She flopped down on her back, closed her eyes, and breathed. The scent of pine combined with a tinge of earthy dampness from the moss filled her nostrils. The pine needles slithered beneath her outstretched arms. After a moment, she opened her eyes, inhaled, and found herself looking up into a whole heaven’s worth of stars. They were sprinkled like glitter across the satin midnight sky, twinkling down at her. The moon wasn’t visible—what she was seeing was basically a cutout circle of sky framed by jagged-edged cliffs—but it wasn’t needed. The universe wheeled above her, perfect and whole.
“Sam,” she breathed, forgetting that they had issues in her eagerness to share the vision overhead.
No answer. She cut her eyes around their little hideaway, which basically looked like a giant had taken a bite out of the base of a rocky cliff. No Sam. Groaning, she sat up and took a better look around. The space wasn’t that big, a semicircle maybe ten feet deep by eight feet wide at its widest point. Certainly not big enough to conceal a full-grown man, even in the dark.
Maddie looked carefully around at the rock walls one more time, and reached the inescapable conclusion: Sam was not there. Neither, now that she thought about it, was Zelda.
Panic was starting to feel like her natural state.
Clambering to her feet, she took a couple steps forward and stopped. What was she going to do? Hunting around a dark forest populated by night-vision-goggle-wearing mobsters who wanted to do her harm was clearly not a good idea. Likewise, yelling was out.
Sam came around the edge of the opening just then, making Maddie jump. He was carrying a small bundle under one arm, and Zelda trailed him wearily.
“You scared the life out of me,” she said through her teeth. The fact that she was whispering did not in any way take away from the vehemence of her tone. “Where did you go?”
“I backtracked a little. I thought that was an old campsite we passed back there, and sure enough, it was. Look, we hit the mother lode. A blanket”—he held up a tattered scrap of cloth about the size of a beach towel—“and a jacket”—it looked like a man’s long-abandoned windbreaker, and Maddie thought that she’d have to be naked in Siberia before she wore it—“and a can. I even filled it at the creek and brought you back some water. You’ve got blood on your face, and I thought you might want to wash it off before you start attracting bears. They’re drawn to the smell of blood, you know.”
Maddie’s eyes widened as she took what looked and felt like a battered tin can out of his hand. “You’re kidding.”
With the sky open above them, there was just enough light to see him smile.
“Maybe about the bears. Not about the blood on your face. You’ve got a tiny little cut just ... here.” He reached out a forefinger to feather a touch across her cheekbone just below her eye, almost exactly as he’d done once before.
And her heart skipped a beat.
Stupid.
“Thank you,” she almost growled at him, backing away with the can. “And you’ve got blood on your face, too, by the way.”
“Not anymore. I washed it off in the creek.”
“Oh. Well. It’s too dark to tell.”
Maddie retreated with the can to the edge of the enclosure so that she wouldn’t get their mossy carpet wet, then rinsed her face, her neck, her hands. The cool water felt so good to her poor, abused finger that she let it soak inside the can for several long moments. When she pulled it out at last, though, it throbbed even worse than it had before, as if somehow she’d woken sleeping nerve endings. Grimacing, she dried it on the hem of her shirt, and then used what was left of the water in the can on her feet. Her poor bruised and tender feet that, wet, picked up dozens of pine needles when, having finished her impromptu bath and abandoning the can, she tromped back toward Sam. He was sitting at the very back of their little dugout with his back leaning against the wall, one knee bent and Zelda in fur-rug mode at his side.
“Feel better?” he asked as she sat down, not too close, on his other side.
“A little.” She leaned her head back against the rock and looked up at the stars. Squinting, she thought she could just make out part of the Little Dipper.
“Sam?”
“Hmm?”
She looked sideways at him. His head was turned her way, and he met her gaze. Glinting black eyes in the dark ...
At the memories that image conjured up, her body tightened somewhere deep inside.
“Do you think we’re safe here?”
