by Jade Allen
Rachel was ripped out of her reverie by the sound of her phone vibrating again. She glanced at her cigarette; it had burned down to the filter while she had been woolgathering. Once more, she glanced at the screen and saw an unrecognizable number, a message. Rachel glanced around; no one seemed to be near, no one was paying any attention to her—all of the other terrace inhabitants were locked in their own conversations. She reached into her purse in the chair next to her and withdrew a pair of ear buds and plugged them into her headphone jack, taking a final sip of her coffee and lighting another cigarette.
The message started with throbbing, heartbeat-steady drums, with a winding, wandering guitar coming in over, bass weaving in between. Unmistakably sensual, Rachel shuddered; it was the sonic embodiment of slow, lazy lovemaking—she could almost feel Dylan’s hands on her. “Have you got color in your cheeks/ D’you ever get that fear that you can’t shift like summat in your teeth/ Are there some aces up your sleeve/ have you no idea that you’re in deep, I dreamt about you nearly every night this week/ How many secrets can you keep? ‘Cause there’s this tune I found that makes me think of you somehow and I play it on repeat…” Rachel gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, breathing in slowly. She exhaled, feeling a mixture of intense desire and dread. “Been wondering if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts…”
She opened her eyes and picked up her phone, clenching her teeth as she ruthlessly tapped the icon to delete the message. Rachel swallowed against the lump forming in her throat and took her sunglasses off, looking around for a server. She wanted another shot, she wanted another coffee, and she wanted, more than anything, to forget that the last two weeks had happened.
It had been after the sex, when her mind was finally clearing from the haze of multiple orgasms, that Rachel had remembered her misgivings. She had sat up in their shared bed and pinned Dylan down with a scowl. “I told you,” she had said, pulling away from him, moving out of easy range of his caressing hands, “I wasn’t going to be distracted forever. You’re going to tell me what the hell is going on and how you figure in all of this.”
“We have to get ready to get out of town,” Dylan had said.
“Oh, but we had time for you to fuck my brains out? You keep telling me I’m in danger—but…” She remembered Brock’s words. How did she know that the guy who’d been at her apartment had really been one of his henchmen? How did she know that her apartment building had been torched at Brock’s orders? Dylan had shown up so conveniently after she’d gotten the first threatening phone call.
“I told you,” Dylan said, sitting up in the bed with her, reaching out to pull her back to him. “I’ll explain everything when we get out of here—it’s not safe.”
“Tell me one thing,” Rachel had said, pushing him away and slipping out from underneath the blankets. She had looked around for her clothes in irritation, feeling vulnerable and somehow like prey in her naked, sexed-up state. “Are you…” she had taken a deep breath, both needing to know the answer to her question and dreading it. “Are you having sex with me because you want to, because it’s convenient, or because… because it makes me—it keeps me complacent?” Dylan had looked at her for a long moment in silence, and Rachel had clenched her teeth and gathered up her clothes.
“Love, it’s not as simple as that,” he had protested.
“Really? Because from where I’m standing it seems pretty damn simple. Why are you having sex with me? I mean it’s not like it keeps happening accidentally.” She had dressed quickly and began grabbing things from around the room almost at random, her eyes blurring with tears.
“You came onto me the first time,” Dylan pointed out. “You practically threw yourself at me, Love.”
“So tell me the truth!” Rachel had shouted. “Are you just screwing me because it’s a way to pass the time, or—or…” her heart had pounded in her chest. “You know what? Fuck it. I don’t even want to know.” She had found her purse, grabbed it quickly, and ran out of the bedroom, out of the apartment, as quickly as she could; she had barely heard Dylan’s shouted protest over the sound of her own blood roaring in her ears.
Her card and her rudimentary French skills had gotten her a ticket to Paris; an hour later she got off of the train at Gare Saint Lazare, her head still spinning. She lost herself in the crowds for a while, going outside for a cigarette and watching all around her in defensive anxiety.
