Like with Danny—or the FBI, who was apparently looking for her because of Danny. Or so she’d been told. Carolina was careful in doling out information, and while Drea hated being treated like something fragile, she was also smart enough to know Carolina was right.
And if Carolina didn’t trust her, it never showed. There were no interior key locks on the door, just a bolt that slid easily. But the house was like a fortress, with alarm systems, cameras in every room and an unending supply of ammunition everywhere Drea looked. The alarm bells chimed whenever a door or window opened, but that was so they could keep track of who entered, like the grocery delivery or Drea’s therapists.
The newest of those were a married couple—the Drs. Siegel were a formidable team. They didn’t let her get away with anything. They probed her mind until she wanted to scream, but they didn’t use drugs or any invasive methods . . . unless you counted what she’d started to deem as “the mind fuck.”
And yes, over the past six months with them, she’d made tremendous progress. As it happened, this very treadmill was where her first memories, post “happy Daniel time,” had come back to her.
It’d been a brief flashback, and even though she’d known logically that Danny wasn’t there with her, hitting her, threatening her with a knife, she still hadn’t been able to hold back her screams. When Carolina found her, Drea had been huddled on the floor in the corner, tears running freely down her face.
It’d taken a while for her to reassure Carolina that she was truly okay, that at least a crucial part of her memory had returned . . . everything, it seemed, except her time with the mysterious Jem.
Now she upped both the speed and the incline, pushing her muscles harder, the same way she’d continued to push forward from that breakthrough.
Discovering Danny was a violent criminal, and now the head of the upstate New York Outlaw Angels MC, like his father before him, made her even more certain that she was with good people. These days, the face she saw in the mirror, while by no means old, was not seventeen.
You’re a doctor.
You’re in trouble because of Danny.
Jem’s been helping you.
Carolina had kept her from mirrors in the beginning, and that hadn’t been hard. Drea had been in a fog, thanks to the antianxiety medicine she’d slowly been weaned from. Even after she’d realized her real age, she continued to actively avoid looking in the mirror for several more weeks, until Carolina forced her hand.
“You’re thirty-two, not ancient,” Carolina would tell her. “What do you think you’re going to see?”
Carolina had to be fifty, but she was ageless. Steely. Beautiful. Her hair was a beautiful white-blond sheen and she had the complexion to pull it off. She looked natural. She had laugh lines in her smooth skin. Her face had character.
And when she’d walked Drea to the mirror and forced her to confront her present, Drea saw a fierce amber-eyed woman with long, tawny hair that was wild and loose past her shoulders, staring back at her, one who didn’t look nearly as weary or exhausted as she felt inside at times.
“Beautiful, child.” Carolina had pulled some of Drea’s hair off her shoulders as they stared at their reflections together. “Trust me. Your memories are all here.” She pointed to Drea’s forehead, and then to her heart. “And here.”
“What happened to me?”
“You’ve gone through more than most, Drea,” Carolina said gently. “The most important thing you need to know is that you’re safe with me. And you’re safe because of Jem.”
Drea believed that, which was why she sat with Carolina nightly since learning that she’d been kidnapped when she was with Jem, that she’d been helping him and things had gone terribly wrong. It was at that point when she’d asked Carolina to tell her about Jem, wanting to know more beyond his physical appearance. Only then did Carolina begin to show her pictures and tell her stories until Drea began to feel as if the man were an old friend.
But somehow she knew Jem was far more than simply a friend.
It was all so much more complicated than it had seemed at first, and she wasn’t at the bottom of it yet. There was so much more to learn, and Drea was determined to make sure she did so.
Carolina had quietly slipped into the gym toward the end of Drea’s workout, knowing that the treadmill tended to fill her with more questions than answers. And she carried the file folder that contained pictures of various Section 8 members, including—especially—Jem.
Drea shut the treadmill down, patted her face with a towel and grabbed for her water bottle, and Carolina motioned for her to follow.
They sat at the kitchen table, and Drea asked, “Did you know any of them—the old Section 8?”
“I’d heard of them, sure. They were part legend and myth, but anyone who worked for the CIA during that time knew that a team like that could be far too real. There were so few rules then. It was . . . lovely.”
“So if you’d been asked . . .”
“I’d have joined that team in a second,” Carolina confirmed. “These days, I’m much better as backup.”
They’d had this discussion before. So many times Drea hadn’t recalled it the next day. Now she did, but they still started this way. It comforted Drea that she could retain information. And this information was important—she could feel it.
To her credit, Carolina was very good at pretending this wasn’t the nine millionth time they’d done this. It happened mostly every night, except for those times when Drea was too frustrated to try.
Tonight wasn’t one of those nights.
They went over the background easily, with Drea recalling, “The old Section 8 was disbanded. Most of the members were killed, except for Darius and Adele. But then Darius disappeared, Adele was killed and Darius’s son, Dare, and his half sister, Avery, found each other. And realized they were in trouble, because they were the kids of Section 8 members.”
“That’s right.”
“So Dare and Avery are part of this new Section 8, right? Along with Jem and Key, who are brothers, and Gunner.”
“Yes.”
“And this new Section 8 started unofficially when Dare kidnapped a woman named Grace but ultimately ended up helping her.”
Carolina pointed to a heavily tattooed man with spiky white-blond hair. He stood outside a tattoo shop, his arm wound around the shoulders of a shorter blond woman. “This is Gunner—he’s a tattoo artist, and a pretty famous one at that. His father was a former CIA guy and a pretty nasty terrorist. Gunner hid from him for years, until Dare and Avery came along, looking for their father. Turns out that Darius was kidnapped and killed by Gunner’s father.”
