No, what kept her awake was the explosion that haunted her every time her eyes closed. She still couldn’t belief that David was gone. Her buddy. Her counterpart.
It was particularly painful to her that of all the people in the world who could have helped her make sense of this grief, David was pretty much the only one. He’d always been able to help her crystallize her thoughts. That’s why they’d made such a good team. She was the ballsy, proud, fiery one and he was the organized, patient, persuasive one. Between the two of them, they always got what they wanted. And luckily for the world, what they wanted was the conservation of wildlife.
He’d been her best friend for nearly seven years and she hadn’t even spoken at his funeral. Of course, that wasn’t really her fault. She’d been recovering from a concussion in the hospital and then fed directly into FBI custody for three days’ worth of questions. But still, missing his funeral made her feel as if his death were still some sort of clerical error. That everyone else had made a mistake. Only Elena knew that David was just on vacation, he’d come back soon, hands in the pockets of his tailored suit, his blonde hair perfectly slicked back.
Of course, Elena knew that was crazy. Intellectually, she knew that David was dead. During the day, she felt hollow and strange, an imposter in her own skin. Night, though, that was when grief found her. In the deep of the night, she’d shake with so many tears she’d get dehydrated, her lips chapped and her mouth dry. She’d shake and cry and wish for David until exhaustion stilled her body. And then she’d just lie there, in a shapeless lump on her bed, sometimes until morning came for her.
It was close to 3 am and she knew, from experience over the last four weeks, that she might drift into an uneasy sleep around 5 am. And then she’d jolt awake around 8. And that would be that for her night’s rest.
She’d always been such a good sleeper.
Sigh.
Those days were gone.
Her tears had ended an hour ago but tonight, in this strange place, she found she couldn’t lie still any longer. She sat up and the covers pooled around her waist. She wore a long t-shirt and boy shorts underwear. She hissed as the freezing cold floor greeted her poor little toes and immediately found a pair of bunchy socks in the drawers she’d unpacked into earlier that night.
Elena found herself pausing at the door to her room. They’d insisted over and over again that she was free to roam the building. She wasn’t a prisoner here and any part of the building was safe for her, as long as she didn’t go outside without permission.
But still, she hesitated. She was in a strange place with strange people. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the hallway, closing her bedroom door behind her.
She was two steps down the hall when the door across from hers swung open and a disheveled-looking Cedric was suddenly all she could see. He filled the entire hallway and her entire field of vision. She blinked at his chest hair, which wasn’t more than eight inches from her nose. Suddenly, he was covered with a plain white t-shirt, shoving his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants and staring down at her from that serious but friendly face of his.
“Elena, are you all right?”
“Am I not supposed to be… in the hallway?” She felt like she was a truant high school kid and she didn’t like it one bit. “Didn’t realize I needed a hall pass.”
His face went from serious and concerned to soft and humored. “Nah. Of course you don’t. You’re allowed to go anywhere. It’s just that it’s your first night and I’m on night duty and I just wanted to check and make sure you were okay.”
“Right.” She wasn’t used to justifying her actions to, well, anyone. She didn’t care for the feeling at all, but she knew that Cedric was just doing his job.
“Look,” he said softly. His bowling ball shoulders lifted and fell. “This will get easier, I swear. Not only will you get used to it, we’ll get to know you better as well. Your comings and goings. We’ll build trust with each other and we’ll know when and where you’re gonna be. So we won’t have to be up your ass so much.”
He winced at his own crassness and she couldn’t help but laugh at the embarrassed look on his face.
“For, uh, lack of a better phrase,” he mumbled.
Whatever stiff resistance there was inside Elena, it folded with his fumbled, late-night awkwardness. She gave in. If she hated this, which she did, there was no earthly reason to take it out on Cedric. “I was just going to go make a cup of tea.”
He nodded. “I’ll walk you down there. But after that, if you want to be alone, that’s fine.”
“Fair enough.”
They made the trek down to the kitchen in silence, with Cedric holding the doors for her as they went. Though the building had obviously been renovated fairly recently, it had remained industrial in design. There was cement flooring, painted a dark gray, and swinging doors with eye-level windows where the hallways connected.
Elena appreciated that Cedric didn’t turn on any lights as they passed, he merely used the ambient city lights through the windows to navigate by.
They got to the kitchen and it too was fairly industrial. Stainless steel counters and a fridge the size of a Volkswagen.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Cedric said, watching her face carefully. After a moment he turned and headed back out into the hallway.
“You’re just gonna stand out there?” she asked him.
He nodded. “It’s okay, Elena. It’s my job.”
“Then when do you sleep?” she asked, folding her hands over her midsection.
“Night duty didn’t start until midnight. So I slept for a few hours after dinner. I’ll sleep again when Geo takes over at seven. Tea is in the far cabinet.” He nodded with his head and she turned to look. “Though I’m not sure if we’ll have what you like. If you want anything in particular to eat or drink, just tell one of us and we’ll make sure that you get it.”
Elena turned back to him, to say thank you, and though his eyes were firmly on her face, she got the strange suspicion that they had just been on her legs. Her bare legs. She wondered why the hell she hadn’t decided to put some pants on before she wandered around this weird ass bunker.
