“No.” When his eyes turned down to study his glass, she asked, “Is my age a problem?” What problem could it be?
“No, no. I’m just surprised again. Everything I think I know about you, or expect you to be, turns out to be wrong.”
“You should pay closer attention, then.”
Another lopsided grin was his only reply. They sat quietly for a few minutes. Lara got quickly caught up in the patterns of the puzzle and forgot he was there, until the kettle began to screech, and Trey shook the table slightly as he got up to answer its call.
There was another sound under that high-pitched wail, something rough, and Lara went still and focused. Gravel. Tires on gravel. The backup Trey had described earlier? I hope you never see them, though, he’d said. They’re supposed to stay away unless there’s trouble.
“Trey.”
As she called his name, light, filtered through the not-quite-opaque curtains, swung through the cabin, across the table and into the kitchen. Headlights.
Trey turned off the burner, and the kettle stopped screaming. “Get over here, Lara. Low, on the floor. Come around the counter to me.”
He meant the peninsula. The kitchen was U-shaped and open to the dining room. She slid off her chair and crawled to him. He’d pulled a handgun from under a cabinet, and as she came to him, he slid the magazine out and checked the bullets, then clicked it back into place. She saw him reach for something, and then crouch down before her. A knife. A large carving knife was what he’d reached for.
He handed it to her. “I really wish you knew how to shoot. This will have to do. If you need it, it means I’m down. What you should do if I go down is run. Out the back if you can—there’s a black backpack by the door, with a few supplies, a gun, some ammo, and a sat phone. Grab it, run, and get someplace hidden. Use the sat phone to call the saved number.”
Somebody pounded on the front door.
“Shit. Lara, do you understand?”
“I understand.” She clutched the big knife in both hands, and Trey stood and walked to the front door.
Hiding on the kitchen floor, she couldn’t see enough to know exactly what Trey did, but she heard the door open, and more light came into the cabin—the headlights of the vehicle were still on.
“Evening, officer,“ Trey said, and Lara could breathe a little more loosely.
“I’m a ranger, sir. Good evenin’. Are you the renter of this cabin?” The ranger’s voice was a thin Appalachian drawl, pitched high enough that Lara wasn’t sure if it was spoken by a man or a woman.
“I am. Needed some peace and quiet. Is there a problem?”
“No sir. Well, not with you. But we’re puttin’ the word out that a family in a cabin down the road had a bear attack this aft’noon.”
“Please? Bear attack?” Honest shock sharpened Trey’s tone—shock, but not worry or threat. There was no danger—except, perhaps, from a bear.
“Yessir. We got black bears all through these woods. Usually, they keep to themselves, but these people put out food for ‘em, and now the father’s in the hospital. So we’re goin’ around, remindin’ folk not to feed the bears. Keep your distance, put your garbage in the bear-safe bins, and don’t leave nothin’ out. And stay in at night for a while. That bear’s gonna be lookin’ for more easy pickins.”
“Will do. Thanks for the warning.”
“Y’all have a good night, now.”
“You, too.”
The door closed. Trey didn’t speak, so Lara didn’t move. After a minute, the gravel sound came up again—louder now, without the cover of the kettle’s scream—and the lights swept through the cabin. The ranger’s vehicle pulling away.
“We’re clear, Lara. It’s okay.”
She stood and set the knife on the counter. He came to her and set his gun beside it. His hand lifted her chin, and he looked hard into her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” And it was true. An unexpected circumstance that should have frightened her had not. She’d been focused on the event, on the details, but had not fallen into their granularity. The only other times in which that was the case were when she was in perfectly familiar surroundings, with her father present. Because she trusted her father to keep the unknowns under control.
And now she trusted Trey Pagano to do the same.
He was still holding her chin, still staring down at her, frowning, like he didn’t believe her. Standing so close to her, he dwarfed her. He seemed huge and powerful, and she felt her frailness keenly. But she wasn’t afraid.
