by Anne Stuart
He’d spent time in a tiny village in the Italian Alps, waiting for the wound to heal. The bullet had nicked his liver, and for a while it had been hit or miss whether he’d make it, particularly since it had taken them a while to discover him, passed out in the BMW in back of the deserted house. They’d found him, and they’d found Maureen, but it had been too late to do anything for her.
But the Committee hadn’t been ready to allow their expensive investment to die, and he’d been brought back from death twice, fighting all the way. They weren’t going to let him go, and he stopped resisting, letting them work their medical magic on him until he was conscious enough to control the pain without their drugs. Drugs to stop the pain, drugs to keep him docile, drugs to convince him to do what they wanted. He didn’t need their drugs.
There’d been a guard stationed outside his room the entire time. Occasionally he’d been conscious enough to see them, though he had no idea whether they were there to protect him or imprison him. No one from the Committee had shown their face, and he wasn’t about to wait for Harry Thomason to appear and give him an ultimatum. He waited until he could walk a few steps, practicing when the nurses weren’t around, and then he pulled the IV out of his arm, knocked out his guard and stripped his clothes from him, taking off into the night.
The Italian Alps first, then on to Venice, a city he knew as intimately as most people knew their own home. No one could find him in the twists and turns of Venice, and he could stay lost there forever if he wanted to.
He didn’t. He was restless, recuperating slower than normal, and his nerves were jumpy, dangerously so. He’d put another section of his life behind him, just as he had so many times before. The wandering years with his mother and Aunt Celeste, the selfish years when he’d gone from one woman to the next, using them and then disappearing. And the deadly years, endless, eternal, employed by and under the control of the Committee, who believed that the end justified the means, no matter how monstrous.
And now he was back to wandering, alone this time. Moving from place to place, not stopping long enough to leave any trace. He left Venice after the madhouse of Carnivale, moving west. The Azores were warm and soothing, and he only thought of Chloe once, when the liquid sound of Portuguese ran over him and he wondered if that was one more language she’d managed to conquer.
She was alive, she was well, she was immured in the mountains of North Carolina, and that was all he needed to know. She no longer had to count on him for anything—for food and warmth and sex and life itself. By now the very thought of him would have her shaking in horror. If she thought of him at all.
He could only hope she didn’t. She’d been ill-prepared for those few days they’d spent together—death and violence weren’t the normal lot for young girls, especially American ones. If she hadn’t managed to put it all behind her he had no doubt that her efficient parents would drag her from therapist to therapist until she was cured. Cured of the memories. Cured of him.
He lay in the sun, letting his mind empty, letting his body heal. He wasn’t sure where he’d go next—Greece was out of the question, and the Far East wasn’t a wise idea. The Yakuza had not taken kindly to Otomi’s loss, and their intelligence network rivaled that of the Committee. Once he set foot in Japan or anywhere near he’d be found and eliminated, even among millions of people. And he found he was no longer courting death, though he hadn’t quite figured out why.
He wasn’t going to the States, that was one thing that was absolutely certain. America was a huge country, but if he set foot inside its massive borders he’d be aware of only one, dangerous thing. One woman. He wouldn’t do anything about it, but he would be unable to concentrate on anything else until he left again. Even Canada might be too close.
Switzerland might be a good choice, with its rigid neutrality. Or Scandinavia, maybe Sweden…
Christ, no! He was never going to be able to think of Stockholm again with anything other than…hell, he didn’t even know what he was thinking. His world was awash in her, contaminated by her. There was no place he could run that didn’t make him think of her. Maybe he did want to die after all.
Or maybe it was just part of his penance.
He was drinking too much, but what else could he do as he lay out in the sun trying not to think? Drinking and smoking, sleeping with the pretty waitress when he was drunk enough to forget. It was a good life, he told himself, settling his sunglasses on his nose and closing his eyes to the bright Portuguese sun. Maybe he could just stay that way forever.
His sun was blotted out, and he waited, patiently, for it to reappear. And then he opened his eyes to see Jensen standing beside his chaise.
He looked very different from the last time Bastien had seen him, across the room at the Hotel Denis where he’d been attending to Ricetti. His brown hair was longer and deep black, he was dressed in designer denim, and although his eyes were covered with sunglasses Bastien had no doubt they were some color other than his natural blue.
“Are you here to kill me?” he inquired lazily, not moving from his chaise. “It’s a pretty public place, and I’d hate to see you get caught. We’ve always gotten along well—why don’t you wait until I’m back in my room or alone on a deserted street?”
“You’re being melodramatic,” Jensen said, taking the chaise next to him. There was no visible sign of a gun, but Bastien wasn’t fooled. No operative would go out unarmed. There were too many unknown, unseen enemies. “If I wanted to kill you I would have done it back in Paris, when Thomason ordered me to, instead of letting you go.”
Bastien smiled faintly. “I thought it would be you. What made you change your mind?”
“Thomason is an asshole. He’s not going to be around forever, and you were too valuable a commodity to simply flush away.”
Bastien smiled faintly. “Sorry, Jensen. My services are no longer available. Go ahead and flush.”
