by Lisa Childs
She wouldn’t want that. And he didn’t want her to know he was keeping an eye on her.
So he watched as she slowly made her way up his walkway onto the porch and bent slowly and painfully to place something in front of his door, then slowly and painfully went down the steps and down his gravel path to the sidewalk.
When she was gone, Joe opened his door and saw a huge pot. It smelled like it had just been dropped from heaven. He picked it up and carried it into his bare-bones kitchen. It was still hot, she’d just cooked it.
He lifted the top and drew in a deep breath. Beef stew. Sort of. Not like the beef stew in a can that tasted like dog food mixed with dog shit that his dad had opened when he remembered to feed his young son. Which wasn’t often. Joe had learned early the fine art of can opening. No, this was perfect beef stew with some kind of special spices that nearly brought him to his knees.
She’d also cooked for an army, so his buddies would get to share, as usual. Maybe he’d call an extra poker night. After eating this, they’d let him win by default. Except maybe for his buddy Metal, nicest guy on earth except when playing poker, when a hidden mean streak always flared up.
Joe always won at poker, always. Drove Metal wild.
He wished he could share it with her, but Joe knew by experience that Isabel wouldn’t eat it with him. She was friendly but reserved. Not cold, but gun-shy. It wasn’t because of anything he’d done, that was for sure.
Joe was big and rough but he took care to control his voice and his movements around her. On his very best behavior. Any other time, he’d have made a play for Isabel, right from the first moment. Any red-blooded male would have, and his blood was redder than most. But he hadn’t. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he hadn’t had any moves in him when they’d first met. He’d been lucky to be alive and upright.
An IED on the last day of his last mission, a month from separation of service, had reduced him to rubble.
Taliban karma.
Two months in a coma, four operations and four months of unrelenting hell delivered daily by his best friend and sadist Metal, who oversaw his physical rehab. And now, here he was, almost as good as new.
Now. Now he could go after the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, a woman who intrigued him like no other. But the fact was, she was still in bad shape.
Isabel wasn’t as good as new. She was still as shaken and unsteady as the day she’d moved in next door to him three months ago.
She was looking particularly shaky as she made her slow way along the sidewalk. She’d turned left at the gate. Outside the gate there was left and there was right. Left was to a small park about five blocks down, right led eventually to the Green, a big meadow about a mile away where people played Frisbee and flirted in the summer and jocks ran in the winter, with a shopping mall on the other side. When Isabel was feeling better, she went right. If she went left it meant she didn’t trust herself to stay out for long.
It wasn’t his business, really, but the thought of her falling down on her walk was like acid on Joe’s brain. So after texting his buds Jacko and Metal—Neighbor lady brought food come for poker if you get back early, otherwise our regularly scheduled transfer of money to me tomorrow—he went looking for his ancient black watch cap and black running gear and suited up.
Once outside, he couldn’t run, he’d pass her in a minute and he wanted to stay behind her. So though he felt like a jerk, instead, when he was worried about her, he walked fast then stopped to do stretches. Luckily there wasn’t anyone around to look at him, because they’d think he was insane to stretch longer than he walked. He looked like a fool.
Which was cool, because that’s how he felt. Awkward and clumsy. Joe was usually pretty smooth with the ladies. He’d never had a big problem attracting them and he’d never wanted one he couldn’t have. It had all worked out really well until Isabel.
She tied him up in knots.
A month ago, Isabel had come home limping and he’d rushed out the door. It wasn’t a sprain, thank God, but she’d banged her knee badly. He’d patched her up the best he could and had Metal come over to be sure. Metal had been their team medic and what he didn’t know about injuries wasn’t worth knowing.
No one else had come to her, for her.
Isabel seemed to be alone in the world, which baffled him. She was so beautiful his jaw had dropped the first time he saw her, talking to the moving guys. Good thing she wasn’t looking his way otherwise he’d have scared her off. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She’d been sick, that was easy to see. She’d clearly lost a lot of weight recently. Joe knew all about that. He’d dropped from his fighting weight of 210 to 150 by the time he was released from the hospital. When he’d walked with two crutches outside the rehab unit’s doors, the skin seemed to drop off him. If they’d put him in old smelly clothes with a hat and a guitar on a sidewalk people would have been lining up to drop coins in the hat out of sheer mercy.
He’d worked hard and was back to 180, and it was all muscle. He’d get all the way back to 210, most of it thanks to Isabel’s cooking.
That first day had started it. The moving guys had been total shitheads. They clearly’d had another delivery before the day’s end and had simply dumped her stuff as fast as they could and left. Some things they’d even left on her front lawn.
He’d never forget that sight of her, lost and lonely in the middle of boxes and a few pieces of good furniture shoved up against the wall. He’d knocked on her open front door and she’d turned to look at him and pow! He was lost.
“Hey,” he’d said gently, “I’m your next-door neighbor. Joe Harris. Need a hand?”
