by Lisa Harris
“So if I agree to take on this new identity, what happens next?”
“We’ll relocate you. I was thinking Jacksonville or maybe Baltimore to ensure there are no ties to me here. I’ll help you get started again, with all the papers you’ll need. We’ll even set you up with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.”
Michael would have laughed if the situation wasn’t so serious. The man actually thought he was being generous.
Valez pushed his chair back and stood up. “You’re tired. I understand you probably need to think through this. We can wait to get everything set up until you’re feeling back to normal.”
Michael nodded. He’d known the risks all along, but this time, he’d known if he decided to stay and play, the stakes would jump to a whole new level.
An image of Bruce rose before him. Bruce pounded his fist into Michael’s chest until the flames completely engulfed his body. Michael felt himself melt into the pavement, unable to escape the haunting screams of the partner he’d been unable to save.
Pain and guilt rocked through Michael’s body. He jerked up and threw the covers off him, awakened once again by the recurring nightmare and his own screams. Sweat dripped down his back and chest. His pulse hammered wildly as the familiar terror of that moment ate through him.
Eyes open, he fought to orient himself. A nightlight on the far wall cast shadows across the floor. The pain … the dreams …
Olivia.
The truth slammed through him along with the knowledge that everything that had happened had been his fault. Bruce was dead. Kendall was dead. Olivia and Ivan had almost been killed tonight. How many more were going to die because of him?
There might have been nothing he could have done to save Bruce, but guilt had yet to release its rigid hold. Because instead of saving his partner, he’d saved the very man he’d sworn to take down. And almost lost his own life doing it. All to stop a war that wasn’t even his own. A war they’d never win.
The explosion wasn’t the only thing that had been haunting his dreams tonight. She’d been in them as well. Olivia Hamilton. Daughter of the man he’d been assigned to bring in and who now wanted him dead. He’d seen her reaching for him in his dreams while they were being chased through the ghostly swamp marshes, always just out of reach. Until he’d lost her, like Bruce, in the watery depths.
How much longer, God … I can’t take much more. The dreams … the guilt …
He’d prayed—begged—for the nightmares to stop. There had been a time when he’d thought himself invincible. Thought that there would be some sort of earthly reward for everything he was doing for his country. Every time an arrest was made or a criminal was put behind bars, he’d been reminded that his decision to join the force and make the world a better place was the right one.
But in the end, what good had any of it done? There was always one more person to arrest. Always someone else higher up on the ladder. The pursuit of truth had become a never-ending game of deceit and evil that he had no idea how to fight against anymore.
A pursuit that had eventually led him here.
The door of the room creaked open. Michael lifted his head, wincing at the pain radiating through his rib cage. Olivia stood on the threshold. Light from the living room illuminated her silhouette, and her hair fell in waves around her shoulders.
She started across the room. “You shouted out something. I thought … I was worried.”
“I’m sorry. I’m fine.”
He laid his head back down. He hadn’t wanted to get her involved, but she was already caught in his hurricane’s destructive path. And he wasn’t sure he could save her.
Wooden boards creaked beneath her as she crossed the floor carrying a glass of water and a bottle of medicine. “You must have had a nightmare. You’re dripping with sweat.”
“It’s nothing.”
He wasn’t ready to admit his fears, or the terror that had engulfed him night after night for months. She handed him the glass, then opened the bottle.
“You need to take some more painkillers.”
He struggled to sit up. “What time is it?”
“Almost morning.” She rested her hand against his forehead. “Your fever seems to have broken. How are you feeling?”
“I … I’m not sure yet.”
He took the water and the medicine without arguing, swallowing the pills in one gulp.
She screwed the lid back on the bottle, then eased into the rocking chair beside the bed. “I used to have nightmares. My mother always knew how to comfort me.”
“What did she do?”
“She sang to me.”
“I bet she was beautiful … like you.”
Olivia’s smile faded, making him wish he could take back the words. He hadn’t meant to be so personal.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound—”
“You’re right, actually. About my mother anyway. She was beautiful. I always wanted to look like her. And my father … he was rarely around, but that didn’t change the fact he was our father.”
Michael formed his words carefully, uncertain if she were trying to avoid the past the same way he was. “Did your mother know the truth about your father?”
Olivia nodded. “She made Felipe and my father swear they’d never tell us the truth.”
“Maybe she was trying to protect you.”
“Maybe.” Her voice softened until he could barely hear her. “The only way I can live with this is to see my father as two different men. The one who loved my mother. Who liked having a family and two children. And then there’s the other side of him. The one you saw back on the island.”
He caught the pain in her expression as she stared past him, clearly ready to shift the conversation away from herself.
“Tell me about your nightmare,” she said.
He hesitated before answering. He’d never told anyone about the private battle he’d yet to discover how to win. But there was something about her honesty along with her frankness that made him want to tell her the truth.