He made a face. “As safe as it’s possible to be under the circumstances. Unless they stumble across us by accident, they’re not going to find us. Night-vision goggles can’t see through rock. And if they should try using heat-seeking devices, the rocks will block those, too.”
“Heat-seeking devices? Do you think they have those?” Maddie never would have thought of that. It was scary to think that on her own, she would still be stumbling around through the woods, vulnerable to detection by devices that had never even crossed her mind.
“Hey, the world’s gone high-tech.”
There was a pause in which Maddie stared up at the stars and contemplated that.
“I think you saved my life a couple of times today. Thank you.”
“Just doing my job,” he said with no inflection at all.
There it was, then. Her answer. For him, there was no going back to what they’d had. She might as well face it: As she had known it would, the truth had changed everything.
“Yes, I know,” she said, looking back up at the stars while her throat ached with what felt uncomfortably like unshed tears. “But thanks.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his head turn toward her again.
“Anyway, I owe you, too. You could have left me cuffed to the bumper of that truck,” he said.
A quick smile trembled around the edges of her mouth. “Not if I wanted to drive it.”
“There’s that.”
He was smiling, too, faintly. Maddie felt another sharp pang in the region of her heart. The truth had changed everything—except the connection they still seemed to have. There was an easiness, a comfortableness, a friendship between them. That was going to be almost harder to lose than the rest.
“Sam ...” She didn’t know what she meant to say. Something, anything, to make it all better. Even knowing that there was nothing that could make it all better. Nothing that could take her past away.
He cut her off. “Look, why don’t you try to sleep a little? As soon as the sun’s up, we’ve got to get moving. Here, take the blanket, take the jacket, make a bed.”
She accepted the items he produced from the shadows behind Zelda and held out to her, then hesitated. “What about you?”
“Darlin’, I’m an FBI agent. Going without sleep is what us agents do.”
The darlin’ got her, and the joking tone got her. Her throat closed up. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She wanted to turn back time. She wanted to scoot over next to him and wrap her arms around his neck and rest her head on his chest and have him hold her. She wanted ...
... what she couldn’t have.
So she shook the blanket and spread it out not far from him, then shook the jacket, too, and rolled it into a pillow. Trying not to think about how filthy the items probably were and what they might have been used for in the past, she lay down on her makeshift bed, then turned onto her side so that her back was toward him, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep. It was almost certainly after midnight, she calculated, although it was hard to judge precisely how long it had been since the truck had run off the road. Her body ached from head to toe. If she had to pick the thing that pained her most, though, it would have to be her poor pinkie. Having been awakened by the water, it didn’t seem to want to return to its former seminumb state. Cradling her injured hand close to her chest, she had an instant mental picture of Fish slamming the hammer down onto it and shivered.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Then her thoughts skittered to Sam, and that wasn’t sleep-inducing, e
ither, so she deliberately tried to empty her mind. Immediately, the sounds of the night seemed to increase tenfold. She could hear every whir, squeak, and hoot. She could hear the whisper of a breeze blowing over the top of the cliffs, although she couldn’t feel it down in her cozy nest. She could hear the rumble of the nearby creek. She could hear the soft rattle of Zelda’s snores.
She was counting them when she fell asleep.
Sometime later, the dream came.
Once again she was lying on that small, narrow bed in that house that wasn’t hers, bound hand and foot, shaking with terror. The dark silhouette of a man watched her from the doorway.
He was going to kill her ...
“Maddie! Jesus, Maddie!”
She came awake to the sound of Sam’s voice, to the feel of his hand pressing down over her mouth, to the sight of his face looming over hers. Her eyes opened wide, but it was a moment before she registered more than just those facts. Then she saw the starry sky high above his head, and smelled the scent of pine, and felt the coarse blanket beneath her aching body. And she remembered where she was, and what had happened.
No wonder she’d had the dream.
“Maddie? Jesus, what was that?”
