And there was also a possibility that this girl would find Angela blacked out.
“No?” the girl asked, that wary look in her eyes again. “Yeah, that’s all the information I need. Get lost, creep, or I’m calling the cops. Don’t think I won’t.”
Ryan knew quite well that she would. He held up his hands again and backed away. “Sorry. Honestly. I’ll walk away now. We had a fight—I just wanted to see her. That’s all.”
The girl brushed her hand towards him, motioning him further away. “I get that, but if she doesn’t want to see you, she doesn’t want to see you. Now stay away while I open this door. I have pepper spray.”
“You’re a tough one,” Ryan said, shaking his head and taking another step back so that the woman would open the door.
She did open it and slipped inside, the lock clicking loudly behind her. Ryan swore under his breath, but backed around the building, scanning for Angela’s room. He had a vague idea of where it was, based on how she had described the building and her room to him. She was on the third floor—he knew that for sure. And she was around the back. She had said there were blue curtains in her window, and she had a nice view of the back parking lot.
Using his heightened eyesight, Ryan scanned each possible window. There were three with blue curtains in them, but in one of the blue-curtained rooms, someone was moving around. Someone with blonde hair, who was joined by a man who had dark hair. That wasn’t Angela’s room.
Between the other two, he could only gamble.
Ryan climbed the railing of the ground-floor terrace directly below the room he had decided to try first. He stood on top of the terrace fence and leaped upward, grabbing onto the terrace above him. He pulled himself up, climbing the building deftly, until he was standing on top of the second terrace. Another leap in the air allowed him to grab onto the third-floor terrace, and he pulled himself onto that one, his muscles straining, but more than capable of completing the task. He moved quietly, making no sound at all as he slid his body over the top of the terrace and crouched in the tiny space. There was hardly enough room for a person to stand, and the blue curtains blocked his view of the inside completely.
Carefully, he wrapped his fingers around the handle of the sliding glass door, and pushed. The door resisted him. It was locked. Unless he could see the inner workings of the lock, he wouldn’t be able to move the mechanism with his own power, so he was once again stuck. He listened carefully, attempting to pick up on any sound within the room.
He heard footsteps. One person. Light footsteps. There was a shuffling—general moving about. The person within had no idea that there was a man standing on her terrace, about to use his supernatural strength to yank the door open, locked or not.
Ryan didn’t know if it was Angela, but it could be. It sounded like Angela. He was going to take the risk, and he knew it.
Gripping the door handle firmly, he engaged the deepest level of his strength and pushed to the left. The lock clicked and strained, but it gave way under his brute force, and the door slid open with a loud bang. There was a scream from inside, and the moment Ryan heard that scream, he knew he had made a mistake.
That wasn’t Angela in there. He was sure of it. And all that separated him from the woman who had screamed was a thin blue curtain. Ryan had only seconds to make his move, and he stepped onto the terrace railing, jumped, and grabbed onto the terrace above him. He had hauled himself over the fourth-floor terrace in seconds flat, but he could already hear voices below him, reacting to the scream. He crouched on the fourth-floor terrace, hidden from view from below but vulnerable to whoever might open the terrace door.
But as the moments passed, no one did open the fourth-floor terrace door, and when he carefully stood and tried the door, pressing himself against it to avoid being seen from below, it gave way easily. He slid it open and slipped inside the room, detecting no sounds of a living person. There wasn’t even furniture inside the living room he’d stepped into, and he felt confident that no one was going to suddenly appear.
Quickly, he made his way to the front door and pulled it open, stepping out into a well-lit hallway. He acted as though he was just leaving his room, and in the midst of the chaos as people hurried down the stairs to see what was happening on the fourth floor, he blended into the crowd easily.
Nobody noticed when he broke off from the crowd and went to the door of the other room that could have been Angela’s. He twisted the handle, but it resisted him, once again locked. He knocked loudly on the door, but there was no answer. Angela would have no reason to think that he would be in her building, at her door, so if she was in there, she wasn’t just ignoring him. Of course, she might just not be home, but he couldn’t get the thought out of his mind that she might be in there, blacked out.
If she was, he had to get to her fast. He wrenched the door handle, snapping the lock mechanism inside and pushing the door open. When he walked inside, he could feel the abandonment lingering in the air. It was an empty apartment, aside from the basic furniture with which it would have been furnished. But there was a lingering warmth in the apartment that told him that someone had been there not long ago. He stared at the blue curtains for a long moment, then walked toward the bedroom, opening the door and gazing inside. There were askew hangers in the open closet, and the bathroom door was wide open, revealing a bare sink. He walked towards the bathroom and pulled open the shower, peering inside. There was still shampoo and soap sitting there, and he reached out and picked up the shampoo, bringing it to his nose.
It smelled exactly like Angela.
This was her place, but there was nothing of her in it, except the shampoo.
Setting the bottle back down, Ryan hurried from the bathroom. He did a sweep of the rest of the apartment, but he found nothing of Angela until he stepped into the kitchen. The fridge was still stocked with food, and the way that the scrubbing sponges were arranged by the sink fit Angela’s personality perfectly. Everything was just so.
