Fractured by Deceit

by Jami Gray

  I took the sketch from him and stared into the shadowy image of my imaginary protector. Color rushed to my cheeks. “My therapist claims he’s nothing more than a coping mechanism. Someone I created so I wouldn’t lose hope.” Too bad it didn’t really work.

  Ricochet kept watching me. “What do you think?”

  Jerking my gaze from the sketch to Ricochet, I frowned. “What do you mean, what do I think?”

  “Do you think he’s a figment of your imagination?”

  “What else could he be?”

  There was something working behind his eyes, a knowledge I couldn’t grasp. “Let’s find out.”

  Thoroughly confused, I blurted, “What do you mean?”

  “Bring him here, Megan. Show me your coping mechanism.”

  Chapter Twenty

  My rush of embarrassment turned to snippy temper. “You make it sound like I should just snap my fingers”—I snapped them—“and voilà, instant hallucination.”

  Unmoved, Ricochet didn’t budge. “Is that how you normally do it?”

  “I don’t know how I normally do it.” There was no hiding my frustration. Ricochet was asking me to do something I didn’t have the first clue about how to make happen.

  Ricochet sighed. “All right, let’s try this. Do you remember the first time he showed?”

  There was no way he would let me out of this, so instead of fighting a losing battle, I closed my eyes. As much as I loathed remembering, he was asking me to do it for a reason, so I opened the door I’d slammed shut all those weeks ago. Perched on a threshold, I felt the shiver of trepidation wash over me. Like a teen coming in after curfew, I snuck past the treacherous memories filled with that hated voice, making sure not to gain its attention. Skirting the yawning pits of blankness, I finally found what I was looking for.

  “I woke in the tower.” My words felt disconnected from me, which made it easier to keep going. “I can’t remember what happened, but it was bad. I was bleeding.”

  “Bleeding?” His question sounded far away.

  “From my nose, my ears, I think.” I brushed at the phantom sensation. “I don’t know how long I lay there, but I felt so tired.” And so damn hopeless. As if naming the emotion gave it power, the desperation rushed back in, sweeping me into that inescapable pit. “I just wanted it to be over.”

  “Wanted what to be over?”

  “All of it. It hurt to keep fighting, and I wasn’t sure I’d hold out next time.” Because there was always a next time. “And I was worried…”

  “About?”

  What bothered me? The answer was there, floating at the periphery, but every time I reached for it, it drifted away. “I don’t know.” A dull throbbing started in my temples. Wincing, I rubbed them.

  “Don’t worry about it, Megan.”

  I reluctantly turned away, letting the answer escape.

  “What happened next?”

  I tried to bring the bits and pieces together. “There was a voice.” I’d been startled by it because no one should have been there. “I opened my eyes, and he was there.”

  “Describe him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. Tell me the first things that come to mind.” Ricochet’s demand drifted in like a feather, and I blinked my eyes open. He was crouched in front of me, patience personified.

  “Warm.” It was the first thing that hit me, a sense of warmth when everything around me had become a frozen wasteland. “Strong.” The innate sense of my protector’s strength gave me something to cling to when mine was all but gone. “Relentless.” He’d never stopped with the whispered encouragement, not even when I raged at him to shut up because I knew no one was coming for me.

  “What the hell?”

  The question snapped Ricochet’s head around as he rose to his feet. Unable to see around him and not believing that the particular voice was really here, I scrambled up and stood at his side. Together, we stared at a puzzled-looking Bishop standing at the edge of the room.

  “How’d you get here?” My borderline-rude question came out as a squeak.

  Bishop looked between Ricochet and me. “I hope you aren’t asking me, because I don’t have a clue what just happened.”

  “Don’t look at me, brother.” Ricochet tilted his head in my direction. “It’s all on her.”

  “What’s on me?” Even as I asked the question, mortification left my cheeks hot and my fists clenched. I didn’t want Bishop here, where my craziness was blatantly apparent.

