Blank Slate

by Snow, Tiffany

  Erik got to his feet, aware of her watching him, and tried not to preen at the frank admiration in her eyes. Preening was not manly.

  He stalked her, their eyes locked, until she had to retreat. O’Connell stopped when she hit the bed, and Erik drew close until he just touched her. Her breath caught in her chest and her pupils dilated.

  “I’d appreciate it,” he said softly, “if you refrained from kicking my ass for a few hours.”

  “My, what stamina,” O’Connell teased, her eyes now glinting with desire instead of fear.

  “You have no idea.”

  * * *

  Clarissa took a moment to gaze at Langston. He was sacked out in the bed, the sheet pulled barely to his waist. And well he should be exhausted. The last few hours had been amazing.

  Their last few hours.

  With an inward sigh, Clarissa tied her shoelaces, hesitating before she grabbed Langston’s jacket and slid her arms into the sleeves. She dropped his keys and his cell phone into the pocket then looked around to make sure she had everything.

  “What are you doing?”

  Langston’s question made her spin around even as her heart fell. Damn. She’d been hoping to get out while he was still sleeping.

  “O’Connell, what’s going on?” He went to sit up, but was brought up short by the handcuff around his wrist, binding him to the heavy, wooden bedpost. “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s time for me to go,” she said, careful to keep her voice matter-of-fact. “Sunrise is in a few hours.”

  “Why the fuck am I handcuffed?” he fumed.

  “Isn’t it obvious? You can’t come with me, Langston.”

  “What are you talking about? We agreed—”

  “No,” she cut him off. “I didn’t agree. It’s time to finish what I started. And you can’t come.”

  He looked at her, studying her, then his lips pressed into a thin line. “How long?” he bit out. “How long have you had your memory back?”

  Clarissa met his angry gaze unflinchingly. “Since the phone call with Danny.”

  Langston looked stunned, but he recovered quickly. “So you know how to recover the money? You remember how?”

  She nodded.

  “That’s great,” he seemed to force out. “Uncuff me. I’ll come with you, have your back.”

  Clarissa just looked at him. “There’s no good reason for me to do that,” she said, “and so many reasons not to.”

  Langston froze, his eyes darting to hers. “What do you mean?”

  “Your promise,” she said. “Your promise to let Danny go.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  Clarissa’s lips felt almost frozen as she forced out the words. “Did you think I wouldn’t remember? Is that why you didn’t tell me?”

  A silence that was too oppressive filled the air between them.

  “I don’t know—"

  “Don’t lie to me!” she exploded. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Did you think I wouldn’t remember the circumstances of Danny’s arrest? That I wouldn’t put two and two together?”

  He still just stared at her.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t find out that my brother is the one who killed your partner?”

  Langston said nothing.

  Clarissa gave a slight shrug, despair like a living thing inside her. “Maybe you meant it, what you said about letting him go. I don’t know. But either way, I can’t take that chance. The chance that you were lying…or that you were telling the truth.”

  He frowned in confusion. “What—”

  “If you let the guy go who killed your partner, you won’t be able to live with yourself, Langston,” she said. “Eventually, you’d regret it. You’d resent me for being the reason you let his murderer go. I’m not going to let that happen.” She paused. “Or you’ll resent the fact that you never followed through with your original plan. You know, the one where you avenge your partner’s murder by putting the killer’s sister behind bars. Or was it in the grave?”

  That finally got a reaction.

  “I was never going to kill you.”

  His tacit admission that she was right sent a shaft of pain through Clarissa. Even after knowing what she now knew, she’d hoped, somehow, that she was wrong. Her eyes closed involuntarily.

  “Listen, please,” he said. “Yes, I was obsessed with you because of what Danny did. I was going to put you behind bars no matter how long it took. But things changed. And at first it didn’t matter what you knew or didn’t know about me, and then it became too late to say anything. I wanted you to trust me.”

  Clarissa grudgingly admitted that she could see that. When would have been a good time for him to say, “Oh, by the way, your brother killed my friend and partner, so I’ve been hunting you down to punish him.” She would have felt betrayed and lied to no matter what. And if he’d told her that from the beginning, she never would have trusted him.

  “Look at me.”

  Clarissa opened her eyes. Langston was staring at her, his imprisoned hand clenched in a fist.

  “I got to know you, who you really are, and I realized you’re not who I thought you were.”

  “You don’t know me,” Clarissa snapped. “You know a girl who doesn’t exist, who lost her memory, who had no idea what she was.”

  Langston was calm as he asked, “And what is that?”

  “Someone without a future.”

  O’Connell picked up Erik’s gun, expertly ejecting the magazine to check that it was fully loaded before slamming it back in place. She tucked it into the small of her back under his coat.

  “Why are you taking my gun?” Erik asked, a sense of foreboding coming over him.

  “The only way out of this is to kill Clarke and give Solomon back the money, once I have Danny.”

  Alarm shot through Erik. “You can’t do that,” he said. “Crooked or not, he’s a federal agent. If you get caught, they’ll bury you. And if Kaminski is there, he’ll shoot you no matter whose side he’s on.”

