How could my father know some random guy I found on the Inter—
Shit, shit, shit. The photo wasn’t random.
I gasped.
When I’d opened my laptop on that fateful day of deceit to create my fake boyfriend, my browser had been parked on my father’s website. Being a photographer, he had tons of links leading to portfolios, advertising various shoots he’d done over the years.
Christ. That’s it. I’d followed one of the links.
How could I have not remembered that? The link had a gorgeous photo of a man standing on the beach, looking out across the waves. I remember being captivated by that tormented look in his eyes, and thinking how I felt just like him.
So…Santiago is a…supermodel? I burst out laughing. The thought was ludicrous.
I continued to the dorms, my mind an impossible mess. But one thing I knew, I would figure out my own housing. I’m sure the school had somewhere for me to go, so my dad could just pound sand. I mean, what was this? The only rational explanation was that my father was some overprotective bastard who hired someone to stalk me.
When I got to the lobby, there were several housing employees handing out flyers and forms. It looked like they were putting everyone up at the visitor center until the affected rooms could be cleaned. I asked one lady about Christy, and all she could tell me was that there’d be a public statement made later and that I’d better go pack some things while I had the chance.
I took several deep breaths, bolstering myself to go upstairs. Dozens of other students carrying boxes poured out of the building.
When I got to my floor, I instantly noticed the smell of char and dampness. People milled about in the common area at the end of the hall talking about what had happened. Arson. Contraband toaster. Smoking in bed. That’s what people were saying, so I guessed no one really knew. I made my way down the soggy, carpeted hallway to my room and opened the door. There was no sign of a fire, but everything was damp and had a weird smell.
I felt sick to my stomach thinking about Christy next door.
“Hey! You completely flaked on me last night! Where did you go? Why didn’t you answer your cell?” Bridget staggered in, mascara smeared down her rosy face.
“Huh?” My mind snapped to. “Oh shit. I’m so sorry, Bridget. I ran into that guy, Santiago. We sort of got into a fight.” I looked inside my purse and grabbed my cell. “On vibrate. Sorry.” I shoved it in my pocket.
“Did you hear about our neighbor?” she asked.
“Yeah.” There wasn’t much to say. It was just…sad. Heartbreakingly sad.
“It sounds strange, but a part of me still hopes she’ll turn up at a friend’s house.” She sighed loudly.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d heard they took away the body.
“Well,” she sighed. “Where’d you spend the night?”
“At Santiago’s,” I replied.
“Santiago’s? Normally, I’d be squealing and asking you inappropriate questions because he’s so frigging hot, but that doesn’t seem right.”
She had no idea just how wrong everything was. One more “un-right” thing wouldn’t make a lick of a difference.
“Don’t worry; you’re not missing out on anything juicy.” I shrugged. “Santiago and I didn’t do anything—wait, where’d you spend the night?”
She smiled and made a little bow. “The fire was all over the news, so I stayed with Eric at his place.” She let out a long, happy breath. “Once again, normally, I’d be oozing details and basking in the glory of my conquest, but I’m not in the mood.”
There was a knock at the door and one of the coordinators popped her head in to tell us we had twenty minutes before they closed the floor.
Bridget looked around the room. “Damn. I’m going downstairs to see if they have garbage bags. Everything’s sopping wet. I’ll bring you a few.”
I thanked her and started sorting through my damp drawers. I felt my phone buzz and checked it—my father. I ignored it and kept pulling stuff out, setting down the clothes into soggy piles on the damp bed. My phone buzzed two more times, each call sending my thumping heart into a deeper tailspin of anger. On his fourth attempt, I couldn’t take it anymore. “What?”
“Dakota, don’t speak. Just listen.” His voice was hard and cold.
“No. You listen! I’m beyond pissed. Do you hear me? Whatever sick crap you and—”
“I’m not fucking around, Dakota. You need to listen.” I’d never heard him swear at me. Not once. Not even on the rare occasion when I’d done something stupid.
“Okay.” I tried to keep my voice from trembling.
“I spoke to the fire chief this morning. He said they thought the fire next door was caused by a curling iron.”
“Dad, I don’t underst—”
“They just called back. They found something. You need to get out of there.”
“But I—”
“Santiago is on his way. Do as he says. Do you hear me?”
“Dad, please…you need to tell me what’s going on.”
“Baby, I love you. Just…stay with Santiago until I come for you. He’ll keep you safe.”
The knock at the door was so loud that I jumped.
“Safe from who?” I asked, but the call had ended.
Santiago burst through the door, panting. “Why didn’t you answer?” he blurted, and then noticed the look of horror on my face. His chest expanded with a deep breath. “It’s going to be fine. I promise.”
He walked over, gripped me by the shoulders, and then hugged me. I supposed it was obvious that my mental state was on the fragile side.
Santiago pulled back and his demeanor suddenly shifted from human being to man on a mission. “You can cry in the car if you need to, but it’s time to go.”
I felt too terrified to cry. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe,” he replied.
“For how long?” I asked.
