by Brook Wilder
“I’ll tell you what is amazing,” Hanna said, wiping her mouth. “This IPA.”
“It’s some local brewery.”
“You should get it in your place.”
“All we need is some taps of Bud and we’re set, none of that college educated, craft crap.”
“Now who’s stubborn?”
Before Roarke could say anything else to her smug face, his phone went off. She smirked harder and he glared at her as he reached down and pulled out the phone to see Robert’s name across the screen.
“Gramps?”
“You need to get to the bar, now.”
Roarke immediately felt his brows knit together.
“Everything okay?”
At that, Hanna put down her beer and wiped her fingers off. She leaned in with concentration, looking for answers on Roarke’s face and he shook his head.
“We found one the girls--at least we think. She’s pretty out of it and the stories don’t quite match up. Either way this has to be going somewhere.”
“One of the missing girls?”
Now Hanna was practically launching across the table to get in on the action in his ear. He put up a hand for her to be patient.
“You’re confusing me here old man.”
“Imagine how confused we are. Just get over here. ASAP.”
“Will do, sir.”
He hung up the phone and looked at Hanna who looked practically red in the face waiting for an answer.
“We need to get to the bar,” he said. “I don’t even know if I can explain what’s going on. A girl showed up. Let’s go.”
They threw down cash on the table and hurried out of the bar and made their way to Roarke’s bike.
***
“For the last time lady, if you don’t calm down I will tie you to this goddamn chair,” was the first thing Roarke heard coming out of Rick’s mouth when he entered the bar.
A young woman was sitting there. She had strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes that looked like they were ready to burst right open with tears. She was pale across every inch of her skin and was visibly shaking, even from where he stood in the doorway looking into the room.
“What the hell is going on?” Roarke asked, stepping into the bar.
Everyone backed down but Rick kept a firm hand on the shoulder of the woman sitting there. Robert was sitting in a corner, frowning and sighing.
“As far as we can tell,” his grandfather said. “The Caracals dropped this girl off for us--”
“I told you like fifty times,” the girl spoke for the first time, the pitch in her voice betraying her young age. “I’ve never met any fucking Caracals. You kidnapped me.”
“What?” Roarke asked, stepping forward and looking between the girl and his grandfather.
“She’s under the impression the Pharaohs are the ones who took her,” he sighed. “It’s a big mess, Roarke.”
“Roarke!” she shouted and caused Rick to jump. Everyone turned to look at her. “I know that name. You were the one who did it! You took me, I remember.”
“What the fuck?”
He went to step towards, anger replacing confusion but a hand gripped at his arm tightly and he knew who it was without looking. She always had a strange power over him, even with the grip of her smaller hands. He turned to look. She was glaring, she was angry, but she was calm, looking at the girl. She turned to Roarke with a more sympathetic look.
“Let’s just take a second to breathe and think about this,” she said.
“She’s calling me a kidnapper,” he hissed, inches from her face.
“I know. I’m standing right here. But something tells me the Caracals want you to lose your head and do something you’ll regret.”
“Your concern is really touching and making me go all fuzzy inside,” Rick said. “But we need some answers from this chick.”
“She clearly doesn’t have any,” Hanna shot back, giving him a stare.
“Sure she does, all it’ll take is a little persuasion--”
“You’re not touching her.”
Hanna stepped forward and placed herself between Rick and the girl, knocking his hand free. He was a foot taller than her, bulky in all the places that made him dangerous, but she wasn’t about to back down. She looked like a kitten ready to take on a lion but she had zero fear in her eyes and Roarke couldn’t help but admire that.
“All the torture in the world can’t fix false memories,” she said. “The brain is complex. She believes Roarke took her, it’s not just some story she was told to repeat. They made her believe it was true. Every time you recall a memory, it changes, your brain colors it and it never goes back into your mental archives the same. It wouldn’t take much to implant a completely incorrect memory. But she believes it’s true and you can’t just torture into remembering what really happened.”
Hanna was shouting by the end and Rick was backing down. Roarke could see the tendons in his jaw bouncing as he clenched and unclenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes. But he wasn’t about to step closer and challenge her more. He had the muscle; he could toss her across the bar if he wanted. But everyone knew that wasn’t going to happen with Roarke standing right there.
“What do you want boss?” Rick asked, turning to him.
He looked at the woman who had stopped her shaking but looked at him with wide yes, full of fear that at any minute he might take out a gun and put a bullet right between her eyebrows. He felt bad for her, for all the bubbling anger at her accusations. Hanna’s words made sense. He knew zero about psychology and needed to ask her later where the hell she learned all that college crap, but the explanation made sense and he couldn’t punish the girl for that. She was a victim, above everything. They couldn’t treat her like a threat.