She hooked her hand in the fold of his elbow. “I’m okay. I am.”
~oOo~
Trey knocked on the bathroom door. “Lara? You okay?”
Lara stared at her reflection in the mirror, her pale face, her chest, bare except for the square of gauze, edged on all four sides with medical tape. The lights above the mirror caught the silky texture of the tape and made it shimmer. The effect was strange and incongruous, like sequins on a sweatshirt.
She didn’t know how to answer Trey, because she didn’t know the answer. Was she okay? There was only okay and not okay. Not okay was something she didn’t know, never remembered. Okay was everything else.
The silky tape drew her eyes again. It wasn’t smooth, had a pattern of ridges running through it. In the mirror, she focused and counted the ridges.
More knocking. “Lara!”
Trey. Trey Pagano. One, two, three, four. Carlo Francesco Pagano III. Five, six, seven. Blood relation to Nick Pagano. Nicolo Pagano. Eight, nine, ten. Nicolo Gavino Pagano. Don Nick Pagano.
The door swung open.
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
She turned and saw Trey spin around, averting his eyes. Because she was topless. She was topless, standing there topless, because she’d come in here to change the dressing on her burn. Her brand. That she hadn’t yet seen. Lara looked down and saw the means to change the dressing—bandages in sterile paper, silky tape on a roll, cream in a tube with a prescription label—strewn across the narrow counter around the sink.
Wound. Burn. Brand. Abducted. Beaten. Raped. Branded.
“Trey,” she gasped and didn’t understand why.
He jumped into the room, and his arms went around her. She was close to his chest, mashed up tight in his arms. A soft weight went over her shoulder—a towel, he’d draped a towel over her shoulders, tucked it snug, held her close.
His head dropped to hers, and he held her. “I got you,” he soothed. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Lara rested her head on his chest. He was warm, and so much bigger than she that he surrounded her. His heart beat against her ear, fast. She counted beats as it slowed. They stood in the bathroom like that until the bits and pieces fell into place.
“I can’t look at it.”
He didn’t answer immediately. She counted four more beats, a bit faster again, before he asked, “Do you want me to do it?”
“Yes.”
He pushed her back, gently, tugging the shawl of the towel down to cover her breasts, and eased her to the toilet. Setting the lid down, he sat her on it, and went to the sink to wash his hands. Those few feet seemed too far away.
But he was back quickly, and took the towel between his fingers, trying to arrange it to expose the bandage but not her breasts, and cover her shoulders, too. There was no way to manage that, they both knew it, so Lara shrugged the towel from that shoulder and bared herself.
He looked away at once, and grabbed another towel. When she was suitably covered, one towel over her shoulders and the other across her breasts, he pulled her hair to her other shoulder and began to ease the tape up. It came without too much resistance. Lara focused on Trey, watched his eyes, and didn’t look down.
His eyes told her everything.
The wound hurt. It still burned, a shadow of the same feeling as when it had been made. When he cleaned it, and again when he covered it with ointment from the prescription tube, Lara hissed through her clamped teeth.
&
nbsp; “I’m sorry,” he said both times, his voice barely a whisper.
Finally, he covered the wound with gauze and fresh tape, and his eyes came back to hers. “You’re all set. How are you doing?”
His hand came to her face and brushed her cheek; she felt a cool slick of old tears sliding over her skin. She’d been crying?
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. She was either okay or not okay, and she never remembered not okay, but right now, she couldn’t be sure what she was. There was more than the fear of the wound and the memories she still fought to hold back. More than this cabin, so far away from the world she knew.
There was Trey, and what he meant. She couldn’t find where he fit in her understanding.
He crouched before her and took her hands. “I think you’re okay.”
She decided to believe him.