Sam removed his hand from her mouth cautiously, and she saw that his face was hard and anxious, and his eyes were worried. She was flat on her back now, and he was lying on his side beside her, propped on an elbow, his hand still hovering above her mouth.
“Did I ... yell?” Maddie couldn’t help it. Her voice quavered.
“Screamed is more like it.”
“Oh, God.” She closed her eyes. She was shaking all over, she realized, still terrified, as she always was in the aftermath of the dream—and terrified, too, that she might have given them away. “Do you think anybody heard?”
He shook his head. “Not unless they’re so close they’re about to find us anyway. Not much can get past these rocks.”
Thank God for the rocks. Maddie closed her eyes and tried to stop shaking. Tried to push the nightmare images from her mind.
“Bad dream?”
She nodded. His hand slid down her arm, paused halfway.
“You’re trembling.”
“It’s a really bad dream.” She got the words out with an effort. But she couldn’t make the trembling go away.
“About what happened today?”
“N-no. I get it—sometimes. It’s about—my—about something that happened in the past.”
She could feel tears leaking out past her eyelids. She could no more stop them than she could stop the trembling.
“Shit.” He must have seen, because his arms came around her, and he pulled her against him, stretching out at full length on the blanket beside her and settling her so that her head rested on his shoulder and her hand with its poor, injured pinkie lay atop his chest. He sounded almost resigned. “All right, darlin’. Talk to me.”
“Sam ...” His tone registered. He was talking to Maddie-with-a-past, and the knowledge hurt so much that she could hardly bear it. Her eyes opened, and she took a deep, shaking breath. Tears were sliding down her cheeks without her being able to do anything about them, and she blinked and sniffed, and wiped her eyes. “It’s a bad dream, okay? I get it sometimes. No big deal.”
“Looks like it.” His tone was skeptical. Then he sighed. “We were going to have this conversation in a few days, when we were safe out of this mess and emotions had had time to cool down. But you’re having nightmares and crying, and I’ve got nothing but time. So talk to me. You don’t want to tell me about your dream, fine. Tell me about your past. You said your father was in the Mob.”
Maddie shook her head and sniffed again. “I said he used to do jobs for the Mob.”
“There’s a difference?”
She nodded. The tears had slowed to a trickle now. Soon, she knew, they’d stop entirely. “My dad hated the Mob. He hated what they made him do. He just ... couldn’t help himself.”
“What do you mean, he couldn’t help himself?”
Maddie glanced up at him, slightly surprised to find his face so close. He smelled of creek water, a little, and of fresh air and himself, and he felt warm and solid and very male against her. The starlight touched on his eyes, making them gleam. Her eyes slid over his lean, bronzed cheeks, his banged-up nose, his square, unshaven chin. His wide shoulder seemed made to pillow her head, and she could feel the gentle rise and fall of his chest beneath her hand. Being held like this in his arms felt so good, so right, that she didn’t even want to move away although she knew, in the interest of salvaging what she could of her poor, battered heart, that she should. Instead, she gave a little sigh of surrender. For better or worse, she was going to bare her soul to him. It was up to him to make of the truth what he would.
“My dad—Charles, his name was Charles Dolan—was a gambler.” The faintest of smiles touched her mouth. “A very bad gambler. He always lost. Way more than he—we—had.”
“He’s dead?”
She nodded. Her throat threatened to close up.
“What about your mother?”
That was easier. “She died when I was two. I don’t even really remember her. My dad kept a few pictures, and when I think about her, one of those pictures is what I see.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
Maddie shook her head. “Just me and my dad. It was always just me and my dad.”
“So, tell me about him. You said he was a gambler.”
