Run to You Part Three: Third Charm

by Clara Kensie

  For someone constantly on the lookout for suspicious people, I’d been so blind. Blinded by love—I was a living cliché.

  The binder held photos of the rest of my family too. Mom and Jillian shopping for Homecoming dresses. Logan looking under the hood of our getaway car in the pouring rain while our mother paced behind him. Only one picture of my dad—he stood on the driveway with his hands in his pockets. It was the only time he’d stepped outside the house in Twelve Lakes, as he’d waited for me to return home from jogging with Tristan, so he could shake his hand again.

  With every turn of the page, my heart hurt a little bit more.

  The hardest pages to see were the photos of the alleged victims, the people the APR had accused my parents of blackmailing and murdering. Underneath each photo was their name, along with the location, date, and manner of death. Heart attack. Car accident. Heart attack. Fire. Falling down stairs. Heart attack.

  Tristan sipped in a long breath when I turned the page to photos of two men. “My dad’s partners.”

  The location listed was Kitteridge, Virginia. My hometown.

  The date was the day Dennis Connelly came to our house eight years ago.

  Their manner of death: Stabbing.

  Those were the only deaths that didn’t match the rest.

  A brick grew in my throat. Calling the fog in a bit closer, I dragged my sight from the words to the pictures of the two men. Both photos were simple headshots against a plain backdrop, perhaps taken by the APR for their ID badges. The men stared accusingly back at me, the elder man hefty and wizened, the younger man thin and determined.

  “That guy?” Tristan said, pointing to the younger man. “He was Kellan’s brother-in-law, but they were more like real brothers. I guess Kellan didn’t want to just apprehend your parents. He wanted revenge.” Hands curling into fists, he muttered, “So he took it out on you. Defenseless you.”

  My despair, and the fog, lifted as I realized I didn’t recognize either of those men. I’d never seen them before.

  “Ha!” I cried. “I would have remembered three men coming to my house that day. But there was just one. Your father.” I shoved the binder off my lap and onto his, as if it was contaminated.

  He licked his lips. “My dad was purposely distracting you.”

  Narrowing my eyes at him, I slid the binder back onto my legs and resumed flipping the pages. It didn’t matter what Tristan said; I had absolutely no memory of three men in my yard. I remembered only one: the man who’d tried to kidnap me. The man who’d sliced me open.

  I vaguely recognized a few of the people in the photos—was that the man who’d sold us our getaway car when we left Montana? The binder said he’d died when he cracked his head open after slipping on motor oil. And the hook-nosed waitress from a Georgia diner a few years ago. She’d died of a heart attack.

  I had to stop this. I had to stop looking at these photos. There were too many, and they weren’t helping me prove Tristan was lying. I thumbed through the rest of them as quickly as I could, barely glancing at them—

  Wait.

  Was that...

  Yes. That last photo. The date in the corner showed it had been added to the binder this past Thursday night.

  Dr. Fielding. The college professor.

  I stared at his picture, the same portrait from his website. Even the words “In Memoriam” were printed on top. But it was the words printed on the bottom that made my breath catch.

  I ripped the page from the file. Shoved the binder to the floor. Jumped to my feet and waved the page over my head like a trophy. “I knew it!” I said, my voice screechy and frantic. “You’re lying. And I can prove it.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  “I’m not lying,” Tristan said.

  “Yes you are! This,” I said, waving the photo in his face, “is Dr. Fielding.”

  “The college professor?”

  I stabbed the words under his portrait with my finger. “He died in Hebron, Iowa, on November twenty-third. My family moved to Twelve Lakes, Illinois, in August. We never went further than ten minutes away from our house. And Iowa was at least two hundred miles away. There’s no way my mom could have killed him. She’s not that powerful.”

  Tristan’s face went white.

  “I knew you were lying.” I ran my finger down the professor’s portrait. Dr. Fielding had rescued my family after all.

  Tristan scrambled to gather the papers that had scattered on the floor and began to read them again. Elated, I held Dr. Fielding’s photo in front of me. I could have kissed it. A hysterical giggle escaped from behind my lips.

  They were innocent.

  My parents were innocent.

  They had never blackmailed anyone.

  They’d never killed anyone.

  They’d never lied to me.

  I turned to Tristan with my hands on my hips and snarled. “Now let my parents go, you disgusting, pathetic liar.”

  But instead of being intimidated, he just gave me another one of his sad, sympathetic looks. “You didn’t read the notes on the next page. It says here Dr. Fielding was in Twelve Lakes on November twenty-second.”

  “That can’t be true. He didn’t know who we were. We left all of our personal information out of that email, and Logan made it untraceable. How would he know to come to Twelve Lakes?”

  He referenced the notes again. “Because your parents called him and told him to come.”

  “But...how would my parents know about him back then?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe when Jillian was piggybacking he was able to see inside her mind. Or maybe your parents didn’t trust her, so your father still watched her.”

  If that was true, then my parents had mistrusted the wrong daughter.