A series of impulsive decisions sent her to Lyon, and then quickly to Geneva on the TGV and a reserved first class seat on a commuter rail. The pristine alpine city with its churlish people had palled on her after two days, and the urge to keep moving—to get away from both Dylan and Brock—sent her back into France, to the Haute Savoie region close to the border; close to a major city but buried at the same time in rural splendor. It was between seasons, and while the pickings were slim, Rachel managed to find a house for rent on a per-month basis, and set about navigating a new town.
She knew Dylan was looking for her; she knew that if Brock’s henchmen were able to track her movements in Rouen, they would certainly have known that she had fled the city. What Rachel did not know was whether Brock had taken that as a sign that she hadn’t believed him. She had received no more messages from the man who had been painted as her enemy, who had treated her with a mixture of condescension and courtesy when they met, but Rachel was wise enough to realize that the lack of messages didn’t mean much of anything at all. Her skin crawled with the sensation she felt of being constantly watched. She knew she should get rid of her phone; if Dylan was still reaching out to her that way, then she could be tracked by it.
What she wanted, more than anything, was to know what to think. She wanted to know how to react, what to do, whom to believe. She wanted to be able to sleep a full night without waking up three or five times wondering if it was a noise that had stirred her out of her dreams, and whether that sound was something she could react to or just the regular noises of a wood-and-stone house shifting in the night.
A waitress appeared at the table, and Rachel summoned up her best polite smile. “Un autre café, et un autre myrtille, s’il vous plait,” she said. The waitress gave her a much more genuine smile than Rachel could bring herself to exchange, quietly collecting up her dirty cups and nodding her agreement to the order before walking briskly away. Within a few moments, another tiny, steaming cup of dark coffee, another clear jigger of liquor, and a paper-wrapped cube of sugar was in front of Rachel once more, and she took a deep breath. She had to think; she had to figure out what her next moves were. She peeled the paper from around the sugar cube and dropped it into her coffee, sitting back and opening up her music library on her phone. She knew she was being a glutton for punishment, but she didn’t care as she flipped through the songs she had filled the phone with and found “Everlong.” The gloomy, glittery sound filled her ears, and Rachel knocked back her shot, setting the glass down and picking up the coffee spoon to stir the dissolving sugar into her coffee. “Breathe out, so I can breathe you in/ hold you in/ And now, I know you’ve always been/ out of your head, out of my head I sang…”
****
Rachel was making her way back to the tiny house she had rented, weaving slightly from the eau-de-vie burning through her veins, when she felt the sensation of being watched. She cussed softly to herself; she had been stupid to drink a third shot. She felt a flicker of genuine regret for leaving Dylan—even if she couldn’t trust him, at least she had felt safe, protected around him. At least he was alert when she was incapable of it, even if the people he was alert to were apparently not necessarily her enemies. Rachel stumbled, reaching out blindly to grab onto something to steady her on the unevenly paved road, looking around in the early evening gloom to try and find the source of her sudden presentiment.
“Rachel, please, let me steady you,” someone said, and she felt a firm hand on her shoulder doing just that. The voice was unfamiliar—and the fact that the voice was speaking English, w
hen she had become accustomed to a constant gabble of too-fast French and weird Swiss German, sent a thrill of fear through Rachel that made her try and lurch away from the hand holding her up. “I’m not here to hurt you, Rachel; calm down.”
“Who are you?” Rachel asked, turning her head. She caught a vaguely familiar face; a middle-aged man, around the age of fifty or maybe sixty on the outside, impeccably groomed and clean-shaven.
“I don’t blame you for not remembering me,” the man said with the faintest glimmer of a smile. “Why don’t we talk at your place? That seems much more comfortable than out here on the road—these Alpine drivers play fast and loose with speed for people would could careen off the side of a mountain at any moment.”
“I’m not leading you back to my house until you tell me who you are and why I shouldn’t start screaming right now,” Rachel said.
