“I need to use the bathroom.”
“Of course.” He walked backward to the end of the hallway, bathed in afternoon light.
“What time is it?”
He checked his watch—black band, heavy black case. Not a luxury piece. A sportsman’s watch. “Almost four p.m.”
More than a day of her life was missing.
Lara nodded and closed herself in the bathroom. The dark was almost absolute—no window in this room. She found the light switch and flipped it. Three sconces over the mirror went on. There was no lock on the door.
The room was simple and clean, mostly white, with no décor to speak of, but an open shelving unit held rolls of white towels and washcloths, as well as baskets of hotel-size soaps, shampoos, and lotions. Was this simply a rental? Something billed as a romantic mountain getaway?
It took so long to convince her now-desperate body that it was safe to let go that she’d begun to be worried something was wrong inside her. Something more than she already knew. And it hurt when she was finally able to pee, a burning, cramping ache that made the memories she wasn’t ready for jostle against their restraints.
As she washed her hands, she looked into the mirror over the sink. The three lights above shone down on her bruised face like spotlights. She could still feel the blasts of backhanded slaps. A silky white edge of hospital tape showed in the V neckline of her dark grey t-shirt. Staring at that straight edge of tape, she remembered the wound beneath it. They’d burned her. The pain had seared through her and made her nipple tight, just below the burn. Afterward, one of them, maybe the one who’d burned her, had pulled and twisted her nipple, and the screaming skin just above it.
They’d hooded her and bound her. Gagged her. And hurt her. But not for what she knew, because they’d been unaware of her true worth.
Nick had wanted a shield between her and him, and that shield had been her father. The people who knew anything at all believed that Frederick Dumas, professor emeritus of business at Brown University, was Nick’s cryptologist, the person who buried his secrets deep into intricate, arcane patterns, and who broke others’ codes to unlock their secrets for him.
They hadn’t known that it was his daughter who did that work. They’d hurt her to hurt him, to scare him into some kind of compliance.
Or maybe Nick was wrong. Maybe what had happened to her had happened not because of what she knew but simply because people were monsters.
The memories were breaking through again, more powerfully this time, and she wasn’t ready. She needed order and understanding all around her before she could turn in their direction. And she needed her meds to dull their clamor.
She needed … she needed … needed …
~ 5 ~
Trey stood in the hallway, trying to give Lara enough space but not be too far away, either. She’d been in the bathroom for a while, long after he’d heard the flush of the toilet. The tap was still running in the sink.
In light of Dumas’s extensive explanations and instructions, Trey had expected Lara to be different. He’d been prepared for fireworks and had spent the hours driving, and then after they’d arrived at this cabin, planning how he’d handle various crisis scenarios once she woke.
Instead, she’d been calm—obviously confused and disoriented, clearly not normal, but not the shrieking banshee his imagination had conjured. He’d also expected her to want her father’s letter at once, but each time he’d mentioned it, she’d either ignored him entirely or set the idea quickly aside. She’d been far more focused on her surroundings.
She’d known him, and, surprisingly, she’d known their location. That she knew who he was in the Pagano Brothers wasn’t a true surprise; he just hadn’t given it much thought before. But that she’d so quickly discerned where they were, that had thrown him hard for a second.
Preternatural powers of perception. A good thing to remember in dealing with Lara Dumas.
He’d watched her as she’d come out of her room and gone into his, the way her eyes scanned and studied every inch of space. She had this look, a furrowed frown without any aspect of disappointment or sadness, that was like seeing through her skull and finding clockwork whirring in her brain as she sorted information into knowledge.
She’d turned that same look on him as he’d stood in the doorway, and he’d felt exposed. What had she deduced about him?
The water was still running, and no other sound was happening. Not even the splash of that water in use. The bathroom had no window, or trap door in the floor, or crack in the wall, or anything else that might possibly be construed as an alternate exit. She was in there.
He knocked. “Lara?”
No answer. Nor when he knocked again.
“I’m coming in, Lara.” Shit, he hoped he wouldn’t find her naked. He opened the door.
She wasn’t naked.
She was on her hands and knees, staring at the floor, muttering to herself, something he couldn’t hear over the running tap.
Trey turned off the water and stared at the floor with her. Now he could hear the words rolling softly and quickly from her lips. Numbers. A sequence, repeating.
She steadies herself by finding patterns in the world around her, Dumas had said. It’s when she can’t that things get bad.
Order. She needed order. Why would a woman like this choose to work for a man like Nick? As much control as Nick exerted, as tight a ship as he ran, chaos always churned in the sea around it.
Why would a woman like this choose to work for Nick? Because Nick had not made it a choice, of course. He’d found the brightest mind in Rhode Island, an expert in cryptography, and he’d made her his. Nick Pagano got what he wanted.
Trey crouched on the bathroom floor beside this brilliant, broken woman. “Lara,” he said again, making the sounds as soothing as he could. Wanting to see more of her face, he brushed her long hair over her shoulder and across her back.
His touch went through her like an electric jolt, and she jumped so hard his hand was knocked away by the force of her flinch. Fierce, violent blue eyes shot up at him, and Trey braced himself for an attack. Those scenarios he’d prepared for might be useful after all.
