Blamed

by Edie Harris

  A loaded question, as it was one he rarely permitted any of his family members to ask him. Multiple sclerosis had stolen the vibrant life he’d led, the diagnosis one he’d hidden from everyone—including his wife—until he was compromised in the middle of an assignment. Frank had never quite forgiven his youngest daughter for witnessing his collapse, much less finishing the job for him with an accuracy and clean getaway he might not have managed on his own.

  Ever since, the Faraday siblings had worked hard to offer their father the breathing room he needed to focus on his health, not that Frank had appreciated their efforts, leaving his relationships with his children strained, at best. They knew he loved them, just as they knew Faraday would have crashed and burned if they hadn’t gently elbowed him aside. Frank had been running Faraday Industries almost singlehandedly for a quarter of a century, but under his children’s leadership, the company’s known public reach had expanded from an American staple in military manufacturing to an unrivaled weapons-technology power.

  The success, though bringing in oodles of revenue—technical term, of course—didn’t exactly endear them to their sidelined father.

  “Better,” she told Frank now, moving to stand beside his chair. “I...need to talk to you about something.”

  The grooves worn into his familiar face, rugged but fatigued with the onset of age and illness, deepened as he stared up at her. “You want to leave.”

  Her oversized cream sweater shifted over her shoulder as she shrugged, the soft cashmere brushing delicately over healing skin. “When I left last year, I left for good. I don’t want to get stuck in this life again.”

  “No one said you had to.”

  “But it’s assumed, isn’t it?” Her lips twisted in a wry grimace. “We’re Faradays. We’re supposed to contribute and uphold the family name, but I have no way of doing that unless—”

  “Unless you take on assignments again,” Frank finished for her, gravelly voice with its thick New England syllables sharp as an axe. “You’re right—we don’t have much use for an art curator around here.”

  The blunt statement pummeled her confidence, but she stood tall, nodding in apparent agreement. “No, but the Art Institute in Chicago does.” Her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she hesitated. “They’ve held my job for me. I can go back tomorrow, if I want.”

  Frank shifted his stare past her to the view of the backyard. “Is that what you want? Your job? Or are you thinking there’s a man waiting for you back there, if you get on a plane and go?”

  Vick. Their interlude in Chicago, fraught with danger but amazing and lovely and painfully poignant, was nothing but a memory, a moment in time never to be recaptured. So as much as she might wish he’d be waiting for her on the tarmac at O’Hare International Airport, Beth knew that, if he hadn’t been here, he most certainly wouldn’t be there.

  Stupid-ass logic brain, kicking her in the balls once more.

  And since her father knew, there was no point in pretending. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I know he’s not there.”

  Her father snorted derisively. “Damn right he’s not. The British bastard’s been on my property from the moment you arrived.”

  Pulse thundering in her ears, Beth steadied her suddenly weak knees with a hand on the back of a nearby armchair. “Vick’s here?” At the compound? But she hadn’t seen him once in the past two weeks. “Where...where is he staying?”

  “In the employee dormitory.” Frank sighed, the sound a reluctant mix of frustration and affection. “Your brothers keep feeding him, like a stray. I’m just waiting for Adam to bounce in here promising to groom him and walk him, and trick me into thinking he’s an indoor dog.”

  A low chuckle rumbled from the kitchen doorway. “Been compared to worse.”

  Beth’s pounding heart leapt straight from her chest as she turned to find her spy watching her with hungry, pale-blue eyes, black hair tousled and a gray-speckled beard trimmed close to his jaw. “Vick.” His name rasped past her lips in a taut whisper.

  He nodded, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, tension hiking up his big shoulders beneath casual navy plaid. “Hello, love.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Twenty minutes ago, Vick had been lounging in the extra gaming chair in Adam Faraday’s office, located in the basement level of the old warehouse, tossing a baseball in the air with one hand only to catch it with the other. He’d substituted boredom for the agonizing irony of being so close and yet so far from Beth.