“James Whitley,” the man said. “I’ve been looking for you ever since you dropped out of Dylan’s care. You’re in a great deal of trouble, my dear.” Rachel stared at the man in shock; this was her mysterious benefactor? He looked like someone’s father-in-law. He looked like someone she might have seen at a bistro in Rouen. He didn’t look like an unstable billionaire CEO who knew the kinds of people who could procure a fake passport that had fooled four different countries. “We have a lot to talk about, Rachel.”
“Yeah, I suppose we do,” she said, sighing. There was obviously no getting away from him now; his arm was around her shoulder, and even if she wasn’t just shy of drunk, Rachel didn’t think that she could have managed the steep road up to where her rented house stood at a run. “Okay. I’m guessing you probably already know where I live, if you managed to accost me on the way there.”
“I had a good idea of the neighborhood,” James said with another quick smile. “Let’s get you up this last hill and then we can have a nice, long conversation about what’s going on in your life.”
“My life?” Rachel began to walk slowly, following the road, leaning against James slightly. “My life is shit right now, thanks to you; that’s what’s going on in it.”
“There are quite a few people who would find your life pretty romantic,” James pointed out. “But I can sympathize; you’re not wandering around Europe by choice, and you’re under constant threat. I promise you there are a lot of reasons for the things I have done—I’m not out to torture you. But I think that part of the conversation is best saved for home, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Rachel said, stumbling slightly and catching herself. “I don’t seem to have a hell of a lot of choice in anything that’s been going on for the past two months, I might as well just go along with your plan.”
****
Dylan worried at his bottom lip as he watched the scenery flash past the windows of the train. It had been over a week since he had seen Rachel; over a week since she had asked him why he was having sex with her—a question that, in his stunned mind, had nothing to do with the real issue at hand—and then ran out of the apartment. He had been so baffled by her question that it had taken him a few minutes to get his clothes on and follow her; and she had taken advantage of that head start to lose herself somewhere in Rouen, and then leave the city altogether.
He knew that she had left, but he didn’t know where she had gone. Dylan shifted in his seat, taking a slow breath. This is why you don’t get involved with the target, you dumbass, he thought to himself. It had been much easier to track her before; he had been able to remain objective, he had been able to think clearly about where a woman like Rachel would go, what she would do. When Whitley had called him to give him the details on their arrangements—the planned escape from Rouen that he and Rachel would have made if she hadn’t left—Dylan had felt ethically bound to tell his client that he had lost the girl.
“What the hell did you do, Dylan?” Whitley had asked him after a moment’s silence.
“We got into a fight and she ran off.” Another moment of ominous silence.
“When I told you to stay with her at all times, I didn’t mean to stay in her bed,” Whitley told him slowly. “You could have just as easily watched her without sleeping with her.”
“I don’t take my job quite that seriously,” Dylan had remarked caustically. “Look; from what I can gather she hopped a train, probably to Paris. That’s the only place she could really go to get the hell out of dodge from. I’ll see if I can pick up the trail there.”
“Do what you can,” Whitley had replied. “I’m going to take other measures. Do you think Jeffrey knows?”
“If he doesn’t now, he will soon,” Dylan said grimly. “We have to get to her first.”
“One of us does, anyway. Do what you have to do; send me the expenses later on.” With that, Whitley had ended the call, and Dylan had been left to his own devices to attempt to track a woman he thought he might never fully know across the country—and perhaps out of it—without having any idea of what she might do.
It had taken him a few days in Paris and a few persuasive questions to find someone who remembered the woman he described; slowly, Dylan began to trace the path that Rachel had taken, the trains across the country, out of it and into Geneva. He knew that if he was able to do it, Brock with his superior resources would be just as capable—if not more so.
