by Mari Carr
Utterly betrayed her trust by crossing the line of professionalism, by taking advantage of her in a moment of vulnerability.
“Annalise, hey there.” Walt shifted, an easy smile on his face, his eyes kind. “Can I touch your wrist? I’d like to check your pulse.”
Mutely, she dropped her right arm to lay across her lap.
Walt tapped his smartwatch, starting a timer, then found her pulse. After half a minute, he looked up. “Your pulse is a little fast, so I’d like you to take a few slow, deep breaths for me. And maybe a glass of water?”
The last was addressed to him. Jakob stared at Walt, then pointed toward the door that led to the dining room and kitchen. He wasn’t going to leave Annalise.
Walt looked back and forth between them and then said, “Okay, I’ll go find some water.”
When Walt was gone, Jakob let down his guard. Not all the way, of course. Without his walls up, his self-control dialed to nine, he talked too much. Said stupid, inane things no one wanted to hear.
And while his ability to remain quiet hadn’t been a natural part of his personality, rather something that had been beaten into him—literally—right now, Annalise needed him to be calm, to comfort her.
He eased up on his control so that when he moved to stand in front of her and she met his gaze, he smiled, just enough that she smiled in turn. Seeing her smile made him feel like everything was right with the world. As if for all the good and bad he’d done in his life, he knew how to make this woman feel safe. How to make her smile. And that was a worthwhile achievement.
The door opened, and Jakob retreated a few steps.
Walt sat down on one of the footstools and passed Annalise the glass.
She took it, her hand shaking.
Jakob put his hands behind his back so she wouldn’t see his fists clench.
Over the next five minutes, Annalise drank the whole glass of water, and Walt checked her pulse a second time, confirming that it had slowed.
Annalise finally relaxed enough to let go of her bag, which Walt took from her, placing it, and her empty glass, on the floor.
Jakob needed end tables in this room, one for each chair. What kind of end tables did she like? Maybe the guy who made the chairs would make end tables with hidden weapons drawers.
“I’m so sorry, Dr. Hayden,” she said softly.
“Walt,” he said. “And sorry for what?” Walt gave her an easygoing, friendly, reassuring grin that Jakob could never have managed. He wasn’t sure his face could make that expression if he wanted it to.
“For putting you in danger.”
“That was Eric, not you, and that was not nearly as alarming as Eric showing up covered in blood in the middle of the night.”
Jakob made a mental note to check if the Spartan Guard, the poor, cursed bastards whose job was to protect the fleet admiral, had sent a cleanup crew to deal with whatever had left Eric bloody. He doubted they had, since no one in the Masters’ Admiralty, except now himself and Annalise, knew where Eric was.
Of course, technically, he no longer knew.
And then he remembered that Eric had forbidden him from telling the Spartan Guard—actually anyone in the Masters’ Admiralty—that he was here.
“I’m the reason we were in danger,” Annalise insisted quietly. “I’m the one he was after.”
Walt nodded as if he understood but shifted just enough to shoot Jakob a quick look. Odd that he understood exactly what Walt was asking—Do you know what she’s talking about?—when they’d only met yesterday.
Jakob had so much he wanted to say to her, so many reassurances he wanted to offer.
You owe no one an apology. You are strong and brave and wonderful, and someday I’m going to kill the man who’s tormenting you. I will kill him and make him real and mortal, not the dark, terrifying monster I know you see in your dreams.
Out loud, he said. “It wasn’t him.”
Annalise’s lips trembled. “You don’t have to lie to me so I don’t feel guilty.”
“I don’t lie.” That was a fat lie.
Annalise blinked and then her shoulders straightened, and she tipped her head ever so slightly. “Everyone lies, Jakob. I know you’ve sat in on that particular lecture at least once.”
He could have cried with relief at seeing her looking so controlled and composed. Looking like, sounding like, herself.
He would never say it aloud, but he wished he’d known her before. Before the trauma of the stalking, and then her sister’s attack, had robbed her of her self-assurance and confidence.