  “It says here your mother arranged to meet him at the coffee shop in the town square,” Tristan said. “The security cameras show him getting there at 10:54 a.m. He waited for two hours, and when no one showed up, he left.”

  “See? My parents never met him. So they couldn’t have killed him.”

  He read the notes. “Your mom came in at 11:06, bought a cup of coffee to go, then went home. She never spoke to him, but she was close enough to plant an aneurysm in his brain. Aneurysms don’t necessarily kill right away. She probably chose that method so he wouldn’t die until he got home.”

  I stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

  “Sorry, Tessa. For a minute there, I really thought the APR might be wrong about your parents.”

  I sat down hard on the cot. “This file is fake. It has to be.” I grabbed it from him and flipped through the pages, almost tearing them from the binder.

  “My parents donated to charities,” I said. “They gave money to anyone who needed it. Once when we were on the run, driving through Massachusetts, we were at a motel and the manager was kicking out a woman and her two little kids because she couldn’t afford to pay. My parents gave her enough cash to stay in a different motel, a better motel, for a month. If they were killers, they wouldn’t have done that. They wouldn’t.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Tristan said.

  I tried again. “What about the police detective and the FBI agent we asked for help?” I said. “My dad watched your father kill them, he watched your father slice them right down the middle, and each time, I watched my dad. He could not have faked the horror in his eyes. My mother could not have faked her tears. She was hysterical, Tristan.”

  He only shook his head with a sorrowful sigh.

  Memories. All I had were my memories of my parents’ altruism and my father’s horrified expression as he witnessed those murders. Those memories were enough evidence for me, but they wouldn’t be enough evidence for Tristan.

  I was no longer happy that Jill
ian and Logan had escaped. Selfishly, I wanted them here, with me. They’d help me prove our parents were innocent.

  But Jillian and Logan were gone. I’d have to find the proof myself.

  * * *

  Shaking off my despair, I studied the notes in the binder again. Kellan wrote how he could not use his telepathy to read our minds in case one of us could sense his intrusion. He recorded his plans, from hiding a tiny camera under our front windowsill to record our comings and goings—it must have been Kellan’s handprint on our window—to pulling the wires in our getaway car in an effort to provoke my mom or brother into using psionics to fix it. But with my mother standing watch and clearly ready to attack, and still not fully informed on all of our powers, he had decided not to move in.

  The bulk of his strategy involved Tristan prying information from me. It was those notes that made my stomach churn.

  A note written by Tristan, on the day we met for the first time: Followed targets 4 and 5 as they left the house and went running in park. Made first contact with target 4. She resisted conversation. —T. Connelly

  A note written by Kellan, from the night of Ethan’s party: Instructed agent to tell target 4 he has fallen in love with her to prompt her to confess her own secrets. Partial success. —J. Kellan

  “Our whole relationship was set up,” I said, my voice small. “You manipulated every moment of it.”

  “Tessa—” He took my hand.

  I jerked it away. “I think you mean ‘Target 4.’”

  He grabbed my hand back. “No. I mean Tessa. I love you. That is not a lie. I wanted to tell you, but not because Kellan said to. I wanted to wait until you knew the real me.”

  I knew the real Tristan now, and he was a liar.

  “Tell me, Tristan.” I narrowed my eyes. “Was the tree almost falling on me part of the plan too?”

  “God, no. We’d never purposely put you in danger like that.”

  “And what would you call this?” I waved my arms around the cell.

  “This,” he said as he copied my movements, “is the first time in your entire life you haven’t been in danger.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He roared then, a frustrated, furious growl, and jumped up. “It terrified me when you told me some man was hunting you, Tessa! The first thing I did was call Kellan to demand an army of guards to protect your family until we found him. But before Kellan answered, I saw the name you wrote in my notebook. Dennis Connelly. My father.”

  He slapped the wall. “So I hung up on Kellan and called my dad. All missions are supposed to be confidential, but I told him everything. That’s when he realized which case I was on, that I was on a criminal case, his old case. Kellan was lying to us all along, and your parents were lying to you.”

  His anger scared me a little, and I shrank back. He sank to the cot and raked his hands through his hair. His next words were gentle. “When I was ten, my dad went out of town with his team on a simple recruitment mission. That afternoon, some guards came and brought my mom and sister and me to the APR. They told us my dad had a heart attack and his partners had been killed. We were never told any details except they were interviewing a potential psionic subject, and something went wrong and the subject and his wife attacked them. They stabbed his partners to death, and they suspected they actually gave my dad that heart attack. The healers healed my dad, but he was weaker than before. He spent the rest of his career here trying to find your family and bring you and your siblings to safety, until my mom finally convinced him to retire so he could rest his heart.”

  I said nothing, trying to imagine a weak Dennis Connelly.

  I couldn’t do it.

  “Then last week,” Tristan said, “once I knew what was really going on, I did everything I could to protect you. I begged Kellan to let Heath safeguard you, but he said no. If your father tried to use his remote vision on you and couldn’t, he’d know something was up. We couldn’t use psionics on your family at all. We couldn’t do anything that would make your parents suspicious until he had a plan.”