“I agree with Hanna--”
“Surprise.”
“Shut your fucking mouth.”
Rick looked taken aback by the outburst as Roarke took three steps to cross the room and come face to face with him, the threat if he opened his mouth to talk more was all in his eyes.
“That being said, we can’t just let her go free with stories that we--that I--kidnapped her.”
“You can’t keep her here as a prisoner,” Hanna said, shock on her face.
“What choice do we have? She’ll go to the cops and I’ll have no way to defend myself.”
“That doesn’t mean you can just falsely imprison her. She doesn’t deserve that.”
“What do you propose we do then Miss Psychology Expert? Got any quick hypnosis ways to fix her fucked up memories so I don’t go to jail?”
Hanna was back to staring daggers at him. He gave them right back. He wasn’t going to back down from this. Her neck wasn’t on the line. He had a record of all sorts of things, no one would bat an eyelash at the possibility that he kidnapped some twenty-something girl. He doubted he’d have any alibi that could save him. He wasn’t letting this girl walk out the door and right into the police station. He wasn’t getting dragged out of his own bar in cuffs when the cops showed up ten minutes later, finally with something more permanent to pin on him than some public intoxication and vandalism.
“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “We give her a place to stay here fortwenty-four hours. We try and get what we can out of the situation and then, even if nothing has changed, we let her go back to her family and her friends and her life.”
Hanna was back in that same stance, the one that got him riled up no matter how many times he saw it. No matter how many times he watched her there with her arms crossed and her legs holding her ground in a solid plant. He knew he could physically overpower her. He could have her thrown out and do things his way. He could be rid of her and all the mess of thoughts she created in his head.
But he didn’t want to.
He didn’t trust her plan and he was fifty percent sure he’d go back on his word if tomorrow came and they still didn’t have answers. But there was also a fifty percent chance of the unknown. She was ma
king him willing to face that unknown.
“Deal.”
She looked like she hadn’t expected it. She’d been prepared for a fight. She’d been ready to pull out that extensive vocabulary she always seemed to have ready to use against him. The tension was leaving her body, her arms uncrossed. She looked at him much softer, questioning without words. He shrugged.
“This is fucking stupid,” Rick said behind them.
“We’ll decide that tomorrow,” Roarke said. “Get her a bed and some food and some clothes we’ve got any.”
Hanna turned around and said something to the girl. She shook her head and gave a small, grateful looking smile as Amber pulled her off in the direction of the backroom. Hanna returned while the crowd around them dissipated but Roarke knew them better than to think they weren’t still watching. She stepped up in front of him and, for the first time, wasn’t able to meet his eyes it seemed. He tried not to smirk.
Compromising was hot. She felt it too.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You were right. Which yes, that does pain me a great deal to say,” he said. “I keep her locked up forever and let Rick do whatever the hell he wanted then I’d be no better than the fuckers who took her in the first place.”
“The Caracals were relying on you not having a better nature,” she said. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you won this round. Give me some time with her and I think I’ll be able to get at the bottom of what happened.”
“Where’d you learn all that shit anyway?” he asked.
For a brief second, something flashed over her face that he didn’t quite recognize. Fear, confusion, nervousness. He wasn’t sure what to name it but, in that brief time, she looked like someone else entirely. Then it was gone and she was back.
“The Caracals tampered with her brain. I saw it plenty of times when I was with them,” she said. “I think you forget I have expertise here.”
“Very true.”
Then they were left in nothing but a comfortable, quiet silence. Well, it wasn’t exactly comfortable. It was rippling. Compromises, her intelligence, it was all getting overwhelming. He knew for a fact, in that moment, if they weren’t surrounded by his friends and family he’d have yanked her in and gotten her shirt off already. There was no stopping that. The only thing now was the environment. He feared what might happen the next time they were alone and he didn’t have the willpower to prevent them from being alone now. The desire to fight it was dwindling.
He saw it in her. It was in her grateful eyes and her deep breath as she watched him with eyes that said if he kissed her, she’d kiss him back.
They let it go at that for the night. They had a job to do and they’d both have to work to keep Rick from doing anything stupid between then and the deadline they set for all this. So they moved away from each other with a nod. Hanna went to talk with Amber and Roarke went to sit next to his grandfather, ignoring Rick’s glares from across the room.
