by Jill Cooper
I don’t get the chance as Marcus steps up beside us with a grave expression on his face. “Lara. Mr. James.”
Donovan nods his head and already his hand is shoved into his pocket. Maybe he didn’t like Marcus. They had their differences, and most of it had to do with me. “Hey, Marcus. Any idea what’s going on tonight?”
Marcus sighs. “Hell if I know. Mr. Kincaid shut me out. After Lara left today, he threw his weight around with a—pardon the expression—a shit-eating grin if I ever saw one. Like he won.”
The words send a tingle up my leg.
“He was in Delilah’s office for hours having a closed-door meeting that I wasn’t privy to.”
I don’t like the sound of that at all. “Who was he meeting with?”
“Phone call.” Marcus shrugs. “I don’t know, but if you want access to the logs…”
“And have you get caught?” I raise my eyebrows. “If we’re going to outsmart Cameron, I’m going to need you here on the inside.”
“Outsmart him at what?” Donovan asks.
I nod my head toward the podium as Cameron heads out from behind the curtain. “Looks like we’re about to find out.”
Cameron takes the podium. The lights intensify on him, but toward the back, the shadow of a person stands. “Thank you,” Cameron lifts his hand in a wave, a simple gesture. Dimples appear on his cheeks when he smiles and it turns me cold because of how familiar it all seems. “Thank you for appearing tonight under such short notice. My dear friend, Ms. Delilah Chase,” Cameron’s face falls in what is supposed to be grief and sadness, but it looks false on his face.
“My dear friend, Delilah, was brutally murdered a few days ago. She entrusted me with this fine organization, the TTPA, and it’s my job to honor her last wishes.” Cameron reaches into his pocket and pulls out a blue piece of paper. As he unfolds it, I recognize it as a legal brief.
“And I, Delilah Chase, of sound mind and body, wish beyond hope, that the TTPA can be persuaded to loosen Time Travel restrictions.” The crowd audibly gasps and I feel faint. I don’t know where he got that document, but it can’t be real. It just can’t. That’s not what Delilah wanted. I knew her, loved her, it just wasn’t true.
I step forward without meaning to and Donovan reaches for my hand, but I snarl-up at Cameron anyway.
If he sees me, it doesn’t show on his face. He just keeps reading, occasionally gazing up at the crowd.
“It’s been my dream to bring well regulated, but open, time travel to the nation and to the world. Why keep such a great power for ourselves? If not for some narrow-minded fools in this organization, it’d already be so and I’m afraid…” Cameron takes a long breath, “afraid for my life if I move forward, which is why I am entrusting my vision with Cameron Kincaid and hope the board will keep in line with my wishes. For commerce and the rights of her citizens.”
He can’t do this. He just can’t. The TTPA doesn’t have the power to loosen the laws congress put into place. Laws put into place to protect people, protect the integrity of time.
My jaw grinds together and a pressure of pain builds up behind my eyes. I can barely see the crowd and only focus on Cameron’s face. He’s going to take it all away and I need to stop him. I can’t let him—
Cameron places his hands on the podium. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll be asking the board to remove the biggest roadblocks to Delilah’s wishes. Ms. Miranda Montgomery, Mr. Marcus O’Reily, and Ms. Lara Montgomery. It’s a shame really, she is the one who started it all and now…” he shakes his head as if my position is sad.
Like my position…I see red, it crowds my vision and my breath labors. I don’t know if I’ve ever been as angry as I am right now. Light’s flash in my vision and I can’t control it. Can’t stop it. I’m going to time jump and I don’t even want to stop it. I need time to think and I want out of that room. Now.
Marcus touches my arm and whispers. “Without us, the board will never hold strong. He knows this. Somehow, he knows this. Lara…” His voice edges with real fear.
“He’s a time traveler.”
“What?” Marcus gasps. “The system would’ve caught…”
I shake my head. “He has a different system. Based on someone else’s brain pattern. He as much as told me yesterday in the security booth.”
Marcus’s eyes can’t get any wider and his face flushes red. “Who? How?”
