by Brook Wilder
“If you don’t know my plan, how can you know whether you’re playing into anything I want from you or not?”
“Are we going to talk in riddles or are you actually going to say something worthwhile?”
“Fair enough.”
Isabelle took a few steps closer and Hanna didn’t flinch. She knew this was a test as well. She wasn’t going to give Isabelle any satisfaction or any reason to think she might have an upper hand. She stayed put, even when Isabelle moved within inches of her space, staring right into her eyes like they were a telescope into something deeper. But Hanna wouldn’t be moved, Isabelle wouldn't find what she was looking for there.
“I wanted to explain myself to someone,” she said. “And you seemed the most sensible with Roarke on the rampage and Amber turned against me.”
“I was never on your side in the first place,” Hanna said.
“No, but you’re neutral, based on your actions so far. So I’ll talk to you,” she said.
Hanna frowned but didn’t give up any more than that. She needed Isabelle to keep talking, she knew that much. And the gun was just inches away if she needed it. She wouldn’t be incredibly fast getting to it. But Isabelle was small. She doubted that she matched her mental chess game with any real physical skills. It would be easy to distract her, knock her to the side, make her tumble and reach for the gun.
But Hanna had no desire to hurt Isabelle. Roarke wanted vengeance, he wanted to hurt her. If he were in this position--if Isabelle ever let him get this close--he’d have tried to break her neck by now. She wasn’t going to be that person. She wasn’t going to give into the horrible emotions that were forcing Roarke to act the way he was. Someone had to be the good person. And she wasn’t going to hurt someone else while a child was growing inside her, being nurtured, hoping for a bright future.
“What do you want to say?” Hanna asked.
She allowed her guard to visibly come down. She wanted Isabelle to feel safe. Or as safe as she could feel. If she was telling the truth, if she felt safe, they might actually get somewhere.
“I want someone to know why I was doing what I’m doing,” she said.
“Because you’re nuts?”
“Very funny.”
She stepped closer to Hanna who tried not to let her hackles come back up too obviously. Trust was key here. She didn’t trust Isabelle, not in the slightest, but Isabelle needed to believe there was no reason that Hanna was going to do anything rash. And people who were paranoid were the most likely to do just that.
“I know you’re judging me, you’ve been doing it since day one,” she said. “All of you. You think you know so much about me. It was such a shock right, when it happened? When Roarke found out what he was really dealing with? Because he assumed so much about me. His head is so empty, it was easy.”
Hanna couldn’t exactly argue with that.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like growing up the way I did? I wasn’t just born into a gang, I was born into a dynasty,” she said. “My grandfather, my father, my brother. I’d never inherit the throne, as it were, but so much was expected of me. No. Not even expected of me, forced on me. By the time I could talk and walk I knew no other life except to do what my brother said, for the good of the gang.”
Hanna watched the wall come down, her facade was cracking the more her rant went on. It did take away from the fear Hanna had been feeling, after all the scariest thing about this girl was her Cheshire grin and the way she made it seem like she knew everything there was possibly to know about any given situation. She was a young girl again, quite suddenly. The twenty-one year old from the party was still there, but saddled with a new weight that Hanna couldn’t help but pity.
Maybe that was part of her game too, though.
“Did you know I wanted to work at the movie theatre? All my friends were working there and I could see movies for free, stories about people going off and doing wonderful, crazy things,” she said. “But no. The second I was legally old enough to work, Roarke shoved me behind the front desk of the auto shop and then when I turned eighteen he shoved me behind that bar. All my days were spent making me money, flirting with the right people to get him the deals he wanted. Did he tell you that part? I never did anything with these sleaze-balls but he basically wanted me to encourage these guys to mentally fuck me so he could get the drugs and guns he needed into town.”
Hanna felt a shiver and thought again of the child inside her that she felt more and more sure was going to be a girl. A girl whose father was willing to very nearly sell his own sister into some sort of pseudo sex trade to get what he wanted. He wasn’t kidnapping anyone, but hadn’t he? Isabelle had no choice, she was born into a specific type of destiny that no one wanted to tell her she could escape from. He kidnapped her at birth and forced her to play his games for very little reward on her part. Would he do that to his own child? If it was a boy, would he shove a glock in his hand the second he started walking and tell him no one would suspect a child and teaching him to make kills?
She didn’t want to side with Isabelle. She was too afraid of everything lurking under the surface here to truly be on her side, but it was impossible not to be afraid of the man she thought she knew. It was her own fault, really. She’d known him for a matter of months, how could she expect to get at the soul of a person in that time with rose colored glasses and post sex glow fogging up her vision?
“I know, that if I were you, I wouldn’t want to bring up a child in this same environment.”
