He shoved her away and opened the revolver’s chamber. The goddamned thing was full. The safety was off. He dumped the bullets into his palm and flung the gun across the room.
“Oh, I care,” he snapped, terrified for her. “For some reason, I’ve gotten myself attached to a woman with a death wish who keeps a loaded gun in her house. Which makes me more of a head case than you are, I suppose. Because here I am. Still. Convinced I can help you.”
“I…” Clarity returned to Maddie’s expression. Tears surged. She was back, the Maddie he knew, staring at the gun that had landed near the window sheers. “I’ve never seen that before in my life…”
Her gaze begged Jarred to believe her.
And for some inexplicable reason, he did. Just like he’d accepted every other crazy thing that had happened that day. The question was, what did he do next? Call an ambulance? Commit her to an indefinite psych hold, the way he would anyone else? But he couldn’t abandon her that way. Not Maddie.
He was certifiable.
“How did the gun get into your kitchen?” he asked.
“I…I have no idea…” She scraped her nails up and down her arms.
He drew her hands to her side.
“Just let you die,” he repeated, “before what?”
Maddie putting a gun to her head hadn’t been a cry for help. There’d been determination in her eyes. Conviction. And he was certain she hadn’t been aware of what she was doing.
“I…I don’t…remember,” she answered.
“You don’t remember what?”
She jerked and focused on him as if she’d just realized whom she was talking to.
“Let me help you.” He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, trying to soothe his own panic and fear as much as hers. “Technically, I have an obligation to admit you for observation. You just tried to kill yourself. But returning to the hospital’s not the answer for you, is it? Not tonight. Not any night until we can find a way to keep what other people are feeling from hurting you.” He might as well put it all on the line. The impossible, implausible thoughts that had been rambling around his mind since Maddie left the hospital. “That’s what happened in the ER, wasn’t it? When you got sick after diagnosing your patient and dealing with Britton’s outburst. All of it…gets inside you somehow.”
A small nod was her only response.
“But…Being around me doesn’t hurt as much, right?” He relaxed a bit after her next reluctant nod. “Then let me help take care of you until we know more. Or are you trying to wind up in a padded cell next to your sister’s across town?”
“Across town?” Loneliness and pain and hatred and guilt. Maddie’s eyes filled with each emotion, one after the other, then all at once. Her confusion swirled around them, drawing him closer. “Sarah’s hundreds of miles from here,” she insisted, “in a long-term care facility in Georgia.”
Jarred lifted an eyebrow, remembering the tense conversation he’d interrupted between Maddie and her mother. Maddie had been asking for information about a twin she’d assured him she wanted nothing to do with.
“According to the records I accessed over the hospital’s medical link, Sarah Lynn Temple was committed to Trinity Psychiatric Research Center after suffering an irrecoverable mental breakdown. For the last ten years, your sister’s been cared for just a few miles from here.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kayla Lawrence was dead.
Richard had used every safeguard he’d programmed into Sarah’s dream conditioning. He’d stayed connected with her mind throughout the simulation this time. But he hadn’t been able to stop the shadow dream from taking over. He hadn’t stopped some perverted bastard from using Sarah to kill a woman whose mind she’d known intimately for months.
How could this have happened?
Richard terminated the com link to the center surveillance team watching Lawrence’s apartment. The police were on scene. The suicide case was already all but closed. No suspicious circumstances for local authorities to investigate. It was a tragic tale about a seemingly content, middle-aged woman ending her life with no explanation.
No family to demand further investigation. No significant other who needed to understand the unexplainable. Viable hosts had been chosen for Dream Weaver based initially on their loner status. Richard had selected Lawrence from the government’s list. And now she was dead. Sarah had killed the woman with the dream-projection skills Richard had taught her.
She’d never forgive him.
He’d never forgive himself.
