Lucas put on coffee. He looked tired. Worn around the edges, more rugged than usual, but handsome as hell. Her heart gave a little roll in her chest. She needed to get him far away from her. She couldn’t bear it if anything bad happened to him.
“I take it no one knows I’m here?” she asked carefully.
“Just us,” Lucas answered.
“I won’t tell anyone.” The last time those words had passed between them they’d been talking about sex. A flicker of acknowledgement sparked in Lucas’s dark eyes. “Let me go, and I’ll disappear. No one will ever know you kidnapped me.”
“You’ll forgive us?” The cynical humor in Lucas’s voice took her aback.
“I thought you were working for my uncle when you snatched me, and that fear is something I won’t forget in a hurry.” His brown eyes widened, and a look of remorse crossed his features. Yeah, too late. “So, no, I won’t forgive you—not for a long time. But I understand it.”
Parker ignored her, typing furiously. “No electronic trackers on this system.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, thank goodness for that.”
“Rather than sniping at him, why don’t you tell us your version of events?” Lucas spoke from the other side of the room in a deceptively soft voice.
She narrowed her good eye at him. “What’s the point if you won’t believe a word of it?”
“Try me.” All the different meanings of the phrase buzzed between them. For a moment, his pupils flared with heat. Then his gaze frosted over like the Arctic in January. He turned away to pour coffee, too disgusted to converse with her any more than necessary. He placed a steaming mug in front of her and moved away again.
Parker picked up her personal laptop and took it to a nearby counter to work on, no doubt to prevent her from tipping her drink and frying the circuit boards. Something she’d definitely do if she had something to hide.
“Why did Jenny Britton fake her own death?” Lucas asked. “Or did the whole crime family see the tsunami as some huge opportunity to leverage?”
The word “tsunami” had her mouth going dry, and she glanced out the window. Her fear was something she’d managed to control with some intensive hypnotherapy and by never staying too close to the edge of the sea. She was embarrassed she’d lost it yesterday, but then, she had been abducted by parties unknown, so maybe she should give herself a break.
Lucas sat in the chair Parker vacated, close enough she could smell the male scent of his skin. “We don’t have much time, Ashley,” he said impatiently.
The reminder made her shake off her inertia. She might not be part of the fight anymore, but she was part of the problem. And she wanted these animals caught even more than Lucas did.
“When I was sixteen years old, my parents were killed in an airplane crash off the coast of Malibu.” His expression registered the fact she’d lied to him when she’d told him her parents had died in a car wreck. Car wrecks were harder to track, but the emotional impact had been the same. She wrapped her hands around the mug for warmth. “We were devastated.”
“We?” Lucas asked.
“My brother Andrew and me. He was a year older than me.” She was pretty sure he was the one running the computer systems for the Devils. “As if losing our parents wasn’t bad enough, two weeks later we were told by the family lawyer that we were being sent to live with an uncle we’d never even heard of in Macau. I freaked out.” She stared down at her coffee. She was still protective of the girl she’d been and didn’t want them judging her actions. Jenny Britton was the very best part of Ashley Chen. “I complained and rebelled. I even ran away, but the cops caught me and took me back. They shipped us off in October in what should have been Andrew’s final year of high school.”
The coffee was strong and bitter so she added some sugar. It helped to have something to do with her hands. “My uncle and his son tried to make us feel welcome. At first I thought it was going to be okay. As soon as I was eighteen I’d receive my inheritance from my parents and be able to leave. I was too stupid to realize my uncle was placating us in the short-term. He hired a private tutor, who included all sorts of Chinese cultural shit into our lessons—how women should be demure and feminine. Seen, not heard. Homemakers. How they should learn to please a man in the home and the bedroom.” She’d wanted to gag. “That’s not how I grew up. My mother was well educated and very much the equal of my father. Needless to say, I continued rebelling and things got real, fast. Yu Chang took us to Thailand for the Christmas break, and I began sneaking out.” She looked up and caught Lucas’s gaze. “He never imagined I’d be foolish enough to disobey him.”