I can’t tell him that. Some secrets I just can’t give away.
Cameron nods his head as people applaud. I must’ve missed something he said. “Thank you. Thank you. Together with my wife, we’ll petition Congress. A slow process for sure, but the future for the TTPA is very bright. Stockholders, investors, we’re all going to make out very, very well.”
He couldn’t lay it on thicker if he tried.
He extends his hand to someone off stage and I wait to see who this wife is. A beautiful blond in a red dress smiles at him and takes his hand. Before she gazes out at me, I know who she is. My heart pounds and my skin shivers.
The wagons are circling. I’m trapped, like an animal.
Cassidy presents her cheek to Cameron and he kisses it daintily. Well, how nice. How quaint.
***
She’s the answer. She’s the problem. The solution is easy, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to do what needs to be done. She needs to be stopped, but I remember such a different person. I remember when she was my friend.
I can’t breathe and the ground rushes up to greet me. More than one person screams my name, but it’s Donovan who grabs my arm. “Lara!”
He holds the back of my head as he lays me back. “Hang in there, Lara. Hang in there.” He touches my cheeks and speaks with stress to Marcus. “Get her some water.”
I blink my eyes. With each blink the room changes. Florescent lights replace the chandeliers overhead. The regal ceiling is replaced with glass panes. Everyone in the room disappears. The colors flow together, flying and reforming in front of me.
Blinking one more time, I roll over and gaze out of a plexiglass wall.
I’m in a cage. I’m in that damn cage.
Chapter Fourteen
It can’t be real. I touch the plane of plexiglass with my fingers. Sure enough, it’s slick and cold against my fingers.
I’ve gotten out before, I can get out again. I glance down at myself and see my party dress is gone. I’m dressed in white scrubs and matching sneakers. My limbs shake as I rise to my feet, but I can’t go far because the cable attached to the back of my head keeps me tethered to a machine on the opposite side of the cage.
With a grunt, I grab it and try to pull it free, but pain assaults my brain with a flash of colors. I can’t get it out. I’m stuck.
“Oh, Lara. When will you ever learn….”
The voice jars me and I take a step back. It’s Rex’s voice with the deep, posh British accent. He’s back. The monster I killed long ago. A light turns on outside of my cage and he’s standing in his fine pressed suit, but it’s not Rex at all.
It’s Cameron, but his smile is as smug as it’s ever been. No one may have believed me that they were the same person, but I knew and now I’m vindicated.
Cameron steps forward and puts his hand on the glass. “Dear Lara, it’s such a pleasure to have you back where you belong.”
My insides heave with so much anger; I’m not sure where to direct it. “How’d you change your face?”
Cameron waves his finger back and forth. “A magician never reveals his secrets. Let’s just say, there are infinite choices when you have an infinite amount of timelines at your disposal. New technologies. New surgeries on a micro level. I was able to…cultivate what I wanted from each place. The future is as miraculous as one can imagine.”
Cameron paces in front of the cage but never takes his eyes off me. “And then I went back in time. As far back as I could, to leave a trail for Cameron Kincaid to pick up. Money. Power. Everything I learned in the future, I used to amass wealth.” He grins
at me. “And sell to your boyfriend. A willing, but an unknowing pawn.”
He wouldn’t get away with this. I would stop him. I would find away.
“I must confess; I was surprised at how fast you were onto Cameron. Onto me. It was genius, though, wasn’t it? The look on your face when you first heard my voice at that initial meeting.” Cameron steps forward and puts his hand on the glass. “Perfection. Artistry.”
Full of himself as usual. “How did you travel in time? You’ve never been able to travel in time. I killed you.”
Cameron shrugs as if it doesn’t matter. “There were a hundred different timelines. Different choices. Different reactions. There were timelines in which you still live in a cage.”
I refuse to believe it. “I closed the timelines. I looped them all back into one.”