Instead, she froze, with those eyes locked on him, taking him in.
“Lara.”
She blinked. “Trey Pagano. Carlo Francesco Pagano III.”
Before today, the last time he’d heard his name like that, he’d been ready to walk across the stage at his Princeton graduation. Never before in his life had someone used it in any capacity except official. His mom had never even used the ‘all three names’ approach to discipline. When he’d been in trouble, she’d called out Trey Pagano! Whatever his legal name, the one he shared with his father and grandfather, he’d always been Trey.
“Yes.”
“This is West Virginia.”
“Yes.”
“Nick Pagano wants me here. With you.”
Intuiting what she needed, he responded simply and without explanation or extraneous words. She wasn’t asking him for information, she was processing the information she had. His job was simply to acknowledge what she knew. “Yes.”
“I was abducted and raped.”
That was harder to simply acknowledge, even for him, facing this woman on her knees in a bathroom, showing the bruises of an hours-long attack two days earlier. He blew out a breath before he said, “Yes.”
No visible reaction from Lara.
“They beat me. Burned me.”
“Yes.”
“Nick thinks they did it because of him.”
“Yes.”
A change in her eyes—ferocity waned, and something softer replaced it. Something young and afraid. Trey almost reached out to her again.
“Who?”
That was the first question she’d asked in this surreal exchange. Trey wasn’t sure he should answer it. But this was the woman who knew everything, and she already wore the answer burned into her flesh.
“Bondaruk.”
That information gave her something to catch onto, and the lost look left her eyes. He saw the clockwork begin to whir. “Ukrainian.”
“Yes.” Trying to build on the change in her, he broke their rhythm and added, “Lara, let’s get out of the bathroom. We’ll eat, and I’ll tell you everything I can.”
“I need my meds.”
“Your father sent a traveling pharmacy with us.”
“Us.”
“Yes. You and me. I’m here to keep you safe.”
“And what I know.”
“And what you know.”
He stood and held his hand out to her. She stared at it, studying it, and then, at last, set her own in it.
~oOo~
Alfredo sauce wasn’t difficult or complicated to make. A staple of every Italian-American home he knew of.
Growing up in such a big family, Trey had learned to cook and bake from various aunts and uncles—his Uncle Eli was an actual chef, with a famous restaurant in Washington DC and a hit online cooking show—and he’d learned enough from them all to have acquired decent skills in the kitchen himself. From this isolated little cabin, he’d put together a list for a stocked kitchen that would serve Lara’s narrow tastes and his more various preferences, and managed to make it work.
White foods. Her father hadn’t explained why white foods were her preference, and Trey hadn’t asked. He assumed it had to do with her childhood. She liked cheese, bread, pasta, potatoes, milk. And fresh vegetables, which frankly seemed an odd comparison. But at least it was something to balance out all those carbs.
He’d joked to himself as he’d made up the list, wondering how she was so skinny—and she really was; carrying her had been like holding a sack of dry sticks—eating nothing but cheese and bread, but he was starting to get the picture: she didn’t eat. Close to thirty hours without food or drink, and she seemed not to have noticed.
While Lara had slept, Bobbo and Jake had taken his list to the tiny market in Buckle Springs, the little town half an hour away, and managed to get almost everything on his list, or a reasonable approximation.
Meeting up with them here at the cabin to deliver the groceries was likely—hopefully—a one-time deal. With Lara unconscious, they’d had no other choice, because Trey couldn’t leave her. But now, Bobbo and Jake would keep their distance unless there was trouble. They’d draw too much attention to be seen as a group. If things went according to plan, Lara would never lay eyes on Bobbo or Jake.
Buckle Springs was a touristy little place, a picturesque mountain town where people came up to get away from it all. There was a lake nearby, and a state park and campground, with good trails for riding and hiking. Several lodge-style hotels ringed the lake and were tucked into the hills around the town, as well as individual houses used as vacation homes by their owners or rented out for the same purpose.
Towns like Buckle Springs were excellent places to hide out in—the resident population was only a few thousand people, and they probably all knew each other, but they were used to lots of strangers coming and going, and wouldn’t mark any stranger as interesting unless they showed up in town regularly, or did something interesting while they were there.
Bobbo and Jake might have been pretty interesting coming into town together the way they usually dressed—Bobbo, well into his sixties, in a three piece suit, and Jake, in his thirties, wearing a track suit and golf shirt—but they were dressed for a mountain ‘vacation,’ in jeans and flannel. Neither of them thought their new look was an upgrade.
Trey thought Jake’s definitely was. He hated that track-suit-and-gold-chains mob cliché, and it bugged him that Nick tolerated it in the associates, when made men were expected to dress well. The difference in dress made it clear who mattered in the organization, and who was beneath the don’s notice. That Trey, an associate without a clear path to being made, was required to dress in designer suits and had ready access to the don did not endear him to the Pagano men his own age.
Not that he cared all that much; ‘friends’ wasn’t something he did well. He thought he had that, at least, in common with Lara Dumas. Actually, he had a few things in common with her. Including a mentally ill mother who’d tried to hurt him.