Lucas’s smile was tight. He could obviously imagine it all too well.
“I met a boy, a German guy. I lied to him about my age. Yes,” she said, seeing his expression, “I’ve been doing that for a long time. I snuck out on Christmas night, and I let Martel make love to me for the first time on a secluded beach.”
The memory of losing her virginity was tainted by blood and violence. Tears still wanted to fall when she thought of it. If only she hadn’t met him. “The next day at the villa, when I came downstairs, my uncle and cousin were in the garden beating Martel. My cousin had followed me and seen the two of us having sex.”
Rage and horror flowed through her at the memory, and her hands shook so badly she carefully put the coffee down on the table so as not to spill it. “Yu Chang gutted Martel in front of me.”
Lucas’s expression turned grim.
Martel’s murder had never been solved. She was the only witness who wasn’t tied to her uncle’s organization, and she’d pretended to be dead for more than a decade. He’d never found justice. He’d never been avenged.
“Then the wave came.” Her knuckles whitened in her lap, and she forced herself to relax.
“That’s why you freaked out about being on the beach yesterday.” Understanding dawned in Lucas’s eyes.
She glanced at the window and held back a shudder. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen you’d understand why living on the beach is lunacy.”
One side of his mouth quirked. “People pay millions of dollars to live on the beach.”
“Idiots. All of them.”
“I’ll be sure to tell my mother,” he said wryly.
The words caused a weird pang in the region of her heart. Sadness at the thought she’d never meet his mother was ridiculous. They’d had sex, nothing more. She’d never have been invited to meet the parents, never have gained approval in a relationship. She might be a fuck buddy for a while, but she sure as hell wasn’t wife material.
Then she shook her head at herself. That ingrained need for parental approval never left no matter how old she got. She didn’t know if it was because she was an Asian-American female or because she was an insecure orphan. Whatever it was, it sucked.
“What happened after the wave hit?”
Her heart started thumping as she thought of the nightmarish aftermath, of being dragged through the water and flipped like a rag doll. Nature had been cruelly indifferent to her victims. No mercy was shown.
Her therapist had helped rationalize her fear. Hypnotherapy helped control it. Neither method was foolproof.
“I thought I was dead. I mean I literally saw the tunnel of light and heard my parents calling me. I lost consciousness. When I woke I was tangled up in the branches of a tree wondering why Heaven hurt so damn much.” At first she’d been joyous to have survived, then horrified.
She’d known the only way to escape her uncle’s grasp if he was still alive—and cockroaches always survived—was to disappear and hope he believed she’d succumbed. It was a daunting prospect for a sixteen-year-old girl thousands of miles from home.
“I knew this would be my one and only chance to escape. I didn’t recognize the landscape, but I figured out which way was south and headed in that direction.” Her pulse pounded a rhythm in her ear. “People were rushing past on mopeds and in jeeps, but there were places that were impassib
le, and everyone had to get out and start walking. Most were milling around, dazed. Then someone would scream that another wave was coming, and we’d all run for higher ground.” She made fists with her hands to stop them from shaking. “As the sun started to set on that first day, I went into the bush to relieve myself and found a dead girl who was about my height and build.” It had taken all her courage to swap T-shirts with a fresh corpse. Then she’d put the diamond earrings that her uncle had given her the day before into the small holes in the girl’s ears and stolen the shoes off the dead girl’s feet. The next thing she’d done was the one thing in her life she was truly ashamed of. The girl had been dead, and it hadn’t mattered. It had been a desecration.
Ashley had made sure that young woman would never be visually identified.
The two men watched her carefully. Maybe they’d figured out the awful unsaid things she’d done to escape her uncle. Maybe they didn’t care.
“The next day, I carried on walking. I didn’t speak to anyone, because I didn’t want them to notice my American accent. You could say I acted traumatized, but I wasn’t acting.” She frowned. It was odd the things that came back to you. The sight of women comforting barefoot children on the side of the road. Of tourists helping locals. Locals aiding strangers even as they faced the total destruction of their homes and livelihoods.
