It was something else. Something new. She was waiting, but she didn’t know what for. Mumbling in her sleep, she rolled onto her belly. A jarring pain shot up her arm, and she groaned, automatically cradling her injured right wrist against her chest.
The soft cast that went from her hand halfway up her forearm immobilized her wrist and hand, but it didn’t keep it from hurting when she moved wrong. The pain was enough to bring her completely out of sleep, and she lay on her back in the dark room, staring up at the ceiling. She could finally open her left eye again, but it still hurt like the devil. Taige lay there debating between getting up and finding one of the bottles of pain meds the doctors had prescribed or just finding a book and reading until morning.
Wasn’t like she was going to be working for the next few days. Before that thought even made a complete circle through her mind, a chill streaked down Taige’s spine. Her breathing hitched. In a smooth, unconscious movement, she rolled out of bed and grabbed the jeans lying on the floor with her left hand. She shimmied into them without hurting her hand much, but she had to lie back to zip and button them, and that hurt.
She shrugged the pain off and grabbed a tank top from the basket of clean clothes she hadn’t ever gotten around to putting up. Hurry hurry hurry. The words seemed to echo all around her, whispering to her in the dark. She didn’t turn on any lights as she moved through her house. Instead, she took up position staring out the huge picture window that faced the front yard.
When the headlights cut a swath through the darkness, Taige held herself still. She didn’t recognize the truck, but that was little surprise. Very few people had ever come looking for her. Jones with the Bureau, Dante, Rose before she died; once upon a time, her uncle had sought her out, but that was out of a desire to hurt and torment her just a little more.
But it wasn’t any of them.
Taige couldn’t have explained how she knew any more than she could explain quantum physics. But she knew. Her breathing went shallow, her heartbeat started to pound, and although she didn’t possess much vanity, she ran a hand over her hair. She generally didn’t spend too much time messing with her hair, just securing it in a French braid or a ponytail, but with her hand messed up, she wasn’t going to be doing too much on her own, and braiding her hair was definitely a two-handed task. So yesterday, tired already of trying to keep it halfway neat, she had spent hours getting the curly mess woven into a series of tight braids. That would keep her from having to mess with it for a while.
Still, she couldn’t help but wonder how her hair looked as she stood there, fiddling with her shapeless tank top and fighting the urge to go and change. She pressed gentle fingertips to the nasty bruise ringing her left eye and grimaced. After all these years . . . she’d known she’d see him again. Even when she drove away from Cullen Morgan’s home in tears, she’d known it wasn’t over between them.
Why he was coming to her now, she didn’t know and honestly, just then, she didn’t care.
She was so desperate to see him again, it was almost pathetic.
No, it was pathetic. It had been twelve years, and she was all but panting at the thought of seeing him, of staring into those amazing eyes and standing close enough to smell him. How much had he changed? Taige wondered. Instinctively, she knew that Cullen would be as devastating at thirty-three as he’d been at twenty-one. The truck came to a stop close to the house. She couldn’t see anything beyond the back bumper, and when the tail-lights went off, she jerked as though somebody had used a Taser on her.
She took a deep breath and then groaned as her shirt dragged against her nipples. They were stiff and erect, throbbing under the thin layer of cotton. Embarrassed, she folded her arms over them and wished she could manage to get a damn bra on. Her hand hurt too much to manage it, though.
Facing Cullen braless and in her bare feet: how much more disconcerting could it get? She held herself stiff as the knock came, pounding on the door as though he wanted to tear the door from its hinges. It came a second time, and third. Finally, she made herself move, shuffling through the dark living room with her arms crossed over her breasts, the wrap on her cast abrading the bare skin of her left arm and rubbing against her nipples.
Nerves jangled in her belly. No butterflies; this felt more like she had giant gryphons taking flight inside her, gryphons with knife-edged wings. She reached out and closed her left hand around the doorknob and slowly opened it, half hiding behind the door. She kept her gaze focused straight ahead so that all she saw was the way his white T-shirt stretched across his wide, muscled chest.
Through her peripheral vision, she saw that he held something in his hand. Something clutched so tight, his knuckles had gone white. She hissed out a breath and forced herself to look upward, up, up, up until she was staring into his eyes. It took a little longer than it should have; he was taller than he had been. At least by an inch. She was five foot ten—she didn’t have to look up to many people, and she decided then that she didn’t care for it at all.
“Taige.”
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. Her throat felt frozen, and forcing words past her frozen vocal chords seemed impossible. She just stepped aside to let him come in, and when he did, his arm brushed against hers. She flinched and pulled away, backing away until a good two feet separated them. Once he was inside, she closed the door and leaned against it, resting her left hand on the doorknob and holding her right hand against her belly and studying the floor.
