by Eva Chase
He raised his hand to skim his fingertips over my cheek. My pulse skipped a beat. I was already leaning into his touch instinctively. He ran his hand into my hair and kissed me.
I should have known Nick would kiss like this. Warm and sweet and utterly committed, like I was the center of his whole world in that moment. Giddy tingles raced over my scalp where his fingers traced, and my lips parted of their own accord to deepen the kiss—to have more of him, however much I could get, because right then I wanted it all.
Nick made a pleased sound in his throat and pulled me even closer. His body wasn’t just warm but hot now—or maybe that was me—or maybe the sparks we were generating between us. My curled fingers came to rest against his solid chest, and I drank in even more of the sweet melding of our mouths.
His hand slid down from the side of my face to my neck. His thumb brushed the chain of my moonstone necklace.
A jolt of panic broke me from the bliss of the moment. Had he touched it on purpose? Was he trying to see what he could read from it?
Oh, God, I’d almost forgotten who I was dealing with. I couldn’t believe anything he’d said, now or before, not completely.
I ducked my head and stepped back. Nick let me go, but he was smiling again—a soft, pleased smile that made me want to throw myself back into his arms and kiss him all over again. I tensed my legs against the impulse.
“Let’s save something for Paris,” I said. “I—I think I should probably go.”
His eyebrow arched slightly, but he nodded. “So, the mojito is for me?”
Embarrassment flushed my cheeks. “I—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’d like to see how good a job I did with it before I inflict it on you anyway. Next time. After Paris.”
If we had an after Paris. “Yeah,” I said awkwardly. “Tomorrow?”
He nodded, and somehow I got myself out of that apartment. I stopped halfway down the stairs, my breath coming short, and gathered myself.
What the hell had I been thinking, letting him kiss me? Letting myself kiss him back? I was getting fucking distracted.
But I’d done my job too. I’d found out one little detail Frederick would have to give me credit for. I didn’t know what to make of the glimpse of the past I’d gotten, but it was just a glimpse. It could have meant anything. I couldn’t let it throw me for a loop.
I jerked out my phone and typed out the text before I could change my mind. Check Dubrovnik for the Keanes senior.
13
Nick
“Oh, wow,” Carina said, turning in a slow circle as she took in the Seine, the bridges, Notre Dame just across the way. The skirt of her pale green dress swirled around her legs. “It really is as beautiful as all the movies make out.”
The sky was clear blue, the temperature warm but not sweltering, and a musician was playing a violin by a nearby café. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day.
I’d gone back and forth between certainty and doubt on the train ride over. I’d let instinct override my common sense yesterday, when Carina had looked so abruptly in need I’d had the urge to protect her, to show her how much I cared… Whether that had really needed to involve kissing her was open to debate, so maybe there’d been some hormones involved too. But I couldn’t take it back now.
Regardless of whether I’d made the right choice, she’d kissed me back. She’d kissed me like she’d been waiting for me for years. It sent a twinge straight to my cock remembering.
She’d seemed almost shy when we’d met at the train station, so I hadn’t made any moves on her. But she’d sat next to me, and about halfway to Paris she’d tucked her hand around my elbow as if it were totally natural to. We’d talked more about our travels and she’d asked a little about “Alex’s” family, so apparently we were still keeping up that pretense.
Now, seeing the joy on her face as she took Paris in, I knew this idea, at least, had been a good one.
“Come on,” I said with a grin, taking her hand. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had a real macaron.”
“Oh, believe me,” Carina said, an eager gleam in her eyes. “I intend to have all the pastries.”
She set off alongside me with an unusually frenetic energy in her stride. I couldn’t tell whether it was just excitement or something more. What had Alpha Project made of her decision to take this trip with me? Had she even told them? I’d gotten the feeling that something that had happened in my apartment—or something she’d seen happening in the past there—had convinced her this was a good idea, at least in the moment.
We found a cozy looking patisserie down the street and grabbed a table in the corner. True to her word, Carina ordered five different things off the menu. “You might have to help me finish,” she said with a wink.
When she was finished eating, a dab of éclair cream lingered at the corner of her mouth. I leaned forward and swiped it away with my thumb. Carina’s eyes met mine, and for an instant the café and the people around us were gone. If there hadn’t been a table between us holding me back, I would have kissed her again.
Even though she’d been asking about the imaginary Alex’s associations with Paris on the way here, she didn’t bring him up again as we strolled down the side streets, taking in the towering old homes that closely lined the streets. Our shoes tapped against the cobblestones in a pleasant rhythm. I wished I could just lose myself in that sound, in exploring a city I enjoyed almost as much as London with a woman I was coming to care about even more. As if we were just an ordinary couple with nothing hanging over us except maybe scheduling conflicts or how quickly we made a commitment.
We stopped by the river again, halfway across one of the bridges. Carina leaned against the cool stone of the railing, the breeze tossing her dark curls and rippling through her dress. She beamed into the sunshine. Looking at her, without even touching her, I had the impression she was reveling in an experience she hadn’t really gotten to have in her entire life before. My chest tightened.
