Was she just talking about wanting him around because of his duty as her bodyguard, or was there another truth to her words?
Jonathan felt the walls he’d built around himself try to slide up—to cut off any emotional response to her words—but he didn’t have time to think on it for too long. She retracted her hand. Jonathan cleared his throat. The moment, whatever it meant, had passed.
“That was smart of you, by the way,” she continued. “Jake said it was your idea to put me under the water to help wake me up faster. Putting me in the shower probably saved my life, or at least its quality.”
“Once Jake gave you the injection, you wouldn’t budge. He said it had been too long and if you didn’t wake up ASAP you could have some permanent brain damage.” Jonathan shrugged. “If I’d had a bucket of water I would have thrown it on you. The shower seemed like a better option. More polite.”
Kate laughed a little. It was a good sound to hear.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “As far as I can tell, everything up here is as normal as it ever was.” She tapped her temple and winced. Jonathan moved closer.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, concern leaking out into every word. Kate rubbed the side of her head but nodded.
“It’s just a headache, one I definitely have had before.”
“When you took the drug a few years ago,” Jonathan supplied. Kate paused the rubbing motion against her head before dropping her hand to her lap.
“Yes. It’s like the beginnings of a migraine mixed with the middle of a hangover.”
Jonathan made a face.
“That doesn’t sound pleasant.”
Kate sighed.
“It isn’t.”
Jonathan contemplated grabbing Kate’s hand to ask the next question. He decided against the action but not the question.
“Kate, I know you probably don’t want to but—”
“You want to know about the drug,” she interjected. He nodded. “You saved my life at least twice today. I suppose the truth is the least you deserve.” Jonathan leaned in a fraction. He had a feeling he was about to learn a lot about Kathryn Spears.
“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a dancer,” she started. “A tap dancer, to be precise. I just couldn’t get over my love for how the shoes sounded when they hit the ground—I still can’t seem to find anything but joy in the sound now.” A smile swam up to her lips for a moment. Then it dived back under in the next. “Jake will tell you he always wanted to be in law enforcement—he used to walk around with a plastic badge and pull it out on kids in the playground citing offenses he’d seen them commit—but I think, given time, he would have pursued something like architecture. He had a fixed fascination with building.” Kate quieted. While she had offered to finally tell him the truth, she seemed to need some help moving along.
“What changed?” he asked.
“The reason I grew up around Jake was because his father was my mother’s partner.”
“FBI?” Jonathan guessed. Kate nodded.
“Our parents became good friends and so did we. There were some rough patches at first between my mother and Bill, Jake’s father, but they worked it out and had several years of friendship and success. That is, until one night when neither came home.” She took a deep breath to seemingly give her strength, but then it seeped out slowly. Jonathan felt a pull in his chest, knowing she was opening a deep wound. “One night turned into two. My mother’s car was found abandoned with signs of a struggle and Bill’s office had been trashed. I didn’t know this at the time. What I also wouldn’t learn until later was, while searching my mother’s car, they found evidence that she and Bill had been investigating something on the sly. Something that hadn’t been reported or sanctioned.” She paused and gave a quick smile. “You think I’m stubborn when I’m focused—you should have met my mother.” Jonathan couldn’t help but return the show of affection. “For the last two years, a lot of their cases fell through last minute. Evidence disappeared. Witnesses suddenly didn’t know anything. You name it and it started to happen. Bill and my mother had a theory that someone within their team was behind the scenes, working against them.”
“A traitor,” Jonathan said.
“Yes. Their boss found their notes and was able to guess the identity of the man. They picked him up and immediately started interrogating him. From what I’ve been told by my father and Greg, the man let it slip that Mom and Bill were running out of time. They leaned on him until they got an address just outside town. My father had made friends with Mom’s boss and was kept in the loop. I remember he called Jake and his mother over to wait. She didn’t trust the information, said it was too easy to get.” Kate’s frown deepened. “She was right. He’d lied, and it wasn’t until hours later that he came clean about the real location. My mother’s boss called the house to tell them they had a lead. Jake and I overheard the address. It wasn’t too far from the house and we knew a shortcut, so we snuck out and rode our bikes there in hopes of saving our parents.”
Kate’s eyes began to gloss over. She paused to swallow, trying not to cry. Jonathan didn’t say a word. He waited as she composed herself.
“To this day, I’ve never felt the amount of unease I did walking into that warehouse. That feeling where you know something is terribly wrong but can’t place it. Jake wanted to leave—he felt it, too—but I was too stubborn. My mother had a saying that just because you were scared didn’t mean you weren’t strong. And all I was trying to do was be strong.” One lone tear slipped out and trailed down her cheek. Before it could keep going, Kate caught it with the back of her other hand. “We found them in the back room. Mom was tied to a chair, beaten badly. Bill was there, too, but in the corner. He wasn’t tied up but had been shot—we were told later he’d most likely been trying to save his partner.” It was Kate’s turn to clear her throat. “We knew the moment we saw them that they were gone, but the kids in us didn’t want to believe it. Jake tried to wake up his dad and I tried to untie Mom, as if that would somehow help, but the knots were too tight. I wasn’t strong enough.”