  Wearing a half grin, Ricochet sketched a bow in my direction then swept his hand out toward Bishop. “Megan, may I present your coping mechanism.”

  Oh, no, no, no. This couldn’t be happening. Unfortunately, there was no denying that it most certainly was happening. Bishop was studying me with a disconcerting calculation, and Ricochet was all but grinning like a damn loon. Not ready to deal with Bishop, I turned and hissed at Ricochet. “You knew.”

  His grin faded, his normal seriousness sweeping back in. “No. I had a hunch, but I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?” Bishop walked over until we were standing in a loose triangle.

  Choking on a mix of temper and frustration, I kept my mouth shut.

  Ricochet did not. He turned to his friend and laid it all out, every damn embarrassing bit. “This is what Wolf couldn’t breach. It’s a mental construct Megan created to keep her interrogator at bay when her ability was triggered.”

  Bishop looked around, and unable to watch his reaction, I looked down, furiously wishing there was nothing but blank stone to stare at. A sucked-in breath from Bishop drew my attention. Ricochet was watching me with consideration, and Bishop was staring at the walls in astonishment… walls that were no longer plastered with sketches.

  “Where did they go?” Bishop asked.

  Stunned out of my ill humor, I turned in a slow circle. Holy hell. They were all gone, every one of those revealing sketches.

  Ricochet kept going with his sharing time. “She mentioned she had a coping mechanism that managed to interact with her. Considering that this is her protective construct, the only entities that could enter would be ones she allowed. The images on the sketches are bits and pieces of her experience.” He turned to Bishop. “I recognized your face in her sketches. You weren’t the only one—there was one of the colonel as well as others I didn’t recognize but who were probably family. Thing was, those were buried deep under the other sketches, which makes me think she was hiding them.”

  It was almost scary how accurate his evaluation was, and it left me off balance but unapologetic. “I didn’t want him to find them.”

  Ricochet turned back to me. “The one holding you?”

  I managed a nod. “He kept using faces of people I knew to trick me into telling him what he wanted.”

  He cocked his head. “Since he had you for so long, I take it that technique didn’t work as expected.”

  Shaking my head, I stepped away from the two men but had forgotten about the staff, which rolled underfoot, sending me stumbling. I caught my balance with a hand against the wall. “I quickly learned to pick up on the little things that always gave away his game. Things got worse after that.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Ricochet kept watching me but directed his words to Bishop. “There was something familiar about the shadowy figure in the later sketches. It made me curious, so I asked her to recreate her so-called hallucination, and now we’re here.”

  “And how, exactly, did we get here?” It was hard to tell what Bishop was thinking. There were no clues in his voice or in his stony stance.

  Ricochet shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Undeterred by Ricochet’s evasive answer, Bishop demanded, “Want to share your guess?”

  “Honestly, I don’t have a damn clue.” Ricochet rubbed the back of his neck. “If you two knew each other before, I could see her reaching for you, but….”

  He trailed off, and my stomach sank. Unable to meet
their eyes, I kept my head down because it wasn’t that I knew Bishop, but he had factored into a great many of my stupid daydreams. If I had any doubts about labeling my previous infatuation as an obsession, this situation wiped them all away.

  My discomfort must have been obvious because Ricochet was frowning at me, and Bishop’s intimidation factor dropped as he walked toward me. With nowhere to go, I was stuck waiting for him to reach me. When he got close, he bent down, picked up the staff, and handed to me.

  I muttered, “Thanks.” Desperate to change the subject, I cleared my throat. “Can we focus on something else?” I needed to say something, anything, that would get me out of this embarrassing-as-hell situation. “Something more productive maybe?”

  Bishop’s shoulder brushed mine as he leaned back against the wall, looking at Ricochet. “What does this mean for our plan?”

  “You mean using Megan as bait?” Ricochet didn’t even glance my way as Bishop dipped his chin in acknowledge. “It’s actually a good thing.”

  “How do you figure?”