He snapped his laptop closed and paced to Sarah’s recovery room bed, shoving his hands into the pockets of his scrubs. He reached for her mind, knowing there would be nothing but silence there. It took her two full days to recover from a typical simulation. He’d rushed her into another projection this time. Now, after Kayla Lawrence’s death…
Sarah had been so horrified, her mind had broken through her meds and the paralysis that came with deep sleep. She’d woken up screaming, semiconscious, fighting him and everyone else in the room before he’d taken her under again. Would her mind recover from this intact? Would she be able to link with him or anyone else again? Trust him again?
Video cameras were recording his every move, providing panoramic footage of every nuance of Alpha’s emotional and physical state. Details he’d used to isolate the stimuli and suppressive routines needed to target Sarah’s dream work. Images that, if he wasn’t careful, would now destroy their chance to escape.
Tonight…Sarah would be nowhere near ready, and she would likely fight him when he brought her around. But their only chance to get out would be tonight.
“So.” He gazed down at the one variable in his deepcover mission that no one would ever fully control—Sarah herself. “It’s time.”
He chose his words carefully.
Performed for the cameras.
“It’s all or nothing now.” He caught faint movement beneath Sarah’s eyelids.
She was dreaming. On her own. Beyond Dream Weaver protocol and Richard’s safeguards—safeguards that had failed them both. Recovery meds seeped into her bloodstream through the shunt in her chest, regulating her comatose state. The recovery period between simulations was on nuclear countdown. Richard’s team would be working up to the last minute—preparing a new host’s background report, presumably for Sarah to use to return to her Dream Weaver work.
Not that the center’s directors were going to let that happen under Richard’s leadership. And he wouldn’t be waiting for his replacement to be named. He pulled the cotton blanket higher, covering Sarah’s body from the chin down. He’d reduced the potency of the pharmaceutical cocktail that kept her mind in its recovery state. He only hoped that would bring her around enough to follow him out of the center, while still keeping her under his psychic control. If not, he would most likely become the Dream Weaver program’s second casualty.
“Get ready, Alpha,” he said. “All hell’s about to break loose.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“How long have you been lying to me!” Maddie shouldered Phyllis aside and continued into her mother’s foyer. “It’s all been a lie from the start, hasn’t it?”
Jarred followed and kept Phyllis from stumbling into the oak-paneled wall. Damn him for insisting on coming with Maddie. Damn herself, for needing him right where he was—by her side. And for thinking damn so much.
“Please—” Maddie said to her psychiatrist-turned-suicide watchdog. “You have to go.”
She was coming unglued. And having Jarred there to see it—she couldn’t bear that.
“You’re in no shape—” he argued.
“To drive, I know.” Any minute, she was going to start begging him to stay. “Thank you for getting me here safely. But this is between me and my…”
She couldn’t say it. She fought to meet the gaze of the mother who’d written Sarah off and made it so easy for Maddie to do the same. The woman who’d taught both her girls to believe the lies that had destroyed them
all. Phyllis eyed Jarred, then took a hesitant step toward Maddie.
“Honey, I don’t know what’s going on—”
“Where are Sarah’s records?” Maddie moved out of reach. She backed into the hall table. A vase, a cluster of happy family photos, crashed to the floor.
“Wh-What?” Phyllis stepped around the mess, her guilt turning Maddie’s stomach. “Why? For God’s sake, what does all this have to do with your sister?”
Maddie risked a glance at Jarred, wishing she could feel something of him in her mind still. But all that was there now was her mother’s regret and self-loathing. Then Sarah’s snort of disbelief.
Are you actually buying this act! the voice demanded.
She’s sick, Maddie argued. She’s been too sick to face any of this for years.
Maddie heard herself defending Phyllis—to nobody—and headed into the den. She’d find proof of Sarah’s commitment to that research center. She’d use the paperwork to force her mother to finally tell her the truth.
“I know you have them somewhere.” She didn’t look back, but she could feel Phyllis follow. “You never throw anything away.” She yanked open the credenza’s bottom drawer and rifled through the hanging file folders. “I can’t believe I never looked…” Her thumb slid across the edge of a folder. The heavy card stock sliced into her skin. “Shit!”
