“Right.” But she didn’t look convinced.
Kara smiled, trying to ease her mind. “Hey. Remember when we used to go to the beach? Way back in the day? We used to always get a room in that motel right on the boardwalk.”
“With the pool on the top deck, overlooking the beach.”
“Yeah!”
“I can’t believe you remember that. You couldn’t have been more than two years old.”
“I remember all of it,” Kara grinned. “Swimming with those inflatable things on our arms.”
“Going on the big Ferris wheel,” Laura whispered. “It used to scare you so much.”
“I thought we were gonna touch the sky. We could see the whole town on one side and the ocean on the other. On and on, for miles maybe. At night, the lights from the rest of the rides and the games and the boardwalk would shine. It was so beautiful. I thought it was the most beautiful, perfect thing in the whole world.”
“You were just a baby.”
“But I remember. I remember everything: how salty the ocean was, the custard we’d get from the stand, the smell of chlorine in the pool and sunscreen, how tired we’d all be at the end of the day.”
“I used to kiss your heads—you’d still smell like the beach even after your shower. And you’d sleep all tangled up in each other.”
“I miss her.” It came out as a whimper.
“Me, too,” Laura whispered. “Every day. You have to be gentle with your dad now. He’s always—”
“I know, I know. He feels guilty.”
“It’s worse than that. Guilty is such a simple word. It doesn’t begin to encompass everything. Not even close.”
Should she say it? It had been so long since the last time she’d dared. How many years had she pretended, gone along with what they told her was true? Her parents, the therapists. All of them telling her she was wrong. She couldn’t possibly know what she thought she knew because it couldn’t possibly be true. Certain things were just a certain way, and there was no changing them.
She knew that all too well.
She couldn’t change what she felt, down in the deepest part of her soul.
“I still feel her,” she admitted in the smallest whisper. It might as well have been the whisper of the little girl she used to be, back when her sister was there with them, physically present, giggling and dancing and playing.
“So do I,” her mother sighed. “All the time.”
“No, Mom. You know what I mean.”
“Kara—”
“Mom, I know what I feel. She might as well be here in this bed with us, just the way I shared a bed with her whenever we went on vacation when we were little. When things were good. When we had normal lives, like normal people. Sometimes, I can hear somebody breathing, somebody over my shoulder. I hold my own breath, and I can still hear it. She’s the one who’s breathing. I know, I know. It sounds dumb.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Crazy, then? Is that the word you’re looking for?” She heard the flash of anger burning its way through her voice, and it chilled her blood. Her mom didn’t deserve it, and this was hardly the time.
Any lingering cloudiness in Laura’s voice disappeared. “Nobody thinks that, Kara. You know it. It hurts me to think you’re still entertaining this idea. All the doctors—”
“They all told me I was wrong, and I guess from their perspective I was. They don’t know what I feel. Nobody does. And I don’t mean here.” She pulled a hand from her mother’s grip and touched her chest. “That would be easy. I could talk myself out of that. I feel her in my skin. I hear her. There are times when I could swear if I reached out I’d be able to touch her.”
Pain creased her mother’s forehead, and she hated that, hated what this did to her, to her father, but it didn’t change anything.
She was in pain too.
“You don’t know what it’s like because you’re not a twin.” Kara shrugged. “That’s all. If you were, you’d understand. I don’t blame you, not even a little bit.”
Laura turned her face away, and a tear slid down her cheek. It was a knife to Kara’s heart.
It was also the signal that the conversation needed to end.
“I wish we could go back,” she murmured. “I wish it all the time. Back to normal. Back to a real life when it was easier and we were happy.”
“Aren’t you happy now?” Laura whispered, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand.
“I was happier back then. We were all happy together, weren’t we?”
Laura nodded. “We’ve done everything we could to give you a good life.”
“It’s good. Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a good life, Mom. Nobody could’ve been a better mom or dad, but this house—it’s like it isn’t even ours. There are always so many people here. And at the other house too. And when we’re on vacation.”
“I know, honey. I know. And even if you moved away on your own, you’d need a security detail. For your own good.”
For her own good. Everything was for her own good and all because of her father’s ambition. She knew better than to say a word about it—talking about Krista had been dangerous enough, painful enough.
Certain things she had to keep to herself, just like always.
There was a knock at the door, meaning it couldn’t be her dad. “I’ll get it,” she assured her mother, crawling out of bed and wrapping a blanket around her shoulders for the sake of modesty.
Not that modesty was ever her strong suit, but there were a bunch of strangers in the house. She wasn’t about to give them a free show of her in a camisole.
Especially when the person on the other side of the door was Jace. She wrapped herself tighter, glaring up at him. “Yeah?” she whispered. “Do you need something? My mom’s resting.”
The light shining from behind her lit up his eyes, turning them from black coffee to strong tea. “I only wanted to let you know I have to leave for a while.”
“I’ll do what I can to get along without you.”
