by Snow, Nicole
I take her hand and lead her across the street.
We’re deathly silent, creeping like burglars around the house, long years of practice making it easy to move without creasing so much as a blade of grass.
We’re sheltered from the line of sight by the fence around the yard as we make our way to the back of the house. A single long, low window looks in on a bedroom past a set of sheer curtains that do nothing to block our view.
They don’t prevent us from drinking her in.
Like she’s water in a desert and we’re desperately thirsty.
It’s very much an ordinary teenage girl’s bedroom—posters everywhere, clothing ranging in trends from pink punk princess to defiant goth-black anarchist and everything in between draped over the chairs and beanbag. I see books left open on her desk, a laptop, a few stuffed animals still holding places of honor on a shelf although she’s clearly decided she’s too old to have them in her bed anymore.
She’s only fourteen.
Only, I say, as if I haven’t counted every day I’ve missed of her life.
She’s a tall girl with her mother’s rangy build but my firm shoulders. A foxlike face relaxed into sweetness in sleep. A mess of black hair spills across her pillow, with a single streak of white starting at her temple and pouring through that river of black like a splash of bright paint.
Our daughter.
Our black hole.
Our hope.
Fuchsia stops short just outside the window, still as a statue before it comes.
Then she makes a choked, hurting sound, pressing one hand to her mouth, her other resting against the window, gloves not leaving a mark on the pane.
I clench my jaw.
It’s hard as hell to watch, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here at her side.
Her eyes glisten, already red-rimmed but now shining, threatening to spill over.
“You can’t miss her,” she whispers, her voice thick and heavy. “One look at her and you know...you just know she’s ours, Oliver.”
She sounds like she’s about to break.
But then she drops her hand, and it’s my turn to have a sledgehammer falling on my heart.
She’s smiling.
Watery, tremulous, but rich and sweet with so much raw, bittersweet emotion. It’s like she doesn’t even know what to do with it, standing there trembling and frozen.
I move closer, stand next to her, looking in at our daughter.
We’re invisible ghosts to her.
She doesn’t even know we’re haunting her.
“Mandolin,” I murmur, sucking in a breath that tastes like a knife. “Her name is Mandolin.”
“Mandolin!” Fuchsia lets out a broken laugh that sounds half like a repressed sob. “Of course it is. Any daughter of mine has to have a name that makes her stand out.”
I probably shouldn’t say what I say next, but fuck it, here goes.
Fuchsia deserves to know the truth.
“She’s with the Lakes,” I say. “They—”
“I remember who they are.” The set of her mouth turns bitter. “Cleaners. The people who made everything disappear when it was time to pull up stakes and move out. I guess my child was just another thing to disappear for Galentron’s convenience.”
“It wasn’t like that, wildcat,” I protest, and she turns a fierce look on me.
There’s so much anger kindling in her eyes.
So much that’s been building for a lifetime, bursting to the surface, irrepressible.
“Is this what they took her for?” she bites off. “So they can turn her into another slave to that vile company? Brainwash her? Were we so obviously about to turn against them that they just had to make sure we couldn’t unduly influence our own damned daughter?”
“Yes,” I answer frankly. “They took her to keep you in line, while grooming her for their own ends. I think the goal was political, at first. Using her keen intelligence to place her in a useful, high-powered position someday. Galentron’s own Manchurian candidate of sorts.”
“No!” Fuchsia flies at the window—and there’s no mistaking her tears now, her sobs, her rage. “I won’t let them—those fucks! I won’t let them slither out of the dark like the snakes they are and make my daughter a part of a new generation of—of—of slaves!”
It’s a miracle I catch her just in the nick of time.
She’s not thinking rationally. Not anymore.
I only have a split second before she manages to slam her upraised fists against the window.
Right before she manages to give us away.
Right before our dream goes up in a shrieking crash and an unpredictable future with a very predictable bad end.
“No!” I snarl, dragging her back, holding on with all my might and then some.
Imagine wrestling a full-grown cougar protecting her cubs, and you’ll have some semblance of what it’s like swinging Fuchsia backward, tearing her eyes away from the only thing that matters.
Wrapping my arms around her from behind, I cage her against me, catching her wrists in my hands and trapping her writhing, thrashing form in my embrace.
It’s a hellish testament to how upset she really is that I’m not bleeding out on the grass from a well-placed kill strike right now.
But I think she knows as well as I do.
We can’t just come charging into Mandolin’s life like this.
No matter how much it aches to stand back and see her, without being able to touch her and tell her she has biological parents who never meant to let her go.
And who never stopped loving her, even when we thought she was gone for good.
I can feel that love in Fuchsia as much as I feel her heartbreak.
Because it echoes my own.
It’s in her trembling.
In my harsh, ragged breaths.
In her near-silent, racking sobs.
In the way my chest hurts every time I try to fucking speak.
My heart smashes itself against my ribs like it’s trying to squeeze through the spaces in between.
It hurts like nothing I’ve ever known.
