Hidden Hearts

by Eva Chase

  Langdon looked at me for a few seconds with a curious glint in his eyes. I swallowed thickly. Then he clapped his hands. “A reasonable compromise. All right, Carina, we’ll do things your way. But see if you can’t scrounge up enough data from your current contact beforehand so we already know to storm right in. And you know, it wouldn’t hurt to get a sample or two from the contact to test, just to see.”

  I stared at him. “From Nick? He’s the one who told me about his friend’s talent. You don’t really think that one of the Keanes would be going around advertising their skills, do you? They’ve managed to keep ahead of us for so long.”

  Langdon shrugged. “I learned thirty years ago to never think you can’t be surprised. The more we know, the faster we can take them down.”

  7

  Nick

  Carina let out her breath as we stepped into the Indian restaurant in what sounded like a contented sigh. I smiled as I took in the place alongside her. The rich smells of spicy curry and saffron rice drifted past the worn teak tables and into the alcoves set up along the walls, where you could tuck yourself away with a heap of cushions and the illusion of privacy.

  “This is my favorite nook,” I said, motioning her over to the alcove in the corner. The whole raised floor was padded, and pillows lay against the wall for comfortable leaning. A couple of low teak tables waited to hold whatever food we ordered. I clambered up and got comfortable with my legs stretched out.

  Carina settled against the opposite wall, arranging her shapely legs to sit cross-legged. Her gaze was still roaming the room, but a soft smile had come over her face. I hadn’t realized that there’d always been at least a little tension tightening her expression until right now, when it had briefly fallen away.

  All the weight of the tasks Alpha Project had given her. Did she realize how much of a toll they were taking on her?

  I’d have liked to always see her like she was in this moment: that soft smile, her eyes alert but eager, her body easy against the wall, like she belonged here.

  With me.

  I shook away that last thought as Carina’s gaze slid back to me. A little of that wary tension came back into her face. She did still have her mission, however exactly complicit in them she was.

  “This is where you and your friends always hang out?” she said, patting the cushions, but I knew she meant one friend in particular.

  I hadn’t wanted to push the Alex angle unnaturally hard, but since she’d given me the opening… “Mostly me and Alex,” I said. “He’s the one who’s got the taste for spicy food.”

  “I like him more and more!” she said, her smile widening. “When is he getting back, anyway? I still haven’t had any luck tracking down that guy I’ve been looking for. I could use some of those supernatural skills.”

  She was pushing a little harder now. I guessed that was to be expected. But I couldn’t string her along much longer. If I was going to find out something game-changing, I’d better do it today.

  “This weekend,” I said. “I’ll probably catch up with him soon after that, and I can mention you to him then. He’s a pretty easy-going guy—I’m sure he’ll want to try to help.”

  She nodded, looking satisfied. The waiter came over, and I asked for a couple of my favorite dishes for us to share. Carina piped up right away with two of her own favorites, so obviously she already knew what she liked.

  “Good choices,” I said, “If you’re into Indian, this is a real treat. It’s the most authentic place I’ve found.”

  She looked me over with a hint of amusement. “And you’re a good judge of that because…”

  I grinned. “I spent several months in India when I was twenty. Didn’t know what I was missing until then.”

  “Okay, I guess you can speak with some authority then.” She’d kept her tone casual, but I could see interest light in her eyes. In the impressions I’d gotten from her, I’d seen her in a bunch of different locales—some that I recognized and others I didn’t. The one common theme had seemed to be that she was always hanging a little back. Always on her own, observing, absorbing. But those impressions had been tinged with happiness, not loneliness.

  I could relate to being that kind of traveler. It was an opening, a way that maybe I could get her to open up more consciously to me.

  “It was an easy place to get lost in,” I said. “Not the kind of lost like you’re having trouble finding your way, but just—caught up in the atmosphere. So much energy, so many lives going on around you. Sometimes I like to sort of step out of myself and get sucked up into everything I can see going on around me, rather than trying to push myself on a place. If that makes sense.”

  “Actually, it does.” She rubbed her mouth. “I know what you mean. When I’m traveling around, sometimes it feels as if getting too involved in what’s going on kind of… taints it. Makes it less its own thing and more something I’m influencing. I’d rather see what it’s like if I wasn’t there.” She laughed. “Which maybe sounds like I don’t think very much of myself, but it’s more about wanting to really understand it.”

  My breath caught. I’d never heard anyone express that idea so close to the way I thought. When I tried to talk to the rest of the family that way, I tended to get odd looks.

  “Exactly,” I said, leaning closer automatically. “I feel like, if you never step back and take things in apart from them, you never really know anything except how you fit into them. Which, I’m not down on myself either, but I do recognize there are plenty of interesting places and people in the world that have nothing to do with me.”

  “Yeah.” Carina’s expression had gone a little dreamy. “Where would you most like to go that you haven’t already?” she asked abruptly.

