In her room, she closes the door behind us and walks to the small desk in the corner. She pulls out a notepad and begins to write frantically. Then, to my astonishment, she opens a drawer and reaches inside and up. Whatever she does causes a panel in the wall to open. She rushes to the entrance that appears to be a small closet and rifles through a file cabinet, pulling out a few slips of paper and what looks like a book. The door slides closed again when she steps out, the wallpaper completely concealing the entrance.
Back at her desk, she stuffs the note and paper into an envelope. She tucks in the flap and turns back to me. Her gray eyes are swollen, the dark circles beneath them more pronounced. As she looks at me, a tear slides from one and then the other. “Take this,” she says, holding the envelope and book out to me. The envelope is plain, letter-sized, an address scrawled on the back. Up close, the book looks more like a journal. “Here.” She shoves it toward me when I hesitate, then tucks it into the open shoulder bag I carry.
“Mom, you have to explain what this is all about,” I beg, really scared now. I’d never before seen my mother cry. But here she is, the normally loving but stoic woman I’d known for twenty-six years. Shaking. Crying. Her eyes wild with fear. “Please, let’s sit down.”
She smiles and wipes at her eyes, taking a calming breath. Then she’s back, the mother I know, the one I recognize. Her cheeks are still wet, but her face is composed now. As if she has just calmly accepted her fate.
She tucks a stray brown curl behind my ear and places her hands on my shoulders. “Oh, my sweetheart,” she whispers. “I’m sorry to leave you.”
“You’re not going anywhere!” I nearly shout it, desperation cutting through my worries. But she doesn’t hear me at all, and the sense that I’m being ignored jangles my already tense nerves.
“Listen to me,” she says firmly, digging her fingers into my shoulders until her nails poke into my skin. “Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I manage to squeak.
“I never wanted to involve you in any of this, but fate seems to think otherwise, because you’re here. You’re here in the hour of my greatest need. But what I ask of you will put you in great danger. Mia, I’m so sorry, but you are the only person I can trust with this. I shouldn’t, but I must.”
I nod, trying to understand. Trying to comprehend what she needs from me.
“In the freezer downstairs is a key to my safe deposit box. It’s frozen in ice, at the back. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I repeat, beyond confused.
“I need you to go to the bank today and remove the contents of that safe deposit box. Right away. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I breathe.
“The proxy to access the box and instructions on what you are to do once you secure it are in the envelope I just placed in your bag. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say again, confusion turning to horror. What sort of scenario does she think this is? How far off the rails has she gone? Is she delusional? Early onset dementia? And how had I not noticed her behavior deteriorating like this? Have I been so selfish and involved in my own life that I hadn’t seen the signs?
“You are to go now. Right away. And trust no one. Understand? Do not trust anyone, Mia.” She shakes me as she says this, her voice fierce.
I break free of her grasp, the red marks of her grip sure to turn blue later. “I understand,” I assure her, desperate to placate her, wondering if I should call the hospital when I leave.
“You will need your passport. Do you know its location?”
“Y-yes. Where will I be going?”
“Russia, my darling. Instructions are included. You’ll find money in the bank box. Use it.”
“Mom, why? Tell me.”
“There is no time. Remember, trust no one. Those who look to be your friend will be the one to distrust the most. I love you,” she murmurs, pulling me into a tight hug. “Now go!”
Just as I turn to walk away, a loud crash from downstairs startles us both. I open my mouth to gasp, but Mom’s hand covers it, silencing me.
“Under the bed,” she breathes into my ear, the words tumbling rapidly from her. “Do not make a sound. Remember the silent breathing I taught you. And do not come out until you’re absolutely certain there’s no one left in the house. Now.” She shoves me toward the bed and waits until I’ve scrambled underneath. She’s back a moment later, down on her knees, sliding a gun toward me. “It’s fully loaded and the safety is off. Shoot anyone who walks through that door that isn’t me. You remember how to use it, correct?”