“As long as it takes.”
“Who are we running from?”
“Very, very bad people,” he replied.
I somehow sensed my life really did depend on Santiago now. I didn’t like the feeling of being so vulnerable and weak.
I reached for my purse.
“You can’t take anything with you,” he said.
“Why not?”
He grabbed the phone in my hand and threw it onto the sopping wet floor. “Your identity has been compromised. There might be devices planted on your things.”
Compromised? Devices? Those were words used by shady spies. “This is not happening.”
He growled impatiently. “Yes. It is. Now deal with it.”
I protested with a hiss. “I need a few things. Underwear, socks—”
“Fine, but…” he looked at the trash can and emptied the moist, crumpled pieces of paper on the floor. He handed me the white plastic shopping bag. “Use this.”
I held the slightly grubby bag in my hand. “I’ve got an overnight bag. It might be dry—”
He shot an angry, impatient glance my way and then marched over to the door. He quickly peered into the hall. “You will use the bag. You have exactly five seconds.”
Shit. I turned the bag inside out, scooped a pile of clothes from the bottom drawer of my dresser, and shoved them inside. They smelled funny but were actually dry. Then I saw my notebook peeking out from beneath the wet pillow. I snatched it up and checked the thing. It was lightly damp on the outside, but fine. I shoved it into the bag between two T-shirts. “Okay. Ready,” I said with a shaky voice.
Santiago grabbed my hand and walked me out of the building as if we were escaping a ticking bomb.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“This is your car?” I asked as we approached the large, black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows, parked curbside.
“Put your seat belt on.” He opened the door and waited for me to slide in before slamming it shut.
He quickly got behind the wheel and sped out of the
lot.
“Santiago?”
His dark eyes focused intensely on the road ahead as he weaved through the local traffic. “Not now. I’m concentrating.”
When we approached the red light, his head whipped from side to side. He hit the accelerator and roared right through the intersection.
My nails dug into the black leather seats. “Holy shit. Are you trying to kill me?”
“Funny,” he mumbled to himself. “The girl asks if I’m trying to kill her.”
“Nothing about this is funny.”
“Agreed. Now let me drive.” He looked in the rearview mirror and then made a hard right.
I looked behind us, but didn’t see anyone following.
He took another hard right into a parking garage and pulled into a spot next to a silver Suburban with tinted windows.
“What are we doing?” I asked, panting.
“Changing cars. What does it look like?”
He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and hit the remote. The lights on the Suburban flashed. “Get in.”
He’d been planning for this. An escape with me. I couldn’t begin to articulate how frightening I found that to be. Why would I, of all people, need to have an escape planned for me?
I got in the truck, and he calmly exited the garage, pulling into traffic like we had all the time in the world.
“Are we being followed?” I asked.
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s my job to know,” he replied.
“Job.” I laughed, and shook my head. One more piece of the puzzle slid into place. “I’m your job. So you’re some bodyguard?”
“Something like that.”
“Did my dad hire you?” I asked.
“Something like that.”
“Are you going to tell me anything?”
“No,” he replied.
“No?” Did he really expect me to go along with all this without him telling me what was happening? “Why the hell not?”
He glanced at me, clearly annoyed. “My job is to keep you safe, not answer questions that will only make you…less safe.”
“Less safe. Wow! Fucking unbelievable. You ruin my life, and I get riddles.”
“Don’t start,” he warned.
“Screw you.”
He huffed. “Nice.”
“What do you expect me to say? Oh, thank you, Santiago. Thank you for stalking me, making me think I’m crazy, and then tearing me away from my life without so much as an explanation as to why I’m being subjected to…your job?”
“Ask your father,” he replied coldly.
“He’s not here. Otherwise, trust me, I would.”
We pulled onto the freeway, and Santiago’s dark eyes continued scanning the mirrors.
“So,” I said, “are you going to tell me who you are and why you’ve been stalking me?”
“I told you. It’s my job. I work for your father. But let’s get one thing straight: I never asked for this assignment. You,” he glanced my way, “chose me.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“The photo.”
Oh. My brain ran a couple of queasy laps. I picked out a photo. I put it on Facebook. My dad saw it. Poof. Santiago. No, the pieces still weren’t forming an explanation of any sort.
I ran my hands over my clammy face. “I’m guessing my father isn’t the photographer who took your picture. Probably isn’t a photographer at all.”
“No,” he said.
“And you’re not a model,” I said.
“No.”
“Is your name even Santiago?”
“No. That’s the name you made up. My name is Paolo. I’m actually Italian, not Spanish.” I hadn’t noticed before—too busy going out of my mind, I supposed—but his accent had changed.
He hit the fast lane, but kept the speed under eighty.
“Well, that’s a start. And my dad, what is he? Some spy? An assassin? Do you work for the CIA?”
Paolo continued concentrating on the road. “No.”
“Then what?”
“We keep an eye on things and we gather information. There is no name for us,” he said, his accent now completely unmasked. Der iz no name for usss…“We don’t exist.”
