Broken With You

by J. Kenner

  I’m not crazy about the parameters, but I would have agreed to anything to get through that door. Now that I’m in, I’m not going to risk being dragged out again.

  “I take it by your silence that you’re not going to tell me,” he says. “It’s okay. I didn’t really expect that you would.”

  “If it helps, I was debating. But I’m pretty sure I’d end up chained in the dungeon for the next decade if I spill. And I just started re-watching Game of Thrones. It would suck to have to stop midway through season one.”

  Mason and I watched the show together until he went away, and I search his eyes for a flicker of recognition, but I don’t see a thing. My shoulders droop with disappointment, but maybe it’s for the best. According to Seagrave, Dr. Tam insisted that any specific reference to his name, his relationship to me, or any past assignment runs the risk of short-circuiting his brain, which could end up blocking the information for good.

  “She explained it with medical speak and a fifty page brief,” Seagrave had added when he gave me the rundown. “But that’s about what it amounts to. Something traumatic happened, and we’re assuming that event is tied to his discovery of key information that could lead to us shutting down that terrorist cell once and for all. We can’t risk burying that information forever.”

  Maybe not. But at the moment, I care a hell of a lot more about Mason than I do about a terrorist cell. But only in my heart. My training is too ingrained, and no way would I compromise the country’s security or undermine all the work that Mason did while he was gone.

  So instead of telling him his name, I volley the question back to him. “What are you calling yourself?”

  “Jack Sawyer. It amused Seagrave. I guess it amuses you, too,” he adds, obviously noticing my grin.

  “You always were a fan of Lost. Do you remember the show?”

  “I do. Life on that freakish island seems more real at the moment than my own.” He stands, then goes and gets a cup of coffee from the Keurig in the corner of the room. “Want?”

  I nod, and a few moments later he brings me a Styrofoam cup filled with the magical elixir. Our fingers brush as I take it, and an unexpected shock of awareness ricochets through me at this first contact in what feels like forever.

  I tense, hoping he doesn’t notice, and at the same time delighting in the flood of memories that even this slight contact with him revives.

  Mason—no, I need to call him Jack—returns to the bed and sits again, slowly sipping his coffee. As far as I can tell, he’s completely unaffected by the brush of skin against skin.

  “Your turn,” he says, and it takes me a second to realize he wants to know my name.

  “Denise. Denise Marshall.” I’ve always used my maiden name professionally, so it easily rolls off my tongue, even though what I want is to tell him that my name is Denise Marshall Walker, and why the hell doesn’t he remember that?

  “And your husband?”

  I hesitate only a second. Then I look him straight in the eye. “Mason. Mason Walker.”

  For a moment, the name hangs in the silence. Then he says, “Is he dead?”

  I’m unable to hold back the small, strangled noise that escapes my lips. “He—he’s been gone a long time.”

  He nods sympathetically, and I’m terribly afraid he’s going to ask me a more probing question. One I really can’t answer. So I fire my own question off first. “How did you know we were partners? You still haven’t told me.”

  “Well, apparently I’m a hot shit intelligence officer.”

  It’s the right thing to say, as a laugh bubbles out of me, lightening the mood. “Can’t argue with that, but I still want to know your reasoning.”

  “I was close to him, but you said we weren’t partners. If we’d been just run-of-the-mill friends he wouldn’t know about my work.”

  “Not everyone in intelligence works undercover.”

  “But I did. Or at least, I’m playing the odds and saying I did.” He sweeps his arm, indicating the room. “If not, all this seems like overkill.”

  Since I can’t argue with that, I don’t. “How do you know that he was aware of your work?”

  “A guess, honestly. But you know. And if I wasn’t Mason’s partner, the next best guess to get you into this room is that you’re in intelligence too, and that—”

  “—we’re partners. Yeah. I get it.”

  And I do. It’s cold, hard reasoning, which has always been one of Mason’s strong suits. Right now, though, he’s reasoned me right out of his arms and into another’s. I’m his friend. His colleague. His partner.