  I wondered the same thing. I couldn’t see how any of this would help when I faced the monster hunting me.

  Ricochet turned to me. “You understand that Bishop’s plan relies on you being able to hold the dreamscape and keep your stalker busy?”

  “Yeah, but if there’s a trigger buried somewhere, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.” The idea of luring the madman into my mind only for me to lose my shit scared me to death.

  “Which is why we’re going to identify that trigger before we do anything else.”

  Ricochet made it sound so easy that I wanted to lash out at him. Instead, I tried to keep my tone level. “Say we manage to find it—then what? Can you make it not work? Destroy it or something?”

  “I’m not sure that’s our best course of action.”

  His answer hit me with a breath-stealing punch. “Excuse me?” I wheezed in disbelief.

  Bishop explained, “If we disable the trigger, it may warn him we’re onto him. We need him to feel like he has control.”

  “He does,” I snapped. “That’s the whole damn problem. If there is a trigger, he could trip the ticking time bomb in my head at any time.” God, did these two have a death wish? They acted like it was no big thing, but they weren’t the ones who’d be eaten alive with guilt if anything happened to them. And if I ended up hurting Bishop… the thought terrified me beyond imagining.

  Bishop grabbed my arms, holding me in place. “We won’t let him get you.”

  It’s not me I’m worried about. I bit the words back. Once upon a time, I might have believed him, but spending six months in hell—most of which I couldn’t remember, and the rest, I sure wished I couldn’t—made it hard to have faith in what Bishop had said.

  “You can’t promise me that.” The retort came out harsh, but fear was riding my ass like a damn horse jockey.

  A dark light flared in Bishop’s eyes, but before he could say anything, Ricochet cut through the tension with a practical calm. “Let’s find out if it even exists first. Once we have confirmation, we can figure out what it will cause and how we can use it.”

  I tried to push my fear and panic back. Hard as it was, I needed to trust the experience these two men held. It wasn’t as if navigating danger was my day-to-day job as it was theirs. “Fine,” I said tightly.

  Bishop turned to face Ricochet. He didn’t let me go completely but tangled his fingers with mine. Does he think I’m going to run? I snorted at the thought. Where in the hell could I go? Irritated as I was, I still didn’t let him go as we waited for Ricochet’s next move.

  “Let’s get this done,” Bishop said.

  “Megan?” Ricochet asked.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Want to do the honors?” He waved at the blank wall.

  “Me? Isn’t this your dreamscape?”

  “Not since you brought us here. Now it’s yours.”

  Well, shit. Taking a deep breath, I glared at the blank wall. If the only way out of this disaster was braving what lay beyond my tower of solace, then it was time to leave. My irritation faded into stunned surprise when a wooden door replaced stone and silently swung open. “Cool.” I took a step forward only to have Ricochet pull up short and slip by me before disappearing through the door. I reared back and shot a look at Bishop.

  His fingers were smoothing down the sides of his goatee, probably to hide a damn smile. “He’s taking point.”

  “Uh-huh.” I loaded that one word with a ton of sarcasm.

  He put his hand in the small of my back and gently pushed me through the door. “After you.”

  With my back to him, I felt safe rolling my eyes. “Let me guess—you’re playing rear guard?”

  That earned me a cough that sounded close to a chuckle. “It’s what I do best.”

  My exasperated snort was cut short when I caught sight of what waited outside the tower. Whatever I expected my mind to look like, it wasn’t this. We stepped past the door and found ourselves in a scene that would have fit right into a medieval landscape. A thick forest lay to our left, rolling fields stretched ahead, and when I turned to look back, the stone tower seemed miles away. It wasn’t all picturesque. In fact, to the right lay a roiling bank of shadows that left my skin crawling.

  Ricochet and Bishop studied our surroundings, but I couldn’t take my horrified gaze off those damn creepy shadows as I grabbed Bishop’s hand. “What is that?”

  “That,” Ricochet said grimly, “is where we need to go.”