Except Angela.
Ryan pulled out his phone and frantically texted her.
Angela, if you see this, you need to call me. This is not a joke or some ploy to get you to forgive me. I’m genuinely worried about you. Please text me back.
He stared at his phone for a long moment, but no message came in. He swore under his breath. He had been standing outside the building for half an hour, and it had been fifteen minutes since he’d broken in. Angela hadn’t walked past him. That meant that she had been gone for close to an hour, unless there was some other exit in the building that he didn’t know about.
As he walked back into the living room, his eyes landed on a key on the hall table. He grabbed it and tested it in the lock of the door. It was the apartment key, and that clinched it. He knew that Angela had packed up all of her things and left. Why would she do something so reckless? Didn’t she understand that he was only trying to help her?
Ryan rushed out of the apartment, pocketing the key, and headed for the stairs. As he ran down them, he called Quentin. “I need a rundown on all the flights from here to England,” he said when his friend answered. “Can you get that for me?”
“Going on a trip?”
“No,” Ryan said. “Angela has run off. I’m going to look for her around here, but she’s been gone for a while. I need to make sure she hasn’t booked a flight.”
“Wow, she’s really panicked.”
“Apparently,” Ryan said, eyeing the crowd of people by the front door and pausing in the hallway. “I also yelled at her, so that didn’t help. Can you text me the info.?”
“I’ll see what I can come up with.”
“Thanks,” Ryan said, hanging up the phone. He made eye contact with the girl who had refused to let him in the building, and her eyes narrowed. She started to walk toward him, but Ryan backed into the stairwell and shut the door. He hurried up to the second floor, then opened a hallway window and jumped down to the ground, landing on his feet with ease. He wasn’t interested
in going through her twenty questions again. There was no proof he had ever been in the building—so he would let her think that he was a figment of her imagination.
Once on the ground, he got his bearings and headed for his car. He had no idea where Angela might go in a city that she didn’t know well and where she had no friends except the people in the building she had abandoned and him. Except they weren’t friends anymore, apparently.
With no leads in a big city, she was going to be almost impossible to find. But when he saw her car in the parking lot, his hope rose. She had taken all her things and left her car behind.
She had to be going to the airport, and she probably had taken the bus. He was an hour behind her, but he was a lot faster than she was, and he was determined not to let her out of Louisiana.
Chapter 16
Angela
Click, click, click. The airport attendant’s long red fingernails flew across the keyboard as her black, sharply-arched brows lifted and lowered while she concentrated. Every click shivered along Angela’s nerves, tugging at them until she felt almost raw. The woman kept frowning, her brows knitting, and then she would shake her head. Angela had asked for the next available flight to London, which she thought should be a relatively simple request. But it appeared that the woman was struggling with it.
“Is there a problem?” Angela asked, after long minutes of silence, interrupted only by clicking. The line behind her was growing long, and she could feel other passengers’ impatience radiating out at her.
“Yes,” the woman said, looking up. “There are thunderstorms all across the East Coast, and most major airports have grounded their planes.”
Angela clenched her hand around the handle of her suitcase. “Surely there’s some way around the East Coast, isn’t there?”
“Well, the flights out of Atlanta are full for today, and the flight out of Chicago is delayed by four hours currently, due to technical problems. It routes across the East Coast, anyway, so you would still face delays there. I’m sorry, but there’s no way to get you out to London today.”
“That’s impossible,” Angela said. “You could at least get me out of Louisiana, right? I can go somewhere else and then catch a connecting flight from there tomorrow.”
The woman pursed her heavily-lined lips. “We could get you to Denver. There is a direct flight from Denver to London, but the one tonight is full. You’d have to wait in Denver for twenty-four hours.”
“Fine,” Angela said. “That’s Denver, Colorado, right?”
The woman looked up at her through her lashes. “Yes.”
Angela didn’t even care about the woman’s attitude. Every moment that she remained in Louisiana was a nerve-racking moment. On the long bus ride to the airport, she had convinced herself that whatever was wrong with her was rooted in Louisiana. She’d never had a whisper of a problem until she’d landed here, and the sooner she was out of this state, the better. Angela was almost desperate. She would have flown to Alaska, if that was the only flight available.
“The flight to Denver doesn’t leave for three hours,” the woman said. “It’s a three-hour flight, which means you’ll get into Denver around 7:00 this evening. Your flight to London will leave at 9:35 p.m. the following day. That’ll be $2,632 dollars.”
Angela’s mouth fell open. “How much?”
The attendant looked up at her through those same lashes again. “It’s $2,632. That’s for both flights.”
In all of her estimating, Angela had never expected a number so high. She knew that she should expect somewhere around $1,500 dollars, but this was more than a thousand dollars over her imagined budget. Her credit line was only for $3,000 dollars, and she had a few hundred on it already. She wasn’t going to be able to put the plane ticket on her credit card, and paying $2,600 dollars plus accommodations in Denver was going to completely drain her savings.