She sucked the cut into her mouth. Ignored the insane laughter chuckling through her mind.
What a baby, Sarah’s voice heckled.
“Let me see.” Phyllis tried to examine Maddie’s hand.
“Don’t touch me, bitch!” Maddie flinched at the memory of her twin saying the exact same words. They were the last things Maddie had heard Sarah yell at their mother.
Pain and shock flooded color into Phyllis’s pale cheeks. “I don’t know what’s going on or who this man is, but you’re bleeding all over yourself. I have some Band-Aids in the bathroom, and—”
“I’ll get them,” Jarred offered.
“I don’t want a Band-Aid!” Maddie’s explosion stopped him in his tracks.
There was a sea of soothing calm waiting for her in his mind. It was calling to her now, the same way it had that morning, tempting her. Maddie wanted to crawl inside Jarred and hide until everything and everyone else went away. Trust me, Maddie…I can feel it, too…But she didn’t dare. She closed her eyes, trying to trap the impulse. Hold it back.
Keep the secret, no matter what…
“Maddie,” her mother prodded. “Your thumb. I—”
“Do you think I give a fuck about my thumb!” Maddie cringed as more laughter accompanied her words. Sarah’s laughter. Laughter only Maddie could hear.
“What’s gotten into you?” Phyllis’s hand rose to her throat.
“Could it be the same thing that got into Sarah?” Maddie could taste her mother’s weakness now, the same weakness that had assigned Maddie the emotional role of parent for a decade. “You remember Sarah, don’t you? The daughter languishing in a coma at a psychiatric care facility so specialized, there’s only one of its kind in the country. A hospital too far away to visit, or so your excuses went. My excuses.”
The ugly truth was that Maddie had been relieved to let her twin go when she and Phyllis had moved away from their mountain home in Lenox. She’d never been able to bring herself to face Sarah’s rehab hospital. Phyllis had been adamant that leaving her twin at peace, with experts to care for her, was the best thing for all of them. And Maddie had drunk her assurances down. Except—
“She’s been here all this time, hasn’t she?” Maddie’s glare dared her mother to keep lying. “We didn’t move to Boston to start over near my college, and then stay for my job. We moved so you could be near her, while you let me pretend she didn’t exist.”
“Who?”
“Sarah! You wanted to be close to her. No matter what happened to Daddy, or what you said afterward. But…” Maddie dove back into the files, leaving a smear of blood on the first folder she grabbed. “…but you didn’t want me near her. Why? Because you were afraid something like this might happen if we were ever together again?”
“Some…Something like what?”
Maddie ripped folders from the drawer, yanking them open, then flinging them to the carpet.
“Mr…” her mother asked.
“Keith,” Jarred answered. “Dr. Keith. I’m a friend of your daughter’s at St. Chris.”
Maddie snorted.
Friend.
Unwelcome images cavorted through her mind. Flashes from their dates. From that morning and what little she could remember of the last hour. Jarred’s anger when he’d wrestled the gun away. The gentleness of his touch…his thoughts…even then. The sting of his concern, wrapping around her while he’d pushed her to confront what she’d never wanted to know.
“What’s going on?” Phyllis’s tone achieved the pitch reserved for when she was truly scared. Crazy scared. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“Maddie’s been having a difficult time,” Jarred began. “And…”
Leaving him to his doctorspeak, Maddie dug until she found a folder hidden at the bottom of the drawer. The tab wasn’t typed like all the rest. Trinity had been handwritten instead, in Phyllis’s loopy script. She pulled it free and confronted the woman she’d believed was the one person on earth she could trust unconditionally.
“What have you done?” She threw the folder at Phyllis and ignored the roaring in her ears. Roaring that sounded too much like her twin’s haunted summer storm. Like the truth hurtling toward Maddie on a raven’s wings.