“Not him,” Jakob said again.
Annalise studied his face, and then her expression relaxed ever so slightly, but she didn’t just take his word for it. “How do you know?”
“There were three, maybe four people. Watching us.”
Annalise’s eyes widened. “That many? And you’re sure they were after us?”
“When you went into the kitchen, they stood up,” Jakob replied.
“If there were that many of them, shouldn’t they have been able to catch us? I mean we weren’t walking that fast.”
“We took evasive measures.” Jakob didn’t think he needed to go into more detail than that, but she also had a point.
“Or they weren’t interested in us and followed Eric,” Walt suggested.
That was what he’d been thinking.
“We need to tell someone,” Annalise said.
“Can’t.” The fleet admiral had expressly forbidden it at their first meeting in her office.
“Who do you think was following us…well, him?” Walt asked Annalise. “The people he mentioned? Someone else? Or is it top secret, secret society stuff?”
Annalise didn’t tighten up or retreat the way Jakob expected her to. Instead, she turned her attention to Walt. “You are not a member of…”
“Of the Masters’ Admiralty? No. But my sister is. She’s married to a knight in England. Guy’s name is Lancelot Knight and he sometimes carries a sword, if you can believe it.”
Annalise’s lips twitched.
Jakob grunted.
Walt made a face. “Crap. What’s the German word for knight?”
“Ritter,” Annalise said cheerfully.
“Aaaaand that’s what Eric called you. Sorry, man. Oh shit, wait. You had a sword, didn’t you?”
“He did.” The longer they spoke, the more Annalise came back to life, shaking off her earlier shock.
Jakob stared at Annalise. She was clearly enjoying this, her humor, her genuine happiness something he’d only caught brief glimpses of. She grinned at him and his heart skipped a beat.
“I was jetlagged. That’s my excuse for not taking note of that fascinating detail,” Walt declared. He shook his head in apparent amusement at himself.
Jakob admired Walt’s entertaining, while self-deprecating, manner of speaking. His calm assurance and confidence might have come from being a doctor, might just be who he was, but it meant he had no problem making fun of himself.
They were all quiet for a moment, but it wasn’t awkward, especially when Walt slid from the ottoman to one of the other chairs, leaning back and sighing.
Jakob looked at them. The fact that Walt was sitting in the chair where he’d always pictured their shadowy, mysterious third was making him feel odd. Not bad, not good. It was a feeling he didn’t fully understand, and so he couldn’t name it.
It was winter, and though the heat in the house was on, Jakob turned to the fireplace, taking a few minutes to stack wood and then using a starter log to get it going quickly. Walt had his head back, his eyes closed. Jakob took a breath, and then went to the kitchen to make coffee. He didn’t exactly like leaving Annalise alone with the other man now that they were out of the crisis situation, but after watching the American doctor take care of her and put her at ease, he found he could accept it.
Several minutes later, he returned with a tray including a French press waiting to be pressed, cups with saucers, delicate cut-glass
sugar and creamer set, though the creamer had some non-dairy shelf-safe stuff in it, which was all he had in the house at the moment. He really needed to make time for a trip to the store.
“Cooffffeeee,” Walt moaned, sounding rather like a zombie from a horror movie.
Jakob retreated to the wall, ignoring his desire to kneel and pour out the coffee, to take care of her, and of Walt, by providing for them. It was Walt who depressed the plunger on the French press and poured coffee into each of the cups.
Jakob drank his black, Annalise added a little of the cream, and when she was done, Walt dumped half the sugar into his own cup.
Annalise and Jakob both stared at Walt, her in amusement, him in horror. Annalise hid a smile behind her cup, shook her head gently, and finally sipped.
The fire was starting to warm the room, and the hot cup felt good in his hands. But Annalise’s next words made him cold. She cleared her throat, faced Walt, and said, “I have a stalker, and someday he’s going to kill me.”
