The Darkness Gathers: A Novel
Page 30
He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth, his heart flooding with relief.
“I have an idea for the new firm,” said Jeffrey, referring to their plans for Lydia to come in as a partner. He took her hand in his.
“Yeah?”
“How about Mark, Mark and Striker?”
“No way. I’m keeping my own name. Anyway, it should be Strong, Mark and Striker. I have more name recognition,” she said with a smile.
“Was that a yes?”
“What was the question?” she replied, looking at him with mock innocence.
“Why don’t we go upstairs, and I’ll see if I can communicate it to you better.”
She pressed her body against his and put her mouth on his neck, smelling his cologne and feeling the stubble against her lips. He put his mouth on hers and she felt the familiar jolt of desire, the seductive wash of safety and comfort she knew only in his arms.
“Help me close up first,” she said, her smile wavering a bit.
“You bet,” he answered. “I think the book for the new security alarm is on the counter.”
As Lydia walked over to turn off the television, something on the screen caught her eye. “Look,” she said.
The camera had zoomed out a bit and the famous newscaster with salt-and-pepper hair and sparkling blue eyes had his hand folded in front of him as he delivered the rest of the news script. On his right hand, he wore the gold insignia ring Lydia and Jeffrey had come to know so well.
They exchanged a look and turned off the television. They hadn’t spent a whole lot of time discussing what they had learned about the way the world worked. And maybe that was because they recognized themselves to be powerless to change it. For the time being anyway. And they had a more present demon to battle than the shadowy, nebulous ones they knew maneuvered behind the scenes. If the Council members were the masterminds of world order, then Jed McIntyre was chaos. A chaos that needed to be chained.
Lydia truly hoped that with Nathan Quinn and Sasa Fitore burning in hell, where they belonged, she’d done significant-enough damage to their evil operation to have saved some of the women who might have met their fates at their hands. She knew they had only scratched the surface and there were many more battles left to fight.
While she went over to get the new manual, Jeffrey closed the security gates they’d had installed on the windows and in front of the elevator door, locking them each with a heavy clang. They walked together to the new touch pad installed that morning by the elevator. Jeffrey pressed the keys as the manual instructed, waiting for the confirming beeps that would assure him he’d set it right. If compromised, the system would sound an alarm and send a signal to the police, to a private security firm, and to Dax. It was only Jeffrey’s FBI contacts that allowed them access to the sophisticated system, normally reserved for government officials, diplomats, and heads of state.
Lydia looked at the gates with dismay before turning out the lights. They were harsh and ugly in contrast to the warm and beautiful living room with its carefully chosen colors, lighting, and soft, luxuriant materials.
“I feel like an inmate,” she said.
“We’ll paint them.”
“That won’t change what they are or why they’re there.”
“It’s not forever,” he said, walking over to her and touching her face. As he took her hand and led her upstairs, she pushed away the black fingers of despair that tugged at her inside, reaching for the hope that forever was a place they’d find together … all three of them.
Author’s Note
While the circumstances, people, places, and events in this book are entirely a product of my imagination, they do have a basis in reality. My knowledge of Albania, its conflicts and challenges, has been quilted together from extensive research, including news broadcasts, newspaper archives, and several books.
In my research, I obtained a wealth of information from the following Internet resources: the New York Times archives (www.nytimes.com); ABCNEWS.com; Albanian.com; BBC News Online (news.bbc.co.uk); the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park Web site (www.vancortlandt.org); The World Sex Guide (www.worldsexguide.org … for those of you who are interested); and numerous other sites.
Though The Darkness Gathers is, indeed, fictitious, Albania and the Balkans in general are clearly in crisis. The International Committee of the Red Cross (www.helpicrc.org/help) offers relief to this area and troubled areas around the world and is a good place to start if you are wondering how you might get involved. Furthermore, the trafficking of women and girls into sexual slavery is a very real situation and occurs daily around the globe. The Global Fund for Women (www.globalfundforwomen.org) or Amnesty International Women’s Pages (www2.amnesty.se/wom.nsf) are both good places to start if you are interested in becoming more involved or informed on women’s rights internationally.