~ 7 ~
Morning sun streamed across the plank floor. Enjoying the warmth, Trey closed his eyes against the glare and finished his third set of a hundred sit-ups. At home, he worked out in some way almost every day, on his board, or in the gym, or running with his Uncles John and Theo. After a few days cooped up in this cabin with no form of decent exercise available, he’d become jump-out-of-his-skin restless. He was an early riser, and Lara slept twelve or more hours a night, wrapped up in a medicated haze, so he’d taken to old-fashioned calisthenics first thing in the morning, when the cabin was quiet.
She slept deeply; he, on the other hand, did not. Something her father had neglected to tell him: Lara was a sleepwalker—or, more accurately, a sleep doer. The second night in the cabin—the first night after she’d woken here—Trey had been yanked from sleep by the sound of male voices. He’d slunk out in nothing but sweatpants and his Beretta to find Lara sitting on the sofa, watching television in the dark.
Or so he’d thought. She’d ignored him completely, staring at the screen above the fireplace, until he’d said her name. Then she’d looked at him and said, her face totally blank, There’s mercury in the pancakes. Don’t forget to tell the parrot. She’d turned back to the screen as if she hadn’t just dragged them both through the looking glass.
His mom had been on the same kind of sleeping meds for a couple of years when he was in high school, during one of the tenser times between him and his dad, and when his little brother, Ben, was going through some shit, too. Misby was always the one standing in the middle of the family fray, trying to calm everyone and bring them all back together, and sometimes it wore too much on her. Trey remembered that she used to do shit in her medicated sleep, too—for Misby, it was eating. She’d stand at the open refrigerator and eat just about anything in reach. Once, his dad found her eating a stick of butter.
So Trey had quickly deduced what was going on with Lara, and he’d led her back to bed. However, he couldn’t simply assume that she was safe and watching television when he heard her wandering about in the middle of the night, and she went wandering every night. He was either up with her while she wandered, or waiting, barely sleeping, when she was in bed. A little exercise had the added bonus of keeping his reflexes sharp despite his nights of poor sleep.
After a third set of push-ups, Trey finished his insufficient workout with some yoga poses. Nick’s wife, Aunt Bev, had been a yoga instructor in the days before she was Donna Pagano and mother to four children, and she’d suggested some moves to him after he’d wrenched his shoulder on a bad wipeout a few years ago. He’d felt a little silly at first, but yoga was hardcore, once you got past the goofy names.
A set of sun salutations later, he grabbed the towel off the ottoman in the living room and wiped his face. At least he managed to work up a sweat with this living-room workout he’d devised. On his way to the kitchen for a glass of ice water, he paused at the dining room table and smiled at the puzzle in progress.
Today would be their sixth day in this cabin, and the puzzle spread on the table now, partially completed, was Lara’s third. The first, a thousand-piece version that made a close-up photograph of a collection of marbles and would have taken Trey, oh, a year or so to do, if he didn’t set fire to it before he finished, she completed in just more than a day.
Her focus and attention to detail was fucking awe-inspiring. A piece that looked like nothing but frustration to him, she saw precisely what it was, and knew seemingly instantly if it was the piece she needed. He’d watched her build that entire puzzle, and could count on his hands the number of times she’d tried a piece and been wrong.
The next puzzle had been almost the opposite design. ‘Only’ five hundred pieces, it was a hyper-intricate piece of art. Instead of all the elements of the image being highly similar, they were all different, but minute. Broken apart, it had been chaos to him.
She’d put that one together in an afternoon, including all the piece-sorting.
When he’d expressed an interest in watching, she hadn’t refused him, but she didn’t like to talk while she worked. Still, she’d answered the questions he asked, and he kept them to a minimum. Her process was perfectly methodical and always the same.
Who’d have thought watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle would be so fascinating? Not he, before this week.
The puzzle on the table now was another thousand-piecer, and the image was nothing but blue. Just the color blue, with the subtlest possible gradation from lighter to darker. This one, at last, had offered her a challenge; today would be her third day on it. But it was well more than half done.