I didn’t want to have to cast a shadow on this place, on this trip, for her. But I’d had reasons for bringing her here other than just to give her a vacation from her life with Alpha Project.
“Carina,” I said. When she looked at me, I grazed my fingers over her hair, waiting, watching, to give her a chance to pull back if she wasn’t sure. A different sort of light came into her eyes, one as hungry as the sensation low in my belly. She didn’t even wait for me to lean in. She grasped the front of my shirt and stepped forward to press her mouth to mine.
Kissing her yesterday had been pretty amazing. Here, on a bridge in Paris with the lingering sweetness of the éclair on her lips and the sun glowing over us? It was heaven.
But it couldn’t last. I drew back just a couple inches, close enough that her sweet scent lingered in my nose. Carina’s fingers stayed curled around my shirt. She looked up at me, a question in her gaze.
“There’s something else here I think you should see,” I said. “If you’re ready…?”
“Okay,” she said with a little rasp, as if she knew I wasn’t talking about anything all that pleasant.
I took her hand as we walked on. She let her arm brush against mine now and then, sending shivers of anticipation over my skin, as if we were likely to do much more than kissing here today. How much had she already guessed about where we were going? What did she think of it? We were still pretending so much, even as we hinted at a deeper understanding.
After this, after I saw how she reacted, I’d tell her. It was time to clear the air. And if I’d taken a risk I shouldn’t have, well, I’d deal with those consequences. We couldn’t keep going like this—that much I knew for sure.
I could make my way to the little courtyard without looking at any map, even though the first time I’d been here, the time it had mattered most, I hadn’t been old enough to remember anything that had happened. When I’d come to Paris on my own for the first time at eighteen, I’d asked Dad where that last confrontation with the
Alpha Project goons, the one he’d always told us about as a warning of how careful we needed to be, had been. He’d remembered the neighborhood and the streets nearby well enough for me to find it.
The courtyard didn’t look like the sort of place where anything momentous would have occurred. And really it hadn’t been all that momentous to anyone but the four of us: my parents, Jeremy, and me.
A plain stone fountain burbled in the middle of the cobblestone square. A couple of little stalls selling jewelry and fresh fruits stood at one end. A tiny bistro stood at the other. A faded mural had been painted on the wall of the old apartment building that ran along the far end of the square. I walked up to it with Carina.
There were two notches in the stones there, one at thigh level and one about the height of my shoulder. I ran my fingers over the higher one, where a bullet or a tranquilizer pellet had struck it so hard it’d bit out a chunk of the rock. A bullet or a pellet that had been meant for us.
Where exactly had the trash bin that Dad had set on fire been back then? That part I hadn’t been able to witness for myself. But maybe Carina would see it.
“My parents and I and my older brother came through this square about twenty-seven years ago, when I was five months old,” I said. “We almost didn’t make it out the other side, at least not on our feet.”
Carina studied my face. She touched the notch that I’d indicated. “Nick…”
“Go ahead,” I said. “I want you to see it. If you can, I mean.”
She swallowed audibly. For a second I thought she was going to deny her talent, act as if she had no idea what I was talking about. Then she said, “I can try.”
She rested her whole hand against the wall. Her chest rose and fell with a deep breath. That glazed look I was becoming familiar with came over her face. Her shoulders went slack. Her eyes stared forward, but I knew she wasn’t seeing me anymore.
I waited in silence, watching her. Wondering if I’d know when she found the right moment, if she did at all. Her brow furrowed in apparent concentration. Her lips pursed. Then all at once her back stiffened.
She turned her head, tracking movements of people who were no longer here, who must have existed in whatever distant past she was witnessing. Her eyes widened. She winced, pressing closer to the wall as if on instinct. Her gaze darted through the courtyard, here and there. After a moment she went still. Her head tipped to the side. She took a careful step forward, and then another. I had the sense she was listening to something.
Her jaw worked. Her golden-brown face turned a tad sallow.
She shook her head as if clearing it. When she turned to me again, her gaze was focused on me here in the present. Her expression was so haunted that I could tell she’d seen what I’d brought her here for.
“You know who I really am,” I said quietly. “You know who my family is. And I know that the same people you just saw shooting at us—at a young man and a young woman just trying to protect themselves and their toddler and infant sons—are the ones who sent you to find me. To find us.”
“Nick,” she said, and faltered.
“It’s okay,” I went on. My hand clenched around the urge to reach out to her. I didn’t know if touching her was a good idea, not yet, not while she was still processing. “I don’t blame you. I’ve got no idea what your life must have been like, but they’ve been able to tell you whatever they wanted the whole time. They’ve been able to lie to you this whole time. Now it’s my turn—and I’ve just shown you something true.”
Her jaw tensed as she swallowed audibly. She didn’t seem to know what to say, so I barreled on.
“All I can do is promise you that whoever killed your parents, if they’re even actually dead, it wasn’t my parents. All we’ve ever wanted to do was live in freedom. Just live. The people you’ve been working for, they’re using you. That’s what they do with people like us, people with talents like ours. Thirty years later, and they still can’t stand the idea that any of their test subjects might be walking around free rather than trapped in their lab.”