He turned to stare at her. From under her lashes, she watched as his shoulders rose and fell, his chest moving as he blew out a harsh breath, almost like he’d been holding his breath the same way she had.
“God, Taige . . .”
His voice sounded almost exactly like it had in her dreams—no, exactly. In the dim light, she couldn’t see his face very well, but she had a bad, bad feeling that her dreams had been pretty damn accurate in that aspect, too. Shoving away from the door, she kept her head down as she moved around him and headed into the living room. He followed behind her slowly. She heard a click, and light flooded the room. She shot him a look over her shoulder, just a quick glance, enough to tell her just how dead-on her dreams had been.
It was almost too spooky; even his hair looked right. It was shorter than it had been when he was younger, almost brutally short. His shoulders strained the seams of his shirt, and she had a flashback to her last dream, when he had crowded her up against the couch, demanding she tell him how she’d gotten hurt. She’d shoved him, pushing one hand against one wide, rock-hard shoulder, and she imagined if she reached out and touched him, he’d feel exactly like he had in her dreams.
“So, are you going to look at me or just let me stare at the back of your head all night?” he asked softly.
She shot him another quick, almost nervous glance over her shoulder, and Cullen blew out a breath.
When he spoke again, his voice was closer. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?”
Aren’t you going to speak to me at all? Cullen wanted to ask. Instead, he waited until she finally turned around and faced him. In the brightly lit room, he noticed two things. The first was that she had her arm, her right arm, in a cast that went halfway up to her elbow. A chill raced down his spine. The second was that her left eye was puffy and nearly swollen shut, a dark, ugly bruise that Cullen suspected was every bit as painful as it looked.
Those dreams—shit.
She spoke, and her voice sounded just as it had in all those dreams. “I already know why you’re here. You need my help.” A bitter smile curved her lips as she stared at him. “Why would else would you be here?” She glanced at the file in his hand and held out her hand.
Cullen swallowed and lifted it, staring at it with the metallic taste of fear thick in his mouth. “You don’t owe me a damn thing, Taige. I know that. I’ve got no right being here, and I know that, too.”
She sighed and dropped her head, covering her eyes with her uninjured hand. “Cullen, stop. You
want something. Out with it. I’ve got better things to do than stand here and have you brooding all over me. So just spill it.”
“I . . . look, if I didn’t have to have your help, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s not me that needs you—just . . . just don’t—”
Taige cocked a brow. “You don’t have much of an opinion of me, do you, Cullen? Whatever brought you here in the middle of the night twelve years after kicking me out of your life has to be pretty damn important, and considering the kind of help you probably need, I’m going to assume there’s somebody else involved.” She stared at him, her gaze shuttered. “You think so little of me that I’d refuse to help whoever this is just to make you suffer because you and me got some history?”
History . . . Is that what we had? That seemed such a simplified statement. Still, said like that, Cullen felt very much the fool. He looked back down at the file and then at her, watching as she once more held out her hand. Careful not to touch her, he held it out. She took it and moved to sit behind the big iron and glass coffee table before she opened it. She settled down on the overstuffed black couch. If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he never would have seen it as she took a deep breath and set her shoulders, almost like she was bracing herself.
Her eyes, her expression, they were carefully blank as she opened the file. But as she stared down at Jilly’s picture, something changed. Her smooth, caramel-colored skin went pale. She looked up at him, and he watched as her eyes darkened to the color of thunderheads. The tension in the room mounted until it seemed too thick to even breathe.
Taige tore her eyes away from the picture and stared up at him. “Who is she?” Taige demanded, her voice harsh and shaking.
“My daughter.”
My daughter. My daughter.
The words seemed to echo through her, but instead of getting fainter, they got louder and louder, until the words seemed to shriek inside her skull. Blood pounded in her head, and her vision narrowed down until all she could see was that little face with the pretty smile and solemn eyes. Taige had lost count of how many times she’d seen that face. It had haunted her dreams for years.
“Her name is Jillian. She was kidnapped earlier today, well, technically yesterday . . .”
“I know.” Taige looked back down at the picture and traced it with the tip of her finger. “I know her face, Cullen.”
Cullen went still. “How is that possible?”
Carefully, she closed the file. She pushed it away. Cullen looked back down at it and then back at her, agony screaming in his eyes. Denial. He thought she was going to refuse him, refuse that little girl. Softly, she told him, “I don’t need to see the file, Cullen. And don’t look at me like that. I’ll find her.”