  But I’m not his lover, and I’m not his wife.

  He’s erased me. Somehow, his mind really has erased me along with everything else, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

  I can’t wrap my arms around him and weep. I can’t twine my fingers through his hair as my mouth finds his.

  I can’t kiss him back to reality as if I’m a fairy tale princess and he’s a prince trapped in a hundred year sleep.

  I can’t even tell him the truth.

  All I can do is cry, but I’m not even allowed to do that.

  “You have to hold it together,” Seagrave had said. “You’re a professional, Agent Marshall. If I let you walk into that room, I expect you to behave like one.”

  The memory whips through my head, and I draw in a resigned breath as I once again focus all my attention on Mason.

  Correction: Jack.

  He’s Jack Sawyer. I’m Denise Marshall. And never the twain shall meet.

  “How long have you been in the private sector?” he asks, interrupting my pity party and making me look up sharply.

  “How do you know I am?”

  “Because if we were still partners, you would have popped into my cell before now. You’re still in the business, though. Just more on the civilian side of things.”

  “Guess you really are a hot shit intelligence officer.”

  “I know something else, too,” he says with a grin. “We made a damn good team.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Sure I do,” he says. “I don’t remember it, but I feel it. We were good together, weren’t we, Denise?”

  “Yeah.” My voice catches. “We made one hell of an awesome team.”

  5

  “That’s about the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” my friend Cass says, glancing up from where she’s doing the final touches on a wrist tattoo of a single domino with four dots on one side of the tile and two on the other.

  I’ve just finished telling her and Sylvia—who’s getting the ink— that I saw my husband this afternoon, and he didn’t have even an iota of an inkling of a clue that I’m his wife.

  “Believe me,” I say. “I know.”

  “Are you supposed to be telling us this?” Cass adds. “Isn’t this one of those situations where you can tell us, but then you have to kill us?”

  “Yes,” I say, looking from her to Sylvia. “As soon as you finish Syl’s wrist, I’m going to take you both out.”

  “Well, hell,” Syl says with a put-upon sigh. “What’s the point of getting a new tattoo if I don’t have time to show it to anyone?”

  “That’s true,” Cass says. “Whacking us would be just plain rude.”

  I exhale loudly and flop down into the big leather armchair that’s been tucked in this corner of Totally Tattoo for all the years I’ve known Cass. I keep my expression bland, but inside I’m grinning. I knew my friends would make me feel better. “Fine. You live. But that means you both owe me a drink.” I glance at the kitty cat clock with the swishing tail. “As soon as the big hand gets to the twelve, I expect my due compensation.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll have to take a rain check.” Syl offers me an apologetic smile. “I’m so sorry I can’t stay. Because honestly, Denny, if anyone deserves a drink today, it’s you.”

  “I won’t argue with that,” I say. “And I forgive you. Big plans?”
>
  Her huge smile is answer enough. It lights up her face and makes her eyes twinkle. She wears her hair short, like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, and the style complements her elfin face.

  “We’re dropping the kids off with Nikki and Damien for the week,” she tells me. “Then Jackson and I are heading to the airport.”

  “That’s right,” Cass says. “The museum dedication in Reykjavik, right?”

  Syl nods. “I’ve never been to Iceland, and Jackson’s giving a speech and getting an award. It should be a fabulous week.”

  A world-famous architect, Jackson Steele is also Damien’s half-brother. And Sylvia, in addition to being Jackson’s wife, is a high-level exec with Stark Real Estate Development.

  Considering I now work for the Stark Security Agency, I find it completely ironic that I met Sylvia through Cass and not through Damien. Especially since Cass isn’t a billionaire, doesn’t work for any Stark subsidiary, and doesn’t know squat about the intelligence community.