Carina rubbed her forehead. Her gaze slid away from mine. “I’ve never seen any lab,” she said. “I don’t know anything about any of this.”
“I know,” I said. “And it’s a lot to take in. But will you at least—at least talk with me about it? You can get away from them. You can have a life that’s really yours. If I can, I’ll help you find out the truth about your parents too. I know you’re a good person, Carina. I know you’d never hurt anyone on purpose. I could have just disappeared from London as soon as I saw you were tracking me there, but I didn’t.”
“Why?”
A question I’d been asking myself more than once in the last week. But I knew the answer.
“Because I wanted to understand, and when I understood, I couldn’t just leave you behind. Will you trust me enough to give me a chance to tell you everything I can?”
14
Carina
Nick looked at me so earnestly my heart wrenched. But it was beating too fast, my mind full of the images I’d seen, images I almost wished I hadn’t.
I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know what to think. I’d come here with him hoping whatever he led me to would prove me right in the end, prove that he was the one who’d been told lies.
No. I was the one who’d been wrong. So very, very wrong the knowledge nauseated me. My talent had never lied to me—that much I was sure of. Which meant the people who’d raised me, the people who’d pretended to care about me… they had, so many times over.
Was there any chance that things had changed since all those years ago? That what I’d heard wasn’t completely true?
I couldn’t think it through, couldn’t think at all, with Nick standing right there with that plea in his gaze.
My feet tripped over each other as I scrambled back. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t— I need to think. Alone.”
“Carina,” Nick said, but I was already spinning around. I dashed for the nearest street leading away from the square.
The images from the vision of the past chased after me. No matter how many turns I took, no matter how quickly I strode over one of the river’s many bridges, they kept replaying in the back of my head. I was still smelling the flowers on display at the booth, the acrid smoke that had shot up to overwhelm it. Still hearing the choked sobs of a little boy in his mother’s arms.
I’d known how to look for Nick’s parents. I’d seen the photos of them, only a few years younger than they must have been that time they’d been in Paris: his dad with shaggy sandy-blond hair a few shades brighter than Nick’s, his mom’s wild red curls.
She’d cropped those curls close and had them tucked under a hat, but I’d recognized both of them the second my reach into the past had settled on them, hurrying through that square. She’d been clutching a dark-haired toddler I assumed was Nick’s older brother Jeremy against her chest. Her partner, Jason, wore the baby on a carrier on his back. The baby who’d been Nick.
It’d been obvious even in that first glimpse, before I’d seen anything else, that they were terrified and fleeing. The woman—Lisa—her eyes had been just a little too wide, the whites gleaming starkly. Jason’s jaw had been clenched so tight the tendons had stood out in his neck.
Then the first shoot had gone off with a bang that had echoed off the tall buildings. Jason had flinched down, the bullet striking the wall just inches from baby Nick’s head. Little Jeremy had started to sob. Jason and Lisa had bolted for the other end of the square, more shots crackling in their wake.
“Stop them!” a voice had shouted from above to the people watching in the square. A couple of men had moved toward the family as if to tackle them, and Jason’s head had jerked around. An instant later, a trash bin a few feet from the flower stand had blazed up with a burst of flame. The woman at the stand had yelped, and the men had dashed to help her instead. One of them grabbed a bucket of roses and dumped it, flowers and a big splash of water, in
to the bin to douse the flames.
Jason and Lisa had disappeared down the street.
That hadn’t even been the worst part, though. The worst part had been when a trio—two men and a woman in athletic gear with the padding of bulletproof vests underneath—had stalked into the courtyard from the other side. One guy had a handheld radio at his ear. He’d shaken his head with a grimace.
“The squad farther down never sighted them. They’ve gone back to ground.”
“Some ambush that was,” the woman muttered.
The man with the radio wheeled toward the other. “What the fuck were you doing aiming that high?” he said in a low but threatening voice. “Rubber bullets will still kill if you get a bad shot to the head. Especially the kids.”
For a second, I’d almost been relieved. But only a second.
“Who the fuck cares at this point?” his companion had retorted. “We’ve been wasting our time trying to bring these two in for years. Better if they just kicked the bucket.”
“Langdon wants them alive, you idiot,” the woman had said. “Hasn’t he made that clear enough? These two were his most valuable test subjects. God only knows what the kids might be capable of. He’d kill us if we destroy them. Maybe if you’d been aiming right, we would have gotten one in the leg or the ribs and caught them.”
“Maybe you should aim better,” the second guy had said in a snarky voice.
I’d pulled back to the present then, sickness rolling through my gut.
Langdon wanted the Keanes as test subjects. And I’d seen with my own eyes that even faced with the most direct possible threat, they hadn’t fought back. They hadn’t harmed anything more than a trash bin.
All those stories I’d heard from Langdon, from other people in Alpha Project, about how vicious the elder Keanes had been—it’d all been garbage. If they had killed my parents, which I was having trouble believing at this point too, I had to think they’d been pushed to it. That it’d been a choice of taking those lives or sacrificing their own children.