“After a day, I was delirious from lack of food and water and couldn’t carry on, but just as it was getting dark a rescue convoy came along and pulled me onboard. When I woke up I was in an overcrowded hospital in Phuket. I borrowed an American tourist’s phone and called my great aunt on my dad’s side. She was a retired diplomat.”
She saw the spark of interest in both men’s eyes. Her aunt had immediately understood the importance of getting her out of the country and back to the States without Yu Chang finding out she’d survived. Her aunt had wanted to get Andrew out too, but Ashley hadn’t known if he was alive or dead. She still didn’t know for sure.
“My aunt had a friend who worked for the Red Cross.” Ashley didn’t know how she’d managed it, but two excruciatingly tense days later, Jenny Britton had found herself on a cargo plane bound for Australia. “I made it to Canberra and from there my aunt enlisted the help of another friend of hers and secretly got me back to the States using diplomatic channels.” There was no record of her arrival or departure from Australia.
“What was her name?” Lucas asked.
“My aunt? Meredith Beauchamp—Merry. She died a couple of years ago.” She held Lucas’s gaze. “She’s the godmother I told you about.”
She needed him to know she hadn’t lied about everything. He looked away.
“How’d you construct the false identity?” Parker asked.
She’d been trying to pretend Parker wasn’t there in the room, judging her.
“My aunt’s long-term boyfriend was retired CIA. Frank Pratsky. He died last year.” That loss had hit her doubly hard.
Parker’s face showed recognition.
“He used his Agency contacts.” And her false identity had been so good, it had fooled everyone, including the FBI’s screening service.
The only people to ever question it had been Alex Parker and Lucas Randall.
“You changed your age.” Lucas’s tone was accusatory.
“I’m way past the age of consent if that’s what you’re worried about,” she snapped. She tried to dampen her resentment. “I added four years to deflect anyone who might have been searching for me online.”
“So you finished your degree at Cornell at nineteen?” Parker was still typing on her workstation.
“Worked in the tech industry and joined the FBI as soon as I could.”
“Except you were actually only twenty-two,” Lucas admonished. As if that was her biggest sin. “And you’re twenty-seven now?”
“Jenny Britton would have been twenty-seven next week.” Valentine’s Day. “Ashley Chen is thirty.”
“And who’s next? You have a new identity all mapped out?” Anger lit the depths of Lucas’s eyes.
She stared at him, stunned. That was all he had to say after she’d told him of her narrow escape from death and epic journey halfway around the world?
“Hmm…” She put a finger on her bottom lip. “Maybe a high class call girl to take care of the needs of middle-aged white guys? Pretty sure I’d make a fortune.”
He glared at her.
What the hell did he care? He’d told her he hated liars, but not everyone was as lucky as he was with their relatives. And he’d told some corkers to Sloan today. It was probably another black mark against her. Corrupting his soul.
“How’d you beat the polygraph?” Parker asked.
She stared at the tabletop. It was unfinished wood. She touched her fingers to the raised grain. “I had a lot of nightmares after the tsunami and spent years in therapy. It included a lot of hypnotherapy. I started using that for pretty much every aspect in my life that stressed me out. Exams, being near the beach, cocktail parties.”
“Maybe I should try it for when I visit Mallory’s parents,” Parker quipped.
She blinked at him in shock. He had never made a joke with her before. Never. Not once. He seemed to realize it, too, and looked away.
“When I decided I wanted to join the FBI, Frank got hold of a polygraph machine, and the two of us practiced until I could beat it nine times out of ten.”
“He approved of what you were doing?”
She didn’t like the judgmental tone Lucas was using against one of the few people to have offered her their unstinting support. Ashley hadn’t had many people she trusted in her life, but Frank was solid gold.