But at least we don’t have to face it alone.
Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
“Oliver, you—”
“She’s not a slave. They wouldn’t let that happen to her,” I whisper against Fuchsia’s ear while she jerks her shoulders halfheartedly, fighting me just for the sake of fighting something.
I know her. It’s how she keeps herself from feeling helpless.
And now she freezes, locks those pale grey-blue eyes on mine, and whimpers out a question. “What?”
“They got out, Fuchsia. Right after things blew up in Heart’s Edge. When you started pulling the rafters down around Galentron’s ears, they got out early and sang like birds in exchange for FBI protection for themselves...and for Mandolin. So now they’re just ordinary people, living clean, and raising our daughter to be a normal girl.”
“But that should be us!” she protests weakly, scrubbing at her face furiously and somehow not even managing to ruin her makeup despite how awkwardly she moves her hands with my grip still on her wrists. Waterproof mascara is some serious shit. “We’re her rightful parents. She should be ours.”
“We are,” I agree softly, “but so are they. They’ve been there for her through every moment of her life, Fuchsia...and believe it or not, they’ve loved her. Right now, we can’t even offer her a safe life. We can’t even give ourselves a safe life. And it wouldn’t be fair to take her away from the future they can give her. Protected. Loved. And never coming into contact with anyone from Galentron ever again.”
I hate what I really mean when I say anyone from Galentron.
Because I also mean us.
Both of our fucked up circumstances that are far from resolved.
Fuchsia sags against me with a low moan—then twists in my arms, as if she can’t stand to look at Mandolin’s obliviously sleeping face anymore, thoroughly dr
ained. She wrenches her wrists from my grasp so she can slide her arms around my neck.
I hold her while she cries a lifetime of pent-up tears.
In a way, she’s crying for me, too.
My eyes may be dry, but I don’t feel it any less.
Sometimes it’s the smallest things, not the hardest blows, that can break even the coldest person to pieces.
After what feels like forever, the sun starts to spill its light across the horizon. I feel the seconds ticking down until we have to disappear.
Fuchsia goes quiet against me, save for her shallow, ragged breaths. She’s loose and pliant in my arms, but she seems different.
Lighter, somehow.
“Never?” she whispers. “Not even on her own terms?”
“One day,” I say. “One day we’ll tell her how to reach us. But for now...” I press my lips to the top of her head. “We’re out of time, wildcat. I hate it, but if we don’t go now, we may get picked up by the Feds any minute.”
She smiles weakly, curling her fingers in the front of my shirt. “Where do we even go from here?”
“Alaska sounds good,” I point out. “More moose than people.”
She barks a tired, humorless laugh. “It’s a good thing layers are in fashion this year. Is that where you’ve been all this time? Alaska?”
“Canada,” I say. “Where there are also more moose than people, but somehow even more angry geese than moose.”
Her face goes blank and she blinks.
“Promise me one thing: you’ll never try for a career in stand-up.” She pushes away from me enough to look over her shoulder, watching Mandolin with her lashes beaded wet, eyes pensive and half-lidded. “Can’t I leave her something? Some kind of message? Something to let her know we even exist?”
Sirens start blasting in my head.
Fuck.
I know it’s a terrible idea.
I know I should tell her no.
But I can’t.
Because deep down, she’s asking for the same thing I’ve asked myself a thousand times.
It’s what I’m aching for, too.
That promise of one day.
The phantom idea that maybe, just maybe one day it’ll be different, even if I don’t have a clue how it happens.
Maybe we could have our daughter back, one way or another.
“Be careful,” I say and pat the pockets of my jeans before I come up with a pen and a small notepad.
It’s habit carried over from years of working in senior-level operations—always be ready to write something down.
What I write down now is the number to a burner phone. I keep a few in my cabin up in Canada, and we’ll be swinging up there to lay low for a bit before we start making our path to Alaska, I think.
I’m already plotting it out, planning ahead as I scribble the number down, then pass her the pad and the pen.
“Five minutes,” I warn. “Not a second longer. Then we need to disappear. People are starting to wake up.”
I see the flash of rebellion in her eyes for just a moment.
The defiance that says she wants to stretch it to six minutes, seven minutes, more. Until Mandolin wakes up and has no choice but to see us.
I see behind her polished exterior just like I did so many years ago.
Fuchsia is still that girl who captured my attention in a breath.
That relentless, strange, bright-eyed girl who had the nerve to lay a senior military official out on the floor and come to my penthouse to plot a coup without caring about the consequences.
But I can see, too, the moment when she realizes I’m right.
She does care.
Because it’s not about the consequences to her.
It’s about the consequences to Mandolin.
Goddamn, it kills me.
I think, given half a chance...Fuchsia would’ve been a badass amazing mother.
Her eyes darken, and she lifts her head, looking back through the window for several aching seconds.
I think I’ll remember her like this for the rest of my life, fresh with longing, the first pink hints of sunrise falling over her. She’s wearing this expression of mixed joy and wrenching loss on her face, beatific and tortured and serene and painful. The full emotional spectrum of every human being who ever drew breath lit in her and shining all at once.