It was not my intention to malign or degrade the Albanian population in this country or anywhere in the world in any respect. All the Albanian characters in this book, good and bad, are entirely fictitious and have absolutely no grounding in reality and were not inspired by any real person.
All mistakes are my own.
Thanks for reading.
Lisa Miscione
www.lisamiscione.com
Acknowledgments
Writers are solitary and work in isolation. But no book is completed or published without the support and encouragement of a vital network of people. And I am truly blessed in that regard. I am most profoundly grateful to:
My wonderful husband, Jeffrey Unger, for his tireless reading of drafts, his unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement, and his seemingly endless supply of patience. I am also thankful for his genius in designing and maintaining my Web site and taking my author photographs. And most of all, I am grateful for his love and support in all things. Without him, I would be only half the person that I am.
My literary agent, Elaine Markson, for her wisdom, optimism, patience, and encouragement. And her assistant, Gary Johnson, who offers all those things with his own brand of personality and humor.
Kelley Ragland, my talented and inspiring editor, for her extraordinary ability to see through the flaws of my manuscripts to something better and lead me there. And everyone at St. Martin’s Press, for turning the pages of manuscript into an actual book and getting it out there into the world! And especially the wonderful artists in the art department—their vision puts a face on the body.
My mother and father, Virginia and Joseph Miscione, cocaptains of Team Houston, for their shameless bragging and endless promotion.
My wonderful network of dear friends and family, especially my brother, Joey Miscione, my cousin Frankie Benvenuto, as well as Marion Chartoff, Heather Mikesell, Tara Popick, and Judy Wong, who each offer a crucial and thankfully endless supply of love and support, cheering me through the great days and pulling me through the tough ones.
My friends and neighbors Joan and Carroll Lovett, Marty Donovan, Kimberly Beamer, and JoAnna Siskin, whose day-to-day enthusiasm and support in a thousand different ways help to infuse me with excitement even in those moments when I’m stuck inside my own head.
Special thanks to Pembe Bekiri for her invaluable insight and advice on Albanian culture. She provided a much-appreciated insider’s perspective, offering details that turned out to be priceless.
About the Author
Lisa Unger, writing as Lisa Miscione, is an award-winning New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author. Her novels have been published in more than twenty-six countries around the world. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1970), but grew up in the Netherlands, England, and New Jersey. A graduate of the New School for Social Research, Lisa spent many years living and working in New York City. She then left a career in publicity to pursue her dream of becoming a full-time author. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter. She is at work on her next novel.
an excerpt from
twice
BY
L
ISA UNGER, WRITING AS LISA MISCIONE
COMING IN
FEBRUARY 2012
Prologue
It was night when he came back. His return was washed in bright moonlight, accompanied by the crackling whispers of branches bending in harsh cold wind. He stood for a while on the edge of the clearing, making himself one with the barren trees and dry leaves beneath his feet. Standing tall and rigid as the black, dead trunks around him, he watched. It stood like an old war criminal, a crumbling shadow of its past grandeur, the stain of its evil like an aura, the echo of its misdeeds like a heartbeat. It lived still. He couldn’t believe that after all this time, it lived. He pulled cold air into his lungs and felt the fear that was alive within him, too. Like the old house, his dread had aged and sagged but would not be defeated by time alone.
He made his way across the once elaborately landscaped and impeccably manicured lawn, now a battlefield of dead grass, weeds, hedges that had grown wild then died from neglect. The branches and thorns pulled at his pant legs like an omen. Everything about the house, even the grand old oak that stood like a sentry beside it, warned him away. But he was a part of that house and it was a part of him. He was all about collecting the lost parts of himself now. It was time.