“Annalise,” Jakob said, hating her words, but hating himself more for failing to catch the man, so that she didn’t have to live her life with a guillotine blade dangling over her neck.
The sad smile she gave him told him she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings and she felt guilty for speaking her belief aloud. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
He didn’t reply. He couldn’t. His throat was clogged, his chest heavy with regret.
Walt, however, had no problem finding his voice. “Who is this stalker?”
Annalise shook her head. “I have no idea.” The breathy, self-deprecating scoff that followed those words made it perfectly clear how much she hated failing. “I’m a profiler, a psychologist. And yet I’m completely incapable of creating a profile of my own stalker.”
“I don’t find that surprising at all. You’re too close to the case, too emotionally involved. There’s a reason surgeons can’t operate on someone they know. There has to be distance. And just because you understand the psychology behind an emotion doesn’t mean you don’t feel it,” Walt said, his voice quiet and kind, soothing.
“I know that’s true, but it doesn’t make it easier to deal with. Someone…someone I was close to was badly hurt by this man.”
Walt tilted his head. “Okay. Annalise, you don’t have to tell me anything more if you’d rather not.”
“You’re…you’re involved now. In a way. Maybe not, if you’re sure it…” She glanced up at Jakob, her eyes wide and vulnerable.
“Wasn’t him.”
Walt leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking back and forth between them. “Who did this man hurt?”
The doctor was forthright, the type to ask questions he needed answers to. Jakob respected that. The question was, seemingly, directed at either of them, but Jakob sure as fuck wasn’t going to answer.
“My twin sister.”
Walt’s brows rose. “You’re a twin?”
Annalise nodded.
“I’m a triplet. Identical, so technically a quad since the number needs to be a multiple of two, but there’s just three of us.”
She and Walt shared a look that Jakob assumed only those who’d spent time in a womb with another would understand.
He was an only child.
Thank God. His father hadn’t been cut out to rear children. A military man, he’d raised Jakob as if he was just another soldier under his command. And while he’d been terribly lonely as a child, he wouldn’t have wished his upbringing on another simply to have someone to play with.
“My sister, Adele, lives in Tokyo. I didn’t tell her that I’d acquired the attention of a dangerous man because I didn’t want to worry her. And…” Annalise paused. “And because I had just enough pride that it bothered me to admit to her that I couldn’t put together any sort of cohesive picture of the man tormenting me.”
Walt reached over and placed his hand on top of Annalise’s on the armrest of her chair when her voice started to wobble. Jakob stared at their touching hands, strangely compelled to rise and add his to theirs.
There was also an underlying desire to shove Walt away from her, because damn it, Annalise was his.
But he trusted Walt, or maybe she trusted Walt and that made him trust the doctor.
No, he decided, he trusted Walt.
Goddamn stupid feelings.
“She came to Frankfurt on business and decided to surprise me.” Annalise swallowed heavily.
“If this is too hard…” Walt said, offering Annalise another out, a chance to end the conversation here.
She shook her head, refusing to take it. “I need to go back. To when Jakob started taking care of me.”
Jakob’s heart beat a little bit faster when she said he took care of her. That was what he wanted. To protect her, make her happy. Keep her safe.
“I have a near phobia of flying bugs. Clinically my reaction isn’t quite extreme enough to be a true phobia, but I strongly dislike them, and I’m scared of them.”
“You might not want to pay a visit to me at home in South Carolina then,” Walt said. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like to run into a wheel bug.”
Jakob made a mental note to look that bug up later. Actually, he felt compelled to research South Carolina as well, curious about where Walt came from.
“I’ll consider myself warned.”
“Why did you mention the bugs?” Walt asked.
“I’d begun getting threatening phone calls and letters. At the time, I worked for the Kripo, that’s the German police.”
Walt nodded, his calm, kind attention focused on her. His face showed empathy, compassion. Maybe Walt could teach him how to do that. His years of intelligence and knight work may not have beat the stupid out of him, but it had taught him to mask any and all emotions.
