by Jenna Mills
The truth scraped hard. It would take something she didn’t have, and he didn’t want.
Because she wanted to step closer, anyway, she turned from him and headed for the front door.
“I mean it, Danielle,” he said, his heavy footsteps closing the distance she’d put between them. “I don’t want you taking any more chances.” She pulled open the door—and stopped dead in her tracks. She must have made some kind of noise, because Liam was by her side in a heartbeat, swearing softly and putting his big body between her and the package sitting on her welcome mat. “Get back in the house.”
But she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could only stare at the four words printed neatly in big black letters across the brown wrapping.
DON’T DEFY US AGAIN.
Chapter
“They were here.” Danielle’s words were barely more than a choked whisper. “At the house. While we were inside.”
Adrenaline crashed through Liam. He kept his body between Danielle and the package, scanning the front yard, the driveway, the street beyond, for anything out of the ordinary. A young mother pushed her baby along the cracked sidewalk. Two houses down three boys practiced hockey shots. Across the way an elderly man pruned his roses.
But other than that, there was nothing, just the package sitting on the doormat of faded yellow sunflowers.
The sun blasted from high in the sky, but the darkness pushed closer, and everything inside him went cold. While he’d been sitting inside, playing house and trying not to lose himself in Danielle’s big wounded eyes, Titan, or one of his men, had made a move. Ventured close. Close enough to grab, if only Liam had been paying attention.
“Alex,” she whispered, reaching for the package.
He acted without thinking. He acted without finesse or caution. He acted on pure blind instinct, and black boiling horror.
“Don’t!” He lunged after her, caught her before she touched the perfectly square box.
She twisted toward him, lashed at him first with her eyes, then with words. “I have to know what’s inside.”
“Me first,” he bit out, wrestling the ugliness he didn’t want her to see. The possibilities he didn’t want to consider. The box was large enough to contain any number of things, some benign, some horrific, some deadly.
Images clouded his mind, of nasty surprises other agents had found.
Nasty surprises he himself had found.
“Please,” he said, holding her upper arms. “Trust me on this one. Just go inside and wait.”
Horror darkened her eyes. “You don’t think—” She brought a shaking hand to her mouth. “No.”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s probably nothing,” he added, fighting the crazy urge to pull her into his arms and hold her, just hold her, to take the chill from her body and give her the heat of his, to find some way to make the ugliness go away.
“Just give me a few minutes,” he said. “Alone.” Because she just kept staring over his shoulder, down at the package, he brought a hand to her chin and lifted her face up toward his. “Trust me.”
Slowly her gaze met his and damn near sent him to his knees.
“Come on.” He turned her toward the spill of cool air from the open front door and walked her to the family room, where pictures of Alex smiled at them from the mantel. “I’ll be right back.”
She nodded, and he turned and walked away from her, each step feeling as if he dragged heavy slabs of lead behind him.
Training took over. He stepped onto the small front porch and closed the door, kne in front of the package. Carefully he lifted it, brought it to his ear, listened. Nothing. No ticking, no whirring.
Relief flashed hard and fast, not just because the package didn’t make noise, but because it was dry. No liquid—clear, brown, red or otherwise—oozed or leaked from within. And it was light. Beautifully, gloriously light. Whatever was inside—if anything—didn’t weight much at all.
The sickness he’d been fighting, that dark ball of dread that had lodged in his throat lightened, and the dry grit in his eyes dissipated. He sat there a moment on his knees on her porch, with the sun beating down on him and a lightweight brown package in his hands, not at all understanding why the world had gone watery.
Very carefully he eased back the brown paper and found the box within, then lifted the top.
The shoe was small, not clean, but dirty in only an innocent sense—stains made from mud and grass. Not blood.
Then he saw the videotape.
Swallowing hard, Liam looked up at the deceptively blue sky, the cumulous clouds building to the east, and said a silent prayer of thanks. He hadn’t wanted to think something gruesome lurked inside the box, but years ago he hadn’t wanted to believe the phone call from his neighbor, either. He hadn’t wanted to believe the flames licking against the night sky were coming from his house.
And, God, he hadn’t wanted to believe that the impersonal black body bag, like so many he’d seen over the course of his tenure with the FBI, contained the body of his wife.
“Liam?”
He looked up to find the door open, Danielle standing there with uncertainty hovering in her eyes.
“It’s okay,” he said, pushing to his feet. “It’s—”
“His shoe.” She had the small white sneaker in her hands before he could warn her about tampering with evidence, but just as quickly he realized it didn’t matter. Neither one of them was about to involve the authorities. Danielle wasn’t going to risk angering Titan, and Liam, well, he had his own reasons for avoiding exposure.
“Come on,” he said, sliding an arm around her. Her bravado made her appear tough, almost untouchable, but when his hand settled around her waist, when his fingers skimmed her rib cage and he realized he could count each bone, a sobering truth pierced deep. All that strength she projected, all that bravery, protected a vulnerability she skillfully hid from the world.
Deep inside something tightened, squeezed. A heavy, forgotten rhythm pounded through his blood. Frowning, he fought the sensation, the fledgling urge to protect, to defend—urges that had been brutally murdered one night long ago.