Neither of them said anything for a moment and finally Cedric just nodded his head and went out through the swinging door to the hallway.
Elena put the kettle on and selected chamomile tea from their selection. She turned back to survey the kitchen and her eyes settled on the fridge. She actually wouldn’t mind a little midnight snack. Elena grabbed one of the handles of the two-door fridge and yanked, but nothing happened. She planted her feet and yanked again, this time putting a little weight behind it. Still nothing. She tried the other door.
She wasn’t starving, but now this was a point of pride. She yanked again, grunting with frustration.
Without thinking twice on it, Elena stalked to the kitchen door, kicked it open and poked her head out into the hallway. Cedric was waiting patiently with his back against the wall but he immediately sprang to attention at the extreme scowl on her face.
“You all right?”
“I can’t get the damn fridge open!”
“Oh.” His face broke into a grin as he slid past her into the kitchen. “I know. This thing is like Fort Knox. Unless you know the trick.”
“Why would a fridge need a trick?”
“Beats me.” He turned toward the fridge and pushed one handle in while he pulled the other out. He closed the door and stepped aside for her to try.
She imitated him, but the fridge didn’t open.
“Here.” Cedric laid his huge hands over the tops of hers and showed her the mechanism again. Press and pull. Only this time her slender hands were swallowed up by his. Her back to his front and his arms completely around her.
Elena made a small, almost injured noise and Cedric immediately stepped back from her. What had he been thinking? What an idiot! He hadn’t meant to press himself against her like that, but there he was, practically pushing h
er up against the fridge.
He took another step back but froze when she whirled away from the fridge and launched herself straight at him. His hands levitated in the air behind her as she pressed her nose into his breast bone, her slender arms wrapping around his waist and her breath heating him through his shirt. She shuddered, once, and that injured noise came out of her again.
Cedric did the only thing he could do, the human thing to do, and let the weight of his arms wrap her up. He was mindful to leave an inch or two of space between their midsections, but he couldn’t help but draw a circle or two over her back with his palm. She shuddered again and he felt his shirt get wet with her tears.
He wracked his brain for something to say, anything to say, and could come up with absolutely nothing.
She thanked god that Cedric didn’t say anything right then. She would have been incapable of responding and she didn’t need words. All she needed was his warm, comforting bulk. It was like hugging a grizzly bear. And Elena needed it. Ever since she’d blacked out in the parking garage explosion part of her felt like it had never really woken up again. She was just in this horrible, feverish nightmare that never ended. She’d been punted from the hospital to rooms swarming with federal agents and then finally to the coffin-like solitude of her apartment. And now she was here, the weirdest place of them all. Her mind raced to make sense of it, any of it. But this? This right here? Well, she could understand this. A large, handsome, good-smelling man was drawing a circle on her back, his breath in her hair, and the tips of his sneakers pressed against her socked feet.
She wasn’t sure how long they stood like that. Could have been three minutes or it could have been twenty. All she knew was that she’d just cracked like a nut and hadn’t worried one bit about holding herself together. She had someone else to do it for her. In the circle of Cedric’s arms, she was a hundred percent certain that there was no risk of flying to pieces.
“Okay,” she said eventually. His hand stopped circling but it was another moment before she stepped backwards and he dropped his arms. Elena took another step back from him, but realized that her hands were fisted in his shirt. When she forced them to open up, his shirt was sweaty and crumpled where her hands had been. She didn’t feel shame for it. And she didn’t wipe her tears from her face. Instead she let out a long breath and turned back to the fridge.
“Okay,” she repeated and gestured to the fridge. “Show me this again.”
The kettle started whistling across the kitchen and Cedric moved toward it. “Just push one in and pull on the other.”
Cedric poured her tea and Elena finally opened the fridge.
“Wow,” she said, as Cedric crossed back over the kitchen and handed her the cup of tea. “That’s a lot of meat.”
“Yeah. Oh! I guess as an animal activist you probably don’t eat a ton of meat.”
“Not so much. I eat vegan.”
He smiled down at her a little sheepishly. “We didn’t think of that. But we’ll get some vegan stuff on the grocery list pronto.”
Elena selected an apple from the fridge and closed the door. “That’s very accommodating of you all.”
Cedric followed her out of the kitchen and the two of them padded quietly back toward the crow’s nest. “We want you to be as comfortable as possible.”
He checked all the security points on his phone well before she passed them and double checked to make sure no alarms had been tripped. Though, if any of them had, every single member of the team would have descended upon them like cheetahs. He let Elena ascend the stairs ahead of him and immediately knew it was a mistake.
Her messy black hair swished against her back and her thighs peeked out from the hem of her shirt with every step.
Note to self: don’t let Elena go up the stairs in front of me anymore.
“Do your bodyguard services generally include letting your clients use your shirt as a kleenex?” she asked him, looking back over her shoulder with a little smile on her face. Her tear tracks were still drying on her cheeks, her eyes tired and sad.
“Well, they definitely don’t preclude that.”