  “Okay, that’s a killer question.” And one I had to really think about. My family’s unique situation had given me a good excuse to stay on the go during my late teens and early twenties. I’d hostel-hopped across three continents before I’d settled on London as a home base. “How do I pick? I guess… You know, I never really vacationed. But there’s an interesting dynamic in those places that mostly cater to tourists, isn’t there? It’d probably be pretty enlightening to go someplace like Fiji or Barbados and slip behind the scenes there.”

  “Plus beautiful beaches to relax on?” Carina said with an arch of her eyebrow.

  I chuckled. “Okay, I might take a little break from getting enlightened here and there. What about you? Where would you go that you haven’t been to yet?”

  She paused. “I guess I should have been ready for that question, since I asked it. Um. Fiji sounds nice? No, but really… I like big cities. All the energy, all the bustle of life that you can just soak in, like you said. It seems like someplace like Tokyo or Beijing would be amazing for that, but I haven’t had a chance to see much of Asia.”

  The mention of Tokyo sent a little nervous jolt through me. Liam’s home base for the moment. But Carina was saying she hadn’t been out there, with a sort of casual longing that suggested she didn’t expect to go any time soon. That meant Alpha Project wasn’t on to him at all yet, I hoped.

  “So, where all have you made it to so far?” I asked as our food arrived. If I could get more of a sense of where she might have been investigating, I’d know how far ahead of her people we’d managed to stay. And I was honestly curious.

  As she talked and we dug into the food we were sharing, it wasn’t hard to find little moments when my fingers could brush hers, when I “accidentally” reached for a serving spoon at the same time she did, when I offered her another piece of naan. We’d both scooted closer to the table, and a couple times I simply touched her wrist, her forearm, while making a point of my own.

  Each time, I got another of those fleeting impressions. Another city, Carina on the edge of a busy square—I thought it looked like Rome. A plain room in what I’d gathered was the apartment she’d grown up in, watching a movie on a laptop with gunfire crackling through the speakers.

  A few nights ag
o in the club I’d taken her to, the view before her hazing and shifting to the same place, but a different crowd of figures.

  Her talent. I’d confirmed it that night from a few fragments I’d gleaned: What she did had some similarities to Liam’s ability, what with that sort of trance I guessed she went into, but while he would see things happening now somewhere else, she seemed to see things happening where she already was, but before. I’d bet she was waiting to find an excuse to get me out of this booth so she could try to see some past time when I’d been here with “Alex.”

  I guessed she’d get a few red herrings if she managed to direct her talent with that much accuracy. It wasn’t a whole lot of fun eating in a restaurant like this alone. Sometimes I came with Dushane, and he might bring a friend or two from the club if he was feeling gregarious. Sometimes I ended up chatting with someone I had no plans to see again later in a park or a bar and ended up suggesting we head over here. I had been here a lot, so there was no lie for her to catch me out in.

  She hadn’t been anywhere I was particularly worried about, from what she said. New York, L.A.—maybe she’d been sent from there over to San Jose after the mess Jeremy had gotten into? A bunch of different European cities, but none of them ones my parents or my brothers had spent time in recently.

  I tapped her hand to point out a bizarre hat on some woman beyond the window, more for another excuse to touch her than because I minded the hat particularly, and a sharper flash hit me. A burst of anger, a childish voice shouting from clenched lungs, You’re not my real parents. If they were here…

  The emotion of that moment was so intense my voice stuttered for a second. I caught myself and got on with the comment I’d been making, but my thoughts started whirling.

  Carina had been living with people who weren’t her birth parents. Had Alpha Project done something to them? Was that leverage they had over her even now?

  I weighed my next move carefully as I swallowed my last morsel of chana masala. I’d been around all sorts of people enough to know that the surest way to get anyone to open up was to open up yourself, like I had talking about my feelings about traveling with Carina just a little while ago. If I wanted her sharing anything personal about her parents, I’d be most likely to get there sharing something about mine.

  If I wanted her to make herself vulnerable, I had to show I was willing to do it first.

  I didn’t want to lie to her, to make something up. I wanted to actually connect with her. But when I thought about painful moments associated with Mom and Dad… There were some places I wasn’t willing to go yet. Some things I couldn’t have explained to her without giving myself away.

  What could I offer? I took a sip of chai, skimming through my memories for options. Okay, that might do the trick.

  “The only downside with getting that absorbed,” I said, since we were still talking about travels, “is sometimes you do miss important things in your own life. When I was in India, I went right off the grid for a couple weeks, off in one of the more remote areas. No cell service, no internet. When I was back in range, I found out my mom might have cancer. She’d noticed some signs and gone for testing days before, and I hadn’t even known.”

  I could still remember that gut-punch of horror when I’d come back into cell range and seen all the texts and missed calls. How hoarse my voice had been when I’d called Mom up to apologize and find out how she was doing. Carina couldn’t know all the extra stress around that moment—realizing how limited Mom’s options for treatment would be with the low profile we needed to keep, the lack of a real home…

  My voice got a little hoarse now as I added, “It’s silly, maybe, because me being around to hear about it right away wouldn’t have changed what was happening to her. But I felt so guilty anyway. So… I haven’t gone quite that far off the beaten track since then.”

  Carina’s eyes had shadowed. “Is she okay?” she asked quietly. “Your mom?”