Chapter 11
Despite protests, it was decided that Roarke and Hanna would be the only two questioning her. Hanna ignored Rick’s glares and constant huffing in her direction. He acted like a child but she knew he had the capacity to be much worse than that. She didn’t want to entertain his childishness, but she also wasn’t about to invite in anything worse. She wouldn’t put it past him to find a way to make her disappear, even if it was clear now that Roarke would, in fact, care if that happened.
How far they’d come in the past couple of weeks working together. She tried not to focus on how far they might go. Instead, she focused on the scared, shaking girl who had gone all but mute since they discussion about what to do with her had reached a peak.
“We let her sleep for a while,” Amber said. “Gave her some Benadryl and she went out like a light. She needed the rest, she had some dark circles under those eyes.”
“Who knows what they did to her,” Hanna said.
“Somewhere inside her head she knows,” Roarke said. “And we’ll get it out of whatever place the Caracals have tried to shove it away. Those fucking rats were always good at hiding shit instead of facing it like men--no offense.”
She shrugged.
“You need to be calm,” she said. “More than anything else, we don’t need something worse happening because you scared her.”
“Worse?”
“I told you, every time memories get recalled they’re changed. They’re never the same twice.”
“That’s a fucked up thing to think about. Is anything in anyone’s head actually true?”
“Yes. It’s not like you just implant yourself with new memories every time you think about last Christmas or something,” she said. “The point I’m making here is that memory can be incredibly delicate and susceptible to high intensity emotions. Fear can make her distorted memories worse, especially if they convinced her that you took her.”
“Fine, doc, I’ll follow your lead but don’t think for a second I won’t jump in if I don’t like the shit coming out of her mouth,” he said. She rolled her eyes.
“And don’t think I won’t hesitate to shut you up when you, inevitably, go too far.”
He smiled. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He punctuated it with a wink and moved past her, careful to be sure the exposed part of his arm brushed past hers. She took a breath and followed after him, ignoring the heat in her face and other parts of her body.
They stepped into the room with the mattress in the corner that Amber sometimes used when she was too drunk to ride home. The girl was sitting there, a little drowsy looking, but she had far more color back in her face. She was looking at them with less shock and fear and more with quiet contemplation.
“You here to water board me?” she asked, deadpan.
“We’re here to talk,” Hanna said, sitting down in one of the metal folding chairs. “We think someone tampered with your memories.”
“Yeah, I heard it all when you people decided to talk about me like I wasn’t there,” she said sharply. Hanna winced.
“You’re clearly feeling better if you’ve got a bite going on,” Roarke said.
“Forgive me for being kidnapped.”
“Fair enough.”
Hanna scooted her chair closer, trying to block out Roarke as much as she could. He was a trigger, or had the potential to be, depending on what this woman was convinced had happened to her. This was trauma victim recovery 101. She needed to create a safe space and she knew for a fact that, right now, she was the safest person for this girl in this bar.
“Let’s start with your name, I’m Hanna.”
The girl looked like she wanted to protest and Hanna couldn’t blame her for that obstinance. She wouldn’t get impatient. She hadn’t dealt with trauma interrogations in a long time but she remembered the training. She just needed to make sure Roarke didn’t somehow destroy her chances of getting through to this girl with his temper that seemed ready to boil over at any given second.
“Annie,” she said and Hanna knew she wasn’t lying. She’d said it so quiet, like it was a secret, something for her to keep that her captors couldn’t take a way. They were one step closer to trusting each other.
“Annie it is then,” Hanna said. “Tell me what you remember.”
She knew Roarke would object to the phrasing but she wasn’t going to change it for him. She didn’t want to make the girl think she didn’t believe her. What she remembered was true in her own mind and they had to operate under language like so. She needed Roarke to understand that much and keep his mouth shut.
“I don’t know,” she groaned, dropping her face into her hands. “Some guys grabbed me. I got shoved into a van. I was in some basement for a while. I couldn’t really tell how long with no windows. I kind of just remember weird stuff like smells.”
“Real helpful,” Roarke muttered.
“Shut up,” Hanna hissed. “What smells?”
“Damp smells, kind of like the must in your grandma’
s attic or something, but wet. If that makes sense,” she said.
“Sounds like a basement. Anything else?”
“Lots of tequila,” she said. “I bartend by the college, I know the smell of spilled tequila anywhere.”
“Might have been a bar then,” Hanna said.
“Did you see any decorations on the wall?” Roarke asked, stepping forward. “Banners? Flags? Anything like that?”
The girl closed her eyes and seemed to be going over the memory in her mind. They waited patiently as her eyes moved beneath the lids, rapidly, and her mouth even started muttering. Eventually her eyes opened back up.