Then she sighs, quickly scratches something down on the notepad, and rips the sheet off.
Fishing in her pocket and pulling out a plastic-wrapped ball of pink hard candy, she folds the note around it.
Then she looks around, spies the soccer ball against the fence—and slips over to kneel down, tucking the paper-wrapped candy under it.
Smart.
Mandolin will probably see it as soon as she heads out this morning, stopping like any girl would to kick the ball a little before heading off to school, only to pause when she notices something that shouldn’t be there, resting in the same space where the ball had been.
I hope she understands it.
And I hope she knows we’ll be waiting.
If it’s in the cards, it’ll happen.
It’s meant to.
I’ve always known that.
Just as I’ve always known that one way or another, I’d find my way back to Fuchsia.
We’ve waited this long. So what’s a little longer while we work to un-fuck our mess?
As the sun rises in a hot golden burst, I offer her my hand.
“Time to go, wildcat.”
She slips her hand in mine, gripping my fingers with a warmth and certainty that says she hasn’t forgotten how we used to make each other feel.
The promises we made each other. The same promises it’s not too late to fulfill.
Together, hand in hand, we disappear into the back streets of Bainbridge and then Seattle.
We take our sweet time, walking slowly, making our way back to the car on foot. It’s not just about not being seen.
It’s about letting this sink in.
This feels like polar opposites, an end and a new beginning.
That’s something you don’t rush.
Drawing near where we left the car, though, Fuchsia slows, looking up at me.
For the first time since I’ve known her, I don’t see the same fire in her eyes or the sharpness waiting on her tongue.
She looks completely lost, at wit’s end.
I give her a smile. Even the most formidable women have their weaker moments.
Maybe that’s what men like me are really for.
To be here for them to lean on until they can stand on their own two feet again.
“What now?” she asks softly. “What are we even good for anymore? This feels like all there is to us. No more missions. Nothing left to destroy. Our daughter isn’t even ours, and we just—what?—vanish to Alaska? Why? To rot away in obscurity?”
“To live, wildcat,” I say softly, lifting our clasped hands to kiss her knuckles. “We disappear and regroup. Then we find out what it means to truly live.”
10
Sweet Dreams (Fuchsia)
This isn’t how I ever imagined my ending.
The last month spent hidden away in Oliver’s snowed-in cabin outside Alberta has been all kinds of different.
Strange.
Enlightening.
Unnerving.
Wonderful.
We only came back because it was the easiest place to hunker down while he made arrangements—and while I made a few phone calls, too. To clear out his things, making sure his data stash was put into the right hands and migrated into a secure storage facility somewhere in Sweden.
It’ll stay there as our insurance policy, ensuring we stayed off the radar before we made any major moves that could be easily tracked.
I’ve arranged my disappearance many times, but not forever.
There’s a funny freedom in that feeling I don’t really know what to do with.
But I’m also terrified, deep down, that if I di
sappear, I’ll be truly lost.
Mandolin will never be able to find me again.
I keep that burner phone in my pocket at all times, always charged, always checking to make sure the prepaid minutes loaded on it haven’t expired.
I can’t miss that one call from her.
All of this can’t be for nothing.
Though calling it nothing hardly seems fair.
This month spent rediscovering Oliver has been something, too.
I always remembered him as this high-class executive in expensive power suits, a luxury penthouse, a wine cabinet worth more than the GDP of some small countries. The beast hid behind the suit, his twisted and beautiful menagerie of birds of prey inked on every inch of him, ready to devour me the instant we were naked.
In Canada, I meet another side of this man.
A hint of the Oliver Major I knew and an encore of the man he’s become.
And getting to see him as this rustic country man out in the wild, chopping wood with an axe like he’s let his inner lumberjack out to play?
Okay.
I won’t lie.
It’s nice.
It shows me who Oliver is without corrupt companies and never-ending cloak and dagger games.
Without Galentron, even if Durham and his wolves took his leg, took his eye, took so much of his life the same way they took mine.
And even if the mushy, snowy ground is hell on stiletto heels and the rigors of wilderness life have ruined my manicure, it has a certain charm.
I think I just might love it.
I know I still love him.
It’s tentative at first. We’re shy around each other, after my ugly cry and that first passionate reunion kiss.
Me.
As if Fuchsia Delaney could ever be called anything like shy.
But there’s a night when we’re sitting on the patchwork-quilt-covered sofa in front of the fireplace. Glasses of cheap wine that still taste just as good as ones many years ago, especially when they’re flavored bittersweet like my candy.
So much laughter my sides hurt in the best ways.
I don’t ever remember laughing so freely, but we’ve been trading half-drunk stories all night over our drinks.
Him telling me about a trip to Alaska, getting chased down a frozen river by an angry mama grizzly bear in the middle of a December blizzard with his prosthetic barely hanging on by its clasp lock.