He almost laughed, but it was just too miserably sad, that she could be so self-absorbed and dense. That he had endured it for so long.
“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “I’m done. There’s a difference.”
Her brown eyes shimmered with tears. “I broke up with Aengus two months ago,” she confided. “Turns out he had a serious girlfriend back in Ireland. A seven-year-old son, too. He was just playing around.”
“Ah.” He waited. “And this is relevant to me exactly why?”
She snapped her empty glass angrily down on a nearby table, and beckoned to a passing waiter until the girl passed by with another tray of glasses. “Don’t be a prick,” she snapped, taking another swallow. “I’m trying to apologize, and explain, and you’re making it really hard.”
“Don’t waste your breath, Cin,” he told her. “I’m not interested.”
“Oh, come on.” She gave him that look from under her sooty lashes. “You’re furious, and you have a perfect right to be. And I am so ready to make it up to you. I checked the place out when I got here. There’s this administrative office in the back that’s unlocked. No one there. We’ll lock it from the inside, and I’ll do anything you want. And believe me . . . I know just what you want. I know you so well.”
Oh, Jesus. He wished there was a way he could make her understand what was wrong with this picture.
If he were a different kind of guy, without scruples or complicated sensorial brain damage, he might just take her up on her offer. She was gorgeous, skilled. He could just enjoy it, and walk away, vindicated.
Bummer for him, he was not that guy.
Cindy took his hesitation to mean that he was tempted, and started moving in on him, penetrating his danger zone. He tried not to lurch back. God forbid he make a spectacle out of himself. He was sure they were being minutely observed as it was. By everyone.
“Don’t touch me, Cin,” he said quietly.
Cindy laughed, throatily. “You know you want to, baby.”
Not.
He genuinely didn’t. Maybe it was the shield that had changed him, or maybe he’d finally just grown the requisite brain cells. But the spell was definitively broken.
Cindy didn’t know what to make of him now. The only weapon she had was seduction, so she ramped it up, even when it was the wrong weapon for the situation. Ironic, that she only genuinely wanted him when he’d finally disinvested. A long, painful process, and not one he could reverse. She tossed off the third glass of champagne. He caught himself wondering if she was planning on driving. Had to remind himself that it was no longer his problem.
He no longer had to save her, or understand her. Or encourage her to mature into someone who could be his partner in life, someone he could trust and rely on. This flushed, glassy-eyed girl with plunging cleavage and the lipstick on her teeth . . . nah.
“So?” She leaned, brushing her breasts against him.
“No, thanks,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, come on. You’re just going to sulk?”
He walked steadily away, until the appetizer buffet table blocked his trajectory. Not where he wanted to be. The food smelled too damn strong.
“You need rescuing from Cindy?”
It was Sean, behind him, jiggling his chubby toddler son Eamon in his arms. Frowning.
“Nah,” Miles responded. “I’m good.”
“So good, you had to bury your head under a pile of rocks in the mountains for weeks?” Sean chomped grilled shrimp off a skewer, scowling as he did so. “What were you thinking, not calling your mom all that time? Dude! You suck! That’s domestic abuse!”
“Sean, don’t start with—”
“Shut up, man. Just shut the fuck up. The poor woman drove all the way out to the SafeGuard headquarters, and tried to hire Davy and Seth and Connor to find you! Have you called her yet?”
Miles shook his head, trying not to inhale the odor of shrimp, which was oh, so very far outside his olfactory comfort zone. “Not yet.”
“Call her.” Sean’s voice was hard. “Right now. She’s hurting. Not a pretty sight, man. Big fucking fail.”
“No, not yet. I want a crack at him while he’s still on his feet.”
Aaro, behind him. Miles hardened his belly into cast iron and turned. Aaro was clutching Nina, the woman he insisted was his wife, though they had not yet legally tied the knot. Everyone humored him, of course. Only smart thing to do, with Aaro. Behind him was Kev McCloud, his wife Edie, Tam Steele, and Connor and Davy McCloud. A phalanx of people, all accusing him with their eyes.