Hanna’s blood went from a shiver to completely running cold. Her spine became ramrod straight and she tried not to gasp because Isabelle’s smirk was back, her momentary look into the humanity of this girl was over. She felt watched, she felt like she needed to shower. She felt like she needed to do whatever was possible to get as far away as she could.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said steadily. “If this chat is over, I need to go.”
Hanna turned, not waiting to get permission from her. She walked towards her car but felt a cold, hard hand come to grasp her arm and pull back, slightly. She wanted to turn around and strike her, all her training and years of work were telling her to do it, to move in on Isabelle like a snake. But she stopped herself. There was a child inside her. She had to fight those instincts to fight, replace them with instincts to protect.
“You should have stayed far away from Roarke,” Isabelle very nearly whispered.
She knew. There was no way she could. She had seen any of them in person in weeks. But somehow she knew or thought she knew and that was just as bad because she was getting the reactions out of Hanna that wanted and needed.
“Thanks for the advice,” Hanna said, pulling back her arm with a hard jerk, breaking Isabelle’s grip a little too expertly.
“I know you’ve had your cop friend following me,” she said. “I’ve been doing research on him, too. You know.” Hanna swallowed. “James. Nice name, respectable looking guy. I also know he had a daughter. An adopted daughter, according to the paperwork. And when I took a good hard look at her I could help but notice how incredibly familiar she seemed to look…”
Hanna turned to face her now, looking her right in the eye. She wouldn’t let this child scare her. Isabelle thought she was tough only because they were giving her that illusion. Hanna had the choice not be scared of her, not to be unable to meet her eyes.
“I hope the little girl won’t miss her too much…”
“What are you talking about?”
She was slipping. She was giving in. She was doing what she said she wouldn’t do, giving Isabelle power where she said she wouldn’t.
“I had him taken care of. If you hurry you might be able to see him before he gets carted off to the hospital,” she said. “I left him out as a gift in front of the Pharaohs’ bar. They probably found him by now, hopefully called the proper authorities.”
Hanna couldn’t stop it. It was a rage she couldn’t hold back or push away. She launched hersel
f at Isabelle but the girl as quicker, expecting it. She moved out of the way and pinned Hanna to the car with force. Hanna panicked, remembering what she carried and needed to protect. She forced Isabelle off her. She was bigger, she was stronger, and she pushed back against her, throwing her off her and turning to get back in the car.
She didn’t say a word, didn’t think to look back. She just slammed the door of the car and drove and drove. She headed off in the direction of the bar, not caring as she powered through stop signs and street lights and ignored the honks of other cars or the possibility of cops following after her. She swerved and turned and heard the screech of her own tires.
If James was hurt, if James was dead, it would be her fault. She was the one who got him involved, she was the one who got far too close to Roarke and let her judgement get cloudy. She was the one who was losing sight of that small, scared girl who took comfort in the only real father she’d ever known. And now she got him killed, endangered her own unborn child, and chose the worst possible man as the father of her baby.
***
She only stopped moving when she was standing at James’s bedside, staring at him. He had bruises visible all over his body, a few stitches over deeper lacerations. The nurse rattled off the injuries, the broken bones, how they repaired them, the amount of pain medication he was on. It was all a buzz to Hanna who understood only one thing: her uncle, the closest thing to a father she ever had, was badly hurt.
Rick had been the one to find him and get him to the hospital. Roarke had been off doing God knows what and shown up only a few minutes before Hanna. She didn’t utter a word about how she knew what happened, who had given her the information, what she’d learned from her conversation with Isabelle.
“He’s stable,” the nurse said.
She said it like it was a great goal to accomplish, congratulations you’re the very baseline for being alive, well done. It was better than critical condition, which had been his designation when he was first brought in. But Hanna couldn’t take the nurse’s upbeat attitude when talking about the hope for his recovery. He was in a coma, smashed into by another car that no one had any doubt was driven by a Caracal, even without Hanna offering the information she knew.
“Anything to report?” Roarke asked her, staring at the ground in a hard scowl.
She knew what he was really talking about. He was asking what the doctor said about their baby from the appointment he promised to be at and missed. She thought about all the things Isabelle had said, the way he’d forced her hand into a life he invented for her. Was there a monster lurking underneath all of that muscle and hardness? She could believe it, and that’s what scared her.
“Nothing,” she said, also staring a hole into space with her glare.
Whatever she thought he was, he was something else. Whether that something else was a terrible monster or a careless, deadbeat man like her own father, she would find out. And then she would leave Texas to start again with her child.
Chapter 27
It was Hanna who was there when James came to. They’d all agreed to take things in shifts, watching James for periods of timing, getting each other coffee, tapping out after a few hours and someone else taking their place. Hanna, naturally, volunteered for virtually every shift she could on that front. Rick often tried to cut her shifts short, showing up early to force her to get some sleep or bring her coffee and food, at the very least. But she was terrified hers wouldn’t be the first face her uncle would see when he woke up.