She spent her days working these puzzles. They kept her calm and centered, and Trey found himself content to sit and watch her for hours at a stretch.
Lara Dumas was a puzzle herself, one still scattered over his psyche. He was fascinated and couldn’t stop poring over each little piece, each strange shape. Her will and focus were extraordinarily powerful; he saw exactly how powerful each time they neared their limit. She seemed to have decided not to confront what had been done to her, and she held off the memories of it with all she had. Each time her will slipped, and the reality slipped through, Trey saw how bad it would be if she lost control completely.
Like the first day, when she’d been on her hands and knees in the bathroom, staring at the floor, counting something. Or later that night, when he’d gone into the bathroom and found her topless, staring at herself in the mirror, muttering numbers, interspersed with horrifying words, unable to remove the bandage and see the mark they’d left on her.
Always, it was in the bathroom that her will slipped. When she had to deal directly with her body in some way. He’d taken to standing at the end of the hall each time she went in there, like a sentinel, waiting to be needed.
He made his way to the kitchen and got himself a glass of water. As he drank, he considered their options for breakfast. The cupboard was getting a bit bare. If they were up here for more than another day or two, they’d have to go into town for provisions.
Fortunately, that eventuality had been part of the planning. One determinant in the selection of this cabin, so far from home, was that they could move around a bit with minimal concern that they’d be recognized in town or even noticed, and not much more concern that they’d be discovered, unless their location were expressly exposed in some way. Having had no word from Nick or anyone else, it was safe to assume they hadn’t been exposed.
Lara showed no interest in even going through the door to the forest beyond, especially after word about the bear attack, but Trey was looking forward to the errand. He was not a man who sat around indoors.
They were out of eggs, sausage, and juice. No more buttermilk for pancakes or cream for coffee. Toast and cold cereal it was, then. Not much of a breakfast, nutritionally speaking, but at least he knew Lara would eat it. She liked Cheerios. The day before, she’d even finished a whole bowl.
The woman was frighteningly undernourished. He’d known she was skinny—walking around in yoga pants and a t-shirt, she’d shown her bony ass, gangly elbows, and collarbones high enough to hook a finger into, an
d he’d felt all her bones poking at him when he’d carried her to and from the car. But when he’d walked in on her in the bathroom and she’d been topless—shit. Every single bone stood out like it lay on her skin instead of under it. Each pebble of her spine. Each twig of her ribs. The knobs of her shoulders. And her tiny breasts, barely swelling from those stark ribs, the bandage over her burn nearly covering one entirely.
She was eight years older than he, but she had the body of a prepubescent death camp inmate.
And the face of an angel.
She was probably thirty or more IQ points smarter than he, but her mind was a mysterious, dark thicket of trauma and tics.
And endlessly fascinating.
She wasn’t his type at all. He preferred athletic girls his own age, girls who thought beachwear was Speedos and wetsuits, who drove soft-top Jeep Wranglers and always had a tan by Memorial Day, not fragile little fairies with broken wings who hunkered around in dark corners muttering numerical sequences like magical spells.
And yet, Trey thought he was falling for this particular fragile little fairy. Or he was simply obsessed. He didn’t know how to tell the difference.
~oOo~
After they cleaned up the few dishes of their breakfast, Lara headed toward the dining room table and her puzzle. Trey caught her arm before she rounded the peninsula. He’d earned touching privileges over the week; she no longer flinched, even if she didn’t see him coming. She stopped and turned her head to him.
“I need to get out of the house, Lara. I’ll go straight through my skin if I don’t get some fresh air soon. What would you think about taking a walk? Just a little one, down that trail for a bit.” He’d gotten her as far as the porch on a couple of afternoons, and she’d studied their surroundings as far as she could see. There was a trail that started right off the driveway.
Turning to the front windows, she stared for a while. “I don’t like it outside. I don’t know it here.”
Simple Faith (The Pagano Brothers Book 1) Page 8