His nostrils flared. “Do that. You’d be smart to stay put all night and into the morning when I’ll be back.”
“What does any of this have to do with you in particular?” she asked. “Who cares if you’re here or not? Don’t you have a team? Aren’t there, like, twenty guards downstairs right now?”
“None of them are me.” He had the nerve to look smug. “To answer your question, Senator Collins asked me to take lead on your protection. I’ll be your regular guard throughout this case.”
“Over my dead body,” she snickered before she realized what a stupid thing that was to say. Her heart sank, her stomach turned to ice.
“Poor choice of words.” He smirked, backing away. “The idea is to keep your body alive.”
It wasn’t until he was down the hall and jogging downstairs that Kara realized she was too busy hating him to be afraid.
Chapter Six
“A hack?” Jace asked as he and Logan marched from the parking lot into the command center. It was rare for Logan to wait for any of them out in the lot, pacing like a scared woman. Jace had known when he saw his team leader walking back and forth outside just how serious this must’ve been.
“Attempted hack,” Logan corrected, though it was clear this didn’t make him feel any better. “They did their best, but we’re better.”
“As always.” Jace stole a glance at him. “You’re not usually this stressed over something that didn’t come to pass.”
Logan ignored this or seemed to. Hawk and Val were bent over their workstations, muttering to each other as their fingers flew over the keys. It was clear from their tight voices and their serious expressions that the team wasn’t out of the woods yet.
“What were they trying to hack into?” he murmured, one eye on their technicians. “Client info?”
“No.” Logan leaned against his desk, lifting a cup of what was probably cold coffee. He never cared whether it was hot, cold, fresh, or stale so long as it ke
pt him alert.
“What, then? What am I missing?”
“It was us. They were trying to learn about us. They never touched the client files.”
“I thought our information was hidden behind—”
“Roughly a million firewalls. Yeah. It is.” Logan looked over to where Val threw her arms over her head and stretched, groaning as she did. “But they got close. Very close.”
“What the hell? Who’re we dealing with here?”
“That would be what those two are trying to find out as we speak.”
“Val hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours. None of us have.”
“I heard that,” she called out. “And that’s never stopped me before. My personal record is eighty-three hours.”
“Yeah, but you were playing with friends at the time,” Hawk snorted.
“Shut up.” At least they could still banter. Jace wasn’t sure he could in their position.
“Our information.” Jace stared at Logan. “We’re talking about everything? Like, everything everything?”
“All of it.”
“Can I ask a personal question that I hope you don’t take as a challenge or, you know, undermining your judgment?”
A flash of a smile. “Yeah. Though I think I know what you’re about to ask, but I'll give you the chance to give it a little thought, decide if it’s worth asking. Then, go ahead if you think you should.”
“I don’t understand why you’d keep our personal information on file here.”
“If not here, where else? Unless you want all record of you, your service, all of it gone forever, never to be seen again.”
Jace blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t think you would, which is why I’d appreciate it if you’d stop asking questions about things you don’t understand.”
“But if I don’t ask, how will I know?” Jace wondered if he sounded half as exhausted as he felt. Imagine if he were still fully human. He’d be flat on his back, unconscious, even after the SEALs had stripped him of everything resembling weakness and frailty.
Logan drew a deep breath. “We’re not supposed to exist. Don’t you get that? We don’t exist. We never happened. We were never in the service. We sure as hell never had tests run on us like we were animals in cages. Not ever. And the government and their doctors never experimented on soldiers. They’d never do anything like that.” He rolled his eyes, even as his jaw tightened.
“They wiped us?”
“Completely—or they tried to, at least. When we overran the lab, I took the files. It… mattered at the time. I don’t remember why.” His gaze darted away, moving around the room until it landed on the floor between his feet and stayed there.
“Because we existed. Because we lived, and what happened to us—what they did to us—actually happened. They can’t erase it. It’s not that simple, no matter whether they think it is or not. I sure as hell don’t blame you for that.”
“Where was I supposed to keep the files?” Logan asked, still staring at the floor. Whether he was asking this question of Jace or himself or the floor tiles was anybody’s guess. “I mean, what’s a safer place than right here?”
“No, you did the right thing. Across the board. I know you made them as safe as you could too. You don’t half-ass anything, never have.”
“Well, our hacker or hackers don’t half-ass either. They got closer to us than anybody outside that lab ever has.”
“Why?” Jace pulled up the nearest chair, sitting backward and wrapping his arms around the back. He rested his chin against the top, a position he’d taken so many times in his mother’s kitchen, trying to work out a problem, trying to figure how they’d make ends meet that month, how to keep the power company from cutting their electricity, how to afford new shoes for kids whose feet never stopped growing while also feeding said children.
His waste of oxygen father had robbed his mother of the will to live long before. Even when he was dead and no longer a threat to anybody, she’d never fully gotten it back—if she’d ever had it in the first place, which Jace wasn’t so sure of. He couldn’t remember a time when she had.