  She shrugged, not even looking his way as she gathered up her clothes into a small stack.

  “Just…tell me why,” Erik said. “Tell me why you’d want your brother out of prison. He killed someone. My partner. He had a wife, a kid, a family.”

  O’Connell’s movements faltered. She was listening.

  “He deserves to be in jail,” Erik continued. “Why would you help him escape that?”

  She finally looked at him. Her face was stark white. “Because he’s my brother,” she said so quietly he had to strain to hear her. “I owe it to him.”

  “You owe him nothing,” Erik gritted out, unable to suppress the hatred he felt for Danny. “He’s used you for years, and he’s still using you from inside a prison cell. He’s in prison because of his mistakes, not yours. You don’t owe him anything, much less your life. Don’t you see that?”

  “He’s all I have, Langston.” Fear underlined her words.

  “That’s not true. I swear to you that’s not true,” Erik said. “You have me. Uncuff me and I’ll prove it. I’ll have your back. I won’t betray you. I can help you out of this without anyone getting hurt.”

  “No one can do that,” she said, going to pick up her sack. “You’d just get killed, and even though you lied to me, I don’t want that.”

  When she faced him again, her face was unreadable. “I’ll call the FBI. Tell them I left you here, that I’m responsible for those men being killed. That should clear you.” She headed for the door.

  His time was up.

  “No! O’Connell, don’t you dare walk out that door,” he warned. He pulled at the handcuff, the metal biting into his wrist as she ignored him. “Trust me — I can help you — O’Connell!” His desperation finally seemed to make her pause halfway out the door. “Please,” he begged. “Please don’t do this. He’ll kill you.”

  “Not if I kill him first. Have a nice life, Langston.”

  Then she was gone.

 
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Blood seeped from the cuts in Erik’s wrist, sluggishly trailing down his arm as he pulled with all his strength, trying to snap the bedpost. But no matter how hard he tried, it remained firm; only a telltale creak indicated he’d even bent the wood.

  The tester bed had a wooden roof, for lack of a better term, that sat atop the four posts. Erik had tried standing on the mattress and lifting it off, but it was fastened tight and nothing he did would budge it.

  O’Connell had left him strung up pretty damn good.

  She’d remembered. She’d known the entire time they’d made love that he’d lied to her.

  Dammit, he couldn’t think about that right now. He had to concentrate, get out of here, save her.

  The phone was across the room, so he couldn’t call anyone. No one else was on this floor, so there was no one to hear him yell for help. By the time Mrs. Cooper came in the morning, it would be all over for O’Connell.

  Sunrise was only four hours away.

  Erik stared at the cuff, thinking. O’Connell had picked her way out of these. They’d even taught him at the academy how to do it so he’d be aware of how a prisoner might escape. But what could he use as a pick?

  The only thing close by was the lamp on the bedside table. Seeing it sparked a memory of an old Mythbusters episode he’d watched. Erik grabbed the lamp and pulled off the shade. Thank God. Mrs. Cooper hadn’t gotten around to changing her old-style incandescent bulbs for the fluorescent kind.

  Carefully cracking the glass bulb on the table, Erik removed the wire supporting the fragile filament. It was a strong enough gauge for what he needed.

  It took him an embarrassingly long time to pick the lock, especially considering how quickly O’Connell could do it, and it was nearly an hour before Erik was finally free.

  He dressed and called a cab, hurrying downstairs to wait for it. All O’Connell had said about where she was meeting Clarke was that it was a plantation. There were a dozen or more plantations outside New Orleans, and Erik had no idea which one was the right one. But he knew someone who might.

  * * *

  Clarissa sat in the SUV, the glow from her laptop’s screen illuminating the car. She’d turned on Langston’s phone and tethered her laptop to its Internet connection. It was slow, but it worked.

  Her fingers flew over the keys as she typed, commands scrolling on the screen as she wrote the code to transfer the money she’d “borrowed” into one account.

  She could still smell him on her skin.

  Her keystrokes faltered.

  No. She couldn’t think about him. Special Agent Erik Langston was a part of the past now. Thinking about him would only make her hesitate, second-guess herself, and that could get her killed.

  Clarissa stared out the window as she waited for the transactions to go through. Regrets consumed her. Regrets for the path she’d taken, the choices she’d made. Granted, she hadn’t had much choice when Danny had first brought her to America, but she’d stayed with him, continued to help him in one get-rich-quick job after another. He would’ve ended up in jail long ago if she hadn’t been there, though that was a fact Danny never seemed to appreciate.

  Just like now. Langston was right. Danny should be in jail. Clarissa had always told him that if he killed an innocent bystander on a job, she’d leave. She wouldn’t go through what had happened to their dad.

  But if she let him go back to jail, what would she do then?

  Then you’d finally be free.

  The thought sprang into her mind, and she immediately felt guilty for even thinking that, however briefly. Danny was her brother. He’d taken care of her since she was small. She owed him her loyalty.

  But not her life.

  Dammit! This was all Langston’s fault! If he hadn’t said all those things, she wouldn’t be thinking them now.

  But look at all she’d sacrificed!

  The past year had been hell.