So when he opened his eyes the beep of his heart monitor went off in a faster pace, she was so overjoyed that she was there that tears pooled in her eyes without her consent and spilled over just as easily.
“Don’t tell me I finally got you to cry,” he said, wheezing out a small laugh that sounded painful, despite how he smiled through it. “Schindler’s List, My Girl, Sophie’s Choice, Titanic, and you finally cry for an old man who was too dumb to see this coming?”
“No one suspected they’d go after you,” Hanna said.
“I did. I knew they were following me. Here I thought I was being careful. That’s the scary part, isn’t it? That I thought I was doing a good job. That’s when you know you’re reaching the end of your peak,” he said.
“You can’t seriously be talking about retiring,” Hanna said. “You’re too young.”
“Well I won’t be doing much of anything for quite a while, will I?”
She didn’t laugh, despite his toothy grin and his wheezing. She had nightmares as a child about losing him, waking up to find him gone, getting a phone call that he’d been fatally shot. It didn’t take a shrink to tell her she had abandonment issues, separation anxiety. She couldn’t blame herself, after what her parents put her through and all the garbage she had to deal with emotionally thereafter.
It was all her late childhood nightmares coming to life. He was alive and it seemed like he would stay that way. The hardest, most dangerous nights were always the first ones. He’d survived that fine with no sign of infection in any of the lacerations or the broken bones, there was no swelling in his brain, no internal bleeding to speak of. He was in pain, uncomfortable, probably quite miserable, but he was okay. That was the weird thing about love though, someone could get a papercut and you’d want to take that pain away from them.
“What’s wrong Laura?” he asked, in a low voice. They were the only ones in the room but his eyes shifted, using that name that she hadn’t associated with herself in so many months now she almost forgot it was hers.
“I’m pregnant,” she said before she lost the nerve. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best way or the best place to go about spilling those beans, but where better to have a heart attack than in a hospital?
He didn’t go into shock or cardiac arrest, however. He looked at her with sad eyes and that was almost worse. It was like the time she hid a F on her report card from him because she was afraid he’d be angry and then he said the one phrase she dreaded to hear: I’m disappointed in you. That was all over his face now. She couldn’t blame him. She was disappointed in her too. She’d been careless, continually, in more ways than one. He didn’t ask who the father was before he spoke next, and that made her heart ache even more.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, calmly, taking her hand in his scabbed, rough one.
“I want to leave Texas when this is over,” she said, sighing. “I want to take this child out of this hellhole, try for law work in a quieter town, or maybe just head into a city in the northeast and work for the DA’s office.”
“You behind a desk?”
“It would be safer.”
“Safer doesn’t mean better.”
“I almost did something incredibly stupid that put this kid’s life in danger before it was even born. What do you think will happen when the baby is born and we’re still running around the streets? You think the Caracals are going to let this kid live a happy, normal life? You think Isabelle isn’t going to be waiting around every corner possible like some wicked aunt in a fucked up version of Hamlet?” Hanna said, taking to her feet and pacing back and forth across the hospital room.
“I don’t disagree,” he said, quietly, calmly. “I just don’t want you making decisions when you’re not in the right space for it. Right now things are dangerous and scary, but if it all gets resolved tomorrow and we move on, would you still want to leave? You need to think about more than just tomorrow. This is an entire life.”
She stopped her pacing and stared at the wall, glaring into the oblivion hiding there. She wanted to just disappear into the air, forget it ever happened, wake up from this dream. She wanted to go back several months and stop herself from volunteering for this undercover assignment. She wasn’t ready for it, she didn’t have the ability to separate things anymore. Hanna couldn’t stop thinking about Roarke, Hanna was pregnant with Roarke’s child. But it was Laura who was going to be facing those consequences. It was Laura who seemed to be disappearing with the more
days this went on.
“I think you need sleep,” her uncle said. “I imagine you’ve been here day and night.”
“They’ve tried to get me out a few times,” she said, rubbing her eyes and smudging the leftover makeup there.
“Well, call for a tap out and get some sleep. I won’t be going away again any time soon. We can talk another time. Just know that I’m here for you, no matter what kiddo.”
***
Roarke wasn’t the one she called to say that James was awake. She called Amber. He felt something toxic settle in the pit of his stomach at that. He really couldn’t blame her for being petty over him missing the doctor’s appointment. It was an asshole move and he deserved to get a bit of cold shoulder and dog house. What did bother him was the feeling in his chest that something was wrong, something was off. Hanna wasn’t quite right anymore.
He thought of the phone call he overheard, the talk about leaving Texas. She was talking to someone on the outside of whatever all this was. There was someone else out there who knew what was going on, monitoring it, keeping tabs. He didn’t like that. She hadn’t said a word about having other contacts which meant that she was hiding it from him, which meant she didn’t trust him. She was carrying his baby and she didn’t trust him. It’s just as well, he didn’t trust her either.