Christ on a crutch. And he’d thought that dealing with Cindy was challenging. He zapped more energy into his shield, and hung on to the image he used as an emotional anchor. Himself, barefoot, bare-chested, perched on the top of the longest tine of the Fork, staring at the wind-scoured, snowy heights of Mr. Rainier. Looking down on clouds, wind nipping his ears, whipping his hair. Poised on that fine balancing point between hanging on and letting go. Clean. Empty.
The calming image wavered, blurred and broke up. “Back off,” he said. “I’ll head back the way I came, if I piss everybody off so much.”
“Don’t threaten us, punk,” Aaro growled.
“Shut up, Aaro!” Nina hissed. “You’re not helping.”
Miles felt a ticklish brush against his mind. Nina was trying to use her telepathic talent on him. She’d gained it months ago, in a freakish series of adventures that Miles tried not to think about. She’d come out of that mess a telepath, while Aaro had unearthed a talent for psychic coercion. Which struck Miles as amusing. And redundant.
Aaro and Nina had found each other, and true love along the way. Not a bad bargain, even considering the terrifying shit they’d gone through. Too bad it hadn’t turned out such a sweet deal for Miles. He’d been the one left bleeding out of his eyes. Monumentally fucked up.
Whoa. Self-pity alert. Cut that shit out fast.
Nina couldn’t get past his mental shield. Not even that psycho Rudd had breached it, using the psi equivalent of high explosives. Anabel, Rudd’s bimbo henchwoman from hell, hadn’t breached it either, using her turbocharged sexual allure. It was a good, sound shield, if he did say so himself. If there was one thing he had totally nailed in his lifetime, it was computer security, even the analogous mental kind.
He just looked at Nina. “Don’t try.”
She gave him a limpid, innocent look. “Couldn’t you just drop the shield?” she coaxed. “It might help, if I could see what’s going on. If I knew more about what you’re going through, we could—”
“Don’t. Try.” It came out louder this time.
She nodded, but his ordeal was far from over. The feeling started small. Anxiety, like the start of the brain-ripping agony Rudd had inflicted on him, but just a distant roll of thunder on the horizon.
His stomach flopped with ugly associations. He looked at Aaro. “Try that again, and I’ll rip your limbs off,” he said.
Aaro’s nostrils flared, but the feeling dissipated quickly.
Miles took a deep breath, and visualized the mountaintop again. He fumbled in his pocket for his sunglasses. Wearing them indoors looked affected, but he had nothing to prove to anyone.
“So?” he said. “Everybody done poking and prodding?”
“Not even close,” Sean said. “Brace yourself.”
Miles let out a painful sigh. “It’s all I ever do.”
“Let’s go out on the terrace,” Nina urged. “We can talk.” She touched his arm. The contact took him by surprise. He recoiled so violently that everyone froze, shooting glances at each other.
“Jesus, Miles,” Kev murmured. “That bad?”
“I’m okay,” Miles said. “Just please don’t touch me. It’s nothing personal, I swear. Just . . . don’t.”
“Double shot of Scotch?” That was Davy’s dour suggestion.
Miles shook his head. If only it were that simple.
The place was set up for the dessert orgy later on. They all sat down at a couple of the white-draped tables, the chairs of which had been tarted up with padded, puffy, brocaded skirts. Edie grabbed one of the cards that had been folded into a tent and left on each table. Dessert menus. A glance at the one in front of Miles showed
baba’, boccanotte
,
tiramisu
and
flauti
filled with raspberries and crème chantilly. Plus the cake. Overkill, as usual. The hand of Zia Rosa was evident. The thought of all that sugar made his teeth ache.
Edie pulled a stub of pencil from her handbag, turned the dessert menu over, and gave him a questioning look. Miles shrugged. Edie had a psychic talent of her own. Sometimes her drawings took on oracular meanings. She’d drawn for him before, even after the Spruce Ridge debacle, but he’d never made any sense of the images.
“Go ahead,” he muttered. “Do your worst.”
“Your enthusiasm overwhelms me,” Edie said, but his permission had set her hand loose. She was already scribbling frantically.
The pencil, scratching against paper, scraped nastily over his nerve endings.
“So,” Kev said. “Woods, mountains. Did it help?”
“When I was there, it did,” he said. “Doesn’t do shit for me now.”
“It’s not a solution,” Aaro broke in. “Hiding like a rabbit in a hole.”
