And… what was that?
Disgust. It was disgust.
I felt something in my stomach flutter once, then fall. Hurt? Disappointment?
His lips had a slight sideways grimace and there were frowning creases above his closed eyes.
I stiffened, and sensing it, he opened his eyes, meeting mine straight on in the mirror. I hadn't realized it before, but he'd probably been watching me all along. Heat suffused my cheeks and before I could get up, he stepped back and motioned me to put on the jacket.
Disgust—displeasure.
I've seen the expression millions of times and all the variations in between that I could never mistake it for anything else.
He shook his head once—for what I didn't know—turned around and opened the window. Cold air invaded the small room, swallowing away all the warmth from inside.
Sounds of traffic, pedestrians and the still-pouring rain reached us, a cacophony of the ordinary.
He couldn't even look at me. Was he giving mixed signals there, or was it because I had no experience in this field? Oh, I might be an ignorant fool around men, but that specific expression I could tell as well as I could tell night from day.
It was a painful blow to my self this and that to realize the first man I ever noticed felt disgust touching me.
I mean, men watched me everywhere I went while I hardly noticed them. And now that I had, now that I wanted a man to look, to admire… I slapped myself mentally, dislodging the self-pity. This was not the time or place.
I didn't even know him.
And the little he knew about me was enough to provoke such reaction. What would he do if he met the real monster within? I kicked myself mentally every way to Sunday, back and forth twice.
“Tell me what to look for. I'll search for it myself,” I said to his back, my voice flat and my face blank. I zipped the jacket back on, wishing now modesty had a stronger hold on me and I had kept the shirt on, wet or no.
“I'll do it,” he said, still looking out the window. And what a SOB, his displeasure rang loud in his tone. He wasn't even trying to hide it. If I thought I had been mistaken at his reaction before, which I wasn't, that was a dead giveaway.
“I don't want you to touch me,” I said stiffly.
He turned then, and there was the disgust, along with lots of frustration. “This is not the time for modesty—”
I barked a sarcastic laugh, interrupting him, my eyes cold. It would have frosted lesser men, sent others scurrying far, far away.
He shook his head, a little perplexed, as if I made no sense to him. “Look, The Society might even now be assembling dozens of guards to come after you.” He raked a hand through his hair and motioned to the bed. “Please, sit down on the bed,” he said, leaving his post at the window.
I crossed my arms over my breasts and gave him that cold stare. “I can do it myself.”
He stared back, the disgust gone, replaced by the empty eyes and the flicker of something. He gave in first, indicating weariness when he began rubbing his face with the palms of both his hands.
“Look, time is crucial here. I know what I'm looking for. If I do it, it'll be done faster.” He motioned me to sit and added, almost as an afterthought, “Please.”
I stared defiantly at him, before my inner self pointed out I was only losing time, being stubborn and proud.
And, of course, he was right.
If I had an active transmitter on me, signaling to my enemies a target on my back and I wanted to go undetected, the first step to take was to remove it. The faster, the higher my chances for success.
I let pride get in the way.
I've done worse for the sake of freedom, worse than let a man, or scientist, examine me, knowing how unpleasant the process was to him.
Gritting my teeth, I sat on the bed and waited. If I had a transmitter implanted somewhere, I wanted it gone.
Logan sat on the chair I had vacated a moment before and motioned for my left leg. I pulled the pant leg up to my knee, then raised it to his thigh, keeping it suspended above his leg, not touching him. He sighed, pressed my leg down. He placed his broad hands around my knee, began moving his thumb in the same circular motion he'd used on my neck and back. Clockwise, counter-clockwise, and then moved down a bit.
I am not conceited. Not anymore. I know I was once, back in the days when my biggest worry was my next outfit, but the confidence and pride I once held for myself died somewhere along the earliest years I spent in the PSS. Because I wasn't yet thirteen when the PSS took me, I never, in my entire life tried to seduce a guy, or used any feminine wiles to entice one. I've never encouraged a man to look at me twice, in fact, I'd rather be invisible. Regardless, I've turned heads no matter where I've gone, and gender and age didn't matter. Even back in the PSS, I turned heads, gaining appreciative looks from new staff, guards, or guests, sometimes even from the veterans. Until one noticed the bracelet on my wrist or realized what I wore wasn't a jumpsuit, but a uniform. Then the appreciative looks turned into disgust. There were those who tried to spare my feelings by giving me embarrassed smiles instead, but those were rare and far between.
Some of the staff even tried taking advantage of my status, me being a prisoner and them my kidnappers, but once Kincaid realized this, he slipped me a letter opener, which I had used later to make a hole in an assaulter's cheek.
But that was then, and this was now, and fool that I was, I had noticed Logan, wanted him to notice me too.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We were in and out of the room in under an hour. There had been a transmitter indeed, implanted under the skin of the instep of my right foot. It was deeper than I had expected it to be, barely felt. Its head was smaller than a lentil, attached to an inch-long hair-thin wire. One would think my body would have rejected such a thing.
It didn't.
