Authors: Lynn Viehl
What woman took physical abuse without a murmur but ran away from fulfilling her own gifts?
He had no more time to wrestle with the puzzle that was Rowan. No matter how much he wanted her, he had to gather together all the pieces of her life in order to make sense of it and her. To do otherwise would be not only foolhardy, but dangerous for them both.
It tore at him to turn away from her door, and what he had to do next filled him with despair. But such was the price of his new life, and the hope that at last he had found the woman who might share it with him.
“Rowan.” He scooped her up in his arms, dodging her fist and carrying her back to the big armchair, where he sat down and held her on his lap, turning on the lamp beside the chair to get a look at her.
She was a mess.
“How did you get in?” she demanded, choking out the words. “Forget it. Just get out.” She pushed at him. “Let go of me.”
“Not happening, Cupcake.” He held on, letting her struggle until she ran out of steam and went limp. She pressed her face into his shirt as she sobbed, shuddering now and then as she muttered broken, nonsensical phrases.
Meriden didn’t waste his breath on words of comfort; she was beyond that. Wherever she was, he’d be here when she came back. And gradually she calmed, enough to regain some control of her limbs and the convulsive clutching motions of her hands.
“If you say you’re sorry,” he told her when he heard her drag in a deep breath, “I will beat the living shit out of you.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“That’s my girl.” He tugged her head back so he could see her face. Her nose was more swollen than it should have been, and a small graze marred her right cheekbone. Something roared softly in his head. “Who hit you?”
“A kid with nasty hands.” She probed her cheek and the bridge of her nose. “How bad do I look?”
“Like you went a round with Holyfield.” He turned her face toward the light to check her eye, but it was clear. “So tell me about this kid.”
“He has a couple of cracked ribs now, courtesy of my elbow.” She met his gaze. “And I’m not sorry about that, either.”
He nodded, feeling his rage ease back. “So what was all this about?” He thumbed some tear trails from her cheek. “Postknockout depression?”
“Maybe.” She settled back against his chest and sighed. “You ever get into a street fight? A bad one?”
He thought of the time he’d gotten jumped outside Clancy’s by a drunken Marine and four of his buddies. “Now and then.”
“I didn’t know how to fight the first time I ran away,” she said. “I was just a little kid, and I only had a couple bucks to my name. I was looking around for someplace where I could buy some food, and these two junkies came out of nowhere. One held me from behind while the other one searched me, and even though they were sick and needed a fix they were so fucking strong, Sean. Desperate strong. They took all the money I had, and when I tried to go after them to get it back, they taught me just how easy ribs crack.”
“What were you doing on the street that young?”
“Nowhere else to go. It doesn’t matter. They picked me up a couple days later and put me back in foster care.” She knuckled her eye and winced. “Have you seen that girl who’s been hanging around the restaurant at night? About five-four, blond hair, real skinny?”
More than once he’d sensed someone out in the alley, but there wasn’t a backstreet in New York that didn’t host someone who didn’t want to be seen. “I haven’t seen her face, but I think I know who you mean.”
“I’ve taken some food out to her a couple times, and tried to talk to her, but she always takes off.” She plucked at one of the buttons on his shirt. “I think she’s about sixteen, same age I was when I finally ditched the foster care system for good. I want to tell her I know how she feels, maybe help her find a safe place to stay, but she won’t let me get near her. She grabs the food and runs.”
“You’re helping her by feeding her,” he pointed out.
“It’s not enough. Kid like that, she needs a home, a real bed, clean clothes, and someone to take care of her. Hell, if I thought I could get away with bringing her up here and having her stay with me, I would.”
“And she’d probably knock you over the head and clean you out while you were unconscious,” he predicted.
“I guess.” She yawned. “You should go to bed.”
She felt good against him, warm and soft, like a long, sleepy cat. “I should.”
“But not with me,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “I’m not sleeping with you, you know.”
She was asleep a moment later.
Meriden sat and held her, content to wait until her breathing slowed and deepened before he lifted her and carried her carefully back to her bed.
She stirred briefly when he laid her out, but only flung an arm out before she went back to dreamland. Meriden considered curling up beside her for a couple of hours—he could think of some great ways to wake her up in the morning—but reluctantly decided against it. When he had sex with Rowan, which he fully intended to do sometime in the immediate future, he wanted her fully awake, completely willing, and one hundred percent aware of him and what they did to each other.