“‘I untied her,’” Jonathan said, quoting her. “That’s the first thing you said when you woke up.”
Kate nodded.
“I dreamed that I finally freed her. I guess it’s been bothering me for a long time.” She shrugged. “In the moment I thought if I could untie her, I could have saved her. There was no time, though. Probably less than a minute after we found them, the cavalry showed up. They had enough evidence to send that horrible man away for both of our lives combined, ending his years of betrayal. After all of that, our families stayed together. Jake and I eventually stopped having nightmares, but we knew we had been changed. Jake decided his only goal in life was to become an FBI agent like his father, trading in a plastic badge for the real thing, while I became obsessed with one notion.”
Jonathan raised his eyebrow.
“If that man had told the truth the first time he was questioned, Mom and Bill would still be alive.”
“That’s why you started working on the drug,” Jonathan said as he realized.
“I just couldn’t get over the fact that one lie destroyed two lives—two families. However, I wasn’t so blind with despair to realize that no matter who you are interrogating, there should be an ethical and moral line you don’t cross. I know that some would disagree, but, for me, it was important to come up with a nonharmful solution.” For the first time Kate gave him a smile that convinced him she was now out of the past. At least the bad parts. “I had a series of lucid dreams in college one month. Ones in which I was a child again and talking to my mother. I told her everything, all of my secrets, without a second thought. I suppose that was because I knew I was dreaming. But that gave me an idea, one that I presented to Greg, who I now realize took it to the FBI. If I could create a drug that replicated the feel
ing of lucid dreaming, then any question you asked the subject while under its effect would be answered without hesitation.”
“Because you trust you’re only dreaming,” Jonathan guessed.
“Yes. A temporary window in which the person being questioned isn’t harmed physically in any way, yet has no imaginable reason why they wouldn’t answer the questions asked of them.”
“A humane way to interrogate.”
Kate nodded. Despite the pride she seemed to take in the idea, her brows drew in together and her lips pursed. Before he could stop the thought, Jonathan imagined the feel of them against his own lips. He shook his head slightly and played it off by cracking his neck.
“The day Greg gave me a physical serum to help remind me of all I’d done was already a bad day. It was the anniversary of Mom and Bill’s deaths and frustration took over. As you might have been able to tell, I tend to like my control. Taking the drug, even though I knew it wasn’t ready, was my way of trying to get control. Instead, it nearly put me in a coma. It put me in a constant state of lucid dreaming with little hope of ever waking up. Reliving my mother’s death over and over again until I died. Not something I want to subject anyone else to. The drug has many years of testing to go before it’s ever ready to be used. What Greg gave me in the coffee shop, in the silver case, is another physical copy of the up-to-date drug. A physical representation of everything I’ve been working toward.”
Jonathan sat back in his chair and let out a breath. His last case was sure turning out to be a doozy.
“Sounds like a drug worth trying to steal,” he said. From threatening notes before she’d ever left home to nearly being killed by the very drug she’d created, someone wanted what Kate had spent the last five years researching. The couple in the jackets were directly intertwined with that attempt, but Jonathan had a hard time thinking they were doing it alone. When Jonathan and Jake had first gotten into his SUV on the way to the lab, Jonathan had forwarded the picture of the man who had left a note on Kate’s door to his phone. Maybe Jake would get lucky and find out his identity. Because the cops still hadn’t called him back with any new information.
Just more questions than answers.
* * *
KATE’S HEADACHE EXPANDED and consumed. Jonathan’s concern seemed to double. It took her several attempts to convince him that the headache was a side effect of both the drug and the fall against the asphalt on the crosswalk. What she needed was some caffeine to help make her feel more alert and normal, something neither of them had.
“I’m not leaving this room,” Jonathan said, stern.
“And neither am I,” she said, motioning to her robe. “But I’m also hungry.”
Kate’s stomach growled loudly, egging his decision on. Finally, the bodyguard sighed.
“How about I do this instead?”
He disappeared into his room for a moment. Then she heard him on the phone. She nuzzled back into her pillow, trying to ignore the dull throb that only seemed to be getting worse. She might be able to lose it if she gave in to the urge to sleep, but she’d had enough of that in the last few hours. She loved her mother, but she didn’t want to chance reliving her death again any time soon.
Even if Jonathan had been in her dream.
Kate couldn’t deny she was more than surprised the bodyguard had made not just one appearance but many within her sleeping mind. From the star lights she’d never owned to the man holding her child form’s hand, warning her against all of the badness, saving her from drowning in a self-made coffin, her bodyguard had done his job in both the real world and the one within her mind. She smiled to herself, wondering how she would phrase that in a job performance review.
“Okay, Jett is back on front-desk duty and is personally bringing up the pizza as soon as it gets here. And some coffee for us,” Jonathan said. “I’m pretty much not leaving your side until we’re on a plane back home. Which should be tomorrow, if you ask me.”
