Darken (Siege #1)

by Angela Fristoe

  It was the other request that lingered, nagging at her as she took orders, delivered drinks, and tried to maintain conversations with customers.

  Was this thing between her and Gavin real? It was sad how quickly she came to the conclusion that no, it wasn’t real. Things between them had moved so fast, yet they’d reached an impasse. As much as Cora wanted a future with Gavin and the chance to build something with him, he was just as determined to keep himself separate.

  Once they brought down Sinclair, where would they be? Cora suspected they’d be right back to where they were two months before; tip-toeing around each other.

  That wasn’t what she wanted, and despite Darren calling her a martyr, she wasn’t willing to spend her life waiting for Gavin to decide if he wanted her fully and completely.

  After her shift, she stopped by the back office and found Noah parked behind the desk, sorting receipts.

  “Hey, need something?” he asked.

  “No, I was just wondering if you had a minute to talk.”

  “That sounds serious. Come on in.” He put down the receipts he held and pushed them slightly to the side as she closed the door behind her and sat across from him.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m moving back to Denver.”

  The words erupted from her before she’d even had an opportunity to think them through. Yet, once said, it was as if a weight had been lifted. Noah didn’t say anything, just stared at her until her nerves took over.

  “I don’t know when I’m leaving. I don’t even have a job or a place to stay yet, and I’ll be here until we stop Sinclair, but … that’s my plan. To move to Denver. Soon.”

  Her legs jiggled, and she pressed her hands to her knees to stop them. Noah continued watching her, his dark, heavy brows pulled low over his eyes.

  “I just wanted to give you a heads up so you could start looking to hire a replacement.”

  “Okay,” he said finally, and her shoulders sagged in relief. “Thanks for telling me.”

  She stood and turned to open the door, pausing with her hand on the door knob. She glanced back at Noah.

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone. At least not until I know when I’m going.”

  Noah nodded, and not for the first time, she wished she could read his expressions.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said and turned back to his receipts.

  She hesitated before turning and leaving for home. Despite her inability to figure out what Noah thought of her not telling Gavin about her decision, she trusted he wouldn’t say anything.

  Back in her apartment, she tugged off her work shoes and tossed them in the small closet near the door. Gavin was picking her up in just over three hours, and she wanted to get a few things done before he got there.

  She showered, then, twisting her hair up in a towel to dry, went back to the living room. On her laptop, she pulled up her resume to update her job history. The line about the museum drew her eye, and she grabbed the phone to call her old boss.

  He sounded vaguely surprised to hear from her, so she asked about the recent exhibit they’d hosted and then worked her way into asking about job openings. When he mentioned a position opening up after Christmas, she practically begged him for it. That gave her just over three months to deal with Sinclair and pack up what little life she had in Thompson Creek.

  After she hung up, she realized she was running out of time before Gavin arrived. She rushed about, getting dressed, and fixing her hair. When he knocked on the door, she was busy applying a coating of mascara.

  With one hand holding the mascara wand, she used the other to open the door.

  “You look great,” he said and leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. The tepid greeting only served to remind Cora at how not real things were between them.

  “Come on in,” she said and walked back to her room. Applying the mascara took longer than it should have, yet she couldn’t stop trembling as the reality of what she was hiding from him hit her.

  She came out a few minutes later and found him flipping through the notebook, reading over the latest details she’d added. She didn’t need the book to know what the night held. Gavin was wearing a black vintage rock band t-shirt and jeans.

  “Chinese food again?” she said.

  “How’d you guess?”

  She took the book from him and flipped back a few pages.

  “Smashing Pumpkins shirt, my new blue tunic dress, Peking Gardens,” she recited then handed him the book to see for himself. “He’ll be in a car a block down the road. No gun this time. He’s just watching.”

  Gavin read over the page before tossing it onto the coffee table. “I’ll call Caleb and have him back up.”

  Yet another reminder that their dating was for a purpose other than love or even lust.

  “Sounds good,” she said with a tight smile.

  Throughout dinner, she pushed back thoughts of the dead-end their relationship was trying to enjoy the time with him. He talked about a computer program he was helping Caleb design. He didn’t call it a job, though it sounded like one. She told him about a new book she was reading that she thought he might like, and when they left the restaurant, she pretended he was looking at the stars, not scanning the street for Sinclair.

  Safely in the Jeep, though, pretending got hard. Gavin pulled out his cell and called Caleb. She listened to Gavin’s side of the conversation, and it was enough to know Caleb spotted Sinclair, but there’d been no opportunity to get to him.

  If he had … then … She didn’t know. Gavin had ruled out taking Sinclair to the police, the mole created too big of a risk of Sinclair walking away.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked as Gavin drove.

  “Same thing. Nothing’s changed. We wait until we can grab him. Making a move when he’s got a chance to escape doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, I mean, after. After you catch him, what’s the plan? Do we call the police? Can they even do anything?”

  “No police.”

  “So, what happens?”

  His expression hardened. “We stop him.”