  I nodded. “It was just a scare. Something benign. Thank God. No one expects to lose one of their parents when you’re only twenty.”

  “No,” she said. She poked at her tea mug. She smiled, but it was bittersweet. “I guess I understand and I don’t. My parents died when I was so little I don’t remember them. So I know what it’s like not having them, but I never had to feel the loss in the moment. I’m not sure if that makes it easier.”

  Her parents were both dead? It took me a moment to find my voice and decide what to say. “I can’t imagine it does. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, well…” She shrugged, but every angle of her body showed her pain. That loss definitely hadn’t been easy on her. Her hand came up to briefly squeeze her necklace, the one she’d said was a present from her parents. “I had foster parents, and other people looking out for me.”

  Alpha Project sometimes scooped up foster kids, from what Mom and Dad had said. But that still didn’t explain how Carina had ended up working for them instead of hidden away in their underground lab.

  “I guess no matter how many people you have on your side, it’s hard not to imagine what life would have been like if your birth parents had been around,” I ventured, watching her.

  “Yeah.” She laughed roughly. Then she fixed me with a gaze so fervent I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to. “I didn’t just lose them. They were taken away. The truth is, the guy I’m trying to find—I think he might know something about the people who murdered them.”

  Murdered. The guy she was trying to find…

  My throat closed up. She was trying to find me, and through me to get to the rest of my family. I’d caught hints of how she’d thrown herself into this mission with anger and determination.

  Because she thought my parents were the ones who’d murdered hers?

  Right in that moment, I couldn’t even say for sure that they hadn’t.

  8

  Carina

  The second the words came out of my mouth, a chill washed over me. Why was I telling Nick anything about my parents? Had I said too much just with that little admission?

  But at the same time I was watching him avidly, wanting to see how he’d respond. That was why I’d said it, wasn’t it? To see if I could provoke some kind of reaction, if he had any idea what I was talking about already.

  To see how a guy like him handled information that fraught in general—whether he’d get awkward and distant, and suddenly he wouldn’t be so interested in seeing me anymore.

  I’d never told anyone outside of Alpha Project about the finding the people who murdered them angle before, but he wasn’t the first guy I’d mentioned my parents’ deaths too. Every other one, that’d been their cue to decide I was more complicated than they wanted in any one-night stand.

  Nick’s eyes had widened just slightly. His jaw worked. I braced myself. And then he said, “I’m so sorry, Carina. No one should have to go through something like that.”

  He reached across the table, offering his hand but not immediately taking mine. Letting me decide whether I wanted that contact or not from him. A lump rose in my throat, so fast I almost choked on it.

  I wanted it, especially when he offered it with that much consideration. The more important question was whether I should.

  I didn’t want to reject the gesture completely, though. I let myself quickly squeeze his fingers, a gesture of gratitude and nothing more.

  “I don’t know whether Alex will be completely helpful,” Nick said. “But for a cause like that, I’m sure he’ll try. You deserve some closure. The police never caught the people who did it?”

  I shook my head. I had to tread carefully here. The full story was way too crazy for an ordinary guy like him. “They thought it was an accident. There was some evidence, but not enough to convince them. That’s why I need more.” There, that sounded at least somewhat reasonable.

  “It’s a big weight to be carrying all by yourself.”

  The lump in my throat expanded. “Yeah, well… It’s not completely all by m
yself. I have people who support me. But with some parts, I’m the only one who cares enough to go to all the effort that’s needed, you know?” With some parts, I was the only one with the talent to ferret out the truth.

  “I hope you find the guy soon, then,” Nick said. “And that he gives you the answers you need.”

  “Yeah.” I forced a laugh. “Now look, I’ve made our lunch all dire. Sorry, I don’t usually bring that up out of the blue.”

  “It’s totally okay,” Nick said with a dismissive gesture, and the warmth in his voice convinced me that he meant it. “I wanted to get to know you better. That’s obviously an important part of who you are.”

  “It is.” I dragged in a breath. And that was why I really wanted to get a scope on this restaurant, to see if I could be sure this friend of his was the guy we needed before it was time to meet him. Now that Nick was all concerned about me, this was probably the best time to convince him to give me a little space.

  My gaze caught on a fleck of curry sauce that had landed on his shirt. Perfect. “Oh, no!” I said, with a half-smile to show I didn’t think it was that big a deal. “The amazing curry is going to leave an amazing stain if you’re not careful. And that’s my favorite of the shirts I’ve seen you in so far.”

  Nick raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really?” He glanced down at the dot and grimaced. “Let’s see what I can do about this in the restroom. I’ll be right back.”

  “Take your time if you need to,” I said as he eased off the platform.

  As he headed to the restrooms, he motioned to the waiter, who immediately came to collect our dishes. So much for grabbing something that’d touched his mouth and might offer a little DNA. But that wasn’t the main reason I was here anyway.

  I sank deeper into the cushions and let my eyelids droop so my daze wouldn’t be quite so obvious. Inhaling and exhaling slowly, I cast my mind into the past of this little nook.