“To stop Xavier Daniels?” Cameron’s eyebrows rise at the look of shock on my face. How could he know that? “Ahh… From here, I can watch everything. I can see all the choices and changes you made. And dear Lara, my unlucky niece, you did everything you said, except you didn’t take care of me. I’m the anomaly.”
The anomaly? I don’t understand what he means and I’m desperate to hear him out. “Rex….”
“We’ve talked long enough for now,” Cameron smirks as he steps away from the cage. He snaps his fingers and a moment later, light’s flick on in a row in the outer room. One after another, the lights illuminate one glass cage after another, after another.
In each cage, an unconscious person lays, hooked up to a monitor just like me, except I’m awake.
Dad. Molly. Jax.
And the one closest to me stills my breath. Rick. It’s Rick. When was the last time I thought of him, when was the last time I saw him?
I gaze out at them and I want to doubt what I know. What I’ve seen, but I don’t. I know what’s real. Cameron can’t take that from me. Whatever is going on here, it’s a nightmare. A bad dream. It can’t be real. It can’t be…
“See to it she lies back down and gets back to sleep.”
“Yes, Mr. Montgomery.”
The sound of Mom’s voice jars me. I back away from the door as she enters. “Mom?” But she doesn’t respond, she only puts her clipboard down and picks up a syringe.
“Hold still, Ms. Crane. It’ll only take a minute.” Her eyes have a dull sheen to them. She’s drugged, under Rex’s control. She doesn’t remember me, just like…
It can’t be the truth.
“Mom!” I beg her and grab her arm as she comes at me. She pushes and I sit down on the bed, unable to keep my jelly legs working. “Mom, please!”
She only smiles as she slips the needle beneath my skin. “I don’t know why she always calls me that.”
My head feels heavy and it falls onto the pillow. Everything’s going dark. My lids can’t stay open anymore and I wonder what’s real. What’s true.
Will my life ever really be mine?
Chapter Fifteen
“She’s waking up.”
Marcus says the words, but it’s someone else’s hand that grips me. When my eyes finally snap open, I recognize the sofa I’m lying on. The leather is soft and there’s a hand crocheted blanket thrown over my lap.
This is Marcus’s office. Beside me, Donovan perches on the edge of the coffee table. The look on his face is weary as he leans over me. “Thank God, you’re okay. When you went under—.”
“It’s the stress,” Marcus sighs as he paces the expanse of the wide office. He stops at the rear wall of bookcases only to turn around and start over again. “Everything Cameron Kincaid gave a speech about…”
Cameron. The cage.
I bolt up, into a sitting position and I’m struck by a wave of nausea. Groaning, I grip my forehead. It feels as if a freight train slammed into me, but I ignore it to see the hands on the ticking clock. They’re going the right way, but what if I can’t trust that, anymore?
What if I can’t trust me, anymore?
“Lara.” Donovan slides beside me, onto the couch. “What’s the matter?” His hand on my knee is supposed to calm me, but instead, it only makes me jitter more.
“The cage.” I pull my hair out of my face and realize that I’m back in my dress. My shoes lay on the plush carpet beside the sofa and my ring sparkles on my finger again. “I was back in the cage. I never got out.”
Donovan’s face relaxes. “It was just a dream.”
“A bad one.” Marcus agrees.
“Cameron was there.” I swallow hard. “My family, everyone—they were all in cages.” My mouth falls open. “You were dead, Don. Dead.”
“I’m not dead.” He touches my face with both his hands and I can’t deny the warmth that passes through us. “I’m right here, Lara. Right here.”
I pull myself away from him and stomp off to the bookcase. Grabbing a random book, I flip through the pages looking for a blank page, but words fill all the pages. Every single one. Frustrated, I throw it on the ground and go after another and then another.
Their stares beat down on my back, but I have to be sure. I can’t live a lie. What if I’ve been living one for over six years? What if nothing has changed. It’s always been my greatest fear.
“Cameron’s gotten inside your head,” Marcus says, “that’s all it is, Lara.” He places a hand on my shoulder and I throw a glance at him. Something about his steady gaze reaches me. Like an anchor, it slows me down.