  Head down, he stared at the concrete floor. “It was the worst week of my life, Tessa. You kept looking up at me with those big hopeful eyes, but I’d never felt so helpless. I couldn’t tell you the truth. I was afraid to let you go home, knowing what your mother could—”

  With a strangled whimper I shoved the binder to the floor. I could not let him finish that sentence. How dare he even think that my mother would purposely hurt me, let alone say it out loud. “You’re still trying to manipulate me. You want me to feel sorry for you, but it won’t work. You strut around with that cocky smile and your stupid warning premonitions, knowing nothing bad will ever happen to you. But now, for the first time in your life, things didn’t work out the way you wanted. And you don’t know how to handle it.”

  He released a shaky sigh. “You’re right. I don’t.”

  “So stop trying to make me feel bad for you. I’m not your puppet anymore. I’m not your girlfriend anymore either.”

  It worked. He never finished the sentence. He stopped talking completely. He just stared at me, looking hurt.

  Good.

  The binder’s rings had opened when I’d pushed it to the floor, and the papers had scattered. With shaking hands, I bent to gather them up. One page caught my attention as I slipped it back in the file, a transcribed phone conversation between Tristan and Kellan, dated this past Thursday night:

  J. Kellan: Now that we know what they can do, we have to figure out what they can’t do. There’s got to be a way to apprehend them without getting anyone else killed. They must have a weakness.

  T. Connelly: I’ve been thinking about it for days. They don’t have a weakness.

  J. Kellan: You know that family better than anyone, Junior. There’s got to be something you’re not telling me.

  T. Connelly: I’m telling you everything I know.

  J. Kellan: I’m on my way over there right now, and I’ll order Heath to remove your safeguard. I’ll read your mind and find out what you’re not telling me anyway.

  T. Connelly: (unintelligible)

  J. Kellan: Damn it, Connelly! Tell me! What else do you know? What is their weakness?

  T. Connelly: (unintelligible) ...They think she’s breakable. They take care of her. They protect her. Their greatest weakness, their only weakness...is Tessa.

  I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even breathe. The only sound in the cell was the pounding of my heart. I read Tristan’s words over and over again, then finally looked up at him.

  His face was ashen. “Tessa, I am so sorry.”

  Pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes, I sank to the cot and tried to get air into my lungs. “You gave Kellan the idea to kidnap me.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I begged him to leave you out of it, and he swore he would. He lied to me right up to the very end.” He put his arm around me, rubbing my back. I couldn’t even shake him off.

  He was right.

  I was my parents’ greatest weakness.

  My parents were locked up, neutralized and unjustly accused of murder. All because I had believed Tristan when he said he loved me. Because I’d believed him when he said he would keep me safe. Because I had told him our secrets.

  This was all my fault.

  Exhaustion weighed me down like a blanket of lead, and the desire to call in the fog was so strong I couldn’t fight it, or Tristan, any longer. “I want to go to sleep now please.”

  “Okay.” Relief was clear in his voice. “Go get ready for bed.”

  I slipped from under his arm and shuffled to the bathroom. Like a robot, I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Thank goodness there was no mirror over the sink. I wouldn’t be able to stand looking at myself.

  When I returned to the cell, Tristan had fallen asleep. He slouched agains
t the wall, the binder open on his lap.

  I stared at him, trying to decide who I despised more at that moment: Tristan...or myself.

  I declared a tie.

  I dimmed the light, then went to my familiar corner of the cell and curled up on the floor, using my forearms as a pillow. The chill from the cement seeped through my gray cotton pants and sweatshirt.

  Good.

  I stared at the darkness for a long time.

  “Tessa?” Tristan’s whisper broke the silence. “What are you doing over there? Come to bed.”

  I said nothing.

  “I won’t touch you. I promise. We’ll just sleep.”

  Still, I said nothing, just bent my knees up to my chest and shivered. The fog rumbled, and I imagined it surrounding me, taking me away. But it disappeared with a whoosh when Tristan’s strong arms scooped me up. I shrieked and tried to bat him off, but he held tight.

  Without a word, he deposited me on the cot. Then he took my place on the floor, stretched out on his back with his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.

  I stared at him for a few moments, then pulled the blanket up to my shoulders and turned to the wall.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The smell of soap and masculinity woke me the next day. I opened my eyes to see Tristan pulling a hockey sweater over his freshly showered chest, a chest that once upon a time I’d associated with strength and safety.

  He moved stiffly and rotated his shoulders with several crackling pops, but stopped when he saw me watching.

  The cell door opened. A very heavy guard with black shoes that squeaked with every step walked in, carrying a tray with two baskets of cheeseburgers and fries and two cartons of milk.

  “You slept through breakfast,” Tristan said to me. “It’s almost noon.”

  Squeaky Shoes handed Tristan the tray and turned to leave.

  “Hey, buddy, wait.” Tristan gestured to me. “She’s a vegetarian. Can you bring her something else?”

  “This is a prison,” the guard said. “Not a restaurant.”