Logan and I separated after we left the hotel. I took a cab to a mall where I spent the remainder of Logan's money without a pang of regret. He took the transmitter to be disposed of, told me he had some stuff he had to see to, like finding a car, calls to make, and some money he wanted to be wired to him. All in all, I had a couple of hours to kill shopping before I had to call Logan on a number he gave me and made me memorize.
I went to Arden Fair Mall in Arden Way. It was one of the places I frequented when I was a kid, and I wanted to see it again through adult eyes. I shopped for my needs first. And for the first time in over a decade, I window-shopped for a good hour and a half.
Arden Fair was located near a not very nice part of town, but I used to like it before the PSS had come, and now that I was seeing it again after such a long time, I loved it.
I shopped from Victoria's Secret and from JCPenny—stuff that was on the sale rack and that I absolutely needed.
When I finally made it to the food court on the second floor, nostalgia was a tight knot in my chest. I was wearing my new jeans, blue button-down shirt, and had my new coat draped over my left forearm, my purchase bags on the other.
Despite the gloomy and disastrous way the day had started, I felt almost normal. Michelle used to tell me shopping cleared the mind and freed the soul, and today I could almost believe it.
In memory of the last time I ate here, I ordered fried rice and Kung Pao chicken from Panda Express, then found myself a table. I savored the spicy chicken and vegetables and brought to mind the PSS's HQ grounds while I ate, recalling and visualizing everything I could remember. Now and again, I'd take note of my surroundings.
Just like every other time I came here, the food court was packed with people and sounds, laughter and shouts, screaming, wailing and giggling children. The emotions, smells and noise didn't bother me like the swirl of emotions had in the casino, mainly because they lacked most of the greed and malevolence. Unlike the food court where I had met Logan, there were so many people here, I felt like a small dot in a sea of bodies.
After I was done eating, I took the white painting book and the magic markers tha
t cost more than the flip flops and PJs combined and began drawing, the cacophony of sounds and emotions around me like soothing background music.
I wasn't what one could call an artist and, despite my initial thought that drawing squares and rectangles wouldn't be hard, I ripped a couple of pages before I was satisfied enough with what I was doing to continue.
I drew first the perimeters of the three main buildings on the first page, then flipped a page and began drawing the details of the ground floor of Building C. I had no doubt that Logan's friend would be found either in that building or the topmost floors of Building A.
There was a cubical maze on the ground floor of Building C where the more recent research was kept, locked rooms that opened with authorization cards and retina identifications, which were also rooms Logan wouldn't need to go in. I drew the details I remembered and marked numbers for reference on the bottom of the pages so Logan would know what was what and where he needed to go or avoid. I drew the whole ground floor of Building C, where the labs were located, although floors in Building C were subterranean, going down instead of up. It was very military, but I suppose it's harder to escape a building with only a couple entrances, several floors up.
When I had finished drawing everything I could remember from that floor and checked the references, the cameras and sensors, a long time had passed. I politely covered a yawn, stretched my legs under the table and massaged the kink from my neck, took a look around.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The food court was still packed, more so now than when I had arrived. It was refreshing, I guess, to be crowded like this and not call attention.
I checked the time, discovering with shock I'd been gone for over four hours. Damn, Logan was probably thinking that the PSS caught me. I studied my drawings for a moment and decided that Logan would be able to decipher them after all. I still had to do the floors on Building A and the subterraneous ones in Building C.
I rolled up both drawings, stuck them inside my purchase bag from JCPenny and left to find a pay phone—if they still existed—to call Logan and arrange a meeting place. Where? He seemed to have known his way well enough earlier.
“Roxanne?” someone called. “Roxy?”
I turned, alarm bubbling in my chest.
The first thing I noticed was the blue aura, no smudge, no shimmer. The second was that he wore plain clothes—black pants, blue knitted shirt, and a black biker jacket draped over one arm.
But that didn't mean he was harmless. Anyone from the PSS could ditch the suit so they wouldn't stand out, or so I wouldn't be able to identify at first glance.
This man had broad shoulders, narrowing as he tapered down to lean hips and long legs. A linebacker, no doubt, or something in the football line. Not particularly threatening on its own, but if you add up the way his t-shirt was loose enough to conceal a weapon, and that he knew my name… I had to pay attention. He was clean shaven, with a strong jaw and small lips. His jet-black, straight hair had fallen over the corners of soft, chocolate brown eyes.
At that moment, they looked anxious and, after a brief shake of the head, his lips turned down at the corners and the look turned disappointed. Not a threatening look either.
“Sorry, thought you were someone I knew once.”
Chocolate brown eyes. Striking eyes I had known once. Imagined and fantasized seeing over and over again.
“Tommy?” I blurted. My heart galloped a thousand miles and there was a prickling sensation in the back of my eyes I had to fight to keep back. It had been a long time ago when I had last fought to keep tears at bay.
He turned, an array of emotions playing on his face like a slide show. Disappointment cleared to disbelief, bafflement, joy, back to disbelief, then his face broke into a tentative smile that grew and grew, breaking his face in two.
“It is you! My God, Roxy, it's you.” He surprised me by giving me a huge, bone-cracking bear hug. “It's you. Roxy, my God,” he repeated over and over, his voice muffled by my hair.