  On the contrary, Cass is just Cass—one of the best tattoo artists I’ve ever met, which isn’t saying much since I still haven’t summoned the nerve to get a tattoo. But back when Mason got his tribal band, I did a ton of research on local parlors and learned that Totally Tattoo is one of the best.

  The studio’s been around for over three decades, and Cass has been working at the place in various capacities since she was a kid. Back then, her dad ran it. And from what she tells me, she and Syl met when they were teenagers, hit it off, and have been lifelong besties.

  When Mason and I came in, the plan was for us to get matching ink. After watching the process with Mason, though, I’d chickened out. I may be a badass in the espionage world, but that doesn’t mean I want to voluntarily get stabbed with a zillion little needles.

  Cass took my wishy-washiness in stride, which was probably the second thing about her that impressed me. The first, of course, was her looks. With her ever-changing hair—today it’s dark with pink tips—her brilliant green eyes, and the magnificent tattoo of an exotic bird that marks her shoulder, Cass has always been exceptional.

  Since I felt guilty for bailing on my ink and leaving Cass with a big gap at the end of her Friday calendar, Mason and I took her out for a beer. After that, we started hanging out a lot. Me, Mason, Cass, and her girlfriend, Siobhan.

  That’s part of why I feel no guilt for sharing Mason’s secrets. I know Cass loves him, too. Not like I do, but our friendship is strong, and when that first month without Mason dragged into two, five, ten, it was to Cass’s house that I’d go when I needed a reality check or a shoulder to cry on.

  That shoulder is the reason I came here today instead of going straight to my house in Silver Lake. I need a hug. I need to talk. I need…

  Honestly, I need Mason. But since that isn’t going to happen, a friend is the next best thing, which is exactly what I tell her when we’re finally settled at Blacklist, the Venice Beach bar just a few blocks from Cass’s shop.

  “The bottom line is that I couldn’t bring myself to go straight home,” I tell her as I sniff my bourbon at the long oak bar, then push it away. “I didn’t want to walk into that house without him, which is stupid, since I’ve been going home to an empty house for over two years now.”

  “But before it was empty because he was away working, but you knew that he was wishing he was there with you. And that made it important.” She traces her finger thoughtfully along the rim of her wine glass. “Because it belonged to both of you.”

  “It still belongs to both of us,” I say defensively.

  “I know,” Cass says gently. “But it’s hard to be in a place after the meaning changes.” She looks down at her wine, her head tilted so that her hair falls in a curtain of curls, partially shielding her face. I expect her to brush it back, and I frown when she doesn’t.

  “Cass?”

  She takes a sip of wine, shakes her head, and tucks her hair behind her ear. What she doesn’t do is look straight at me, and in that moment my gut twists and I realize I’m the worst friend ever.

  “What happened?” I say. “Is Siobhan going to be stuck in Chicago longer than you thought?” After organizing a few successful fine arts exhibitions in the LA area, Siobhan got invited to work on a touring show, and she’s been traveling for months. The last I heard, she was in Chicago for the final three-week run.

  I assume Cass is just missing her, so I’m unprepared when she lifts her head, meets my eyes, and says flatly. “She’s staying.”

  “Staying? So, what? She wants you to move to Chicago?”

  “No,” Cass says. “She doesn’t want me there at all. I’m pretty sure Anthony doesn’t want me there either.”

  “Anthony.” The name comes out flat, and I say nothing else. I don’t have to. I know where this is leading.

  “At least Siobhan will finally make her dad happy. He hated when she dumped her boyfriend and came back to me.”

  That was before my time, but I’ve heard about how Cass and Siobhan had split up, then got back together. But from what Sylvia told me, those two were meant to be, and Siobhan’s return had been both a happy surprise and inevitable.

  “Does Syl know?”

  Cass shakes her head. “She knows that I’ve been irritated with how little Siobhan was checking in, but I just wrote that off to her being so busy. This is a new development—yesterday, actually. At least from my perspective. Apparently from Siobhan and Anthony’s point of view, it’s been almost four months in the making.” She shrugs. “I thought about telling Syl at lunch today, but I didn’t want to drop all this on her right before she heads to Iceland.”