“I’ve learned that dreams are often a twisted version of reality.” He took another sip of his water before setting the glass on the table beside him. “For me they’re almost always the same scenario. Part truth. Part illusion. I’m there again on an assignment that was supposed to be a simple exchange of goods, but instead went horribly wrong.”
“What happened?”
For a moment he was pulled back into the nightmare of his own memories. The explosion, the ravaging fire, the stench of burning flesh. It was a place he didn’t know how to erase. A place he didn’t ever visit when he was conscious. But he realized that her questions were probably more about her father than they were about him. She was seeking the truth just as much as he was.
“Eight months ago I was almost killed in the line of duty,” he began. “I was an undercover cop, in too deep, working for your father. I had gone to a warehouse with my partner with information I thought was solid, but instead it turned out to be a trap.”
“What kind of trap?”
Michael worked to keep the emotion out of his answers, just like his years of undercover work had taught him. “We thought it was a meeting to close a deal, but someone planted a bomb in the building, and my partner was killed.”
“A bomb? Why?”
“It turned out to be an attempted assassination connected to a turf war. Someone wanted your father dead. I ended up saving his life.”
“Which is why he trusted you?”
Michael shrugged. “I’m not sure Valez truly trusts anyone, but yes. I made sure he needed me.”
“While you were doing everything you could to take him down.”
Funny how when selling the job, Kendall had made everything he was planning to do sound downright honorable. Nothing he’d done felt honorable anymore.
“And outside your dreams, you blame yourself for your partner’s death?” she asked.
He caught her gaze, surprised at both the lack of
judgment it held and her perception. “I’ve never been able to fully forgive myself. I keep looking at what went wrong, and how I could have stopped it.”
“Did you know about the bomb?”
“Not until seconds before it went off. By then … by then it was too late.”
“Then how was it your fault?”
“It was my fault because I should have known about the bomb.” Whether or not it was true, logic didn’t always mesh with the complexity of emotion. “I was the inside man, there to stop something like that from happening.”
But he hadn’t been able to stop it. Bruce had left behind a three-year-old girl. Kelsey would never know her father. His wife was now a widow, struggling to support her family on a teacher’s salary, and nothing Michael could do would change that.
“I’m sorry.”
His fingers gripped the edges of the thick blanket. Olivia’s presence had reminded him of his own powerlessness. But he wasn’t going to let it happen again. “I’m sorry that you were dragged into this. Sorry that you had to find out the truth about your father this way.”
Her frown deepened, drawing thin lines across her forehead. “It’s time you stopped apologizing. As I recall, I never asked your permission to rescue you.”
He couldn’t help but smile at her honesty. “That might be true, but what you did was both daring and bold,” he said. In only a few hours, he’d learned she was vulnerable, but brave. He liked that. Liked her. Which made him wish all the more that she and Ivan had escaped without worrying about him. Now she was caught up in this tangled mess, with a good chance that neither of them would come out alive in the end.
Olivia fiddled with the top of the medicine bottle in her lap. “I would hardly use those words to describe myself, because—I’ll be honest—I’m scared right now. I’ve seen what my father is capable of doing, and it terrifies me. If he finds out where we are …”
She left the statement hanging. She wanted him to tell her everything was going to be okay but knew he couldn’t. All she knew to do at the moment was to keep praying that God would protect them from the man she’d always known as her father.
“I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he doesn’t find us,” Michael said.
She threw him a weak smile. “Even you can’t do that.”
“He hasn’t traced us here so far, which means we should be safe for now. And as soon as I’m feeling a bit more coherent, we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Olivia shivered despite the warmth of the room. So much had happened in the past few hours to make her question what was real and what wasn’t. Betrayal … loss … fear … She felt every emotion twisting through her.
“I know you’re scared, Olivia, but I meant what I said.”
He brushed his fingers across her hand, but she pulled away. There was something … intimate about the situation that had her emotions wanting to delve deeper into the possibilities and run away at the same time.
She swallowed hard. “I just hate … I hate being afraid, not knowing what to believe.”
“Well, if it helps, you’re not the only one who’s afraid. And you’re not the only one who’s mixed up about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Olivia couldn’t help but smile. “There are so many things I thought I knew, that I realize now were nothing but lies. Felipe knew the truth about who my father is.”
“Why the secrets? I don’t understand.”
“He told me it was my mother’s wish. To keep us safe. But now … it’s hard to know who to trust. There have been so many lies.”
“How does all this change your relationship with Felipe? That he knew the truth and didn’t tell you?”
“I don’t know yet. In some ways it changes nothing … but in other ways, I’m realizing that nothing will ever be the same again.”
“I know you have questions about your father. And I know you don’t know me at all, and you’re struggling to trust me. But we need each other.” He reached out and grasped her hand. This time she didn’t pull away.