I hugged him back and patted his back awkwardly. I had no idea what else to do. It was an ineptitude I blamed on the PSS.
An eternity later, he let go and we eyed each other, studying the differences time had brought, comparing our memories to the figure standing in front of us. He'd grown up a handsome man but, even as kids, he'd always been a pretty boy. I'd been taller than him back then, but he had at least three inches on me as an adult. His hair was still black like mine used to be before I dyed it and, unlike mine, his was Indian straight. He was tan too, and I knew it wasn't the result of too much beach sun or Navajo ancestry like people assumed, but the result of Spanish ancestry. He also had some Asian heritage, the combination giving him striking features.
I remember before I was taken he had shorn his hair to less than an inch to discourage some of the older kids from teasing him that all he needed was longer hair and some make-up to pass as a screwed-up version of Catherine Zeta-Jones's younger sister.
Vicky and I had laughed our heads off about it, over a cup of hot chocolate in this same mall.
The three of us kind of grew up together, inseparable until the day I was taken away. He seemed to have thought about that too, because his grin vanished, and he eyed me speculatively.
“What happened to you? Where did you go?” he asked, as if I had disappeared yesterday instead of a decade ago. He went on, without waiting for an answer, a shadow of the bafflement he no doubt felt all those years ago clouding his features. “My God, Roxy, my God. You just up and disappeared. We came over every day and asked for you. Vicky and I came over every single day,” he repeated himself, emphasizing his words. “Sometimes we came by more than once. Your mother wouldn't let us see you.”
I nodded once, not knowing what to say, then shook my head and settled for an abbreviated truth. “I wasn't there.”
He laughed humorlessly, briefly. “Hell if we knew that.” He shook his head again. “We went to the cops, you know?” he said. “But only a guardian could file a missing person report. Vicky and I kept insisting something bad happened to you, we even got the Navajo twins to come with us. Then Dad talked to this cop he knew, and they sent a patrol to check on you.” He searched my eyes for something, but apparently not finding it, he went on. “We knew for certain then something horrible happened to you when your mother served them custody papers, feeding them some bull about your father gaining guardianship. But we knew your dad was dead, and it was all a lie…” He paused for a second, waiting for me to either confirm or deny, then added softly, “So Vicky and I broke in the house and searched it. But then your mother came home and caught us, and she called the cops on us. We couldn't believe that. Imagine it? We even had this sort of restraining order served to us, had to do some community service.” He fell silent, his eyes distant, lost in a memory that happened a decade ago.
For all the years I had been gone, I never imagined my friends going to the police to report me missing, breaking into my home to search for me.
On my earliest years in the PSS, I'd imagined campaigns, missing person flyers, detectives and all imaginable procedures done when a person was kidnapped. But it had been my mother heading the details and checking with the police. For Vicky, I'd imagined some tears before she moved on, and for Tommy, a stricken boy who thought it wasn't manly to cry. I also imagined him moving on sooner than later.
“Do you know what she did after that?”
I shook my head, but he wasn't expecting an answer. “She left. One day she was there, and the next she was gone, the house empty.” This time, when he looked at me he was expecting an answer.
I shook my head again before saying, “I'm sorry. I had to go.” There was a lump in my throat that wouldn't budge no matter how much I swallowed, and the prickling in the back of my eyes was still there.
“But couldn't you have called or e-mailed or anything?” he persisted, searching my eyes. “We thought you died,” he added more softly.
Another shake of the head. My
vision blurred, and I swallowed twice. I was fighting a losing battle. I looked away. We were surrounded by people, some even bumped us when they passed us by, but we might as well have been alone.
Tommy placed a finger under my chin and turned my head to face him. I kept my gaze fixed on the collar of his shirt. A damned tear fell, followed by a few more.
“Hey, that doesn't matter no more. It's over now. You're here. You're back.” He brushed my cheek with a thumb, the motion soothing. I wiped the other with my coat. I wanted to keep my head buried in it.
But then Tommy tugged me gently, and I moved in and let a few more tears fall on the crook of his neck. His arm went around me, patting my back.
That was Tommy, ever the comforting, gentle type. He had always been there, lending a sympathetic ear, comforting either Vicky or me whenever we'd had a fight. He had been the linchpin in our triangle.
It was good to know some things didn't change.
After a few deserved tears, I wiped my face, getting myself under control. Tears were useless and I, more than anyone, knew how futile they were.
Tommy gave me a gentle smile when I stepped back and brushed a knuckle gently over my damp cheek. “Your face didn't change much. Its thinner, your cheeks seem higher, but I recognized you right away.” He then gave an appreciative look down. “Your body filled out in all the right places…” There was a shocked silence before his face turned an embarrassing shade of red. “I mean, not that you were gangly then, you sure were fine enough, ah, I, ugh…” He winced in discomfort, and I burst out laughing.
He gave me a sheepish smile, his soft chocolate eyes crinkling in the corners, and mimed opening his mouth and inserting a foot.
I laughed harder and loved him for the diversion. Yeah, some people didn't change.
Heir of Ashes Page 16
