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Stupid questions. How could anyone know that?
I knew what they were after, so I was evasive. Told them I didn’t know when sometimes I did. Gave them the wrong answers most of the time. But it was no good. I know they were on the scent of it. This thing that lives in my head. This dark light.
The worst of it is, all the tests they made me do, all the hoops they made me jump through and the batteries of dumb questions they rattled at me, they all somehow fed it. Made it grow.
Before it had been like a flicker. An inkling that I got from time to time. Something unsure.
Now it’s like a living thing.
That was twenty years ago now. And I thought I lost my innocence all the way back then.
It seems there are always more layers of innocence to lose. And there’s never any way back.
When those doors open, what you see on the other side can’t ever be unseen.
Reading those words back makes me shudder, reliving that meeting, the man in that dark back room. I remember him as if I just now shut that wooden door behind me. I’m as breathless and panicky as I was, leaning my puny weight against the door and clenching my fists to get ready to run.
I spent those twenty years looking over my shoulder for that pair of dark golden eyes. I feel them like they were on me now.
One day I know that I’m going to look up, and I’ll be staring right into those eyes.
Chapter Eight
In the hushed cabin of the corporate jet, traveling as the only passenger on a private plane chartered by the FBI, I should feel like a VIP, pampered with privilege.
Instead, I’m just a bag of nerves, chewing the inside of my lip and worrying about what I’m going to find in Portland.
I’m terrified for the mother I’ve never known. All of her words paint a picture of a vulnerable young woman exposed to dangers no one should have to face. By my reckoning, when the DEA first sank their hooks into her, she was younger than I am now. All she tried to do was to help out her sick father. She had a bad way to do it, but he was more to blame than her.
If I’m honest with myself, which I think I usually am, though things have swerved into the crazy lane lately, I’m also fearful of what I’m going to run into. I was brave enough in the face of the DEA when Wolf and Steele were there to back me up, but how will I be in a strange place and on my own?
What the hell am I walking into?
The cellphone Oliver gave me has a single text message from an unidentified number. It’s an address and geolocation in Portland.
He forwarded the same text to my phone. I guess maybe I missed it when I was on the plane to Missouri.
Lucien’s image still looms in the back of my mind. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that situation. Either of those situations. Could I take his offer of a partnership without giving in to intimacies with him?
My problem with Lucien is clear. Personally, sexually, I can’t work out what I want.
Professionally, I know that what he’s offering is exactly what I want. So why am I hesitating? What am I afraid of?
I resist the temptation to drink too much. At least for the first half hour. Before we land, I’ve emptied eight small cans of Fever Tree tonic, and I’m most of the way down a bottle of Bombay Sapphire.
One more G & T, and that will be the one to wash the sweet taste of Oliver off my lips.
Chapter Nine
My recurring dream of her has a voice, strong but gentle, low but musical. Calling. ‘My little Eve.’ Soothing, like a lullaby.
However real it feels, it must be something I made up, hauled out of the depths of my imagination.
The book is full of impressions. She never says where she is. No addresses or locations. Maybe she never knows. They seem to keep her in the dark about everything.
But she writes impressions. How the sun warms her back, how a breeze blows cool moisture on her cheek. All her thoughts are of escape. That and how much she wants to find me. She talks about how she’s feeling, which is usually anxious, nervous, or fearful.
Most of her entries don’t directly describe what she’s doing, apart from the tiniest, most intimate things—how it is to wait for the coffee she’s brewed, tasting the reviving aroma with drowsy impatience—impressions. No hard facts. I know she has to go to incredible lengths to keep the book hidden, secret, and safe.