I nod and her feet disappear as she dashes from the room. I strain to listen and only silence greets me for several minutes, then I jump when something crashes directly beneath me. I hold my hands over my mouth to hold in my screams of panic. What’s happening? Who’s here?
Were her rantings saner than I’d believed?
When everything goes quiet, I don’t know what’s worse. I jump when something overturns, another thump, the breaking of glass. Then the sound I’ve been dreading. Thump. Thump. Thump. Footsteps. Heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
Oh, my God. Is that the sound of my death?
A pair of men’s shoes, topped by a pair of black slacks appears. He enters the room and walks slowly around the bed. I focus on the shoes. Black. Ostrich. Cap toes. They look expensive, but what do I know. The dress pants have flecks of what looks like mud at the hem.
Go away. Please, go away.
I remembered the game I played with my mother when I was little. “The hiding game,” she called it. “Open your mouth, Mia, and breathe slowly in and out. Don’t hold your breath, my lovely. You need all the oxygen you can get.” I remember playing that game many times.
Slowly, very slowly, I breathe in, then breathe out.
He must have been satisfied, because he exits the room. That’s when I remember the gun still lying beside me. I grab for it, realizing I’d missed my opportunity to shoot him. Kill him? Can I kill a man in cold blood anyway?
I lay my cheek on the floor as I listen to him move room to room, my tears sliding down into the carpet. He searches the guest bedroom, then the bathroom, before walking back downstairs. Minutes later, I hear his voice, thick with an accent I can’t place.
“Come. The house must be searched thoroughly.” Oh no, they’d surely find me then. I grip the gun tighter, listening for a response, but there is none. He must be using a phone. “I will leave the doors open. Tell Stan to meet me at the safe house.”
I listen hard, willing my heart to stop beating so loudly in my ears. More footsteps. Then the sound of the front door opening and closing shatters the silence.
Some instinct tells me to wait, even as every muscle in my body begs me to crawl out from beneath the bed, to run downstairs and find my mother. But I force myself to be still. Just not for too long. I don’t know how long it will take the search team to arrive.
It’s another game she taught me. The patience game. “When you feel as if you will scream from wanting to do something so badly, count to one hundred. Then, count to one hundred again. And again, until it feels right to move.”
After I count to one hundred five times, I decide it’s relatively safe to leave the bedroom. I creep down the stairs, the gun in front of me, still unsure of the emptiness of the house. At the bottom of the stairs, a pair of feet sweep all thoughts of caution away.
“Mom!” I stumble down the rest of the stairs.
Lying at the bottom, half in and half out of the hallway, her eyes stare blankly at the ceiling, her face a mask of agony.
“Oh, Mom.” Tears blur my vision as I look around, frantic, unsure what to do. Should I call 911 for an ambulance? The police?
Do not trust anyone, Mia.
I shiver as those words whisper through my mind.
No. I can’t call any of them. The crazy things she told me before her murder are true. It is murder, but the police or paramedics can’t do anything for her now. I stroke her foreh
ead, brushing back her gray-streaked brown hair, and close her lovely gray eyes for the last time.
“I love you,” I whisper, pressing my lips against her smooth cheek. “Always. Forever. To the moon and around all the stars and back.” It’s what she used to tell me when I was little.
On shaky legs, I stand, unsure of what I should do next. Then I remember. The envelope! It’s still in my purse, and the key is still hidden in the freezer, unless the bad guy found it already. She’d had one dying wish: for me to get to her safe deposit box and follow her instructions. I have to try.
I run back upstairs and grab my purse from under the bed. I click on the safety and shove the gun inside. Hurrying downstairs, I run to the kitchen and search the freezer. Sure enough, an ice tray in the back holds a cube containing a small key. I wrap it in a dishtowel and slip it into my jacket pocket. I step gingerly around my mom’s body, tears blurring the sight of her, and stop with a jolt at the broken front door. Instead, I backtrack, pausing only to peek out the shades before simply walking out the back door and across the grass.