That much, she knew. She shoved up from the couch, automatically holding her hand against her belly as she started to pace in absent circles around the couch. It wasn’t going to be long now before it came on her, that dark, eerie knowledge that guided her to the missing. She could feel it hovering just outside of conscious thought, like a thunderstorm brewing out on the Gulf.
Cullen was another storm. She could feel the turmoil inside of him, along with other emotions that she really didn’t want to think about. She shot him a quick look and saw that he was still watching her with confused eyes. “You probably don’t remember it, but there were several times back when we were together that I kept having weird dreams about a little girl.”
His eyes narrowed. The turquoise blue of his eyes darkened, and his brows dropped low over his eyes. “I remember.” He grabbed the file from the coffee table and opened it to stare at his daughter’s face. “Please tell me that you weren’t dreaming about my baby.”
She didn’t answer, and he grabbed the glossy eight-by-ten photo from the file. He shoved it into her face and said it again: “Tell me that you weren’t dreaming about my baby.”
Taige reached out and took the photo. She had a sweet face, Taige thought. Soft, delicately pretty. She’d be a heartbreaker when she got a little older. “I can’t tell you that, Cullen.”
This wasn’t happening, Cullen thought. He shoved a hand through his hair, jerking on it hard in hopes that it would clear some of the fog in his head. You probably don’t remember . . . What would Taige think if she knew that he remembered practically every moment with her in detail so vivid, it hurt? Didn’t remember . . . hell, he only wished that were true. He’d lost track of how often he’d wished that his memories of her would fade, even a little, but they never did.
Shit. Yeah, Cullen remembered those dreams. He remembered all too well, and he wanted to scream.
It didn’t seem possible that she could have dreamed about Jilly. It had been twelve years, longer really. Nearly fourteen years since the time she had first woken shivering from a dream about a little girl. A dream that would come back and haunt her month after month, year after year. But Jillian was only nine years old.
His voice was rusty. “What can you tell me, Taige? Can you tell me that you can find her?” He stared at her, just now realizing how close she was, close enough that he could see the darker striations of gray in her eyes, close enough that he could smell the warm, soft scent of her. Close enough that he could see the gentle rise and fall of her breasts with each breath she took. Close enough that he could see the compassion in her eyes when his voice broke as he asked again, “Can you tell me that you’ll find her and bring her home safe? Tell me that without lying to me?”
She reached up and touched him, laying a hand on his cheek. “Yeah. I can tell you that, Cullen.” Then she turned away from him, leaving him standing in the middle of the room as hope hit his system with a force that left him weak-kneed and almost shaking from it.
Taige barely made it to the bedroom before it hit her. She stumbled, falling to her knees as she knocked the door shut with the back of her hand, and then she sagged against it. She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat and tried not to shake as the adrenaline crashed into her.
Her teeth started to chatter as she looked down and realized she still held the little girl’s picture. Jillian. After nearly fourteen years, the girl had a name. Taige pressed the picture to her heart and whispered, “Come on, honey. Talk to me now. It’s time you and me really talk. Help me out here.”
For the longest time, there was nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Just the roaring of the blood as it pulsed inside her head and the pounding of her heart, beating somewhere in the vicinity of her throat. Slowly, the adrenaline surge subsided, and her vital signs dropped down somewhere a little closer to normal. When the gray came rushing up to meet her, she went to it willingly. The gray, it was like a cloud that took her, guiding her until she made a connection with the victims she tried to help.
Sometimes it showed her things that made her so ill, it was a good thing she had no physical body in that space, because she would become so violently sick, she’d be of no use to anybody. Other times, it showed her things that made her want to cry and things that made her so angry it was a wonder the gray didn’t go bloodred with the strength of her fury.
She rarely sank so willingly into it, but this time, she knew it wasn’t going to show her something that would destroy another part of her heart. This time, she could help. The gray wrapped around her, guiding her, and she could feel the distance grow as she drifted farther and farther from her physical body. Sometimes distance made no difference, other times, she needed to be closer to the victim before she helped.
There were times when she had to get closer, following the gray’s trail, and in the part of her still capable of conscious thought, she worried that just might happen this time, and she hated it. Hated to think she might have to go down and tell Cullen it was going to take some time.
But just when the threads that bound her to her physical body felt stretched tight enough to snap, she stopped drifting. She found herself staring down at a wooden cabin somewhere below her feet, as though the gray was holding her in midair. She drifted do
wn, down, down, through the ceiling, into the dark and there—
There—she found Jillian.
The little girl was tied up but relatively unharmed, lying on a hard, narrow bed that had some very disturbing stains on it. Though the vision she had in the gray wasn’t as focused and clear as she’d like, she recognized those stains for what they were: bloodstains.
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