Jensen shook his head. “I only kill when I’m paid to,” he said. “Don’t you want to know why I’m here?”
“If it’s not to kill me then I suppose it’s to talk me back into the fold. And you’re wasting your time. Tell Thomason he can go fuck himself.”
“Thomason doesn’t know I’m here, and he wouldn’t be very happy if he did.”
Bastien lifted his sunglasses to peer at his companion. “Then who sent you?”
“You and I weren’t the only Committee members at the meetings.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Like who else was on our payroll.”
Jensen shook his head. “That’s need-to-know information, and as long as you’re out of the fold then that knowledge is too dangerous to spread around.”
“Fine,” Bastien said, pulling his sunglasses back down again. “I’m not coming back, and you can tell them that. You can either kill me or go away.”
“I’m not here to bring you back, I’m here to warn you.”
“I don’t need warnings, Jensen. I’ve managed to keep myself alive for this long, I can continue as long as I’m in the mood to.”
“Not you, Bastien. We both know you’re always in danger. It’s your little American. We think they’ve found her.”
Spring came early to the mountains of North Carolina, but Chloe was in no mood to notice. Her parents pampered her, her brothers and sister hovered, her nieces and nephews delighted her, but the raw, torn place inside her was still bleeding. Every time she thought it had scarred over something would remind her, and she’d start shaking again.
Maureen, when she fell in the snow, the knife flying out of her hand, the blood soaking into the heavy drifts of white. Sylvia, her eyes wide and staring at the death that had taken her. The tangle of bodies, the sounds of screams, the smell of blood at the Hotel Denis. She’d remember, and she’d start shaking, and there was no one there to remind her to breathe.
They were all dead—she’d been able to ascertain that much. The police had broken in on the scene just moments after she and Bastien had jumped from
the balcony, and those who survived the bloodbath died in the hospital shortly thereafter. Convenient that no one was left to tell the truth. Monique had died on the scene, shot in the face, Bastien had told her. The baron had succumbed a day or two later, and the rest of them were already gone.
The one thing she didn’t think about was Bastien. For all she knew he was dead—he’d been careless and courting it long enough, and he’d been shot. Then again, he was someone who didn’t die easily. Maybe he was off on a new assignment, or maybe…
Anyway, she wasn’t going to think about him. He was in the dark, mixed-up past, and there was no way she could make sense of it, no matter how hard she tried. So she let go, moving through her days in a calm, even state of mind, while her parents looked on with worried eyes.
They were beginning to relax by mid-April. She’d signed up for courses at the university. Chinese would be enough of a challenge to keep her mind totally occupied, and she would start doing some volunteer work at the hospital in a week or so. By the fall she’d be ready to find a real job, even move out on her own despite her parents’ protests. She was healing, and she refused to even consider what she was healing from. She only knew it took time.
For now she was safe. The Underwoods owned two hundred acres on the side of a small mountain, and their sprawling house was casual, comfortable and nicely isolated. The old farmhouse had been renovated, added on to, torn down and fixed up for a hundred or so years, and its current state was rambling, cluttered and completely cozy. Her mother made no pretensions at being neat, and while a weekly housekeeper kept the place clean, order was a lost cause. All the Underwoods had too many interests. Books and projects, fishing rods and sewing machines, microscopes and telescopes and seven working computers pretty much took up any available space.
Even the guest house wasn’t immune, mainly because Chloe was doing her best to keep her mind busy. She read constantly—television was too ephemeral to keep her mind occupied. She knitted, she played Tetris on her Game Boy with single-minded concentration whenever she had to be in a public place. It even went with her into the bathroom. The little blocks falling into place gave her a Zen-like sense of security, and she played till her hands went numb.
She was cheerful, calm and pleasant, and her parents were almost deceived into thinking she was well on her way to being healed. Chloe knew it was going to take longer, but there was no rush. As long as she had her parents’ place to hide in she could take all the time she needed.
“I think you should come with us,” her mother said, shoving a pile of papers to one side of the breakfast counter and setting down a tall glass of orange juice. “You’ve been isolating too much.”
“I haven’t been isolating,” she said calmly, taking the orange juice that she didn’t want, knowing an argument would be futile. “I’m just…on vacation. If I’m in the way I can always—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” It was hard to annoy her easygoing mother, but Chloe was the one most likely to manage. “There’s always room for you here, as well as the entire family. Why do you think we built the guest house? In fact, you know I wish you’d stay in the main house. I’d feel more comfortable knowing you were under the same roof.”
Chloe drank her orange juice, saying nothing. She knew that was one of the things that worried her family the most, her unnatural quiet, but there was nothing she could do about it. Idle chatter was totally beyond her at that point, even if it meant reassuring her mother.
“I know this conference is going to be a total bore for anyone not in the medical profession, but your brothers and sister will be there, as well as their families. It’s being held in a charming resort on the coast, and I know you’d have a lovely time….”
“Not yet,” she said, her voice so quiet her mother had to lean forward to hear her. “You go on and have fun. I’ll be fine here. You haven’t gone anywhere since I came back, and I know how you like to travel. Trust me, it’s perfectly safe. No one’s going to bother me, and I’ll just enjoy a few days’ solitude.”