I fight to keep my footsteps even and casual, as if I’m out for a stroll on a beautiful day. I round the corner and walk back to Mom’s street, several houses down. Everything looks normal.
Normal.
Will anything ever be normal again?
Chapter 3 – Jax
“Promise me you’ll find love again.”
Her words come to me today as clearly as they did the moment she spoke them. Weak, breathless, but determined. My wife, Laura, had always been determined.
Even now, I can almost feel the weight of her hand in mine, so light. I’d held that hand so many times. In the end, the last of the strength there had withered. Become fragile. The bones and blue veins visible through delicate skin. I remember every detail as the moments left slipped away from me.
She fought the battle for so long and so hard.
In all my years of training and battle, I’d never seen anyone fight as bravely as she did. Shaving her own head before the chemo took care of it for her. Walking down a crowded street with an oxygen tank strapped to her back. Determined to live life on her terms until it was taken from her.
She could only fight so much before the cancer took over. But she drained every drop out of her life; that much she managed.
She laid motionless, the only sounds in the room the beeping monitors and her labored breathing. It was torture, sitting by her bed, listening to her struggle to inhale and exhale blessed oxygen from her lungs. The one thing no one ever tells the loved ones of cancer patients is how much you want the struggle to finally end. How it rips you apart inside to watch the person you adore dying in pain and delirium.
She hadn’t spoken a clear, rational word in days; lost somewhere else, far away, where there was no pain. Her eyes were glassy, unable to focus on anything for very long. There was no way of knowing if she really saw me, or if she was looking right through me to another realm waiting to embrace her.
I stayed with her twenty-four hours a day, sleeping on a cot by her bed when my eyes refused to stay open. There was no way I’d miss out on a minute with her, now that our minutes had grown so few. I remember the nurses begging me to eat, to sleep. I’d lost weight, they told me. I knew I had, the rational part of my brain knew that my belt had to be cinched tighter than usual, but taking care of myself seemed so meaningless. So what if I lost weight? I could put it back on. My wife never would.
On that last day she seemed more clear than she had in a long time. I didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse. At least she had seemed happy while lost in her delirium. But in her final hours, she was present, aware. The same old Laura in a tattered shell.
“Promise me you’ll find love again.” Nothing more. Except for a long ragged breath followed by a slow exhale.
“I’ll never love anyone like I love you,” I tell her now, sitting by her grave. Tears blur the flowers in my lap. I keep my head down, not wanting anyone to see.
“I miss you so much,” I whisper. “Every day I see something interesting and I think, Laura would love that. I can’t wait to get home and tell you about it. Then I remember. How is it that I keep forgetting? How can I forget you’re gone? I think I just don’t want to remember. If I remembered all the time, it would kill me.”
I had wanted to die too, wanted more than anything else to go with her. It had taken my best friend to shake me out of my stupor, slapping me around and reminding me that Laura would hate to see me that way, broken and weeping. I came around and decided to try to live.
But the love thing? I can’t do that.
Sitting by her grave, I remember the night we met. Back then, I sure as hell hadn’t had the time to date, and I didn’t exactly have a social life that allowed for chance meetings. The Rangers had been my life up to that point, but I’d just left the Army to join the CIA. I hadn’t been in my new role more than a couple weeks when my new friends had convinced me to join them at a Halloween party. I hated the idea, but as the new kid on the block, I went along to appease them.
And there she was. Dressed as an angel. Even then I knew how corny it was, thinking to myself that she really did look like an angel, with her perfect golden curls and radiant smile. All the other women at the bar were dressed as slutty-this and slutty-that, and there she was, wings and all. I married her a year later.
“I knew how special you were right then and there,” I whisper, staring at the headstone, her name and the dates of her birth and death carved into the granite. “I fell in love with you that very night, and I told the guys that I was going to marry you. They all thought I was drunk. Maybe I was. But that didn’t change anything.”