He pulled up the linens around her, but when he lifted her arm to tuck it under he saw something dark just above her wrist, too dark to be a bruise. He turned on the lamp beside the bed, angling the shade so the light didn’t shine on her face, and then rolled back her sleeve.
An intricate, densely inked tat of a black dragon with red eyes stretched from just above her wrist to the inside of her elbow. He put her arm down and tugged the covers away from her to have a look at the other forearm, which sported a mirror image of the same dragon. The light caught something else, a faint patch of glowing blue, and when he checked the other tat he saw the same.
The black dragons weren’t the first images tattooed on Rowan’s arms. There was something else, an older tat, under each one.
She can’t be
, he thought, sitting down on the edge of the bed. His weight depressed the mattress, causing Rowan to roll over toward him. He stood up quickly, standing over her for a long moment before he reached into his pocket and took out his mobile phone. After snapping a photo of her face, he turned off the light and left.
He had no choice. He would have to run her.
He locked Rowan’s door, pocketed the spare key, and returned to his apartment, where he took out the file on Alana King. Rereading the medical reports didn’t convince him; the color of the tattoos on the girl’s forearms was not listed. They were not described as dragons, either. Everyone had tattoos today; even little old ladies.
He also didn’t believe that Rowan was only sixteen years old. She might have a young face, but her eyes belonged to someone older, a traveler who had maybe seen too much of the world already. She also had none of the awkwardness of an adolescent girl who had just gone through major body changes. A kid wouldn’t be as at ease as Rowan was in her skin.
Still, there was a remote chance that he was wrong, and the girl he had to find to save his own life was sleeping across the hall.
He took the laptop out from his desk and booted it up, accessing a face-morphing program he’d gotten from a medical examiner in exchange for some bodywork on a Dodge Charger the examiner had been lovingly restoring. The program, which was not available commercially, was used by several agencies and organizations involved in missing persons cases. Any photo loaded into the program could be virtually aged to any point in that person’s life, a technique used primarily to help identify children who had gone missing for several years.
Meriden uploaded the photo he’d taken of Rowan with his phone into the system, and pulled it up alongside the school photo of young Alana King. He saw no resemblance between the two faces, but entered the formula to age-progress Alana King’s features to what they would look like at age sixteen. The little girl blossomed into a pretty teenager, but she still looked nothing like Rowan. He advanced the progression a few more years, and got a look at how Alana would appear as a grown woman, but struck out a third time.
She could have altered her coloring with hair dye and colored contacts, he thought, and removed the age progressions of Alana, restoring her photo to its original appearance. He then changed Rowan’s hair color to blond and her eye color to blue, and had the program age- regress her one year at a time. Although Rowan grew younger and more childlike with each new regression, she still bore no resemblance to the other girl.
Whoever she was, Rowan Dietrich had never been Alana King.
His girlfriend.
He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. Nella Hoff had several PhDs, all of them in subjects he didn’t understand and never would. He liked that she never referred to her education or his lack of it. It would have been much harder to be with her if she’d been a snob.
He dialed Genaro’s private line, which Genaro answered at once.
“You’re late,” the chairman said. “What is your status?”
“I’ve completed a sweep of the apartment, but she isn’t keeping anything here,” he said. “The phone she planted on Kirchner was a throwaway paid for with cash, so there won’t be any paper on it.”
“What about her phones?”
“I’ve installed tracers in the landlines. I think she’s keeping her mobile in her vehicle.” He turned so he could watch the dark interior of the apartment through the window. “Unless there is something else you want, I’m finished here.”
“I’ve just received a report from the New York branch,” Genaro said. “Our team has disappeared.”
He went still. “All of them?”
“Yes. New York will monitor the morgues, but I think it unlikely that King would leave any corpses to be found.” Genaro sounded tired. “I would like to know how he identified the members of the team and their location.”
So would Delaporte; he had personally trained the team, and several of the men on it had been his most dependable hunters. This changed everything. “Do you want me to finish here?”
“No. Until the female is found, Hoff still has some value.” Genaro paused as if thinking. “We’ll take her tomorrow in the lab. Kirchner will need your assistance. Report to my office first thing in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.” Delaporte ended the call.
Engaging in an affair with an enemy of the company had been distasteful to him, as had the role he had taken on—to appear to Nella Hoff as a potential blackmail target. He understood the psychology behind posing as a would-be pedophile in order to intrigue her, but he hadn’t cared for having his background records salted with indications of a predilection he personally despised.