Urges he never wanted to feel again.
With grim determination, he steered her inside and kicked the door shut behind him. In the family room he ejected a video cassette from her VCR and inserted the plain black one from the box, turned on the television and hit the play button.
On the screen the room was small, dark, almost clinical in appearance. A cot occupied one corner, and on the cot lay a little boy.
“Alex…” Danielle sighed.
Liam swore softly, stepped closer to her.
“Oh, God,” she choked out, and this time Liam didn’t try to stop himself. He pulled her into his arms and held her. He held her while she trembled, held her while she turned her head from his chest and stared at the dark, fuzzy image on her television, where sometime in the not too distant past, somebody had watched a video called Lilo and Stitch.
“He’s not moving.”
“Just sleeping.” The words practically tore out of him. There was nothing gentle inside of him, but somehow he managed to keep the movement of his hands along her body tender, reassuring. He skimmed one hand low, stroked the other along the damp hair at the back of her neck. His fingers itched to thread deeper, to tilt her head back and let him see her face, but the intensity hacking through him was not what she needed.
Not what he needed.
“Just sleeping,” he murmured again. He wasn’t quite sure what he said after that, how long they stood there in her small cluttered family room, with the sun whispering in to them, holding each other, him running his hands along her body, both of them staring at the image of her son, who lay as still as death on a cot in a small dingy room.
But it was well after noon when he left.
He’d wanted Spider-Man shoes. Not the kind with Velcro straps for little kids, but the gray ones with the red and blue Spider-Man crawling up from the
bottom, with big-kid laces. Little Jimmy Leonard had a pair, and from the second Alex had seen them, he’d been in love.
Swallowing against a tight throat, Danielle stared down at the plain white tennis shoe that she’d purchased at the discount store, stained now with mud and grass. Alex had been so excited when she’d come home from the store. He’d taken the bag from her hands and retrieved the box, eagerly pulled off the lid.
Then he’d just stood there, for what had seemed like forever but had only been a minute or so, staring at the plain, boring, generic white tennis shoes.
“What about Spidey?” he asked at last, looking up at her through his father’s big soulful eyes.
She’d wanted to cry. “I’m sorry, ace,” she’d said, feeling like the worst mother in the world. The next day she’d gone to the mall and hunted down the shoes he’d described to her, purchased them and put them away for his birthday. As far as she knew, Alex had no idea.
Now he might never know.
Swiping at tears she’d trained herself not to let fall, tears that signified defeat, Danielle forced her hand to release its death grip on the dirty white shoe. Gently, lovingly she placed it on her dresser.
Breathing deeply, she turned toward her bed and pushed aside the memory of the FBI agent standing there, all big and strong and rumpled. “Get some rest,” he’d ordered before leaving, and for a crazy moment, she’d thought he was about to kiss her. Not on the mouth, not romantically or passionately, but a gentle brush of his lips across her forehead. He’d had a hand on her face, a big square palm resting softly against her cheek, and he’d leaned close, but then he’d abruptly released her, as though the physical contact had hurt him somehow.
Then he’d walked away.
It was what she’d wanted, what she needed, but for a long time after he’d left, she’d just stood there at the front door, watching, aching, not at all understanding the hollow feeling of loss.
On impulse she crossed to the small stand by her bed and picked up the phone, punched out ten digits she knew as well as her own phone number. Of course, they’d once been her number. Her heart kicked up a notch when she heard the first ring. The second.
It flat-out stopped when the gruff male voice came across the line. “This is Anthony. Make it good.”
His voice, so deep and strong and…harsh, rushed over her and through her, and despite the rough edges that could easily cut to the quick, a happy little song sang through her.
“Who is this?” her brother barked.
Longing jammed into her throat, preventing words, breath. Two years. Two years since she’d heard his voice, seen his face. Two years since the bitter argument that had severed the once-strong ties of family. She could still see him, though, her brother, her triplet, so big and tall and imposing, with a mane of thick black hair that would make almost any woman envious, the wicked little gold hoop in his ear. The fierce glower on his face.
And despite the sun slicing through the window, she started to shake. One word. That was all it would take. One word and he’d come charging in on his big black stallion, ready to save the world. Save the nephew he’d once cradled in his big arms and rocked to sleep while humming the haunting melodies their mother had once sung to them, melodies from the Old World, of the old ways, their words long since faded with time.
It’s me, some place deep inside of her wanted to shout. It’s Lucky. There was a hum to her blood, low, fierce, an energy that came only from Elizabeth and Anthony. Don’t you feel it, too? she wanted to cry.
But then she remembered the note on the package, the warning that chilled her blood.
“Don’t defy us again.”
“Look, I don’t know how you got this number,” he growled, “but I don’t have time for games.”
And then the line went dead. “Anthony,” she whispered, and his name scraped her throat on the way out. The truth hurt even more. It was too late for him to hear, too late to undo the past. Too late for so many things. Her brother hadn’t understood her need to put distance between herself and her old way of life. He’d taken her decision personally, yet another abandonment in a lifetime of unexpected goodbyes.