  * * *

  “If you’re going to do this, then you must be trained.” Solomon lectured her as she stood in front of the polished oak desk behind which he sat, fingers steepled on his chest, observing her. “Your self-defense training isn’t enough. You’ll be on your own, many times surrounded by people, men, wanting to kill you.”

  Gee, that sounded fantastic, she thought ruefully, though she was careful to keep her face blank.

  “I have someone, an expert in these sorts of things, he’ll train you in hand-to-hand combat, weapons, the tools you’ll need to succeed in your task.”

  She’d had no choice in the matter, not really. Not that training from an expert was a bad thing. Clarissa was always willing to find more ways to help her stay alive and one step ahead. What she hadn’t counted on was the pain.

  Her body hit the mat for the umpteenth time and she groaned, sweat making her tank stick to her body.

  “You think too much,” Jaleel said. “You need to react instinctually. Your pauses give your enemy opportunity.”

  He wasn’t even breathing hard, Clarissa thought sourly as she peeled herself off the floor.

  Jaleel used to be Mossad, or so she’d gathered from what little he’d told her of himself when he wasn’t kicking her ass.

  It took weeks of training, but eventually she held her own against Jaleel as he taught her the finer points of hand-to-hand combat, the many varied ways to kill someone up close and personal, and how to shoot over a dozen different guns, timing her loading and firing them until he was satisfied that it was second nature to her.

  Clarissa had been grateful for his unrelenting training on her first job, when she’d been cornered by two armed guards. They’d tried to take her prisoner. They’d failed.

  The transactions had finished and now the cursor flashed expectantly at her, dragging Clarissa from her memories. There was nothing to wait for anymore, no reason to not head to the meeting place. She closed the laptop and set it aside, slumping down in the seat and staring sightlessly out the window at the empty street.

  She wondered if Langston had found a way out of his cuffs yet. He was a resourceful kind of guy. Clarissa doubted he’d stayed bound for long.

  God, she missed him already.

  Her body was sore in the best possible way after the things he’d done to her. She shivered, remembering. But it was the things he’d said that made her stomach twist inside.

  Had Langston been telling the truth? Did he really love her? He’d lied by omission to her, not telling her the truth about how his partner had died. Other than that, he’d never lied, not once.

  Maybe, just maybe, he really did love her. And if he did, how did she feel about him?

  That wasn’t a hard question to answer, though she shied away from putting a name to it. She’d never felt this way about anyone before, and now that her memory was back, that statement held weight.

  Okay, change of plan. She wouldn’t kill Clarke. She’d give him the money in exchange for Danny, but then she’d tell Danny it was over. Her debt to him was paid.

  Once she was rid of both Clarke and Danny, she’d find Langston, turn state’s witness, and help him put Solomon behind bars. Then maybe they could be together. If he wasn’t still totally pissed off at her leaving him handcuffed to a bed.

  Well, there were ways to make up for that.

  A sudden movement outside her window startled her. A man stood outside. He had a gun pointed at her head.

  “FBI. Get out of the car.”

  Shit.

  * * *

  Tom answered the door again despite the lateness of the hour, his expression wary as he surveyed Erik standing on the front step.

  “I’m not here to hurt her,” Erik clarified. “I just need to speak to her.”

  Tom still looked skeptical, but he allowed Erik in the door. “Wait here,” he said, leaving Erik in the foyer.

  It took a good fifteen minutes before Raven appeared, and Erik paced while he waited, the minutes crawling by with agonizing slowness. Where was O’Connell? Was
she somewhere still in the city, close to him?

  “What do you want?” Raven asked, tying her satin ivory dressing gown closed. Her tone was not exactly friendly.

  “I need your help,” Erik said.

  “Why would you think I’d help you? I was nearly killed because you brought Clarissa here.”

  “I didn’t know she was going to do that,” Erik said. “But you said yourself, it wasn’t unexpected. You knew she would come. Just like you knew she wouldn’t kill you.”

  Raven didn’t reply, but Erik knew he was right.

  “You know she isn’t a cold-blooded killer,” he continued. “Even if your son hadn’t been there, you knew she wouldn’t kill you. So don’t pull this martyr crap with me. I need your help. She needs your help.”

  “Fine,” Raven capitulated. “But you realize you led another FBI agent to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He came by shortly after you left earlier. Said his name was Kaminski and that you were his partner. Wanted to know if I knew where you were.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  She shrugged. “I told him the truth, that I had no idea where you two were staying. But he seemed to think that you were being held against your will by Clarissa.”

  Well, that was a little demoralizing, Kaminski thinking a girl could keep him hostage for days on end. She probably could, a little voice reminded him. Whatever.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  Raven shook her head. “No. He made a phone call to someone as he left, something about tracking, but I didn’t hear all that was said.”

  “He must be trying to track my cell phone,” Erik said. He’d turned it off days ago, but O’Connell had taken it. Surely she’d know not to turn it on? But then why would she have taken it?

  “Where’s Clarissa?” Raven asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  “That’s what I need your help to find out.” Erik explained the deal she’d made with Clarke and what she planned to do. “If I don’t find her, Clarke is going to kill her. He’s too deep into this to leave any loose ends.”