Bones, his orthopedic surgeon, had given him strict instructions to use the cane until the end of the month. Bones had also said that with anyone else, he’d order the use of two crutches for the next two months. But Bones knew Joe was a former SEAL and he knew it was pointless trying to stop Joe from pushing forward with his rehab.
However, Bones had been really strict on using at least the cane for the next four weeks and had given Joe a long, boring lecture on load-bearing coefficients and fusion time and yada yada. It had all made sense at the time and Joe had been following doctor’s orders like a good little patient.
But seeing that beautiful woman trying to tug a couch toward the wall…well, he couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t sit by and watch. He tossed the cane and spent the afternoon helping her unpack. His bones had ached that night, but what the hell. Though he was just back on his feet, he was still stronger than she was. So he’d carried in boxes from the lawn, set up some furniture, unpacked her books and when he saw that she couldn’t take it anymore, he’d gone back to his place and stared at the wall for an hour, seeing that face.
The next morning he found freshly baked cinnamon buns and a pan of banana bread outside his front door.
That first week became a pattern. He helped her set up her stuff and he’d find amazing things to eat outside his door.
She didn’t talk much and he didn’t press her. Something crappy had happened to her—he recognized the thousand-yard stare of someone who’d seen bad shit. The bad shit had gone down fairly recently, too. Once, the sleeve of her sweater rode up and he saw a big scar where something had sliced her. He knew scars. That couldn’t have been more than six months old.
Also—it looked a lot like a knife scar and he’d stopped what he was doing as a fit of rage overtook him.
Someone had knifed her?
Some fuckhead had taken a knife and sliced her? He knew knives, was good with knives. Knew what knives could do to the human body. In many ways, a knife could be more devastating than a bullet.
Isabel had caught his look, quietly pulled her sweater down over her forearm and turned away. It couldn’t have been more plain if she had shouted the words. I don’t want to talk
about it.
She was clearly traumatized. She couldn’t talk about it? Fine. He knew all he really needed to know, anyway. Amazingly beautiful, really sad, incredible cook.
Messed with his head and his gonads.
The rest would come later, whenever she felt like talking.
And if someone had done this to her and he found out who that fuckhead was? The fucker was a dead man walking.
So Joe had resigned himself to waiting it out until she felt comfortable enough with him to talk about it.
God knew he had time on his hands. He wasn’t going anywhere. The doctors wouldn’t let him go to work for another month, though he was itching to.
His rehab was hard but he was on the mend and it was a steadily upward trajectory. Metal wouldn’t let it be anything else. Sometimes Jacko showed up, too, at the gym, to spot him. Metal knew everything there was to know about physiology and Jacko was a world-class gym rat so between the two of them he was putting himself back together again in record time.
He had friends, he had the full support of his company, ASI.
Who did she have?
Nobody. Except him.
She wasn’t looking well at all today. The ground had frozen overnight and there were unexpected pockets of ice.
Joe had good balance but Isabel didn’t.
Isabel might need him.
Joe headed out.
* * *
“I THINK IT might be time to pass on to phase two,” the voice on the phone said.
“All right,” Hector Blake answered and there was a faint click and then silence.
The voice, as always, had been put through an anonymizer and was a metallic tenor. It could be anyone—man, woman or child—there was no way to tell. The software program was created to disguise any identifying characteristics. Though Blake would bet good money it was a man.
Blake could bet good money because the voice at the other end of the line had made him several billion dollars overnight, and so he could be an alien from Aldeberan for all Blake cared.
Still, he had a mental image of the man, sitting at a desk somewhere.
The office would be ordered and plush, full of comforts. There was something prissy about the voice. The anonymizer changed the timbre and tone of the voice but couldn’t change the syntax, the small pauses, the vocabulary.
So, Blake had built up this image of an elegantly dressed, fussy man sitting in an elegant office, dispensing orders like God. Just about as powerful as God, actually, because the man was planning on bringing down the most powerful country on earth in several stages.
Phase one had been a resounding success. So he supposed it didn’t really matter who the voice belonged to.
He remembered clearly the day the voice had called. First of all, he’d called on Blake’s personal cell, which was interesting in and of itself. Very few people had his personal number and Blake took care to keep that number low. He had a very busy, highly successful law practice. His office had ten lines and he had two—one for internal calls and one for outside calls. His staff answered his phone at home and very few were forwarded on to him. He had two cells for business and one for personal calls, which he rarely used. The person who’d called that day had called him on his personal cell.
It had been clear immediately that the voice was altered. Right away, Blake had been both intrigued and irritated. He was a busy man and silly games bored him.
Until the caller told him what the call was about and Blake sat up straight, electrified.
This was—this was illegal and treasonous and immoral.
And yet highly profitable. Almost unimaginably so.
When Blake had asked who was talking, the voice answered, “Call me M.”