Kate put her finger up and placed it against his mouth. It was an impulsive, harmless move on her part, but the feel of his lips against her skin sent a shock through her. One that wasn’t unpleasant in the least. Jonathan’s body tensed. Had he felt it, too?
“Jonathan,” she started, voice much softer than she’d meant it to be. “Let’s not talk about this until we’ve at least eaten. Please.”
Jonathan’s eyes searched her face. The self-consciousness she’d felt earlier wasn’t there anymore. The way he was looking at her somehow made her feel oddly beautiful. She lowered her finger, dropping her hand back to her lap. The corner of his lips pulled up.
“Okay, Miss Scientist,” he said. “Now, I’m going to go check in with the boss to let her know we’re okay. While we were at the lab, she sent quite a few texts. And, before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell her everything that’s going on. Not until we figure out who’s behind this. I don’t want to put her or Orion in any unnecessary danger.”
Kate watched him go back into his room. The adjoining door she’d loathed the day before had become an unforeseen perk.
Giving him privacy, as much as she could while being so close, Kate tried to clear her mind and relax. Or something similar given that relaxing wasn’t possible under the circumstances. She focused on her breathing and it seemed to work. She didn’t even realize when Jonathan started talking or when the knock sounded against his door.
However, she didn’t miss the sound of someone’s body slamming into the wall.
Kate moved out of bed as quickly as she could. The sound of another body hitting the wall made her pause, frozen in the middle of the room.
“Jonathan?” she asked into the quiet that followed. There was a shuffling noise and the bodyguard appeared in the doorway.
“You’re bleeding,” Kate said, looking to the blood on his lip. He shook off the concern.
“Get into the bathroom and lock the door. He’s here.”
Chapter Seventeen
Kate wanted to complain—wanted to help—but she realized her running into whatever fray there was in the next room wouldn’t help anything. She did as she was told and retreated to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. The floor was still wet and cold against her bare feet, but her attention was outside the room. He as in the man who had left the note?
What was he doing here now?
No sooner had she questioned it than her stomach dropped. The woman who had driven the car over Greg had been aiming at her. If she showed up with the man again, then it was safe to assume he wasn’t there to sit down and chat.
Kate strained as she tried to listen to what was happening in the next hotel room. No sound was getting through. Worry about Jonathan crept into her mind and exploded. Which only intensified when a door in the next room slammed shut.
Kate held her breath and waited.
A pounding sound began on the other side, but not against the bathroom door. Whoever had slammed the adjoining door between rooms must have been in her room now. Which meant whoever was still in Jonathan’s room must have been trying to get in hers.
The question now was, who was in there with her?
Before she could weigh the pros and cons of flinging open the door and checking on Jonathan, hoping it was him on the other side, someone tried the door handle.
Kate nearly screamed. The lock wasn’t sticking. The handle began to move and slowly the door began to open. Whoever was behind it wasn’t Jonathan. He would have called out to her, that much Kate was certain. So, with mounting terror, she turned and threw her back against the door, shutting it the small distance it had opened.
A man cursed loudly on the other side.
Definitely not Jonathan.
Kate braced her feet against the slick tile and waited for the man to try again. But how long could she really keep the door closed?
Looking around the room, she tried to spot something that could be used as a weapon. The only thing that looked remotely dangerous was the towel rack. It was too far away and she doubted she’d be able to pull it free from the wall. Feeling increasingly defeated, Kate’s eyes traveled across the counter next to her.
And stopped.
Reaching out, she grabbed her travel-size hair spray. Quickly she tossed off the cap. The man slammed into the door hard. Kate tried to push against it, using her legs to apply pressure backward, but he was stronger. In a last-ditch effort at self-defense, Kate put her finger on the nozzle and jumped away from the door, flattening herself against the wall.
The bathroom door flung open. If the rubber doorstop hadn’t been attached to the wall, the handle would have made one big hole. The man stopped just inside the room. For one moment they looked at each other.
It was the man who had followed them and who was on the hotel security footage. Without his coat he stood tall and well-built and looked quite a deal younger than she had originally suspected—perhaps early thirties. Like her, he had dark eyes and hair. Unlike her, he was smiling. Kate didn’t wait to find out what his plans were.
Wielding the only weapon she had, Kate sprang forward and sprayed the hair spray at the man’s face. It was a move he hadn’t expected, and even though he grabbed the front of her robe and slung her into the hallway, she’d hit her target. It was a delayed reaction but one that wasn’t lacking. The man let out a yell and let her go, fisting at his eyes. Kate used his pain to her advantage. She moved her foot up and connected hard with his groin.
He doubled over, a stream of expletives bursting from his lips. Kate backed up to the wall and moved along it until she was at the door to the hallway. The pounding she’d heard earlier became louder, terrifying her even more and scattering her thoughts, seconds before a loud crack. Kate already had the door open, one foot in the hallway, when another crack followed. She started to turn to place the sound when a ding from the elevators floated down the hallway. If she could get someone to call security, that would strengthen their chances against the unnamed assailant.
Be on the Lookout Page 12