Then I stare at Donovan and see he nods too.
My back is up against the bookcase and I feel the walls closing in. “How can I know for sure? How can I know?”
They can’t answer me because there isn’t a way to be sure. If they’re real, they’re just as perplexed as I am and if they’re not real—if this is just some sort of game inside of a virtual system—they’ll never tell me the truth anyway.
“Come on.”Donovan takes my hand and I want to be led away by him. I want nothing more than to get away from the TTPA, pretend it never even existed, but I have something to uphold. I have a personal responsibility to Delilah and everything we built. I couldn’t let it go.
“Your mom is waiting for us.” Donovan reaches for the door and opens it, allowing me to exit first. “We can’t leave her with Cameron.”
“Any more than we’d leave her with a pack of wild wolves,” Marcus says with a grin.
****
Mom’s giant squeeze says how worried she was about me. She fusses with my hair and pats my cheek. Somehow, it makes her feel better which in turn makes me feel better. “Feeling better? You all right?”
I nod. “Just the fright, I guess, of everything Cameron said.”
“It’s nothing personal, I assure you.” Cameron’s voice comes from behind me and it jars me. When I turn, he smiles at me. “You’re a fine person, a champion for what time travel can do. We just have…a difference of opinion.”
Crossing my arms, I puff out a breath of air. “Delilah agreed with me. I don’t know how you got that document signed, but my guess is, it took some work.” My eyes glare over at Cassidy. Cameron keeps her hand in his, a short leash for his attack dog and I need to get her alone. I need to talk to her when we aren’t trying to kill each other.
“But I can guess.”
Cassidy smiles at me and extends her hand. “It’s such a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Crane—I’m sorry, Ms. Montgomery.” Her smile spreads and I want to rip it straight off her face.
“No apologies necessary,” but I don’t shake her hand. Instead, I wave to Donovan and signal I’m ready to go. “Tomorrow, Mr. Kincaid, I’ll meet you in the conference room. You might be ready to get rid of me, but I’m not ready to bow out.”
Cameron’s face hardens into a plastic smile. “Here I thought you’d at least want to leave with dignity.”
Me? Dignity? “A Crane fights to the end.”
He bows at the waist toward me. “Let the best win. I warn you, Lara, I’m a street fighter. Fighting dirty is what we do best.”
I have no do
ubts about that. Breathing a sigh of relief, I relax when he leaves. “That was awfully brave of you.” Mom’s eyes widen as she watches Cameron and Cassidy leave. She has no idea what’s going on and it’s best if it stays that way.
“You ready to go?” Jax asks as he comes up behind Mom. I watch the way he rubs her shoulders. Strange for them to be touching. Then, Mom tilts her head and accepts a kiss from him as if they’re together. As if they’ve reconciled.
How did I miss that?
It makes me happy. I’ve been rooting for them for a while. “Will I see you both here tomorrow?”
Mom nods and she places her hand on Jax’s chest. “They’ll have to throw us all out.”
Good. As I leave her, I meet up with Donovan and Marcus. Donovan slides his arm around my waist and the three of us head out the front door. Marcus flags down an attendant to signal that we’re ready to go.
“Have any lawyers you can call?” I ask Marcus. “I’m not ready for us to be forced out.”
“Oh, I have my ways. Cameron won’t get off that easy, I assure you.”
The limo pulls up and the rear door is opened for us. “See you tomorrow, bright and early then.” I step into the limo first as Donovan shakes Marcus’s hand.
Once he slides in beside me, I sigh as I signal to the driver. “Well,” Donovan says, “that was quite the…experience. Nothing is ever dull with you, that’s for sure.”
So, he always says. I hope eventually for dull. Just a little dull would be nice for a change.
“Anywhere special you want to go? Just home?”
I check the time on my watch. “I told my dad I’d stay with him tonight. I should swing by.” I give Donovan a flirty smile. “Pick up my stuff for tonight and then maybe we can have that talk.”
“Your dad?” Donovan’s face pales as he speaks and fear glints in his eyes.