Angela felt her chest tighten with anxiety, and she stepped back, trying to catch her breath. “Pardon me,” she said, pulling her bag away. “I’ll—I’ll come back.”
“Ma’am, this flight is going to fill quickly,” the attendant said. “There are only two remaining seats. I can’t guarantee you one of them without payment.”
“I understand,” Angela said, still backing up. She pushed blindly through the crowd of people behind her and sat down on one of the benches by the airport window. Leaning forward, she put her head in her hands and struggled to keep from crying. She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman and an academic. She wasn’t going to sit in an airport alone and cry over money. She just wasn’t going to.
Except a tear did escape, and then others followed. She wasn’t just crying about the money, though. She was crying because for weeks now, she had felt she was living with a stranger—and that stranger was herself. And her glimmer of hope in Ryan had gone up in flames. She was alone in a country she didn’t belong to, where she knew no one, and she didn’t dare go home and tell her family and friends what was happening for fear of being forever branded with some kind of disease. She would never be taken seriously in her field again. She wouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.
“Are you all right?”
Angela picked her head up, looking into the face of an older man with gentle eyes and a wrinkled smile. “Yes,” she said, straightening and attempting to swipe at her cheeks. “Fine. Thank you.”
“I don’t think you are,” the man said, sitting down beside her without invitation. “My name is Norman Rockwell. What’s yours?”
Angela’s brow furrowed. “Rockwell? Your last name is Rockwell?”
“That’s right.”
“Like Rockwell Agency?”
The old man smiled and his face wreathed in even heavier wrinkles. “Oh, back in the day, yes. I was the one in charge of that agency. Those were wonderful days.”
“You’re related to the person in charge of it now,” Angela said. She liked the man instinctively, but she was on her guard. It was no coincidence that he was here, and if Rockwell Agency or Ryan had sent him to bring her back, they had another thing coming.
“Barrett?” the man asked. “Oh, yes. That’s my grandson. He’s a good boy, Barrett. Just like his father is.”
“You’re his grandfather,” Angela said, trying to picture Barrett in her head. She had seen all of them, and Ryan had told her plenty, but she couldn’t quite bring his face to mind. “Did he send you here to find me?”
“Oh no,” Norman said, shaking his head. “No, no. I just have a knack for finding people I need to find.”
She was not at all sure she believed him, but he intrigued her. “And why did you need to find me?”
“Because,” Norman said, simply. “You needed to be found.”
“I don’t understand.”
Norman reached over and took Angela’s hand. Normally, she would have pushed his hand away and demanded her space, but she let him hold her hand gently between his. It was as if she knew him, except she didn’t. But she wanted to.
“Angela,” Norman said, inexplicably using her name when she had never given it to him. “I feel the fear inside of you. You’ve been given news that you don’t want to believe. You think that believing it will change who you are, and there’s so little left of who you actually are that this will wipe away the last trace of you. But it won’t, dear. It will help you find the rest of you again.”
Angela stared at the man, entranced by his voice. She didn’t know how he knew her name or where to find her or what was happening to her, but he clearly did, and she needed him to explain it all to her. Angela gripped Norman’s hand in hers, pressing hard. “Tell me what to do,” she pleaded with him. “What Ryan told me—it can’t be right.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not real.”
“Everything is equally real. We are both real and figments of each other’s imaginations. You filter my words through your lens—your lens, which is not real to me. Only to you. So everything is both real and not real at the same tim
e,” Norman said. “Why put limitations on what is real to you?”
Angela had no answer for that. “I …don’t know.”
“You love knowledge, Angela Winston,” Norman said, “and you love things that you can study and see and feel and touch. But to limit what is real to those things is to miss out on so much of life.”
“But I don’t want this in my life,” she said. “If this is real, I don’t want it. I’m afraid.”
“Pretending it’s not real will not make it go away, though,” Norman said. “Only confronting it will. That’s all you have to do, Angela. It really is that simple.”
Norman released her hands and stood up, smiling down at her.
“Where are you going?” Angela asked, her stomach flipping over. “Don’t go—do you have to go?”
“I do,” Norman said. “But it was a pleasure to meet you, Angela Winston. I need to go find someone else.”
The old man walked away from her, shuffling along. Then she blinked—just once—and she couldn’t see him anymore. He was nowhere in the airport crowds.
She didn’t know what she had just experienced—she couldn’t wrap her head around it. But the man had given her such a feeling of safety, just by sitting with her. She had never felt that before. And his riddles and simple wisdom had nestled their way into her brain, turning on some switch that had been in a permanently off position.
Angela knew what do next.
Chapter 17
Ryan
His phone rang in his pocket, making Ryan jump as he drove down the highway at fifteen miles over the speed limit. It had started to rain a few minutes earlier, and traffic had been bad until he had broken away from it and gotten in front of the crowd. Grateful for good reflexes, he shifted in his seat, keeping one hand on the wheel and his foot on the gas, maneuvering his phone out of his back pocket at the same time.
When he saw the name on the screen, his heart almost stopped, and he slammed on the brakes, yanking the car over to the side of the highway as he answered.
Rockwell Agency: Boxset Page 10