by Brynn Kelly
He flinched. “Lau—Holly! Holly!” He threaded an arm under her legs and the other around her shoulders and sat her up, gently urging her head between her knees. He rubbed her shoulders and smoothed his hand down her back. The sensation of safety washed through her like warm honey. She let herself drink in clean, beautiful oxygen.
Once her breathing had evened out, he drew her onto his lap, wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her forehead. He smelled salty. Her eyes stung and watered, and she had to hold back from throwing her arms around his waist and holding on, tight. Black clouds whirled in her brain, heavy with memories of another man who used to hurt her, then be racked with guilt.
But that just then...that was worse than anything her father had dished out, far worse than Jasper’s manipulation. Jack very nearly squashed her like a bug. She’d thought he was so controlled and calm, but maybe she was just seeing the mammoth effort to contain that rage.
“Honestly, Jack, I don’t know what’s going on here.” She couldn’t speak above a whisper. “All I know is that I was supposed to be paid to sail around the world.”
“I kidnapped the wrong woman.” His voice was flat.
Tentatively, she rested a palm on his chest, as if it would imprison the demons inside, and bring back the Jack she’d thought she knew. His heart pounded. “Yes,” she said.
Would she would snap, too, if her child had been plunged into danger—into even more danger? People always broke along the same fault line, and she’d just located his.
“That footage?” he said.
“I’m guessing they’ve staged some kind of rescue with the real Laura.” And cut Holly adrift.
His pecs bunched up, under her hand. “This is fucked up.”
“So what happens now? That plane—it spooked you. Was it a message?”
“An order.”
She swallowed. “To do what?”
His arms tightened around her.
“To...kill me.”
“Yes.”
“And will you?”
He buried his face in her hair. The water rushed over the sand below, in and out, in and out, like the world was just spinning on as normal.
“Wow. You have to think about it?”
“I didn’t think it would come to this. I thought I could keep you safe. Killing innocent people in cold blood is not what I do. Not who I am.” His voice wavered. It wasn’t a no. It sure seemed like he’d been ready to kill her a few minutes ago.
“That’s reassuring.” She should wriggle out of his embrace, but her nerves craved his touch, her body ached with the comfort of being tucked between his chest and arms and bent head. “Your friends obviously think you’re capable of it.”
“They don’t know me so well anymore.”
Anymore? “If you kill me, will your son be okay?”
“There are no guarantees.”
“But that’s the deal, right?”
“I’m not sure anymore. The game has changed.”
No kidding. It didn’t feel much like a game at all. Reluctantly, she unfolded herself and sat cross-legged, facing him. His eyes were shot with tiny red veins. He was evidently fighting some internal battle. Without thinking, she rested a hand just above his knee—not to manipulate him this time but because...because the thought of him hurting drove daggers into her chest. Oh shit. She cared. She cared about a guy who’d just come one squeeze away from killing her. Would she never learn?
She had to think, to reassess. If the whole of America now knew Laura was okay, no one would be looking for her. Her chances of rescue had plummeted from slight to zip. Her gaze rested on the laptop. Maybe she could get out a message. But who to? No one on Earth gave a damn about her. She’d never felt so alone.
But then, there was Jack. They were alone in this together.
“You’ve been playing games with me from the start.” His tone was dead calm.
“I’ve been trying to preserve my life.”
“So all that stuff about your father hurting you, and learning to fight so you could defeat him, that was a lie designed to make me feel sorry for you?”
“That was true. But my father is not a senator—not even close. And I don’t need anyone feeling sorry for me.”
“Seducing me—was that all part of your plan? To get inside my head, force me to feel something for you?”
“Yes.”
He made a scoffing noise. She stared at her legs, feeling like the fraud she’d been for too many years. But this...this had been different. She couldn’t let Jack think—
“Initially,” she added weakly, raising her head.
He narrowed his eyes. “Initially.”
No—what was she doing even admitting that? This was complicated enough. She should have stopped at “yes.” Whatever irrational feelings she’d been developing for him should have dissolved the second his hands closed around her in anger. Her fingers floated up to her neck. It felt tender, bruised. He closed his eyes and shook his head briefly, as if it was he who was feeling the pain.
“So it’s all been a lie.” He said it as a statement of fact, slowly, like he was still processing it.
Anger rose in her throat. Hang on, why was she getting the third degree? “Too right, it has, Jack.” She stood, shakily, needing to regain control of herself. “No! You do not get to play that card. You kidnapped me, remember? You don’t get to be angry with me that you got the wrong woman, and you don’t get to be angry about what I did to try to survive. I get to be angry that you’ve screwed up my life.” Her voice trembled. She didn’t bother settling it. “For the last three months I’ve been floating around on that yacht fantasizing about beginning a new life, a normal life, with the money I was supposed to get paid for this. No way will I get that now.”
“So this is all about money to you.” His voice was flat.
“It’s about freedom. It’s about walking away from my shitty past and starting over. And, yes, that means money. I’m not naive enough to believe you can start a new life at almost thirty years old with nothing.”
“You don’t know what nothing is.”