Jeez. Well, that explains oh so very much! “Have you been trained in the fine art of not answering questions?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
He sighed. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, but that’s all you’re getting. My job is to keep you alive. Not to make you feel better or answer your questions. If that were the case, I’d never get a day off.”
What a jerk!
“For the record,” I said. “You don’t need to try.”
“Try what?”
“Being an azzzhole,” I said, mocking his accent. “It comes naturally.”
He grumbled something in Italian under his breath and focused on the road. I suddenly wished I’d taken a foreign language—specifically, Italian. Because whatever he’d said, it sounded mean.
I sank into my seat and looked out the window to my right, trying to process the drastic turn my life had just taken. Sadly, so many things began to make sense, while others made less and less. My father’s constant distance from me and my mother, for example. Had it been to keep us safe from whatever crap he was mixed up in? Now that I thought about it, he did act pretty shady. Sometimes he’d fly in unexpectedly in the middle of the night, always bringing some stranger with him who he’d introduce as a “business associate.”
“Oh my God!” I snapped my fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen you before! You were his driver.” A few years ago, my father had come for a quick one-day visit on my birthday. As a gift, he took me shopping. I remembered how odd it seemed that his chauffeur followed us around in the mall. Santiago—Paolo—was some sort of bodyguard. My only question: Did he protect me from criminals or work for one? Or both? Anything seemed possible at this point.
“You remember me?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“Why are you so shocked?”
“You didn’t look at me that day. Not once. You were too busy glaring at your father.”
I remembered now. It was right after I’d spotted my dad in San Francisco with that other woman. But, of course, Paolo knew all about that. Didn’t he?
“Yeah. It was a pretty shitty day,” I said under my breath.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Apparently not that sorry because you used that little tidbit of info to blackmail me into following along with your sick little game.”
“Like I said,” he replied briskly, “I’m sorry. But your father wasn’t actually doing what you think.”
“You expect me to believe that?” I asked. “Because I know what I saw.”
He didn’t respond.
“Let me guess. I should ask my father?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“So is my mother in on this?” Although I found it hard to believe she would subject me to all this—it didn’t fit her overprotective, for-the-good-of-humanity personality—I had to ask. Also, when Santiago first appeared in my life, she’d acted like she’d just met him. Frankly, my mother was a horrible liar, so I knew she wasn’t faking.
“Yes, she knows,” he replied.
“What?” It was official. The entire world had betrayed me. But why? “You’re trying to tell me that my mother knew who you were the moment you showed up?” I asked.
“No. But…it’s complicated. You need to ask—”
“My father.” I felt my face turn a frustrated shade of red.
“Dakota, I can’t give you any information. It would be different if you weren’t my boss’s daughter, but you are. He’s given me strict instructions not to tell you anything that isn’t directly related to saving your life. Satisfying your curiosity doesn’t qualify.”
“What a jerk,” I fumed.
He ignored me and continued watching the road like a well-t
rained robot.
We continued up Highway 15 for about thirty minutes and then exited and jumped on a back road. We continued north, driving in a charged, uncomfortable silence. I looked at his phone sitting on the console, wondering when my father might call or if “Santiago” would let me contact my mother. Not that my parents ever bothered calling me back.
“Can you at least tell me if my mother’s safe?”
“I don’t know. My job is you. Not her.”
Job. There was that word again. My life was a mess, but he referred to it in the same impersonal way a janitor might talk about cleaning floors. At the end of the day, he could go home, pop open a cold one, and watch the game.
“Nice bedside manner there, Paolo. When can I call her?”
“You can’t.”
“I can’t ever call her?”
“Not until the situation is…resolved.”
“But, of course, you have no clue when that will be.”
“No,” he replied.
“Well, it’s still a free country, and I’m an adult.” I reached for the phone, but he pushed my hand away. He quickly popped the battery and chucked the device out the window.
What the hell? “Such impressive eco-friendly manners there, bub, but you and my father can’t keep me prisoner,” I snapped.
He nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”
“You mean you’re not going to argue the point?”
“What’s to argue?” he said briskly. “You can leave anytime you like. If you’re willing to accept the consequences.”
The car made a sharp turn left and then right as we wound our way up the mountain road. Funny, the day looked so clear and bright, the sky a pristine blue. The weather inside the vehicle, however, felt closer to a thunderstorm.
The eye of the rabbit hole…
“Such as?” I asked.
“Your death. Possibly mine if I don’t keep you safe.”
What? “You’re not insinuating my father would kill you. That’s absurd.”
“Is it now?” he replied.
Okay. Maybe it wasn’t. I had no clue what sort of man my father was. Come to think of it, hadn’t he met my mother because he’d been shot? Lord, he was probably some sort of gangster.
“Your father actually would kill me,” he added, “but only for one thing: touching you. However, what I meant was that if you run and these assholes really know who you are, they will track you down within a few days. I’d have to come rescue you, which would be pointless because you’d be dead already—your head shipped off to your father—but I’d come looking for you anyway. My head would follow.”
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