  That boredom resulted in Vick keeping Adam company while the young man ran various scripts on his multiple computers, all with the intent to break the endpoint encryption of a personal laptop in Moscow. A few days ago, Adam had traced the video feed from the camera Tobias had taken out of Nash’s bunker to an IP address in Russia. Interestingly, in the process of tracking the feed, Adam had discovered the video had been hacked while still streaming, but tracing the hack to its source would require more time.

  Vick didn’t like the idea of anyone observing Beth’s torture. But that hadn’t stopped him—and Adam and Casey and Tobias—from sitting in a semicircle around Adam’s desk and silently watching the recovered media files created during the days of her torment.

  When Beth had screamed his name as Nash snapped every finger in her hand, Vick had barely kept down his breakfast. The sounds...he would never stop hearing them. Never.

  The audio recovery had been slightly less comprehensive, only eighty percent retrieved as compared to the total visual recovery. Which was why Adam now attempted to break through the encryption—to perform a comprehensive capture of the data on the Russian laptop, and discern the missing aural moments from Nash’s interrogation of Beth. The other goal required the voyeur’s laptop to be open and running. “If I break through the encryption and the laptop’s turned on,” Adam had explained days earlier, boyishly handsome face animated as he gestured expansively, “I can hack the laptop camera, turn it into a live feed. We’ll see what’s on the other side, and who.”

  Nineteen minutes ago, Adam’s scheme came to fruition.

  Vick dropped the baseball at the younger man’s victorious shout, rushing to hover at his shoulder as Adam typed furiously into an open command box. A moving image appeared on one of the four monitors situated atop the desk, and Vick held his breath as the laptop camera feeding the live video onto Adam’s screen settled into focus.

  Peeling green paper in a seventies-era floral covered what appeared to be the far wall of a studio flat, or perhaps a hotel room. A sagging bed with a maroon coverlet sat on a tarnished brass frame beneath the small, barred window, but their view of the room was soon obscured by a torso clad in a white undershirt, sitting down in front of the laptop. A few adjustments on Undershirt’s end, and then a face appeared.

  “Bloody hell,” Vick breathed, pulse pounding in his ears as he stared at the burned visage of an almost-unrecognizable yet very-much-alive Karlin Kedrov. “Adam, screenshot that image. As many as you can of this man’s face and the room behind him, and then add a timestamp.”

  Adam’s fingers flew. “Who is he?”

  “Kedrov.” When Adam froze, swearing viciously, Vick laid a hand on his shoulder. “What about his hard drive?”

  “Swept and copied. I’m also getting everything he’s typing right now, along with stored passwords in his browser.” Static pictures of the Russian began to fill a second monitor, and Adam stared as though memorizing every pixel. “By the time I’m done, there won’t be a goddamn place on the internet he can hide.”

  Three minutes later, Kedrov closed down the laptop, and their connection was lost. “Jesus. Jesus, I gotta call Tobias.” Adam shoveled both hands through his shaggy hair, eyes wide on one of the stills of Kedrov’s face. “Do you...do you think Beth knew?”

  Knew who was watching her through that camer
a feed? If she had known, she’d failed to mention it in the time since she’d left the hospital. Then again, she apparently hadn’t said much of anything, even when her family gently pressed her for details of what happened with Nash.

  Most of her ordeal was, it seemed, a blur. Thank the fucking Lord.

  Vick shook his head in answer to Adam’s query. “Have you managed to get ahold of Bok yet?” After the standoff with T-16 at the Gherkin, the Faradays had been trying desperately to contact Gavin Bok, needing to find out what he may or may not have known about Nash, but none of their efforts got Bok’s voice on a phone or ass on a plane.