Dylan worried at his bottom lip as he watched the French countryside pass by the window of the TGV. He picked up his phone and flipped through his music library; he had sent Rachel a few messages, a last-ditch effort to get her to reach out to him—but he had gotten no response. She may have ditched the phone, he thought grimly. For all I know I’m sending these messages to some confused French girl who has no idea why she keeps getting songs in her voicemail. As he picked another song from his collection to send to her—not knowing whether she would get it, whether she would understand—the lyrics filtered through his mind. “This indecision’s got me climbing up the wall…How did this come over me, thought I was above it all…Give me some rope I’m coming lose, I’m hanging on you…”
****
Dylan wandered the station at Geneva, sniffing the air as if it could possibly contain some trace of Rachel’s particular warm, spicy scent. He shook his head, clenching his teeth and working to control his irritation. She wasn’t in Geneva, he was somehow certain; she had landed there, dropped by the train, but if he knew her at all—if he understood the strange woman whose life he had been part of for over a month, until he and Brock had ruined the setup—she wouldn’t have stayed. She’d have moved on, prompted both by the need to lose herself even more thoroughly and the less-than-warm Swiss themselves. A big city could conceal her well, but it would also provide plenty of opportunities for her to be grabbed without anyone noticing it. So where would she have gone?
Some keenly refined sense twinged, and Dylan turned on his heel, coming out of his reverie abruptly. Something wasn’t right. He felt the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Looking around, at first Dylan saw nothing to alarm—people milling about the station, greeting friends who had come to meet them, rushing out to catch the next train leaving the station. But he became aware of a group of men who were standing a distance away, oddly still in the rush. Brock. Dylan felt his heart speed up. He had a few options; they wouldn’t want to take him down in public. They wouldn’t want to create a spectacle, reveal the falseness of their pretend-uniforms. They’d want to get the drop on him.
There would be taxis outside, along with the bus; Dylan could get into a vehicle, get away from them—maybe lose them, if the driver was good enough. Or he could jump onto another train, take the fine when they came to check tickets and get ejected somewhere. The options flitted through his mind as he moved through the station, doing his best to appear not to hurry; he had no more interest in drawing attention to himself—yet—than the hired hands looking for their opening to drop him. If they started to make their move, that would be the time to make a scene. The Swiss might be standoffis
h, but they were not about to let a bunch of people tarnish the reputation of their police with impunity.
Dylan started towards the entrance to the station, glancing around him in quick, darting gazes, keeping track of where Brock’s henchmen were, how they were moving to follow him as unobtrusively as possible. As he reached the doors, his heart beating faster, he heard one of them call out for him to stop; they had evidently come to the conclusion about what his plan might be to evade them and decided that a little scene was not as bad as losing their quarry.
He broke into a run, and felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. Fuck. Of all the times. Dylan slipped his hand into his pocket, darting out through the doors. He heard another shout behind them; one of the false officers was telling him to stop, that he was being detained—that he could face serious injury if he resisted arrest. Dylan plowed into a woman rushing towards the station and sidestepped, mumbling an apology in panicked, stilted French. Passersby, passengers waiting for their train, watched with morbid interest as Dylan made for the taxi stand, darting between and around people. More shouts from Brock’s henchmen behind him, the sound of one of them colliding with a very indignant Swiss man.
Dylan heard the air splitting crack an instant before he felt the impact of something hitting his back—he had no idea what. He staggered, almost but not quite stopping, as he continued towards the salvation of a cab; whatever it was, he was certain it had come from one of the henchmen, and as the shocking jolt of it settled into a sharp, prodding ache, he knew that if he let himself stop he didn’t want to know whatever other jollies they might have to apprehend him with. It would be in Brock’s interest to have him killed if he suspected that Dylan knew anything about Rachel’s whereabouts. Dylan sucked in a burning breath, feeling the sharp crackling pain settle into a throbbing ache in the back of his ribs. “I’m not bleeding, I can pay you, let me in and get me out of here—those aren’t real cops,” he told the driver. The man looked out at the oncoming men in uniforms and glanced at Dylan, taking in the import of his less-than-ideal French. The doors unlocked.