All of this and a lot more went through his mind, all wrapped up with the current issue until it was a foggy mess in his overburdened mind. Memories of those weeks in the lab, suffering pain like he’d never known, in and out of fever dreams. Memories of a girl who smelled like vanilla and lavender and youth and woman. His wolf, yearning for her, desperate for her.
“Who would wanna know about us? Who would even know we existed and look for us as a result?”
“Your guess is as good as mine at the moment,” Logan admitted. “The one thing I thought we could count on was anonymity since nobody wanted us to exist.”
“Maybe it’s them. The doctors, the agency, whoever was responsible for us. Maybe they’re looking to see where we ended up.”
Logan snorted, shaking his head before draining his coffee cup. “If they suspected our presence here, don’t you think they’d come in the flesh rather than trying it that way? You know as well as I do if they even imagined our being here, they’d blow this place sky-high. They’re not exactly subtle.”
“So, what’s the alternative? Some random hacker got lucky or thought they did?”
“You know how it is. Somebody hears something, some conspiracy theory, and they take it to heart. They decide they wanna find out for themselves whether it’s true. Some yee-haw hacker thinking they can do the unthinkable.”
This didn’t sit quite well with Jace. “Sure, fine. I’ll grant you that. But how did they know in the first place where to look? How to find us?”
“I guess it’s not such a tough matter when you think about it. You ask yourself what people with our skills would do for a living. You probably assume we’d stick together, since where else would we go? We’re a pack, in essence.”
“In essence,” Jace echoed, frowning.
“And away you go.” Logan shrugged, folding his arms. “I don’t have to like it. In fact, I hate it, but it makes sense.”
“I don’t even know what makes sense and what doesn’t anymore. Does it make sense for some unnamed agency to conduct experiments on us? To see if mortally wounded soldiers will heal when injected with the blood of a wolf shifter?”
An uneasy silence fell. There was no good answer to that question, but Jace didn’t expect one.
Logan cleared his throat, unfolded his arms. Just that small shift spoke of a change in topic. “So. What’d you think of the girl?”
“Can we keep talking about the horrific experiments conducted on us instead?”
“That good, huh?” Logan snickered.
“Worse. I don’t want this detail.”
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t want it,” Jace insisted. “I don’t. Anything but this, anyone but her.”
“Collins wants you in particular.”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants.”
“I want you for it.” When their eyes met, Logan winked. “And don’t tell me you don’t give a damn what I want.”
“Why me? I’m better at surveillance. That’s what I do.”
“Collins trusts you with her for some reason. Trusts you more than he does the rest of us.”
“I can’t be around twenty-four seven.”
“You’ll have to be.”
“I’m supposed to live in that mansion of theirs now?”
“You could do a lot worse. They could live in a trailer.”
“They couldn’t afford us if they did,” Jace pointed out. “And you know my life. My past. I’d be more comfortable there.”
“Just because you have a problem with the wealthy—”
“Watch it.” Jace fixed him with a hard stare. “You know there aren’t many topics I don’t talk about or accept comments on, but that’s one of them. That’s a line.”
“I won’t cross it,” Logan muttered. “But I have to ask you to forget it for now.”
&
nbsp; “She’s a spoiled, useless, worthless—”
“You have to forget that for now, too.” Logan glanced toward the techs, then lowered his voice further. “What’s this really about?”
“Nothing else.”
“You know I know better than that. I can practically hear you howling in my head. What’s really happening? You want her? Does the wolf want her?”
“My wolf doesn’t know what he wants.” Meanwhile, the animal in question howled loud enough to deafen him. He could barely hear himself think over the noise. Those howls were angry, furious. Longing. Irritated at being ignored.
“We don’t have any way of knowing how to navigate these situations,” Logan mused.
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“So the wolf does want her.”
“What do you think?”
“But you don’t.” Logan tapped his temple. “Here.”
“God, no. She disgusts me.”
It wasn’t often that Logan laughed, but when he did it was usually at the wrong time. “Grow up,” he chuckled. “What is this? Middle school? Are you gonna tell me she has cooties? Listen, just because she has a trust fund doesn’t mean she’s had an easy life. You saw the way Collins hangs over her. She hates it. She’s every kid they ever lost and a living, breathing reminder of who Krista might’ve been by now. She’s never been just herself.”
“Great, and I get to guard her. Every kid the Senator and his wife ever lost.”
“You’ve always had the luck.” Logan grinned.
“Guess I’d better get moving.” Jace got up. “If everything’s under control here. I appreciate finding out that my identity and physical state might be up for grabs.”
“It’s not!” Val called out without looking up from her monitor. “We’re good, so don’t go around spreading rumors of anything else, if you wouldn’t mind. Unless you want one of my size tens firmly wedged up that fine little peach of a behind of yours.”
Jace grimaced, looking behind him. “Since you put it that way, my lips are sealed.”
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 5