  Scowling, Adam fell back in his chair. “Nope. I gave him a sat phone to stash somewhere, for emergencies, but he won’t touch it unless something’s hella wrong on his end. Next step is putting boots on the ground, but that’s Casey’s rodeo, not mine.” He shot Vick a sharp glance, reminding Vick that while he might be a fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old, he was also the adult version of the kid who’d broken through Pentagon firewalls at age twelve—in short, a young man not to be underestimated. “I’ll call Tobias, but what are you gonna do?”

  Chest tight, Vick rolled the sleeves of his borrowed flannel to his elbows in preparation for the sprint from the warehouse to the homestead. “I need to talk to Beth.” For the first time in weeks, he was finally going to see her, talk to her. God willing, maybe even hold her. His pulse spiked at the idea of getting her in his arms again. Not waiting for whatever protest Adam intended to offer, Vick took off down the hall, up the stairs and out the building’s main entry.

  The door to the house was unlocked when he reached it, and he stepped into the foyer with a quiet tread, pausing to listen. He’d learned that Frank Faraday was primarily housebound due to his illness, but Sofia, his stunning wife, spent most of her daylight hours outside the house, and often in the city itself, volunteering at a low-income health clinic on Boston’s south side. Casey had gone out with some of the other Faraday employees to grab burgers and discuss spring training for the Red Sox, otherwise Vick felt sure he’d be here, hovering over his sister as he had been since they’d brought her home.

  And Beth’s room...Vick knew it was upstairs. He gazed warily at the grand staircase leading to the second level. He was aching to see her—dying, really—but would she even want to see him? The way they’d left things before Nash attacked in the park...well, Vick wouldn’t blame her if she wanted to kick him off the property.

  She loves me. That’s what he needed to remember. She said she loved me.

  A faint murmur sounded from the back of the house, in the direction of the kitchen and its attached solarium, and before Vick knew what was happening, he was in the entryway to the room, frozen in place at the sight of her. Just out of reach. His hands fisted in his pockets, curling against the temptation to touch. “You look...” Stunning. Strong. Brave and beautiful, and he wanted to hold her more than he wanted to breathe. “Amazing. You look amazing, Beth.”

  She ran a self-conscious hand over her shorn head, fingers tipped in purple nail polish ruffling the soft strands of dark brown. “Thanks.” Lost weight accentuated her cheekbones, the delicate line of her throat, and the dip of her collarbone appeared fragile in the drooping neckline of her too-large top. Her gray-gold irises gleamed with unreadable emotion. “Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”

  His throat burned. “You never asked for me.” Every day he’d demanded an update from the other Faradays, and every day they had shaken their heads, pity in their irritatingly similar eyes.

  “I...didn’t, did I.” Frowning, she snuck a glance at her father, who watched them intently. Her voice lowered. “I thought about you. But...I just assumed that you weren’t here. That you didn’t want to be here.”

  “No. Nothing like that.” Not even close. Uncaring that he had Frank Faraday as a witness, Vick strode to her, arms hanging loose at his sides. He wanted to touch her, stroke her, but the last time he’d held her, she had barely escaped a situation most people wouldn’t walk out the other side of—not whole, anyway.

  She would carry the scars of her time with Nash for the rest of her life; the best plastic surgeon in the world couldn’t erase the marks on her back, though he’d been told the cuts on her arms and legs were fading rapidly, the normal honey of her skin tone would soon return. Her hair would grow past her shoulders, though Vick rather liked seeing the curve of her neck and the pink shells of her ears exposed by a look that, three weeks out from a severe buzz, could only be described as “minimalist pixie.”

  The week she’d spent in the private hospital in London fighting the infection that had set in from the lash wounds striping her back, not to mention the damage from her broken ribs, had been the longest of Vick’s life. He left the room when the nurses forced him out, but only then, and stood watch over the door. Never again would he permit her to be taken from him, not by anyone.

  Including her family. When the personal Faraday jet arrived to carry Beth to the compound on the outskirts of Boston, Vick had boarded with her, to the surprise of no one. But after arriving in the U.S., and faced with the monumentally awkward task of looking her parents in the eye and explaining the depth of his betrayal—and its terrible consequences—Vick had opted to move into the employee dormitory-style housing. Temporarily, at least.