Memories flickered before his eyes, 8mm film projected on a wall. He could see her dancing and see her smiling, see her running. Her chubby little girl legs, her tiny skirts and little shorts. He could see her blond pigtails, her round blue eyes. As she grew older, grew beautiful, her hair and eyes both darkened, her skin looked and felt like French vanilla ice cream. He could see her in those last moments before everything went bad. He heard her laughter and her screams and both were music to him. His love for her was a ghost pain. Since they had been wrested apart, he felt as though someone had donated his organs to science without waiting for him to die. He lived with a prosthetic heart.
He stood on the porch and felt the old wood groan beneath him, threatening to snap. He heard skittering behind the door, and the branches from the great oak scraped the sides of the house, fingernails on the inside of a coffin. He was the damned in front of the gates of hell. He was terrified but knew in his heart that he was deserving.
The house was a caricature of itself, dilapidated, shedding splinters and shingles, with cracked windows and sagging eaves, every house in every horror movie ever made. As he pushed the door open, it knocked some beer cans and they rattled across the floor. The house seemed to sigh with relief as he stepped into the foyer and he felt its cold breath on his neck. The chandelier, made of a thousand crystal teardrops, blanketed in dust, was the central point for a million spider webs that reached across the grand foyer. The crystal jingled like tiny bells above his head.
The door blew closed behind him. He looked around at the havoc disrepair and neglect had wreaked. He felt a rush of anger. It was to have been maintained; instead it had been vandalized and looted. Sun damage had drained all the colors from the rugs and furniture, the portraits on the walls. Spray-painted obscenities screamed in black and red. He could see in the sitting room that a sofa teetered on three legs. But his anger passed quickly. It was nothing a good cleaning wouldn’t fix.
“Or a good exorcism,” he said aloud to himself. He was surprised at how old his voice sounded.
A cracked mirror framed in ornate gold-leafed wood hung lopsided on the far wall. Someone had spray-painted Tracy Loves Justin TL4 on the glass. He startled at his own reflection there. His face was masked by a long full beard and straggling gray hair hanging in limp, dirty dreads. He wore a tattered denim jacket, filthy and stiff over layers of equally rank T-shirts and a once-red sweatshirt. He looked like the kind of man people avoided on the street, the kind people turned away from, holding their breaths against the inevitable stench. He raised a hand to his face and his beard felt gritty and stiff as steel wool. His fingertips were as thick and hard as stones, his nails black with dirt.
He stood mesmerized as the wind hissed through broken windows, rattled cans across the floor, fluttered the heavy drapes that hung in tatters in the study. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his own reflection. In his mind’s eye, he always saw himself as a young man. Handsome and lean, with ice blue eyes and hair so black it sheened violet in the sunlight. But he was less shocked by what he saw in the mirror today than he used to be. At least now he was as wrecked on the outside as he was on the inside. It used to seem like nature’s joke to him that his heart was such a black dead place while his skin flushed with youth and health, while his smile dazzled, electric and charming. The same infected, twisted DNA that made him what he was, that forced upon him his congenital legacy, also had made him exceedingly handsome, like the Venus’s fly-trap that attracts insects with its scent and beauty and then snaps them within its jaws. At least now he was recognizable for what he was.
He heard the echo of laughter and he looked behind him at the sweeping staircase that led into the darkness of the second level. And he heard the house draw and release its foul breath. The bright full moon outside passed behind clouds and the room fell into darkness. He felt his heart rate elevate slightly and his belly fluttered with fear.
“I’m home,” he said as he turned and walked up the stairs into the black, knowing as he did that there was no turning back. That the curtain had risen on the final act and that all the players would be pulled inexorably toward their end.
Also Available
from the Author
Darkness, My Old Friend
A Novel
$24.00 (Canada: $27.00)
978-0-307-46499-6
Angel Fire
Book One in the Lydia Strong series
$15.00 (Canada: $17.00)
978-0-307-95309-4
AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD
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Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface by Lisa Unger
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Part Two
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Excerpt from Twice
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