She studied the raised veins running across the back of his hand, his long slender fingers. He was right. She’d saved him. He’d saved her. And she was smart enough to realize she couldn’t do this on her own.
“There’s something about this I don’t understand.” She turned back to him. “Why does your family think you’re dead?”
She watched his face tighten. “Your father thought it would be best for his business if he had a completely untraceable employee, so he orchestrated my death. I thought I’d been given a second chance to finish what I’d started. I was now a valuable asset to Valez. Walking away would have meant undoing months of work that had put me in the perfect position to bring him down.”
“So you’ve been keeping the truth from your family just like Felipe and my mother and father kept the truth from Ivan and me. Tell me, Michael, how could you do that? I need to understand, I need to know why.”
Michael let go of her hand and laid his head back on the pillow. “You’re asking the wrong person, Olivia. Not a day goes by that I don’t ask myself that same question.”
11
Olivia helped Felipe finish dinner, allowing the routine task to become the distraction she needed. She no longer had any doubt regarding her father’s guilt. Not after listening to both Michael’s story and Felipe’s confessions of the secret he’d kept all these years. But knowing the truth had only managed to bring up more questions and a growing fear inside of her she didn’t know how to squelch.
Felipe jutted his chin toward the closed bedroom door. “You worried about him?”
She followed Felipe’s gaze, confused by her conflicting feelings toward the man they’d managed to save. Michael had been the unexpected addition to the equation she had no idea how to solve.
“Yeah. I am worried,” she said. “Seems crazy, though. I barely know him.”
“You and Ivan have always had a heart for strays. Cats, dogs, birds. Remember the injured skunk you tried to capture that one summer?”
Olivia laughed at the memory, but the similarities to their current situation were too much alike. That skunk had necessitated a trip to the emergency room for her and Ivan after spraying them both in the face. Even when you do everything you can to fix a situation, sometimes you get burned.
“I don’t think you need to worry about Michael.” Felipe grabbed a potholder from one of the drawers and set it on the table. “I’m pleased with the way he’s healing. No fever or signs of infection. He’s a tough guy. I might not be a doctor, but I think he’s going to pull through this.”
If my father doesn’t get to him first.
Olivia set her knife down on the cutting board where she’d been chopping a cucumber for the salad and bit back the thought. “I’m sorry. I’m just having a hard time accepting everything.”
Felipe turned her toward him and rested his hands on her shoulders. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I should have told you the truth years ago, instead of your finding out this way. I hope you know that your mother meant well. She only wanted what was best for you. She loved you, and somehow thought she could protect you. And since she died, I just … I just haven’t known how to handle things.”
“None of this is your fault.”
Felipe dropped his hands to his sides. “Have you told Ivan what I told you?”
“Yes.” She picked up the knife and started chopping again.
“He’s stronger than you think, Olivia.”
“I know, but I’ve spent my life protecting him. I don’t know how to protect him from this.”
She glanced toward the front porch where Ivan was playing catch with Gizmo. The problem was that she would always worry about Ivan, and no assurances from Felipe could change that.
“The truth isn’t always easy to accept, so just give him time. He’ll be okay. Both of you will.”
“I know.”
“And Olivia, the two of you have always been like family to me. I ne
ed you to know that.”
She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, then took a step back. “I do, Felipe. I do.”
The bedroom door creaked open and Michael walked into the room with color in his cheeks for the first time since they’d arrived. Relief flooded through her, causing her to pause. Because it shouldn’t matter this much that he was okay.
“Whoa.” Olivia started across the room toward him. “What are you doing out of bed?”
He shot her a wide smile. “Something smells delicious. Thought I was missing out.”
She stopped in the middle of the room and let out a soft laugh. “You were about to miss out. Felipe made some sopa de frijol—black bean soup. Said it would help have you up and around before you knew it. And as a bonus, you won’t find anything like it this side of the border.”
“You’ve talked me into it, if you don’t mind me joining you at the table.”
“Of course not.” Felipe grabbed an extra bowl from the cabinet. “Besides, if you’re hungry, that’s a good sign.”
“Trust me, I’m hungry enough to eat just about anything at this point.”
Felipe set the bowl on the table with the others. “I’ll go let Ivan know it’s time to eat.”
Olivia set the pot of soup on the hot pad on the table, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “You must be feeling better.”
“How long have I been sleeping?”
She glanced at her watch. “A good thirty-six hours off and on.”
“Thirty-six? Which makes it …”
“Thursday,” she finished for him.
Michael let out a low whistle.
“How do you feel? That’s the important question right now.”
“Better than I have in days. Still sore in a few places, but I finally feel as if I’m going to live.”
She studied the bandage covering up his gunshot wound. The bruise on his face had finally started turning from purple to yellow. He might be feeling better, but he still should see a proper doctor.
“Any signs of infection?” she asked.
“No and no fever either.”