A Cry in the Dark

by Jenna Mills

  Those who walk alone are the first to fall.

  This man had already fallen, she thought with a twist to her heart. Not tonight. Not anytime recently. But once, the tall man with the hard eyes, the one who could walk through the fire without flinching but could barely look inside her son’s room, had fallen.

  And he’d hurt.

  Of their own will, her fingers again found her mouth, trailed over her lips, where only a few hours before Liam had shown her a side of himself normally hidden behind the wall of secrets. He’d shown her the need. The want.

  And just like it had then, the want sent a sharp slice through her.

  Because Alex was missing, and that was all that mattered.

  “Good night,” she forced herself to say, and with a jolt time lurched forward once again.

  “Lock up behind me.” Liam walked away and slid into his car, backed into the street and drove into the night—for the first time since they’d met not pausing to look back.

  Danielle watched the taillights vanish down her quiet tree-lined street before closing the front door and sliding the bolt into place.

  FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks walked alone, and that was the way he wanted it.

  Frowning, she turned and headed down the hall, not to the feminine sanctuary he’d dominated a few minutes before, where the scent of man and soap and musk no doubt lingered, but to the second door on the right, the one that led to a room brimming with toys and books and memories.

  “Alex,” she whispered on a broken breath, and damn near doubled over. Alex.

  She flicked off the light Liam had turned on, then nudged aside the giant stuffed panda her brother and sister had given her son in honor of his first birthday and continued to the bed. There, she lay with her mobile phone clenched in one hand and the Spider-Man comforter balled in the other, and stared into the darkness for a long, long time. And try as she did to chase aside Magdalena’s prophecy of destiny and shadows, danger and salvation, the wise old woman’s parting words lingered.

  Those who walk alone are the first to fall.

  Danielle walked alone.

  The thought, the reality, should not have bothered Liam. She’d crafted her life the way she wanted it. She’d carved out a quiet existence for herself and her son. She’d slapped up brick and mortar between herself and the rest of the world, a near impenetrable wall that she used to hold everyone, everything, at a safe, nonthreatening distance. It was a wall she used to protect herself and her son.

  Because just as Magdalena had warned, Danielle had fallen.

  And she’d hurt. Badly.

  She knew what it was like to lose, and to blame herself. She knew what it was to bleed from the inside out.

  Frowning, Liam ignored the bottle of scotch and concentrated on the four cards spread on the smooth cherry wood of the hotel dresser. The three tattered postcards of the German farmhouse, a farmhouse he’d actually traveled to Germany to find, to investigate, only to come up empty-handed, glowed like old pals. The newest card, that of the grinning rabbit juggling the earth and the sun and the moon, fascinated.

  Titan.

  The old woman had been dead-on with her reading. Dead. On.

  Glancing up, Liam caught his face in the antique mirror, but rather than seeing himself, he saw Danielle, the stunned look in her eyes when he’d consented to a reading. He’d surprised her but not himself. Some answers came only through throwing conventionalisdom out the window. There were forces at work here he didn’t understand, forces that defied logic. He’d accept help where he could find it.

  Because he was missing something, damn it. Something fundamental. Something vital. There had to be a link. A reason. There had to be a motive for Titan to want Danielle so badly he’d abducted her son.

  Want. Danielle.

  The two words twisted, disturbed.

  He should never have kissed her. He should never have succumbed to the need that had ripped at him from the first moment he’d seen her, the need that strengthened with every moment they spent together. The need that had boiled over when he’d turned around and found her gone.

  Wondered if Titan had stolen her, as well.

  If once again he’d been too late.

  Swearing softly, his heart hammering too fast all over again, he picked up the phone and stabbed out one of the countless numbers he’d stored in the memory banks of his mind.

  “Nothing,” Mariah said ten minutes later. “Lennox never said a word about a link between Titan and a woman in Chicago.”