She stood there for a long time after that, in her bedroom with the droning receiver in her hand and memories flooding her heart, her son’s dirty little tennis shoe sitting on her dresser, the FBI agent’s words echoing louder with every beat of her heart.
You need me, Danielle.
You’re not alone anymore. I’m
She needed, that was true. There were so many things she’d tried so hard to deny. But she didn’t know how to lean. Not anymore.
If she leaned, she might fall. And if she fell, this time she might never get back up.
The moon, almost full, hung high and bright over Lake Michigan. The dark waters shimmied in the mercurial light, shifting, restless, unsettled.
Liam could relate.
From his hotel window he stared into the night, looking for a pattern that refused to materialize. A French industrialist. A United States senator. And now a gap-toothed six-year-old boy in Chicago. The first two dead, linked only by a postcard and a hunch. The third, missing, linked by a tip.
It didn’t make sense.
Frustration ground through him, but he refused to indulge the dark desires, the ones that had him wanting to spin away from the window and pick up the phone, call her. Again. Go to her and run his fingers along the smooth curves of woman, or worse, reach out to the bottle that sat on the antique sidebar. He ordered the scotch wherever he went, but allowed himself one glass and one glass only.
The remainder of the bottle served as a test every bit as demanding as the ones he’d aced at Quantico, one he had not failed in two years, seven months, three days, and—
Liam glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours.
Too well he remembered the face staring back at him from the mirror the last time he’d failed. The dark, vacant eyes. The white rim around the mouth. Too well he remembered the woman he’d found sprawled in his bed, the one whose name he’d never even asked. And too well he remembered the vow he’d made in that dismal little hotel room in a town he’d never been to before or since.
He would not slip, would not fall, would not fail again.
But now here he was, alone in an antiques-packed hotel room in Chicago, and God, how he wanted to indulge. Just one call. One touch. One more sip.
No one could see him, catch him, hear him, but he muttered a stream of vile curse words out loud, anyway, then dropped to the floor and stretched out on his stomach, balled his hands into fists and pushed himself up, then down. Up, then down.
She was hiding something. He’d seen the flicker in her pale-green eyes that morning in her house, over breakfast, just after she’d told him about the man who’d approached her in the hotel lobby, a drink in hand.
That fit the pattern. Several of Titan’s victims had been found with narcotics in their system. Nothing strong enough to kill, just to maim. To render unconscious.
But why?
Turning it over in his mind, he pulled his right arm behind his back and continued his regimen with only his left. Up, down. Up, down.
She’d been aloof when he’d called earlier in the evening, robotically formal, talking to him as though he’d not held her in his arms a few hours before, as though she’d not held him back, not rested her head against his chest. She’d said there’d been no further contact, that she was fine. That no, he did not need to come over.
And while he believed her on the former, the latter, uttered in that defiant way of hers, had reeked of lies.
Breathing harder now, his heart beating a little faster, he pushed up high with his left arm, released himself and slammed his balled fists against each other, then continued the routine with only his right arm.
He wanted to go to her, but didn’t trust himself to be near her. Not tonight. Not with all these sharp, jagged edges cutting to the bone. He’d already stepped on the line. He would not let himself cross
it.
Except, five hours later he did. He’d learned how to test himself, how to deny himself while he was awake. But when exhaustion consumed him and his eyes slid closed, when the world went dark and he began to drift, it was during those shadowy, tenuous moments that the demons came out to play.
There was Danielle on the deserted strip of beach, standing stoic and alone, her thick hair blowing in the breeze. Then she was in his arms. Her body was soft and warm, accepting and demanding. Then it was shaking, rejecting. There was a gun in her hands, then it was gone and she was pulling him close. Her mouth was trembling, then it was on his. Chaste, then desperate.
The images blurred, merging with the shadows. Dazed, dizzy, fighting what he recognized as wrong even for dreams, he shoved back from her, staggered back.
Her hair was no longer thick and dark, but long and straight and blond. Her eyes no longer flashed vitality, but froze him with an icy blue. Her mouth no longer trembled, but slid into a hard, condemning line.
“You think this is all it takes?” she asked, gesturing toward the sleek little black chemise he’d ordered for her from Paris. “You think this makes up for the past nine months?”
No, he didn’t think that, not at all. He just thought—
“Just admit it, Liam, okay? Just put us both out of our misery and admit the truth.”
He reached for her, Kelly, his wife, but she twisted away. “I almost wish there was another woman. That, I could fight. That, I could understand. But your job—”
He hit back a sound low in his throat. They’d had this conversation a hundred times. “Sweetheart, I know, and I’m sorry. It’s just this case. Give me a few more weeks—”
“A few more weeks won’t change anything.” Her voice, normally so confident, broke. “Don’t you get it, Lee? I could die, but it wouldn’t matter. Your life wouldn’t change, because you’d still have your passion. Your job.”
The accusation sliced in with unerring precision. He reached for her to explain, but his hands swished through empty space, and his heart staggered hard. “Kelly!” He tore through the darkness, pivoted and found her standing behind him. But her hair was dark now, her eyes untamed, her mouth full and lush and curled with challenge. And in her hands, she again held the gun.