  Gavin didn’t say it, and if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want to hear him say it. Sinclair had faced imprisonment before and walked away. He’d evaded the feds for years. There was only one way to stop him.

  Silence settled between them for the rest of the ride and followed them up to her place, neither of them willing to give voice to what exactly stopping him meant.

  Enclosed in her tiny apartment, Gavin gathered her in his arms, and she lost herself in the feel of his hard muscles. She reached up and tangled her fingers in his shaggy hair then down to his nape where it was shaved close.

  “Stay a while?” she asked as she gazed up at him.

  He answered by lifting her up so she could wrap her legs around him and then carried her to the bedroom.

  For a while, she forgot about Sinclair and about Denver and everything other than the passion consuming her as she gave herself over to Gavin and the pleasure he offered.

  And when he spoke those heartbreaking words, she smiled and rolled from the bed as if the life she was leading was normal and amazing. When she came back from the bathroom, he was dressing, so she pulled on a tank top and pair of yoga pants.

  “Do you want a beer?” she asked as she walked from the bedroom, Gavin following behind.

  “Nah, I gotta drive home,” he said as he sank onto the couch. “I’ll take a water, though.”

  The suggestion that he spend the night was on the tip of her tongue, but she knew better than to offer. If he’d wanted to stay, he wouldn’t have left the bed. She went to the small kitchen and grabbed two water bottles. Setting them down, she picked up her cell phone. There was a missed call from her mom and a bunch of text messages from Keeley encouraging Cora to join her and Sky at a country bar two towns over.

  Cora texted Keeley that she was in for the night and placed the cell back down. She’d call her parents
in the morning. Grabbing the waters, she turned around, only to find Gavin standing on the other side of the breakfast bar, watching her with narrowed eyes. She jerked, upright, fumbling with the bottles.

  “Holy shit, you scared the crap out of me.” She took a deep breath and held out one of the bottles.

  He took the water. “Anything you need to tell me?”

  “No,” she said, her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

  “Really? You’re not looking for a new job?”

  Over his shoulder, she saw her open laptop, the bright white of her resume lighting up the screen.

  “Were you spying on me?” Offense seemed like the best idea.

  “Your computer was open and on. If you want to hide things, you should set up your screen saver and require a password when it restarts.”

  “Good idea. I’ll do that before I go to bed.” She walked around to the couch and gently closed the laptop as she sat down. She’d gotten rid of the screensaver and password protection because she had a bad habit of getting frequently distracted, and it was a pain in the butt to continually enter it in.

  “So?” He crossed his arms over his chest as he leaned back on the counter.

  “Okay, yes I was planning on getting a new job.”

  “I figured that already. Why hide it?” His head tipped to the side. “You can’t think I’d be upset about you not working at the bar, or that I’d tell my brothers before you had a chance.”

  “No, I talked to Noah earlier today.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve got something lined up for after Christmas.”

  “You’re a master at stalling,” he said cracking a smile. “What’s the job?”

  “At the museum. In Denver.”

  “Denver.”

  How could one little word have so much power? Yet, there it was, ripping at the delicate threads that held them together.

  She rubbed her hands along the top of her thighs then stood and paced to the window. She nudged the pale blue curtains to the side and stared down at the street below.

  “Lela’s always here, isn’t she?” she asked, not sure if the question was directed at him or herself.

  “She was a big part of my life and yours.”

  Cora glanced over her shoulder at Gavin and realized that as much she wanted him to heal and move on, that might never happen.

  “No. She is part of yours. You won’t let her go. I want a future with you, but not if it means always come in second. You keep clutching at her memory, dragging her back from the grave.”

  Anger reddened his face and he shoved away from the counter, taking a menacing step toward her. The muscles along his jaw ticked.

  “You don’t know shit. Fuck you,” he said.

  She tried to hear something in his words other than the raging fury that flashed in his eyes, but there was nothing. How quickly the last remaining pillars of her fragile hope crumbled around her.

  “Fuck me,” she said, nodding. “Because that all this ever was. Fucking. Não sou nada para você. I am nothing.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  REGRET WAS A SICKENING feeling, or maybe it was shame. Hearing those words thrown at him, knowing she’d understood him each and every time left Gavin speechless.

  What could he say to fix things between them? For three days, he’d been trying to figure out what to say, but anything he came up with only seemed like it would make things worse. If he was honest, he didn’t know if he wanted to fix them.

  He hadn’t asked Cora to love him. He didn’t want her to, and he sure as fuck never promised her anything other than sex.

  From across the room, he watched as she unloaded a tray of drinks at a table, chatting and laughing at whatever the group of guys was saying. His eye twitched, and he turned his attention back to the keg he was supposed to be hooking up.

  “Dude, I got this,” Josh said, hovering behind Gavin. “Aren’t you off?”

  “Yeah, I just wanted to get this hooked up.”

  Gavin stood and wiped his hands on the top of his thighs. He couldn’t have cared less about the beer. He only stuck around after his shift because of Cora.

  “You need to spend less time here,” Josh said. “Go to the gym, go shopping with Mom.”