“When I was a little girl, he had a job. He worked for a car lot in Baltimore. He didn’t make a lot, but we had a nice apartment and groceries and the whole bit. But he gambled, all the time. On everything. I found out later that when he lost, he’d do something to get the money. Skim parts from the dealership he worked for, or break into a bunch of cars and steal stuff out of them and sell it, or something. Eventually he lost his job, of course, and that’s when we started moving around, from apartment to apartment, mostly in Baltimore, sometimes in D.C. He’d work at whatever he could find, and I’d go to school wherever we were. When I was fourteen, I lied about my age and got a job as a checkout clerk in a Walgreens after school. It didn’t pay much, but we were living in a cheap little apartment, and what I made each month would just about barely cover the rent. I usually managed to catch my dad whenever he got paid to get enough for groceries and the utility bill, so we didn’t go hungry or anything. I thought we were doing all right. Not fantastic, not even real good, but all right. But he was gambling. I didn’t know how much he was gambling.”
“It’s a sickness with some people,” Sam murmured. His arm was sliding up and down her arm, just barely, offering wordless comfort, she thought.
“It was a sickness with him,” Maddie confirmed. “He was a great guy except for that one thing.”
“So how did he start doing jobs for the Mob?”
Maddie drew a breath. “It was the gambling. He made a big bet and he lost. He borrowed money from a loan shark to cover it, and then he couldn’t pay. I didn’t know anything about it until one night these two guys beat my dad up in the parking lot of our apartment building. It was summer. I had just graduated from high school, and I was working full-time. I got home from work and saw my dad on the ground and these two guys just pounding on him and kicking him. He was a big guy, strong, and he just lay there and covered up his head and let them do it. I started screaming and ran over there to help him, and they just stopped and got into a car and drove off. And ... and one of them yelled out his window that I should tell my dad that he ought to pay his debts or next time he was going to wind up dead.”
“Shit,” Sam said, and the hand that had been moving on her arm stilled. Glancing up at him, she could see that his eyes had narrowed and his jaw was hard. “You give any thought to going to the police?”
“That’s your answer for everything, isn’t it? The police,” Maddie said with gentle scorn. “Actually, at the time, I wanted to call the police, but Dad wouldn’t let me. He said if I did, they�
��d kill him. So I didn’t. But he was hurt and shaken up, and he told me about the loan shark. It was so much money. I knew it would take us years to pay it off, if we ever could. So the next day I went to the loan shark—it was this one guy, John Silva, who had a business called Paycheck Loans—to see if we couldn’t set up a payment plan or something.”
“Why am I not surprised at that?” Sam asked into the air, closing his eyes. Then he looked back down at her. “So what did the loan shark say?”
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” Maddie said defensively. “At least, I didn’t think so then. He laughed. He said he didn’t do payment plans, but if I wanted to work for his company and try to pay it off, that would be okay. And he said he’d give my dad some jobs that he could do to pay it off, too.”
She felt him take a breath.
“Let me guess: You and your dad both started working for the loan shark, and your dad kept gambling and getting in deeper.”
“Yeah.” Maddie’s tone was rueful. “Dad just couldn’t get out from under it, and Mr. Silva started loaning him to other people, Mob people, to do things—bad things, I found out later ... and then ... and then ...”
“And then what?” Sam prompted when Maddie’s voice trailed off.
“Then these two FBI agents started sniffing around Paycheck Loans.” Her voice was flat. “ ’Course, I didn’t know what they were at first. They were undercover.”
“Ahh.” The drawn-out syllable signified that light had dawned. “Go on.”
“But one day one of them came by the apartment when I was there by myself and told me that he was an FBI agent. He told me my dad was involved in illegal activities, and if I didn’t want to see him arrested and put away for a long time, I had to get some information from Mr. Silva’s files for them.”
“Shit,” Sam said, and the arms around her tightened. A beat passed, in which he seemed to be thinking about something. “You wouldn’t have happened to have caught their names, would you?”
“One went by Ken Welsh and the other by Richard Shelton, but I’m almost positive those weren’t their real names.”
“Probably not, if they were running an undercover operation,” Sam conceded. “So then you were on a slippery slope, hmm?”
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