Drea frowned. This part was always tricky. “But Gunner’s father was Grace’s stepfather—she calls him Rip. And Grace didn’t meet Gunner until last year. Together, all of them helped to capture and kill Rip.”
“Exactly. And then Gunner tried to leave S8 to keep them safe, once he’d been exposed as Rip’s son, and they’d ended up having to help him get rid of some old, dangerous enemies,” Carolina added.
As always, Drea muttered, “I swear, if I didn’t know better—which I don’t—I’d think you were making this up. It’s like a soap opera.” More so especially because Drea couldn’t recall ever meeting any of the players involved.
“I did not make this up . . . but I could always write this up and sell the script. Do you think anyone would watch it?” Carolina mused, then frowned. “I’d have to redact several classified points, though. Perhaps if I changed the names and dates . . .”
Drea sighed and motioned for her to go on with the picture viewing.
“Oh yes. Where were we? Right. So this man right here is Key. He’s Jem’s brother—younger.”
“You haven’t said much about Key yet,” Drea pointed out.
“Key was in the Army, until he rescued Dare and got court-martialed.”
“I thought rescuing someone was a good thing.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you
? Anyway, that’s how they all met. Key and Jem went looking for Dare.”
“To thank him?”
“To kill him,” Carolina corrected. “And that’s when they all realized that they had Gunner in common, and that Grace’s stepfather was trying to kill them.”
“That would be Gunner’s father too.”
“Right. But none of them knew that at the time, except for Gunner.” Carolina sat back and nodded.
Drea traced her fingers over the tablet where the picture of the team, sitting together on some steps, was looking out at her. The photo had been taken of them especially for her so she could get to know them, that maybe something in their faces would jog her memory.
And then there was Jem. He was in her dreams an awful lot, and before she’d learned anything at all about Jem, she’d assumed the dreams were about Danny. In those dreams that she still had, she’d never see his face, and even though she’d call out to him for help, he’d never turn around.
The first time he did turn around was the night before she saw his picture.
And she still hadn’t told any of that to anyone—not Carolina, not the therapist—and she certainly wasn’t going to tell Jem, if and when she ever met him. Instead she held on to the dream for dear life, because that was what it was to her—a complete and utter lifesaving moment. And every day and every night she scratched and scrabbled to try to regain another scrap of memory, of him and her time together with Section 8.
Tonight, she didn’t ask Carolina any questions about the parts that involved her kidnapping. She repeated those facts over and over in her mind often enough, anyway, and that’s all they were to her: facts, with no feelings behind them.
Jem had kidnapped her because he needed a doctor to save Avery, who was dying. Drea had saved her, but spending time with Jem had gotten her in trouble with Danny and the OA. S8 helped her get away from the OA, and she’d gone on the run with them, willingly. And when they had a job to do, one that involved a human trafficker who was after Gunner, she’d gotten involved as a decoy. Unfortunately, from what she’d been told, it’d gone wrong, and she’d been kidnapped.
By the time Jem found her, she’d gone into shock and was close to death. Physically, she’d recovered fine. The memories were coming slowly but surely, but those last months were more like listening to the plot of an action movie as opposed to having anything to do with her life.
Carolina assured her it was no movie plot. That she hadn’t done anything wrong during her part of the operation. That S8—Jem especially—felt horribly guilty, and hadn’t so much abandoned her as left her with Carolina for her own safety while they continued their attack on human traffickers and other criminals.
“Is this the kind of work you do?” Drea asked Carolina.
“When I retired, I swore I was done with this kind of work. But what am I supposed to do—sit around, read magazines and garden? Those are all fine things, but I’m trained to kill. Frankly, I’m finding retirement boring. I told Jem I’d be more than willing to help them out, but I’m not going up in planes or crossing the country for jobs. That’s the beauty of being old and crotchety—you get to make them come to you.”
“Well, I’m very grateful that you took me in.”
Carolina patted Drea’s hand. “Obviously in my line of work it’s hard to have family. I think of Jem as family. Anyone he’s close to is my family by default.”
Drea’s head was swimming with all the information. It was starting to integrate, but still in that frustrating way because it didn’t seem like her story.
It was always, however, a hell of a bedtime story. “So I know that Gunner is with Avery. And Key is with . . . ?”
“Many different people,” Carolina finished. “Apparently, he’s still hung up on some girl from the bayou. That’s what Jem says.”
Carolina looked as though she didn’t believe what Jem said in that regard. All Drea could do was shake her head and mutter, “Old loves,” disapprovingly.
“Not all old loves are necessarily bad.” Carolina paused. “Granted, right now I can’t think of any good ones. But I’d have to say that second loves are better. You’re through all that infatuation bullshit and you know what’s real. And there’s nothing more real than these men and women you’re learning about. They’ve made lots of sacrifices for one another. That’s the way you build a successful team.”
“And they sacrificed for me too,” Drea said thoughtfully.
“Well, honey, they did almost get you killed. Twice,” Carolina pointed out.
Drea rolled her eyes. “That’s so not helpful.”
“Just keeping it real, dear. Isn’t that what you all say these days? In my time, it was ‘Honesty’s the best policy.’ But come to think of it, that’s total bullshit.”
“You and Jem got along well as partners, then?”
Carolina flashed a brief smile. “Quite.”
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