But the disgust he had expected to feel when he was with her had never manifested when they were together. It was true that he preferred women who had an open, mature attitude about sex, but something about Nella Hoff had made the role-playing less of a chore. He’d enjoyed her submissiveness, even if it had been self-serving.
The sex itself had been unnervingly erotic.
That part of his assignment had come to an end now. Tomorrow when Nella went into work, she would be drugged, removed discreetly from the lab, and installed in one of the “treatment” rooms, where he and Kirchner would begin a lengthy and painful interrogation. From what Genaro had said, Delaporte imagined he would be called upon to sexually abuse her. It was always more emotionally effective when the captive was subjected to repeated violations by a former lover.
He walked back to the bedroom to look at her one last time, so that he could remember her as she had been.
Delaporte registered that the bed was empty a moment before the lights snapped on and a gun barrel pressed against the base of his skull.
“You really should look inside the tampon boxes and under the trash can liners, Daddy,” Nella said in a mocking, girlish voice. “You wouldn’t believe how much you can hide in those little places.”
“So it seems.” He felt almost proud of her. “What are we going to do now, Nella?”
“You’re not going to move, because I know the information in your records about your skills as a soldier and a mercenary wasn’t complete bullshit,” she said. “And as much as I’d like to pull this trigger, I need some information from you.”
He smiled. “Then go ahead and pull the trigger.”
She slid the gun around as she came to stand before him, until it rested under his chin. “Let’s clear the air first. You’re not a pedophile in the making, and I’m not a Daddy’s girl.”
“Does it matter now?”
“It does to me. You knew I’d look for the weakest link, and you set yourself up to resemble one.” She watched his eyes, her own bright with nerves. “Where did I fuck up?”
“You were a little too heavy- handed with Kirchner,” he told her, at the same time subtly changing his stance. “Also, offering him sex was a mistake. He’s a celibate as well as a misogynist.”
She grew thoughtful. “I didn’t think the wife was window-dressing.”
“She’s an experienced bodyguard,” he said. “So are the two women posing as his teenage daughters.”
“You know, you’re giving me a great deal of free, valuable information, Don.” She pressed the barrel in a little harder. “I don’t think it’s because you like talking to your plants.”
Her pun amused him. “I admire your resourcefulness.” “Oh, you admire my tits and my arse,” she corrected, her voice changing from American to a working-class British accent. “He’s called you off, then?”
He saw no point in lying to her. “He has.”
“When am I to be taken?”
He gave her a wistful smile. “Now.”
He took her down with a minimum amount of trouble, knocking the gun away before he pinned her to the floor under his bulk. The weapon didn’t discharge, and Nella didn’t make a sound. She tried every trick he knew to dislodge him, and a couple of moves that were new. Then she stopped and lay under him for a moment, panting hard.
“Do me now,” she said, lifting her chin like an animal baring its throat. “Go on. It’s this or I have to open a vein. You can tell that pisser Genaro I got the jump on you, and you just reacted too fast.”
“No one gets the jump on me.” Delaporte wrapped one big hand around her neck. “And I tell him only the truth.”
“Ballocks.” She wriggled. “Do you need a bit of theater again to get the job done? Should I do the death scene from
Othello
? ‘Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight.’ ”
Delaporte applied enough pressure to temporarily impede the flow of blood to Nella’s brain, causing her to lose consciousness. He released his grip in time to keep from killing her, and then moved aside, sitting on the floor beside her.
Judging by the mistakes she’d made, Nella had not been in the field for very long. Nor had she been trained properly. Delaporte disliked seeing the waste of a good agent, even one that worked for the other side.
No, if he was honest, he hated the thought of seeing this woman tortured and killed before her body was burned to ash in the lab’s massive incinerator. She’d been exceptionally brave and, in her own fashion, honorable.
He stripped off her nightgown and tore it into strips, which he used to bind her ankles together. As he rolled her over onto her belly to tie her hands behind her, the light illuminated her back and he saw what appeared to be a loose flap of skin on her shoulder blade. On closer inspection it turned out to be a small circle of thin, flesh-colored latex that had been glued directly onto her skin with spirit gum.
Delaporte found the edge of the latex patch and peeled it back slowly. Beneath it was a black oval with the outlined profile of a very familiar face.
He took out his mobile and dialed a number he rarely called. “My lord,” he said when his master’s low, powerful voice answered. “We have another problem here in Atlanta.”