“I…” Phyllis tried pulling her into a hug. She began to cry when Maddie shoved her away. “You have to understand. I wanted to protect you and Sarah both, but—”
“Protect us from what? From knowing that we’re insane, all of us? Ten years after the accident, and Sarah’s still a vegetable. You can barely leave the house on your own. I’m turning into a raving lunatic. Whatever your secrets have accomplished, they haven’t protected any of us from a damn thing.”
Maddie looked from the fragile woman standing before her to Jarred’s frown, then back. She could remember the bite of the pistol against her temple. The pistol she hadn’t bought. Hadn’t put in that drawer. And hadn’t been able to let go of without Jarred’s help.
“Protect Sarah and me from what?” she repeated. “The…curse you didn’t want us to know about when we were kids?”
“What?” Phyllis eyed Jarred as if he’d grown three heads. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t worry about Dr. Do-good.” Maddie jerked her head toward Jarred. “He already knows more about our family than I do. He’s the one who found out where Sarah was. He already thinks what happened to her might have something to do with what’s happening to me.”
Phyllis rubbed her hands over the sleeves of her conservative oxford shirt. Then down the front of the khakis that had been her uniform for as long as Maddie could remember.
“Mom!” Maddie shrieked.
“What…What does your doctor think he knows?” Phyllis asked.
Jarred stepped closer. Pulled Maddie’s hand from where it was scratching her already-abused wrist.
“Ms. Temple—”
“Honey!” Phyllis rushed closer, her hands shaking as she reached for Maddie. She gasped at the angry welts on Maddie’s inner arm. “What have you done to yourself? That’s…that’s exactly what…”
“Is this something your other daughter used to do?” Jarred asked.
Maddie flinched away from her mother, but closer to Jarred. She hated that a part of her needed him standing between her and Phyllis. Filling her with enough of his presence that there was no hint of Sarah now. No drive to hurt herself or someone else. He pressed some tissues he’d found into her hand, then pressed both against her wrist.
He was always pressing. Closer and closer. His touch. His…thoughts…
You can do this, Temple. You can face anything.
Trust me…
Another nod of assurance followed, and Maddie felt her own tears start up again. He really was there, in her mind. Then his gaze slid back to her mother.
“How bad did Sarah’s cutting become before her final breakdown?” he asked.
“Cutting?” Phyllis’s gaze dropped to Maddie’s wrist.
“It’s an altered form of coping for children and teens who can’t process the pain and emotion they’re enduring.” Jarred stepped closer to Phyllis, blocking her from Maddie’s view. “It can become a lifelong compulsion, if not halted soon enough. But it’s very rare for it to present itself for the first time in adulthood the way it has with Maddie. Every time she’s forced to confront her memories of Sarah, as a matter of fact. There’s often an emotional connection between twins that isn’t clearly understood. There are likely other parts of Sarah’s childhood behavior that might be blending with Maddie’s worldview, even after ten years.”
“What struggles?” Phyllis tried to get closer to Maddie.
Jarred blocked her with his body.
“It’s better if you talk with me for now,” he warned.
Then he tensed—Maddie’s first clue that she’d laid a hand on his back, near his shoulder blade.
“This is between me and my daughter,” Phyllis challenged.
“Which daughter?” Maddie managed to stay. “The one you abandoned, or the one you convinced that she wouldn’t end up in a loony bin herself. God, Mom!” Maddie buried her face against Jarred’s back. Her arms snaked around his waist until she could clasp her hands across his belly, giving in completely to her need to keep him close. “Why not just let me go, too, when you did Sarah? Why put us through all this? Why pretend I’m any different, if you knew it was hopeless from the start!”
Jarred turned to Maddie. “It’s not hopeless,” he insisted.
“You are different, honey.” But there was defeat in Phyllis’s voice. “You’re doing so well. And you’re going to keep doing well. That’s why…That’s why I’ve let them study Sarah for so long. I thought—”
“Study her?” Maddie shoved Jarred away. She found herself backing Phyllis against the wall. “You turned my twin over to a research facility, because you thought, what? That they’d find a cure? That they could fix me, fix what’s wrong with us? Whatever’s wrong with our entire family. You sacrificed her so—”
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