nods.

  “Everything’s cleared,” Gentian says to me. There’s a bleakness in the way he says it. It's as if we’re about to cross an enormous gap. But that line was crossed hours ago by the guys who chose to open fire in a residential neighborhood and shatter store windows in a joint designed to caffeinate—not kill.

  Silas's phone buzzes. He looks at it and grimaces.

  “Dammit,” he says, pivoting to hit the wall hard with the heel of his hand. “Jake’s dead.”

  I go cold. The guy on detail at the coffee shop, front and center when those bastards opened fire from the car.

  “Son of a bitch,” I mutter under my breath. “He take any of them down?” I ask, knowing it doesn’t matter in the long run. Doesn't matter when he's dead.

  And yet it does.

  “Preliminary reports say he tried to take out the tires. Shot out the back window before they got him in the head.”

  The cold, clinical way that Gentian tells me this is another way that we hold our distance.

  An image of a bullet ripping through Lily’s face bursts into my mind suddenly. Any illusion that I have distance here is long gone.

  This is a first.

  It has to be the last.

  Jane appears, marching over with Lily in tow. The chopper on the tarmac starts up, the early sounds of the engine turning over like a hacking cough from a virus no one wants to contract. The blades even out and soon it’s just a whirr, one I know all too well. Combat, supply missions, civilian life, behind-the-scenes politics—you name it, I’ve done it in a helicopter.

  But I’ve never transported an injured client I just kissed.

  “Ready?” Jane shouts to Silas, who takes her arm and strides with her to the chopper, Lily behind them, me on her heels. She looks straight ahead, the blade’s push of air getting stronger, blowing her hair off her face. The scar from her gunshot is revealed, a winding mess that makes me fall for her a little more, nudged forward into territory I have no right to explore.

  We recover from our wounds because the survival instinct is so strong.

  And those who survive and thrive are the most attractive of all.

  Chapter 3

  The ride to the undisclosed location is devoid of drama.

  Just the way I like it.

  When you’re buzzing like a mosquito above the Southern California coastline, conversation isn’t a priority. Lily’s sitting next to Jane, across from me and Gentian. The second we land, she unclicks her harness, twisting away from me.

  I get it.

  I’m the enemy now.

  Telling the truth makes people hate you.

  Demanding they tell the truth makes people want to kill you. No one wants to be reminded that their very existence depends on someone who can see through their lies.

  And there are two types of people like that: narcissists, and people who really do have something to lose.

  I know Lily doesn’t have a character disorder.

  Whatever she’s worried about losing must be bad.

  “Here,” I say to Lily, pointing to the car.

  “Why are we in a car? Can't we just land at the president's house?”

  “Security issue.”

  Everyone loads into a standard black sedan, big enough to hold a driver and the four of us. I sit in the front. That’s what I do. There is no discussion about who sits where.

  Lily, Jane, and Silas climb into the back, Jane between the other two. No one says a word.

  We are a strangely well-oiled machine, pieces that come together to work in sync. We don’t do this because of orders. We don’t do this because of some weird psychic connection or premonition.

  We do it because this is the way survival works. This is the way intelligence works. Not the kind of intelligence that all human beings possess. The kind of intelligence that involves research behind the scenes, in the shadows, in the nooks and crannies where political animals live and thrive.

  In some way I don’t understand, Lily has learned to speak our language. She’s vigilant. Constantly vigilant, with the dual understanding that everything she does has to be done surreptitiously, and at the same time, that she has to be aware of every single movement, every word, every signal that every person in a given setting is sending out.

  We turn into receivers. We take in radio signals and interpret them. We spit the results back out.

  That’s how it has to be.

  That’s how we’re made.

  The jerky drive through the streets surrounding President Bosworth's personal compound changes the minute we make a certain right turn. Down a slope to a garage where the doors don’t open the way they do in the civilian world. This is where we’ll enter the Byzantine maze that will take us to a room where Jane will find herself standing in front of a man who looks at her with eyes that tell a thousand different stories and absolutely none —all at the same time.

  When you have eyes like that, you get to lead nations.

  If we were in civilian life, Lily would be shaking by now. Normal nervousness requires an identification with other people as social beings. We get nervous when we think we might be excluded from the social group that we need in order to stay alive.

  Exclusion is a tool. Expulsion is a weapon.

  There’s a reason why shame
is used so often as a tool to control other people. Shame disconnects us from the social group. That disconnection can lead to death.

  But here’s the key: you can climb awfully high or live awfully low if you don’t care about the shame.

  It takes a lot to reach that point.

  But once you do, the nerves—they learn something exquisite. They learn to simmer down, to settle in, to curl up and just watch the way the world moves and unfolds before them. The nerves learn that they don’t have to react or anticipate in the same way that they do when you actually care what other people think.

  I can tell by the way Lily moves that she’s gone beyond the point of caring.

  That’s a shift I didn’t expect in her.

  You can’t work in a florist shop, giving people bouquets of happiness, arrangements of sorrow, blossoms attached to emotion, and not care. Then again, Lily changed almost two years ago.

  Where did she go for fourteen months inside her own head?

  She's still changing, before my very eyes.

  It’s the little things that make me realize she’s different. There are no questions on this ride. She doesn’t ask where we’re going. Or why. It’s the lack of why that gets to me more than anything else.

  She knows that President Bosworth is Jane’s father. No one else knows that outside of the circle of security people who surround the president.

  Who now surround Jane.

  My phone buzzes and I look down. It’s a text from Gentian, who’s sitting right behind me.

  How is Lily really? the text asks.

  I stare at my own glass screen and almost make a sound that reveals that my nerves aren’t quite as flat as I thought.

  You know more than I do, boss, I text back.

  He immediately responds with, Bullshit.

  Holding my face neutral, I reply, She was close to telling me something.

  His reply is a simple, Get her to talk.

  Trying, I type back.

  Try harder, he replies.

  And then the question that I know is coming but don’t want to read:

  What do you think she knows?

  No clue, I reply.

  Does she know who her shooter was? he texts.