  Liam turned from the constant drone of CNN and paced the small room. “There’s got to be something,” he said. Something they were overlooking. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Mariah sighed softly, as she always did when about to pull the rug from under Liam’s feet. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe you’re looking for links that don’t exist.”

  “They exist.” He stared over the lake, watched the light of the moon dance across the choppy dark water. It had been a long shot, but he’d hoped Lennox had said something to Mariah before his murder, something seemingly innocuous that could not have made sense at the time, but now shone light in a new direction. “Titan didn’t just kidnap Alex for the fun of it. The boy is only six years old, for crissakes. He can’t possibly pose a threat—”

  Mariah sucked in a sharp breath. “Alex?”

  The ring of recognition, of disbelief, in her voice echoed through the room like a death knell. “Talk to me, Mariah. What does that name mean to you?”

  She was quiet a long moment before answering. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Tell me, anyway.”

  “It’s just that…” She hesitated, muttered something under her breath. “This is crazy, Liam, but you remember Gretchen, don’t you? Jake’s sister?”

  “We’ve met.” He recalled an image of the striking, brilliant brunette who specialized in deciphering ancient languages. “She was pregnant at the time.”

  “She has a little girl now,” Mariah said. “Violet. She’s two.”

  “That’s great, but—”

  “Violet’s very talented artistically, Liam, and for the past three days she’s been drawing pictures. During the night. While she’s asleep. Pictureof a little boy.”

  Everything inside of Liam went horribly still. “A little boy?”

  “Alex, she calls him,” Mariah whispered. “And she says he’s in trouble.”

  It couldn’t be. No freaking way. It just wasn’t possible that a little girl in Boston could be drawing pictures of Danielle’s son, a boy she’d never even met.

  Liam towered over the fax machine in the Stirling’s business office, practically willing the image to come across the line. The manager had been amazingly cooperative about opening the center after midnight, but guest accommodation was one of the hallmarks of the luxury hotel, and Liam had definitely needed accommodating when he’d come charging into the lobby.

  The phone line rang and the machine started to hum, spitting out a piece of paper one slow millimeter at a time. Liam wanted to yank the damn sheet out, but he forced himself to stand there. And to wait.

  Gradually, the image took form.

  It was a crude drawing, clearly that of a child, but remarkable in its detail. He saw the feet first, one foot bare, one sporting a tennis shoe, and his blood temperature dropped a few degrees.

  One of Alex’s shoes had been returned to Danielle.

  Then came the skinny legs, the little cargo shorts, the T-shirt with a primitive drawing of a spider-like man, then the face.

  Swearing softly, Liam grabbed the single page.

  Then he ran.

  Chapter 11

  Danielle just stared. So did Liam. But whereas she stared at the picture drawn by a child’s hand, he stared at her. She stood in the small foyer, with a pool of light spilling around her like a halo. Her eyes, normally a clear, volatile green, were shockingly dark. The roughened edge to her voice told him she’d been sleeping, as she should have been in
the middle of the night, but she still wore the same dark jeans and top she’d been wearing when he dropped her off.

  “Alex.” Clenching the facsimile, her fingers went sheet white. “Dear God, it’s Alex.”

  Liam’s gut twisted hard. He was a man who took great pride in being right. But here, now, hearing the horror drench her voice, he found only the slimy, sludgelike feeling of dread.

  She looked up, pierced him with her gaze. “Where did you get this?”

  It should have been an easy question. “Come on.” He put his hand to the small of her back and steered her toward the kitchen. “I’ll explain.”

  Darkness poured in from the windows, isolating them from the world beyond and creating a disturbing intimacy he did not want to feel. Danielle Caldwell was a tough, gutsy woman. She didn’t cower. She didn’t crumble. She lifted her chin and faced every challenge life cast her way. But now, with the hour pasnight and the drawing of her son in her hands, Liam sensed a vulnerability that ripped at him.

  He didn’t want to sit at the old round table, where a vase made of purple-stained Popsicle sticks held daisies past their prime. He didn’t want to coldly and logically explain something that made absolutely no sense. He didn’t want to be the impersonal FBI agent, the one who walked alone.