“You’ve been enjoying too much solitude.” She turned to her husband who’d just entered the kitchen. “James, talk her into coming with us!”
James shook his head. “Leave the girl alone, Claire. She’ll be fine. She’s just tired of having us hanging around all the time. A few days of quiet will be the best thing for her. Right, Chloe?”
Chloe managed to rouse her voice for that one. “Absolutely. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Claire Underwood looked between her husband and youngest child, equally frustrated. “I can’t fight the both of you,” she said. “Just make sure you have the security system on, you understand?”
“We never use the security system,” Chloe protested.
“We paid a huge amount of money for it, we might as well use it,” her father said, the traitor. “That sounds like a good compromise. Promise to leave the security system on and I’ll make sure your mother comes with me.”
Chloe had never considered that her mother might refuse to go at the end. The very notion of a weekend of mother-daughter bonding gave her cold chills. Not that she didn’t love her mother, but Claire’s attempts at bonding were notoriously inept. “I’ll use the security system,” she said. “I’ll even go buy a gun and a pack of guard dogs if you think it’s necessary.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chloe.” Her mother had given up at this point. “Besides, I think your father has an old twenty-two somewhere up in the attic.”
“Great. I’ll go make sure I know where to find the weapons when the Mongol hordes attack.”
“Very funny,” her mother muttered. “I know the two of you think I worry too much….”
“And we love you for it,” James said. “But in the meantime we’ve got to go. You’ve got a paper to deliver and I’ve got grandchildren to see.” He glanced over at Chloe, sitting on the stool with both hands clasped around the glass of orange juice. “Speaking of which, I wouldn’t mind some more eventually. No hurry, of course, but you might just keep it in mind. I hear Kevin McInerny’s back from New York, setting up a law firm in Black Mountain. You used to date him, didn’t you? Nice young man.”
“Yes, he was nice,” Chloe said. She couldn’t even remember him.
“Maybe I’ll invite him out to dinner when we get back,” her mother said. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you, Chloe?”
She’d rather have her toes eaten by lizards. “That would be fine.”
Her mother swallowed it whole, and by that time her father had reappeared with the luggage. “Have a good time,” Chloe said brightly. “I’ll be fine.”
Her mother gave her a quick hug, pulling back to search her face one more time. She didn’t like what she saw there, Chloe thought, but there was nothing she could do about it.
“Be careful,” her mother said.
Ten minutes later they were gone, blissful silence filling the huge old house. She dutifully set the security system, once she knew they were off the grounds, and then forgot about it. There was an odd chill in the air. The soft ripe scent of spring had been temporarily halted. She should have paid attention to the Weather Channel, but scenes of snowstorms in more northerly climates tended to make her shake, so she usually avoided it completely. The sky was overcast, threatening, and the wind had picked up, laced with an edge of ice. A cold front must be coming through, she thought, trying to still her instinctive nervousness. It wouldn’t affect her traveling family—they were well ahead of whatever storm was blowing in. And it wouldn’t affect her—she had no intention of going anywhere. Instead she was planning on pampering herself while they were gone—taking long, leisurely soaks in the Jacuzzi, watching old musicals on the television. She used to have a fondness for martial arts movies, but since she’d returned from Paris she found she had a low tolerance for artificial violence. But Judy Garland and Gene Kelly calmed her into believing in a happy place where people woke up singing and dancing. For the next few days, she was going to live
in that place, no matter what the weather outside.
It was growing dark by the time she emerged from the hot tub, and she wrapped herself in a thick terry robe and wandered down into the kitchen. The security panel was blinking, the green lights telling her all was safe and secure, and she realized for the first time in months she was hungry. Probably because her mother wasn’t there nagging her to eat. She opened the massive refrigerator that was always kept overstocked, found herself some leftover apple pie. She pulled it out, closing the door behind her, only to look directly into Bastien Toussaint’s dark, merciless eyes.
22
She dropped the pie. It was in a Pyrex dish that shattered at her bare feet, but she didn’t move, looking up at him in shock.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Chloe,” he said, his voice that familiar, mesmerizing sound. “Surely you didn’t think I’d died?”
It took her a moment to find her voice. “I wondered,” she said. He looked different. Thinner, his face lined from pain or something else, and his hair was even longer, though streaked with sunlight that matched his tanned skin. Odd, because she never would have thought of him in the sunlight—only in darkness and shadows.
“It takes a lot to kill me,” he said. He was standing too close, and she started to step back, away from him, when he caught her arm in an iron grip. She fought back, instinctively, but he simply lifted her up, setting her down out of the way of the broken glass. She’d forgotten that her feet were bare.
“You might want to get dressed,” he said. “I’ll clean up the mess while I wait.”
“I don’t need to get dressed,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere, you are. You can leave, right now. I don’t know why you suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but I don’t want you here. Go away.”
“The necklace.”
“What?”
“I came for the diamond necklace,” he said in a calm voice. “You left Paris wearing it, remember? It has a certain value, and I came to get it.”