  Every day for the past two weeks, he’d walked the frozen path from the old warehouse to the Victorian mansion in which Beth had been raised, stopping at the tree line to watch the wraparound porch for any sign of her.

  Except she never showed. She never set foot past the front door.

  Three days ago, before leaving once more for London, Tobias had pulled Vick aside. “She’s healing, but...I can’t explain it.” Tobias had frowned, consternation tugging his dark brows together. “Her memories are scattered, but that’s not a surprise, given that she was drugged much of the time.” A truth they’d witnessed while watching the video files. “She has nightmares, but wakes knowing she’s safe from harm. She doesn’t look for reassurance from any of us, because it appears as though she doesn’t need it. She refuses to...to lean.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Perhaps.” The other man’s direct gaze had swung to Vick’s. “Or perhaps she’s waiting for the right person on whom to lean.”

  Vick was the right person. He knew it; he merely had to convince Beth to trust him again, and permit him to protect her with body and fists, heart and soul. “You’re well?” he asked now, daring to run a finger over the sweet curve of her jaw. Her skin was satin under his rough fingertip, warm to the touch.

  Shadows sat beneath her witchy eyes, stains of recent sleepless nights. “I’m getting there.” Lifting her undamaged hand, she curled her fingers around his wrist, but didn’t attempt to thwart his touch. “I hear you were the one who found me.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “It’s all static. Everything after the end, as soon as I was out of that room...” Dropping her hand, and his with it, she tilted her head to the side, eyes trained on his face. “Nice beard.”

  His lips curved. “Apparently, I’m on vacation.”

  “And you couldn’t swing by to see me in your copious amounts of free time?”

  “I was...waiting.” Stepping back to include her father in the conversation, Vick explained their discovery. “Adam traced the camera footage to an IP address in Moscow, and we just hacked the computer it led to.” He gentled his voice. “Karlin Kedrov is alive, Beth. We believe he was the driving force behind your abduction.”

  Instead of appearing shaken, as Vick had been when Kedrov’s mutilated face popped up on Adam’s screen, Beth frowned thoughtfully. “I...think I knew that.” She glanced between Vick and her father before gesturing to her head. “It’s kind of a jumble up here right now, but I remember Nash asking me something about Kedrov, toward the end.”

&nb
sp; “That settles it,” Frank stated. “Until we find Kedrov and put him down, you’re staying here. Your art job can wait.”

  Beth shook her head in vehement denial at her father’s pronouncement, but gave her attention to Vick. “If it’s not Kedrov, it’ll be another evil dude. God knows the world’s full of them, or I would’ve been out of a job long before Kabul. I refuse to sit around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “The past year in Chicago, I’ve only been living half a life, because I kept trying to conform into this person I’ll never be. I know who I am and what I want, and I honestly believe I can make it work. But I don’t want to be the paranoid, guilty girl who sleeps with a gun under her pillow anymore.” The arm cast in plaster lifted to lie across her chest, as though shielding the vital organ beating with determined life beneath her sternum. “I don’t want to come home from work in the evening and spend half an hour checking the perimeter warnings I set that morning. I’ll never be happy if I go through life constantly on guard, with nothing to protect me but...but me.”

  So Tobias had been right—Beth did want someone to lean on. Vick edged closer, sensing his chance, if he dared to take it. “What if I protected you?”

  Her gaze on him remained wary. “I’m not interested in sudden disappearances or waking up next to a man I literally don’t recognize. An ephemeral spy isn’t what I need.”

  “Tell me what you need, love.”

  “Mornings with you,” she answered promptly, bluntly, her pale face a solemn mask. “Nights with you. Uninterrupted days with you.” Her voice broke then, throat working against a blatant surge of emotion. “I don’t want you to be a ghost anymore, Vick. Ghosts don’t get to have mornings.”

  “Done.”