Blake had hummed the Bond tune but nobody laughed on the other end.
Blake would never have believed that someone would approach him with a plan this terrifying, this audacious. But M had, and over the course of an hour’s conversation a day for several weeks, his reaction shifted from never to maybe to yes.
And then they’d started talking details.
It had come at a moment in Blake’s life in which he was becoming a shade depressed and a little bored. He’d been born for great things and, yes, he’d accomplished his fair share. He’d turned his family’s small estate into a big one. He’d founded a successful law firm specializing in international law and he’d published so many articles in the field he was considered an expert. He’d advised the State Department and the European Union and the United Nations on aspects of treaties.
He’d been an ambassador for two years. To Andorra, it was true, but it was enough to be called ambassador for the rest of his days.
He’d run twice for the senate and won both times, but his time there had been boring and the experience soon grew stale.
However, in spite of all his success, marriage one had broken down—so many years ago he could hardly remember her face—as had marriages two and three. He had no children except an out-of-wedlock girl in Southeast Asia he occasionally sent money to.
None of his ex-wives spoke to him, though they cashed his checks readily enough.
Blake had made his mark, but it wasn’t enough.
What M proposed was enough. God, yes. More than enough. It would put Blake right up there in the history books with Alexander, with Charlemagne, with Napoleon. One of the most powerful men ever to have lived.
Viceroy of the Americas.
Every time he said that title to himself, he smiled secretly. It was becoming so real to him, his own manifest destiny, that current reality was starting to fade. And yet—it was reality that somehow seemed a veiled scrim, almost invisible.
He found himself caught up in plans for the After, completely taken up by what the world would be after the plan came to fruition, completely forgetting that the plan hadn’t been implemented in full yet.
It had begun, though.
He was wealthy beyond belief and soon he would be powerful beyond belief.
Viceroy of the Americas.
The Washington Massacre had been phase one and that had been a resounding success.
One extra special fillip to the Massacre was that it had taken out the Delvauxes, the whole brood. Simply swatted them away, like you would with pernicious flies.
Officious pricks, every single one of them.
The Blakes and Delvauxes had been friends for three generations.
Everyone thought Blake and Alex Delvaux were friends when the truth was Blake despised Alex, always had. Hated all the Delvauxes, actually, with their shock of blondish hair, athleticism and charisma. Kennedys for the twenty-first century. Seemingly destined for greatness when there had been no greatness there, just mediocrity and good cheekbones.
It had been his distinct pleasure to arrange for the Massacre to be at a campaign party announcing Alex’s candidacy for the presidential nomination.
Wiped almost all of them out.
All in all, over fifty Delvauxes killed. Every single one, actually, except for one.
Blake frowned.
Why Isabel Delvaux had been spared was beyond him. The utter vagaries of chance. She was a pretty thing, some kind of food maven, completely inconsequential. Her survival was a quirk of fate. She wasn’t political in any way, as many of the Delvauxes had been. Had gone on record as being against her father’s campaign, but for personal reasons not political reasons. Most of the Delvauxes were highly political and very vocal. Had any of the political Delvauxes survived the blast, Blake would have had them put down by his team because none of them would stand still for phase two.
Blake let Isabel be. She wasn’t going to make waves. She was a shadow of her former self and had changed her name and crossed the country to live a recluse’s life in Portland, Oregon.
&nbs
p; It was a very good thing that it looked like Isabel could barely stand on her feet, because she’d seen things she shouldn’t have. For one electric moment that night, in the midst of the Massacre, their eyes had met and Blake saw that she’d realized something. Then the building had blown. He thought she’d died together with the rest and had been astonished three days later to discover she was in a coma at George Washington University Hospital.
He’d been very tempted to send a kill team to her. There was so much chaos everywhere that it would have been easy to slip into her hospital room and inject an air bubble in the IV line.
In the end, he’d decided to wait it out and he’d been right.
But he kept an eye on her, checking in at intervals. She remembered literally nothing from the night of the Massacre.
If her memory ever came back, Blake would have her put down. He had a man in Portland keeping an eye on her.
No, Isabel was no threat.
So, now they were passing on to phase two.
He got up, poured himself a thirty-two-year-old single malt and sat down again, admiring the view outside his windows.
Viceroy of the Americas. He smiled and took another sip of his 1983 Macallan.
Chapter Two
Portland
IT WAS FREEZING cold and windy, but Isabel Delvaux, now Isabel Lawton, went out anyway. Her daily torture session—a one-hour walk. It had to be done. If she didn’t grit her teeth and force herself to go out, she’d never leave the house.
Staying in her house forever. It scared her that the thought didn’t scare her.
The wind was as raw as she felt. She had three layers under her down coat but the wind made her shiver anyway. Probably because of the exhaustion. It had been another horrible, sleepless night. Just like the night before and the night before that and like tomorrow night would be. She hadn’t had one decent night’s sleep since the Massacre.