  He wanted to be just a man, to draw this woman into his arms and hold her, to promise her everything would be okay.

  But he couldn’t do that, not any of it, so he pulled out an old kitchen chair and robotically helped her sit, then flipped around the one beside her and straddled it to start to explain.

  The postcard stopped him cold.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, and though he tried to be matter-of-fact, the question tore out of him.

  Danielle glanced at the clutter of bills and catalogs across the table, where the deceptive image of a pastoral German farmhouse graced a postcard. “It came in the mail,” she said dismissively. “Yesterday, I think.”

  Liam swore softly. He untucked his shirt and wrapped his hand in the wrinkled cotton, then reached for the card with a Chicago postmark, turned it over and saw the words. Four of them, simple, seemingly harmless.

  “I’ll be seeing you.”

  His vision blurred, and any doubt he’d tried to harbor, any figment of hope he’d tried to manufacture that Titan was not after Danielle went up in flames.

  Don’t stare, Danielle remembered one of her foster mother’s lecturing, over and over and over. She could still see the June Cleaver wannabe, in her prim little high-necked pink dress and expensive pearls, her neatly coiffed frosted hair, scowling at Danielle, who couldn’t stop watching a young mother cooing to her newborn baby. It’s not polite, Mrs. Watters had snapped. It makes people uncomfortable. It shows bad breeding.

  But Danielle hadn’t cared then, and she didn’t care now.

  The woman who’d arrived thirty minutes before wasn’t beautiful, not in a classical sense. Her features were a little too sharp, her eyes, an amazing shade of blue, a little too intelligent.

  Arresting, Danielle realized. The woman, with her long, silky mane of dark hair, was arresting.

  That was why she stared, she reasoned. That explained the odd hum that had started deep inside, the moment Gretchen Miller had walked through her front door, followed by a tall man with wavy brown hair. Her husband, Danielle had learned. Kurt. And propped on his hip with her chubby little arms thrown around his neck, he’d held a miniature version of his wife, little Violet.

  The child who’d drawn the pictures of Alex.

  She’d been in the news, she recalled. Not the daughter, but the mother. Gretchen. The woman who’d graciously flown out from Boston that morning. She was one of the Proteans, a woman born not of love, but genetic experimentation. Several years back the shocking story had flooded the airwaves. There’d been rumors and allegations, a stark fear that therebe more than the original six. For a while, everyone who’d been adopted in the mid-seventies was suspect.

  That explained the blast of familiarity, Danielle reasoned. The strange echo, the swirling sense that she’d met Gretchen before. That she knew her, had always known her.

  “I didn’t think much of it at first,” Gretchen was saying. She sat on the denim sofa, her elegant cream traveling suit making the newest piece of furniture Danielle owned look shabby somehow. “Violet is always drawing things. She’s quite talented.”

  Danielle glanced at the little girl who sat wedged between her mother and father. She fiddled with an old Rubik’s cube Alex had found at a flea market. Her hair was lighter than her mother’s, but her eyes were the same unusual, striking shade of blue.

  “But then she started waking up agitated,” Gretchen said.

  Violet looked up. “Awex wants to come home,” she said in her little-girl voice, but her eyes suddenly looked ancient. Wise.

  Danielle moved to kneel in front of the little girl. Her heart was beating so fast she could barely catch her breath. “Where is he?”

  Violet frowned. “On a cot.”

  Danielle’s breath stalled, but before she could say anything, Liam was standing beside her, tall, strong, solid, gently laying a steadying hand on her shoulder.

  “Has she done anything like this before?” he asked.

  “No. Never. I mean, she’s always been extremely talented, but the pictures didn’t start until the morning after—” Gretchen broke off, shot a sharp glance at her husband.

  “After what?” Liam asked, and Danielle had to fight the urge to lift her hand to his, link her fingers with his, feel his strength, the life force that flooded a room the second he walked inside.