She laughed, a surprised, husky chuckle. “You’re all being very nice to me.”
“Like I said, we want you to be comfortable here.” He paused for a second and decided that he might as well tell the whole truth, she was smart enough to figure it out at some point anyways. “Happy clients are easier to protect, to be honest.”
“Ah,” she nodded, stopping in front of her door, her tea cupped in her palms. “Now it’s making sense. If I’m happy here, then I’m less of a flight risk?”
“Well, that and if you’re happy here, you’re easier to predict. Happy people generally follow patterns. Unhappy people are more likely to do whatever comes into their heads. It’s obviously easier to follow a pattern than it is to guess what someone is going to do next.”
She pursed her lips and nodded, her eyes dropping down and Cedric frantically wondered what the hell he’d said that had made her expression dry up like that. She’d seemed almost relaxed since he’d let her cry it out in the kitchen, but there she was, folding herself up tight again. It hit him. The crying! She’d misinterpreted what he’d meant.
“But that’s not why I, uh, hugged you in the kitchen. It wasn’t, like, a tactical choice or something.”
Her eyes lifted to his and there was a small spark of humor back in them. “Then why did you let me cry all over your shirt?”
He searched for a sophisticated way of saying what he wanted to. She was so smart; it made him want to be eloquent. But, yeah, he was Cedric. So his mind came up blank. After a taut second he just went with the only words he could find. “Because you’re a person. And I’m a person. And that’s just… what you do.”
Her expression didn’t change, but he sensed that it hadn’t been the wrong thing to say. She tightened her hands around the mug and opened her door. “Well. Thank you, Cedric. I needed it.”
“Goodnight, Elena.”
He caught one more glimpse of her dark eyes before the door closed.
Cedric stepped into the annex security room where he’d be spending the majority of his night duty and quickly checked all their systems for any disturbances. None. Just like he’d known there wouldn’t be. It was then and only then that he laid back on the utilitarian double bed that they kept in there for the team members on night duty.
With one foot propped on the floor, in a position of half-readiness, Cedric leaned back and pulled up the Google audio of the article he’d been listening to when his alarms had told him that Elena had emerged from her room.
It was Elena’s words he was listening to. An article she’d written last year about Tanzanian animal preserves. He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t sleep. But he’d let her words relax him.
***
The next few days blurred together for Elena. She took time to get to know the Rook Securities facility, but to her eyes, it really was just a big warehouse with a ring of rooms around the main atrium, which pretty much just housed a bunch of different vehicles. As far as she could tell, there were more locked doors than there were unlocked ones.
Also as far as she could tell, all of the security team lived somewhere on the premises. She saw most of them at breakfast, though Cedric was always missing. She knew that was because he was on night duty and was catching up on his Z’s while the rest of them were breakfasting. It was hit or miss who she’d see around lunchtime. But they all came together for dinner.
It surprised her that Sequence, the most elusive, most intimidating, and quietest member of the team was also the resident cook. He’d adapted to her vegan diet with what seemed to be a skillful ease. It was honestly some of the best she’d ever eaten.
Dinner was often the only time she really saw Cedric or Sequence. Geo, Atlas, and Rook, she spent some time with every day. They didn’t especially need to tail her around the facility, considering it was pretty much as safe as a locked box tossed down to the bottom of
the ocean. But still, if she got up to move from one room to the next, there was Atlas grinning at her from around the corner, or Geo shoving half a sandwich in her mouth and gesturing for Elena to wait up. They were getting to know her, she reminded herself. Her habits. Her likes and dislikes. Her patterns.
She supposed it could have been worse.
She certainly felt safe. But she also felt strange as hell. She wasn’t sleeping. Her conversations with her family, though frequent, were stilted. Elena’s family was large and extremely involved in one another’s lives. Every day she’d get a call from her parents and one sibling or another. But those conversations were the same. They’d make sure she was all right, that she was safe. And then… there wasn’t much else to say. Elena wasn’t sure how to explain the strange, “this can’t be my life” feeling she was having. And everyone she spoke to was much too shy or nervous or polite to ask her about the explosion.
She hated that disconnect the most, the one she was experiencing with her family. It was almost as if the explosion had blown up the well-traveled bridge between her and her family that she’d always taken for granted in the past.
So there Elena went, living this wildly strange life where everything had changed, but no one would talk to her about why it had changed.
The only relief from that feeling that she’d gotten was that one brief moment in the kitchen with Cedric. He’d let her cry her eyes out, no judgment.
She’d been relieved to know that she had a friend on the team. If not a friend, then at least a very calming presence. But she had barely seen him since that night.
It wasn’t until four days after that night in the kitchen that Elena accidentally burst in on Cedric and had her next conversation with him. She’d been exploring the western side of the building, trying doors on the second floor. Three in a row had been locked until the fourth in the corridor sprang open under her hand.
She walked in to a room that had an entire wall composed of windows. There were four high-tech set ups of fancy looking computers and large speaker systems. Behind one of the desks Cedric leaned forward in a swivel chair that was almost comically too small for his large frame. He squinted hard at a computer screen and had his fingers tented under his chin.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 5