“I’ve spent most of my life around people who’ve had nothing. Maybe a different kind of nothing from what you knew, but I’m a stray mongrel, just like you.”
Jack pulled himself up as far as the bench, and sat, slumped, as if his energy had been sapped by the effort of shutting down whatever violent beast lurked under his facade of control.
Adrenaline buzzed down to her toes and out to her fingers. “You can be angry, sure. But you’re not allowed to be angry with me. Be angry with the jerk who’s threatening your son. There’s only one innocent victim here, and that’s your son. But don’t you dare hang that on me.”
He bowed his head and stared at the open hands on his lap, turning them over and back, over and back, as if checking they were still connected to the rest of him. He pressed the palms together, as if in prayer, and brought them to his forehead. Presumably, his son’s safety relied on the ransom being paid. That would no longer happen, so what now? Holly imagined a brown-skinned boy with large chocolate eyes, like his father. She bit her lip. The one thing she couldn’t abide was the abuse of a child—and she could feel Jack’s fear for his son as strongly as if it was sitting, churning, in her own stomach.
“I think we’re both directing our anger at the wrong person.” Her voice came out husky. The fuel of her rage evaporated, taking her strength with it. She dropped on the seat beside him. “We’re not the enemies here.” No response. Her scalp prickled. “Unless you’re still planning to kill me.”
He looked straight ahead, at the sea.
“Oh, would you just hurry up and decide?”
“I can’t kill you, I’ve told you that.”
“You probably should kill me.”
He swung his head around to meet her gaze. His calculating expression made her want to squirm, and not in a good way. “The fact you’re suggesting it...that tells me you’re more use to me if I keep you on my team.”
Okay, that sounded positive. “Who says I’m on your team?”
“What other team are you on? I don’t see some guy with black face paint dropping from the sky to rescue you.”
“Fair point.” Humor was an encouraging development. She gestured at the laptop. “Is there anyone you can call, to help?”
“I’ve sent a message to a guy, but he hasn’t picked it up yet.”
“A guy? As in, one?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know this guy.”
“We could go to the authorities, tell them about your son.” Wow, Holly Ryan, suggesting they call the cops?
“Not yet. If Gabriel as much as smells a uniform, my son is lost to me—one of the many things he made clear when he started all this. I cannot risk it—he has too many contacts in too many corrupt bureaucracies. You must understand, this militia has operated underground for forty years, at least. Any authorities they can’t evade they buy off or blackmail. Gabriel would find out, he’d know I betrayed him, and he’d run, taking my son with him. In the space of a day they could be anywhere in the world.” He dug his knuckles into his temples. “No. This is between me and him. I can still resolve this. I’ll have to.”
“Gabriel?”
He dropped his head back and groaned in self-disgust. A slip.
“You might as well come clean. Who would I tell?”
He studied her grimly.
“I told you my story,” she continued. “Why don’t you start with your name, and we’ll ease on in from there?”
He stared a long minute. “Raphael,” he muttered, finally. “Rafe, now.”
Rafe. It suited him. Masculine and heroic, though he wasn’t angelic in the slightest.
“And you’re in the army—the French army.” She took his silence as confirmation. “So who’s Gabriel? Hang on—Raphael and Gabriel? Are you brothers, with God-fearing parents?”
He shook his head, slowly, like the movement hurt. “No one remembers the names we were born with. We were in the same militia, many years ago, before I became a real soldier. Our commander beat our names out of our consciousness and gave us new ones. His little joke. Gabriel and I had grown up together in refugee camps, both orphans, the closest thing to family we each had. We vowed to protect each other, and we did, for years. Then one night all the orphaned and abandoned boys in that camp were rounded up and taken away, and forced to fight for the militia. Gabriel hid from them. He might have escaped, but he saw them drag me away and came to my aid.”
“Because of the vow.”
“Yes.”
“And you were both taken.”
“Yes.”
Crap. It took a lot to make her own childhood look rosy, but that... “So you were forced to fight. Like conscription.”
“Of a sort. But this wasn’t a real army, with rules. There was no code of honor, no Geneva Convention, just the word of the commander at the top of the chain.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine.”
“Holy shit, really? I thought you were talking sixteen, eighteen. Nine? How can a nine-year-old be a soldier?”
“In some ways a nine-year-old makes a very effective soldier. Frighteningly effective. You don’t question authority, you don’t understand consequences—guilt, remorse. You’re more malleable. Any scruples you might have are swiftly beaten out of you.”
“What did you have to do?”
“Whatever I was told to—intimidate, threaten...kill.”
Kill? “How can a nine-year-old kill someone?”
“We were well drilled in the use of weapons.”
“No, I mean, not how—not in the practical sense. I mean, how could a child...”
He nodded, grimly. “I couldn’t, at first. They threatened to execute me because I couldn’t bring myself to be violent. But I found a way to switch off my conscience. I found I could will myself to fill up with the rage and the anger and the pain and the suffering and the loneliness and the fear, until something gave and I came out the other side, into a—”
“A trance,” she said. “Like just now.” She rubbed the back of her neck.