I remember how she had loved Christmas. I used to call her my Christmas Angel, and I’d sit back in wonder as she transformed our little apartment into a wonderland; later, our little house, and after we outgrew it, our larger house. She loved nothing more than entertaining our friends and family, and put out a spread that Martha Stewart would have swooned over. A fully decorated tree went up in every room of the house … including a small one in the powder room.
I finally managed to put up a small tree this year. Baby steps.
But I still hadn’t resigned from the job that terrified her so much.
She was so scared of my role in the CIA, having watched too many movies, I’m guessing. And I promised her before she died I’d leave it. But after she was gone, I couldn’t find it in myself to have another enormous change in my life. I’ve thought about it many times, but maybe my buddy was right, that I had a death wish. It didn’t feel that way, not really. But maybe subconsciously, he was right. Maybe I volunteered for the shittiest, most violent assignments for a reason other than the adrenaline rush and the desire to take the bad guy down.
Did I tell you I found one of the gifts you hid for me?” I ask her headstone. “It was in the rafters, under the roof. You were always doing that, hiding gifts and forgetting where you left them. Or maybe you got sick and didn’t get around to making it back up there. I don’t know. But it was still ticking, can you believe it?” I hold up my wrist, the watch she bought for me gleaming there. I’d wept like a baby when I found it. Sometimes a moment like that comes around and threatens to crush my heart.
“You had good taste,” I tell her. “I mean, you married me, right?” I laugh, the sound carried away by the breeze. I vaguely wonder what the men I served with would think if they heard me talking to a headstone, laughing at nothing but air.
“I know you wanted me to love somebody else,” I whisper. “But that’s so easy to say when you’re not the one who’s left behind. How could anyone else compare to you? You’re everything, still. You always will be. You’ve been gone for two years, but it feels like yesterday … then again, sometimes it feels like forever.”
Thinking back to all the long nights since her death, I shudder to think of all the ones to come. She always hogged the blankets. It used to irritate the hell out of me. I would
wake up, shivering, in the middle of the night, and look over to find her wrapped in a cocoon. Finally, we had to use separate blankets, and even then she would sometimes take mine. I had no idea how she managed it.
The first cold night after she died, I was left with the blankets all to myself. That was when it hit me the hardest, when I realized she was never coming back. I would have given anything to wake up shivering, if it meant she was beside me again. It had gotten easier to sleep alone since then, but not much. A bed can seem very big when you’re in it alone, especially when it isn’t supposed to be that way.
“You know it’s your fault, right?” I tease her. “That I can’t give my heart to anybody else? It wouldn’t be fair to another woman to know I’d rather be with you.” The wind picks up, blowing my dark hair into my eyes. It’s almost like she’s blowing my words back in my face, making me eat them. I shrug, and semi-grin at the headstone. “Sorry, love, I know you don’t agree, but that’s just how it is. You’re still everywhere inside me. I don’t want you to leave. I don’t want to make room for another person. It would be like losing you all over again.”
By habit, my fingers go to my ring finger, where my wedding ring is supposed to be. I’m still mad at her about that. A little bit, at least. She’d made me promise that I’d bury her wearing my ring, and I did so. Nothing had been so hard as when I’d taken it off and placed it on her cold thumb.
It didn’t take me long to figure out her true reasons for doing that. She knew. She absolutely knew that I’d never take it off, meet someone new, if she left it on this side of the grave.
Standing, I place the flowers in front of the headstone. Stepping back, I take one last look. “I love you, sweetheart. Happy Birthday.”
Walking away from the gravesite, I knuckle away the tears that threaten to spill from my eyes. My back pocket buzzes and I grab my phone before sliding behind the wheel of my Land Rover. It’s my boss, John Stephens.
“Hathaway speaking,” I say into the phone, clearing my throat of the grief still sticking there. “What can I do for you?”
Badass: Deadly Target (Complete): Military Romantic Suspense Page 2