While the sauce thickened, Trey looked across the peninsula countertop to Lara, who sat quietly at the table, her hands resting one atop the other on the polished surface. Before she’d agreed to sit, she’d explored the entire rest of the cabin. ‘The entire rest of the cabin’ consisted only of a large living room, the dining room, the kitchen, and a mud room off the back, but it had taken her the better part of half an hour to know it to her satisfaction. And then, she’d sat and waited for dinner.
She hadn’t wanted to talk while he cooked. Or do much of anything, it seemed. The tall tumbler of ice water he’d given her sat untouched before her, the glass beaded with condensation. The three pill bottles she’d selected from her med case were arranged in a perfect row, their labels turned to face her. She hadn’t taken anything from them yet. Her father’s letter sat before her, unopened. Rather than engage with any of those items, Lara sat, perfectly still, her back straight, her face calm, and studied the wall on the other side of the room.
Most of the walls in this cabin were paneled in pine, but the kitchen was wallpapered, in a cutesy red-and-white check pattern interspersed with tiny country scenes: a cabin by a stream, a barn and scattered chickens, a copse of trees. Figuring Lara was studying the patterns, Trey squinted at the wall himself. He saw the rhythmic repetition of the scenes quickly, but lost interest after that. It was just ugly wallpaper. How did she see it differently that it held her interest so completely for so long?
The sauce was ready. Trey made up plates of pasta and salad and brought them over with a basket of bread he’d warmed up with some butter and garlic. Lara focused on him as he came around the counter, and she moved her father’s letter out of the way to make space for the plate.
“I’m going to have wine. Do you want some?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Not even white wine? It’s good—I brought some with us from home.”
“I don’t drink. Water is fine.”
Okay then. He’d have red, since he was drinking alone. Trey went back to the kitchen and grabbed the half-full bottle of Sangiovese he’d opened last night. As he sat down and poured himself a glass, he asked, “Do you want to talk while we eat?”
“Okay.” She picked up her fork and spoon, and Trey watched as she expertly swirled the pasta around the fork. But she didn’t put the knot of fettuccine to her mouth. Instead, she pulled the fork free, leaving the knot on her plate, and swirled another forkful. And another. And another, until all the pasta on her plate stood in tidy, nearly identical knots, arranged in a semicircle.
She reached for the basket of bread, and Trey picked it up for her. Their eyes met as she took a piece. “What did my father tell you about me?”
“He told me that you have some issues.” He took a piece of bread himself.
She rolled her eyes, and Trey found himself surprised by that expression, and delighted. It was the most normal thing she’d done yet. “Exactly what did he tell you?”
Awkward reluctance stiffened his tongue. What was he supposed to say? He told me you were nuts? No—he hadn’t said that. “He told me about your mother, that she had Munchausen Syndrome, and you were her victim.”
“Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. The first is when someone makes herself sick because she craves the attention it brings. The second is when someone makes someone else sick to bask in that attention.”
“Right. I’m sorry.”
“She used to put things in my food. Like cleanser. And ipecac. And bleach. Of course, I didn’t know that until a long time later, when I read the files. After she was arrested, investigators went through all my medical files. They stacked well over a foot high, those files. They read all the test results and found things doctors had missed at the time, because who would think that a mother
would put Bon Ami on her three-year-old’s oatmeal? Or ipecac in her juice? They think she started putting bad things in my food when I was still on the bottle. I never knew what food really tasted like until I lived with my father.”
Trey’s mind was a riot of shock—first, at the details she was sharing, and second, at the expansiveness of her speech. He hadn’t been prepared for her to willingly and easily say so many words at once. For his part, all he could managed was, “Shit, that’s awful.”
Lara nodded. “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat the food on this plate. I didn’t see you make it.”
“You could have come and watched me cook.”
She shook her head.
“You need to eat, Lara. I don’t know what to do.” Dumas hadn’t warned him about this particular oddity—and not so odd, in context. He lifted his own plate. “Will you eat what I served myself?”
She examined his plate with that clockwork frown and finally nodded, picking up her own plate, with its array of tiny fettuccine haystacks, and they switched, plates and utensils. Immediately, she began the twisting routine again.
“Why did you make all these haystacks if you knew you wouldn’t eat off this plate?”
Finishing her last knot on the second plate, she looked up. “Haystacks?”
He nodded at the fettuccine.
“Haystacks. I like that. Haystacks. Like Van Gogh.” Then, a miracle happened. She smiled, with unreserved enjoyment.
Holy shit. No, seriously. Holy shit. She was beautiful. For a second or two, all he could do was marvel at the view—a beautiful, delicate, almost ethereal woman, beaming light straight at him. He felt he could see her fully, clearly, for the first time. Peculiar, but brilliant. Hurt, but not defeated. Damaged, but not broken. Sad, but still joyful.
Jesus.
“Like Van Gogh,” he finally managed to make his mouth say.
“I don’t like the way the noodles lie on the plate. It takes too long to make sense. So I make them make sense. When I was little, I used to straighten them out one by one, but that takes a lot of time and space, and they get cold. So my dad showed me how to make knots instead. Haystacks.”
Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1) Page 6