“Yes, like now. A trance. A place of refuge, from which I could do whatever was necessary to survive, however despicable. Where I could stop myself feeling anything. Just now, I felt that first warning that it was happening—I saw it—and I was still powerless to stop it. After all these years, I’d thought...” Leaning forward, he clasped his hands across his knees, and stared at them.
She wanted to grab them, link her fingers through his. She didn’t. “What was it, that warning? What did you see?”
“When I was in the militia, my vision would go shaky, like everything was diving into everything else, and that was the last thing I’d know.” He rubbed a callus on his thumb, absentmindedly, it seemed. “That’s what happened, with you. Next thing, you’re unconscious at my feet and I feel like screaming. That hasn’t happened to me in more than two decades. I didn’t know it still could. I saw it coming and I couldn’t override it.”
“That terrified you.”
“Yes.” It sounded like he was repenting, like in confession. Not that she’d know about that.
“That tells me you have a strong conscience, not a weak one.”
“Not strong enough, as you discovered.”
“Sometimes it’s healthy to recognize your weaknesses, so you can at least begin to patch them—find that kill switch. It’s when you’re unaware of them that they bring you down.”
Like with Jasper—if she’d been aware that she was vulnerable to obsession, she might not have lost most of her twenties. Her path wouldn’t have brought her to this predicament.
But suddenly, she didn’t regret being here, with Jack—Rafe. It seemed right, somehow, that she’d wound up on this island with this man. She blinked, hard, reactivating her headache. What an insane thought.
They fell silent. She sneaked a glance at him. His brow was knitted, as he stared out to sea. The things he’d been through. He had to be the strongest man she’d met.
“How long were you a child soldier?” she said.
“Five years. I got out, eventually. It was during a firefight—I was separated from the others and was found by a group of Spanish aid workers. They had to hold me down to prevent me from going back in. I wouldn’t leave Gabriel. They said they would look for him. I described him—he has disfiguring scars.” Rafe touched his nose. “They said they’d seen his body. And then the only thing I felt was relief, that I wouldn’t have to be that monster anymore. They found me a place in an English missionary school, where I could be rehabilitated.”
“But he wasn’t dead.”
“No.”
“So where is he now?”
He sighed, as if giving up a great effort. He was really letting her in. Only, instead of her chest filling with triumph at breaking through his walls, there was only...sadness, for the abandoned orphan he’d been, for the weight he must still carry. “No one knows, exactly. At some point he became the militia’s commander. Six years ago I was stationed briefly in the Indian Ocean, brought in to help the French and American navies bust a human trafficking ring that was targeting former French colonies, among other countries. We’d intercepted comms of the traffickers talking in my native language. It’s an ancient dialect, almost extinct after waves of invasion and genocide in my country. They called themselves a name that translates as the Lost Boys—also what the militia was called when I was a boy. It’s a common enough nickname for child soldiers, but that plus my native language...”
“You
think it was Gabriel?”
He linked his arms behind his neck and stared at the jetty. “No. I still believed he was dead, and they never used his name. But I wondered about others I’d fought with. One of the conversations I intercepted was about me—about ‘Raphael.’ They’d spotted me and knew who I was—who I used to be. That was confirmation it was the same militia. I believe it was also how Gabriel tracked me down. We nearly got them once, but they were tipped off. All we found were the bodies, still warm. Twenty-six women and girls, the youngest barely ten, destined to be sold as sex slaves. The things they did to them, before they killed them...” His jaw tightened. “It bore the hallmarks of the militia.”
“They never got caught.”
“They’re too well organized. Before the French navy lost interest, they called the militia Les Pirates Fantômes—the ghost pirates. If the authorities get too close, they vanish. Your kidnapping suggests they’re involved in a lot more than we gave them credit for. I had wondered if they’d come for me one day—no one willingly leaves the Lost Boys. I...I didn’t think they’d come for Theo, too, didn’t think they could possibly know about him. They must be holding him somewhere near here, but I have no idea where, which is why I have no choice but to follow orders, for now.”
“Theo.” A regular kid with a regular name. “How old is he?”
“Nine.”
“Oh, man. The same age you were.” No wonder Rafe was haunted. Nine. Jesus.
“But he’s much younger, in a lot of ways. I was old before my time. Theo—I’ve made sure he’s stayed young.”
“Given him the childhood you never had.” Breaking the cycle, they called it in the States. Was there a time her father had wanted to save her from the childhood he’d had, instead of inflicting it on her?
Rafe rubbed his face. “This is getting us nowhere.”
Us. Including...her? “Does Gabriel want you to join him again?”
“Either that or he wants me dead. But first, I suspect, he wants revenge. He wants to break me. That’s the way they operate. They force you to do the thing you think you’ll never do, to turn you into one of them. In my day, they made you kill an innocent, preferably someone you loved. They need you to burn bridges with your former self, ensure your family no longer accepts you, ensure you can’t live with yourself in your original form.” He fixed sunken eyes on her. “If I have to, I’ll take Theo and go into hiding—for the rest of our lives, if necessary—after getting you to safety.”