  Gretchen worked her lip. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just…” She again glanced at her husband, her expression screaming discomfort.

  “A few days ago Gretchen thought she heard Violet scream,” Kurt said. Warmth filled his voice, a deep, soothing, Texas drawl. “She ran upstairs, certain something terrible had happened, only to find Violet drawing quietly in her room.”

  The hairs on the back of Danielle’s neck bristled.

  “When was that?” Liam asked. “What day?”

  Gretchen and Kurt exchanged glances. “Three or four days ago?” Gretchen said. “Monday, I think?”

  Danielle absorbed the information like a blow. “That’s when Alex was kidnapped,” she whispered, not even trying to hide the ripple of horror.

  Liam knelt beside her and quietly slid an arm around her waist, drew her against him.

  It was all Danielle could do not to sag.

  Quiet spilled into the room. Danielle looked at the picture on her coffee table, the crude drawing of her son, with his tennis shoe missing and his favorite T-shirt sagging on his chest. “Is

  The question practically burst out of her.

  Little Violet nodded sagely. “He just wants to come home,” she said. “I told him my daddy would help since he doesn’t have one.”

  The room started to spin. “Oh, God,” she murmured, and Liam pulled her tighter against him.

  “And Miss Caldwell,” Violet said.

  It took effort, but Danielle stitched together the threadbare edges of her composure and smiled at the little girl. “Did you remember something else, sweetie?”

  Her little lips trembled. “He wasn’t mad.”

  Danielle blinked. “Wasn’t mad?”

  “Awex,” she clarified. “When he didn’t get the Spidaman shoes.” She set down the cube, all the colors perfectly aligned. “He heard you crying in your room and feels real bad about the fit he threw.” She paused, frowned. “He knows you woulda gotten him the shoes if you coulda.”

  And Danielle couldn’t do it one second longer, couldn’t just kneel there on the old braided rug and pretend she wasn’t unraveling, thread by tattered thread.

  “Oh, God,” she cried on a broken sob, then turned into Liam’s chest and absorbed the feel of him, the clean soapy scent of man and strength, the dangerous luxury of feeling his arms close around her and hold on tight.


  “You need to eat more than that.”

  Danielle glanced at the bowl of chicken noodle soup Liam had heated up, and felt her stomach lurch. “I’m not hungry.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t need your strength,” he said, studying her from across the table. He’d practically inhaled the bowl he’d fixed for himself, then he’d just sat there, staring at the postcard of the German farmhouse. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, didn’t realize he’d been aware of her or her movements.

  “Maybe later.” She stood and carried her bowl to the sink. He was right. She did need her strength. Alex needed her strength. But every time she’d brought the spoon to her mouth, she’d almost gagged.

  Gretchen and Kurt and their adorable daughter had stayed for the better part of the afternoon, before heading off to catch a flight back to Boston. Now the shadows of early evening crept in the window, replacing the bright light of late afternoon.

  She should ask Liam to leave. She knew that. He’d been at her house since shortly after midnight, when he’d simultaneously banged on her front door and called her from his cell phone.

  He looked tired, sitting at her kitchen table, with the light from the overhead fixture glaring down on him, emphasizing the tight lines of his face and the dark whiskers crowding his jaw. He wore the same clothes he had the day before, but with the sunrise she’d convinced him to at least take a shower.

  Funny that the scent of man lingered, even though she knew the bar of soap he’d held in his big hands had lavender fragrance.

  “When are you going to tell me about the postcard?” she asked, returning to the table. She hadn’t thought much of it when she’d found it in the mail, had almost tossed it in the trash. Now she realized what a grave mistake that would have been.

  He looked up at her. “It’s from Titan.”

  She’d figured as much. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because I have three others in my hotel room.” His mouth twisted. “One was found in Senator Gregory’s room after he died,” he said. “And one appeared in my room a few days later, with your name scrawled on it.”