“It was disheartening that I couldn’t identify this man. That I couldn’t even give my colleagues a profile beyond the generic profile of a stalker. But I wasn’t truly afraid until…well…one night when I went home, there was a package waiting. A package from a company I knew and used. Even more, I was expecting to receive that particular box. So I took it inside and opened it.”
“Oh God, it was full of bugs, wasn’t it?” Walt’s complexion turned green. Not really—his skin was only a few shades lighter than Jakob’s own and didn’t pale the way he knew Annalise’s did—but the horrified, slightly sick look was still readily apparent.
“Flying cockroaches. There were so many. The box was full, and they were angry.” Annalise shook her head. “I know insects don’t have emotions like that, but the instant I opened it, they were everywhere. I started screaming, and once I did, I couldn’t stop. They got in my hair, touched my face. One crawled inside my shirt.” Annalise looked as if she would vomit.
Walt made a horrified face, so comical that after a moment, she smiled, only for the expression to drop away once more.
“I screamed and cried and hid from the bugs,” she murmured.
Jakob had a vivid memory of that night. Of the frantic call he’d been forwarded by the vice admiral Pia Klein. The call, a message Annalise had left on one of the numbers members called when they were in trouble, had been nearly incoherent, but she’d said her name clearly enough that they’d figured out who she was, and as the knight based in Frankfurt, he’d been the one sent out to help her.
If she’d never been in trouble, needed help and protection, he might never have met her.
“I didn’t want my colleagues at the Kripo to see me like that, so I called the Masters’ Admiralty. They sent Jakob. He cleared out the bugs, got me up off the floor, helped me stop crying. Later I explained about the stalker. Jakob and the other knights started working on the case too. Everyone wanted me to move, but I wouldn’t move because I didn’t want the stalker to know he had that kind of power over me. So Jakob came up with another solution. The house next door—in English, I believe the term is a row house, yes? Houses that share walls.”
“I understand what you mean,
though a lot of places in the States call them townhouses.”
“It was for sale, so Jakob had the vice admiral buy it. He installed a hidden steel door between them. I went into what had always been my house but then passed through the door, into the safety of the place he’d made for me.”
Annalise smiled at him, and Jakob could feel Walt’s attention turn to him.
“As far as anyone other than Jakob and, I’m assuming, the vice admiral knew, I was still living in the same house.”
“Vice Admiral…” Walt frowned, then grinned. “Y’all have fun titles.”
Jakob narrowed his eyes ever so slightly at Annalise, who smiled sheepishly, the moment chasing some of the darkness away from her eyes.
“I forgot you weren’t a member,” Annalise said to Walt.
“If it makes you feel better, I’m going to be a member of the Trinity Masters, the American version of your secret society. My brothers are both members but fairly new to it, so I’m not familiar with many of their fancy titles.”
Jakob filed that information away to pass on to his vice admiral and admiral. It was interesting—and by interesting, he meant fucking alarming—that the fleet admiral was running around hunting a serial killer with a man who already had ties to the Trinity Masters.
Then he remembered that he couldn’t say anything about the fleet admiral.
Damned Viking.
“Years passed, and we never…I never could figure out who he was. Jakob kept guarding me, when he could, and I was safe in my secret house, but…”
“That must have been really hard. Living in fear,” Walt murmured.
Annalise nodded before continuing. “My sister knew the code to my house, had a key, but she didn’t know about the stalker. Didn’t know I would be safe behind the secret steel door between my house and the place next door. She came by to surprise me, opened the door, and walked inside. She didn’t pull it all the way closed. He, my stalker, must have been watching, seen that the door was still partially open, because he followed her in.”
“Shit,” Walt breathed.
“He attacked my sister. Raped her. And when he realized it wasn’t me, he cut all her hair off so he wouldn’t be ‘tricked’ again. All that happened while I slept safely on the other side of the wall.”