  A snort burst forth from Gavin. “Did you actually just suggest that?”

  “Okay, so skip the shopping. You get the point.” Josh pulled a rack of glasses toward him. “Now piss off.”

  Gavin walked out from behind the bar and went into the staff area. Normally, he’d have sat at a table and had a beer, but that meant sitting in either Cora or Keeley’s sections, and neither appealed to him. He and Cora had resorted to communicating through his brothers, and every time Keeley looked his way she gave him the stink eye.

  Rather than have guilt heaped on him, he strolled back to the manager office. Noah and Logan were both off for the day so the room was empty. He sat behind the desk and turned on the computer, listening to the muffled sounds of the bar drift around him. When it finished loading, he opened a secured file that contained scanned images of Cora’s journal along with all of the other pictures, footage, and data they’d been collecting on Sinclair.

  Despite his and Caleb’s confidence in their ability to find a pattern in the glimpses Cora had of Sinclair’s actions, they had yet to find anything. When she’d described them as sporadic and general, she hadn’t been downplaying the visions. There really was no pattern he could find.

  Splitting the screen, he created a spreadsheet and began diagramming each of her visions, working backward from the most recent. After an hour, he had a colorful data mine that would be absolutely useless in terms of finding Sinclair.

  What was Sinclair doing? It frustrated Gavin to hell and back that he couldn’t get ahead of Sinclair. Craning his head to the side, he squeezed his shoulder blades together, arching his back, and let out a deep sigh at the satisfying pops it made as his spine realigned.

  From the kitchen, he heard his brother’s voice and resigned himself to the loss of solitude. Caleb would want an update on Sinclair and the plan.

  “You figure it out yet?” Caleb asked when he appeared in the doorway.

  “Other than the fact that Cora and I are together in all of the recent ones, there’s nothing.” Gavin pushed the laptop across the desk, turning for his brother to see the color-coded spreadsheet. “I’ve been over these so many times and still haven’t found anything. Different dates, different times. Sometimes he has a gun, sometimes he’s taking pictures or making notes. I don’t get it.”

  Caleb sat down and rested his elbows on the desk, linking his fingers together. Leaning forward, he took a moment to study the data Gavin had organized.

  “It’s there,” Caleb said as he shut the computer down.

  “The fuck it is.”

  “Sinclair’s a scientist. Everything he’s doing has been thought out, planned for the purpose of gathering data. There’s a pattern. The problem is all we have is what Cora sees, and they’re only pieces.”

  As much as Gavin hated it, Caleb was right. They didn’t have everything and that meant their plan might not be the wisest choice.

  Gavin leaned back in his chair, tipping his head to stare at the ceiling. They needed to think like Sinclair. Objective, plan, implement, observe. He’d obviously moved to the observation part of his process. Sinclair was methodical in every piece of data he collected. There was no way he would be as random as the visions suggested.

  “What’s the pattern? What’s the pattern?” Gavin murmured as he rubbed a hand over his mouth. Abruptly he sat up and looked at Caleb with a smile. “What we need is a pattern.”

  “Ya think?” Caleb gave him a curious look. “That’s what we’ve been looking for.”

  “No. We need to make one. We’ve been so busy filling in these details Sinclair is letting us see that we missed the opportunity to fill them in with what we want.” Gavin grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper from the printer then started drawing b
oxes in a circular arrangement. “What are the details Cora’s visions provide that would help us figure out when Sinclair will strike?”

  “Location, people, time, clothing,” Caleb listed. “And what Sinclair does.”

  Gavin wrote each item in a separate box, separating the location into one for him and one for Sinclair.

  “We can’t control everything, but if we manipulate the pieces we want, Sinclair won’t have any choice but to follow along.”

  Nodding in understanding, Caleb slid the paper toward himself, looking at the six boxes.

  “So what do we do? And how?”

  “He shifted from watching just me to it being Cora and me so we give him that.” Gavin jotted down his and Cora’s names in the box marked people.

  “The time is always different,” Caleb noted. “So we control that. Same goes with location.”

  “Exactly, but where?”

  “The old Cattlemen’s club,” Caleb suggested. “It’s on the edge of town, no street lights, so it’s dark by nine. It’ll be harder for him to hide in a vehicle and for him to spot us.”

  Gavin nodded and wrote their chosen location in the box and then added ten as for the time. The club was the logical choice and not just because of the reasons Caleb gave. The abandoned building was the furthest away from any houses. It would give them a place to do what needed doing, and the time would give them the cover of darkness.

  “What about clothes?” Caleb asked.

  “If we make the time and setting the same then clothing becomes the marker of time. We would create a schedule of clothing choices so we would know which day it was.”

  The two of them spent the next half hour going over minute details, working out a plan. From the get-go, including Cora had been a risky plan, and it still was. The difference now was that Gavin felt there was something he could do to shift the odds to their side.

  “So, do I get the pleasure of sharing this with Cora?” Caleb pushed his chair back from the desk. “Or are you going to eat crow and do it?”