  I get that. The news hit me with the force of an anvil, and Syl has known Siobhan for years—and witnessed their first break-up and reconciliation. She’s going to be knocked sideways second only to Cass herself.

  I take her hand and squeeze. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I appreciate that, but I really didn’t mean for this outing to be about me. After all, if we’re comparing pain, I’m going to say that you win.”

  I’m not entirely sure that’s true. As much as it hurts for Mason not to know me, I can’t even imagine how horrible I’d feel if he’d willingly walked away from me. At least this way, I know that it wasn’t his decision.

  “True,” Cass says when I tell her that. “But I still think it’s worse for you. I could fly to Chicago if I wanted. Put up a fight. You can’t. Because even if you tell him who you are, he doesn’t remember it. So there’s no solid ground for the two of you to stand on. From his perspective, it would be like you were arguing about some characters in a TV show. Vaguely familiar, but nothing to do with him.” She lifts a shoulder apologetically. “At least if Siobhan and I have it out, we both know what the stakes are.”

  I let her words flow over me, then nod. “You’re right. I’m definitely the one getting screwed here.”

  She laughs, as I’d hoped. And even though I meant what I said one hundred percent, I laugh, too.

  “Of all the things I imagined when we got married, this was never on my radar. I mean, I thought about when we would have kids. And what we would do if we retired. I worried I couldn’t handle it if he got sent out on assignment with another woman. You know, the usual stuff. But it never once occurred to me that I’d be totally erased from his life. It’s—it’s like being hollow, and I can’t wrap my head around it.”

  “And it’s worse because you can’t tell him.”

  I nod, then reach for my drink before remembering I don’t want it.

  “What?”

  “Just not in the mood for alcohol, I guess.”

  “Here, take my water.” She pushes it to me. “But that wasn’t what I meant. There’s something else on your mind.”

  I shake my head, part of me not wanting to talk about it, and the other part not knowing how to put what I’m feeling into words.

  “You thought he would know,” she says softly. “That he would snap back when he saw you. You thought it wou
ld be like a fairy tale, and you’d step into the secret cave and rescue the wounded prince.”

  “You make me sound like a fool.”

  She flashes a sad little smile. “I don’t mean to. I think I’d feel the same way. Anybody would. What you’re going through—it’s not exactly normal.”

  “Maybe I just did it wrong,” I quip. “I mean, in the fairy tales, it’s always a kiss that works the magic.”

  Beside me, Cass grins. “Maybe you should try that.”

  “I wish I had the nerve,” I admit. “But I have a feeling Seagrave doesn’t share my romantic streak. I’d end up getting banned from the SOC, and Mason would be confused—possibly turned on—but none the wiser.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, all levity evaporating from her voice.

  “Thanks.” The real truth is that I don’t know what to do with myself now. Despite my rather hairy childhood, I’ve always believed that things would turn out all right. That my father abandoning me and my mom wasn’t an omen. That—just like my mother told me—if I kept a positive outlook, everything would be okay. I just had to keep the faith.

  And so I did. Even when cancer settled into her bones. Even when she died despite promising that she’d never leave me. That she’d fight it, and she’d win.

  Even with all her promises, she lost the battle. But I still clung to that stupid, fucking optimism. I’d kept the faith, and when Mason came into my life, I truly believed that he was my reward.

  But now he’s gone, too. And I can’t seem to wrap my head around the randomness of the world. Like it’s nothing more than a game of chance. Dice or cards or…

  I frown, turning to Cass as I remember Sylvia’s tattoo. The domino wasn’t the first—far from it. In fact, the first time we went to the beach together, I was surprised to see how many she had. “Memories,” she’d told me after I commented on her ink. “And a bit of therapy. A map of triumphs and milestones that I hold close.”