  Before I could stop myself, I stepped back, dropping Bishop’s hand. “No freakin’ way, Ricochet.”

  Bishop caught me before I could retreat any farther, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me to his side. “This is your mind, babe, your world.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Megan,” Ricochet said. “It won’t be easy, and chances are damn good that those memories you locked away are going to be part of that.”

  Unable to tear my gaze away from that terrifying mass, I swallowed hard. It hurt to talk. “Including who he is.”

  “His name or his face, yeah.” Ricochet’s voice softened. “Something tells me that no matter how good Rabbit is, if we can’t help narrow his search now, we’re going to be too slow and too late.”

  He had a point, and it wasn’t just Bishop’s team at risk—Dev and Keelie were in danger as well because the monster wouldn’t stop until my world was gone. I leaned into Bishop, taking strength from him.

  He dropped his head over mine, and said quietly, “You survived it once. You can again.”

  I felt a core of belief in the man holding me. I cursed my inability to disappoint him. Forcing my legs to hold my weight, I straightened my spine and let go of Bishop. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  We headed toward the looming haze, and with each step, the sickening dread increased until it felt like I was slogging through thick mud. Dropping my gaze to the ground, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, relying on Bishop and Ricochet to lead the way. We were closing in on the leading edge when Bishop took my hand and Ricochet did the same on the other side. I lifted my head and stared at that intimidating haze, feeling my heart pound in my chest.

  Licking dry lips, I managed a shaky, “Here we go.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  BISHOP

  It took everything I had not to wrap Megan in my arms and drag her back to the safety of that damn tower. Her face was ghostly pale, and her hand trembled in mine. I gritted my teeth and held tight, reminding myself that this was necessary not just for my team but for her as well. If Ricochet was right, and this thing was a manifestation of her broken memories, the keys to surviving this situation lay somewhere ahead.

  The fog twisted around us like coiling snakes, leaving the same chill factor behind. Next to me, the harsh rasps of Megan’s breathing indicated she was on the verge of hyperventilating. “Breathe, Megan. You’re okay.” I kept my tone steady and solid. She di
dn’t need my uneasiness to add to the burden she was carrying. “Come on, babe. In, out. In, out.”

  Her first couple were shaky, but she continued to take one breath at a time. I shared a grim look with Ricochet over her bent head. If she was having this much trouble, how would she handle the increased toll that lay ahead? Maybe we needed to consider an alternate plan on drawing the bastard out.

  Next to me, Megan’s breathing slowed and eased, and her hand tightened on mine. When I looked down, she held my gaze with a determination I was coming to expect from her. “I’ll be okay.”

  Not about to argue with her, I nodded.

  She faced forward, and her jaw tightened. “Right, let’s do this.”

  As if her words were a trigger, a soft hiss sounded, setting every hair on my body on end. Then a brilliant flash of light, much like a lightening strike, hit somewhere nearby, shaking the ground. I stumbled to a stop as white spots danced in my vision. Blinking them clear, I stared at the scene before me and felt my composure slip. Reminding myself that we were in Megan’s mind didn’t help. This skimmed too close to my nightmares. The only indication that it wasn’t one of mine was the eerie silence. My nightmares were filled with moans of the dying and screams of weapon fire.

  A devastating scene straight out of a post-apocalyptic war zone had replaced the stone tower and peaceful landscape. There were no signs of life— no agonized choir of the injured and dying or deafening explosions or the zip of too-close bullets—but the ghostly echoes haunted the air, leaving an uneasy feeling behind. Razed buildings were interspersed with untouched structures. The ground was a mix of churned, scorched earth and patches of undisturbed normalcy.

  “Holy crap.” Megan stared in stunned shock at the scene before us. “What is this?”

  “You,” Ricochet answered, his jaw tight, his face dark. “These are the memories you locked away.”

  With a hard flinch, she pulled her hand free and took a couple of steps forward, her head swiveling as she took it all in. “There’s nothing left.” Her voice sounded hollow and lost.