“He thought I was crazy for applying to the FBI, period. He thought the feebs were a bunch of uptight know-it-alls with sticks up their asses—his words, not mine.”
“He had a point,” Parker murmured.
“He wanted me to join the CIA, but I knew if I did they’d send me to China or Asia, and I’d have more chance of running across someone who recognized me.”
“So instead you join the Bureau and end up investigating your nearest and dearest,” Lucas jeered.
Her eyes narrowed. “They are not my nearest and dearest.”
“So you say,” he bit out.
“They are monsters, and I hate them.”
“Why didn’t you admit this to the authorities before?” Lucas put his hands on his hips, and she had to force herself to look away. She didn’t want basic physical attraction to scramble her thought processes. “They could have protected you.”
“Seriously?” Was he really that naive? “I didn’t even know if they survived the tsunami. They’d have stuffed me in a room and pumped me for information. Then they’d have kicked me out. They’d never have let me near law enforcement or computers.”
“You’re the niece of one of the biggest organized gang leaders in Asia. You don’t think you’d have something useful to share?”
She noticed he didn’t deny the fact she’d never have been allowed to join the feds.
“So, for a few tidbits of information that were probably outdated, I’m supposed to sacrifice my life? You think Yu Chang wouldn’t figure out someone was feeding the FBI information? You think he wouldn’t come after me? Did you see what happened to Susan Thomas?”
“You don’t think the FBI could have protected you?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “No, I don’t.”
“You ever heard of WITSEC?”
“Look, I love and believe in the FBI. But in the old days Yu Chang had people everywhere. He collected blackmail material and was rich enough to buy anyone he wanted. There was no way I was risking him getting wind that I was still alive. I just wanted to fight bad guys and serve my country in a meaningful way.”
“And yet, your lies and lack of faith have made a mockery of the organization you claim to love. You know that, right?” It was the disappointment in Lucas’s gaze that finally got to her.
She swallo
wed tightly. “I never made a mockery of it. I dedicated my life to it—no husband, no kids, no friends, nothing except my job.”
And how did it repay her?
By calling her traitor.
She watched them exchange a look that told her they still didn’t believe her. Hurt boiled over, and she stood. “Fine. Whatever. I ran away from everything I knew when I was sixteen. I was swept away by that terrifying wave, and I was glad that I was going to die. Do you understand how much fear I lived in? My uncle wanted me in his fucking bed.” That stunned them both out of their cynicism. “Do you have any clue what it is like to feel a man’s eyes on your body, on your breasts, between your legs, and know it’s just a matter of time before that deviant rapes you? And no one will come to your rescue no matter how loudly you scream?”
Lucas flinched.
“Sixteen years old,” she stared him down, “and I would rather have died than subject myself to all the things he wanted to do to me. So, yeah,” she spat out, “lying about my identity to stop that kind of violation didn’t feel wrong at the time. It felt necessary.”
She was breathing heavily through her nose, striving for calm. “And he isn’t going to stop now he knows I’m alive. He’s going to keep looking for me, and when he finds me, he isn’t going to kill me. He’s going to confine me and use me the way he wanted to all those years ago. He’s going to find a way to force me to fuck his brains out and suck his dick, probably by threatening someone I love. So I’ll pretend I love him, because for some crazy reason—and I do mean crazy—he was obsessed with my mother, and now he’s obsessed with me.” Tears filled her eyes, and now she couldn’t see at all. Goddamn it. She’d sworn she wouldn’t shed tears over this. “He won’t stop until one of us is dead, and you are not safe with me.”
“That’s why you don’t let anyone close.” Lucas’s soft words drove a spike through her heart.
“I prefer to be alone,” she insisted.
“What if he finds out we already slept together?” Lucas had to push it.
A vision of Martel flashed through her mind. The wrenching sound as metal ripped through flesh. Rivers of scarlet blood, vivid against pale, smooth stone. She turned away so he couldn’t see the devastation on her face.
Cold Secrets (Cold Justice Book 7) Page 25