Miles kept his gaze fixed firmly on the dessert menu.
“So, uh, the sensory overload,” Kev asked. “Is it still . . . ?”
“Kicking my ass,” Miles supplied.
Nina reached out again, as if to touch his hand, but stopped. “So why are you here?”
“Didn’t want to piss off Bruno and Lily,” he offered.
Sean grunted. “You haven’t cared about pissing us off for a while.”
Miles was silent, trying to think of something to say that would ward them off, but no such thing existed, or else he was not smart enough to think of it. And these people were his good friends, even though he couldn’t feel the connection. He was looking at them through a tunnel that was light years long.
A racking shiver went through him. Surrender. He opened his mouth, and the miserable truth fell out, heavily.
“I was thinking about trying the meds again,” he said.
An appalled silence greeted that statement.
“You said the meds made you feel half-dead,” Sean said. “You barely recognized your own family when you were on that shit. You think you’re crazy? Really? It’s that bad? Has it gotten worse?”
Nina tugged her chair over until she was sitting directly in front of him. Forcing him to meet her eyes. “What’s going on, Miles?”
“I’ve done time on antipsychotic drugs,” Edie said. “I don’t recommend it. I don’t think you’re there, Miles. None of us do.”
“But the voices,” he blurted. “I . . . well, I don’t exactly hear her.”
“Her? Who’s her?” Aaro snarled. “Make some sense, damn it!”
“Her?” Nina’s eyes went huge. “Lara? You’re talking about Lara? You
hear
her?”
“Well, no. I don’t exactly hear her,” he said again. “It’s, uh, text messages. She, ah . . . she texts me.”
They all glanced around at each other, utterly perplexed.
“You mean, on your phone?” Davy said, his voice tentative.
“No,” Miles forced out. “No, I mean, in my head.”
It took them an interminable, silent interval to process that. He waited, teeth clenched. Braced for it.
“Weird,” Connor commented, finally.
“Yeah,” Miles agreed. “I never even met this girl. I’ve been assuming she was dead. And even if she isn’t dead, how would she ever have learned my password?”
“What the fuck?” Aaro sounded angry. “Password? I could wrap my head around voices. But texts? You’re a machine, with circuitry?”
“That’s what’s happening to me, so eat it,” Miles growled.
Aaro gave him the stony mafiya stare. “Don’t give me attitude.”
“You’re the one with the attitude. If you can’t shove it around or bully it, you don’t want to deal with it at all,” Miles retorted.
“Shut up, both of you,” Nina scolded. “We’re getting off track.”
“It’s his hero complex,” Aaro said. “He needs a damsel in distress to save. Cindy’s out of the picture, so he’s creating a new one.”
Miles snorted. “When the damsel starts texting my brain directly, it’s time for the fucking meds.”
“You think she’s a psychotic delusion?” Nina asked.
“Matilda wouldn’t have thought so,” he replied, and then he had to explain all about Matilda, her cryptic voicemail, and her subsequent murder. Those grim details quelled even Edie’s scribbling for a while.
“This is creeping me out,” Aaro muttered.
“You’re not the only one obsessing about Lara,” Nina said. “She was like my little sister. Aaro and I have turned this thing inside out.”
“Me, too,” Miles said bleakly. “I followed them—every clue. Roy Lester’s dead. Dimitri Arbatov, too. Anabel’s disappeared. Rudd got splattered. There’s no such place as Karstow, as far as I can tell. And Thaddeus Greaves is a dead end.”
Flat silence followed this litany of dead leads. After Nina and Aaro’s adventure, no one was left alive to ask where Lara Kirk might be, except of course for Greaves himself, Rudd’s billionaire boss. Who had insisted that he was as innocent as the dawn. According to Greaves, his minions had gone tragically rogue. So shocking. And embarrassing.
“I couldn’t read him, when I was close to him,” Nina mused. “His shield was like a force field that swallowed anything it touched. Yours feels kind of like that, too. Remember when you came up with the encrypted computer as your analog for a shield? And I made you write down the password? I remember it. All caps LARA, hashtag—”
“Stop, Nina,” he warned, but it was too late. The questing tickle in his mind intensified as she dredged up the rest of it, picking up speed.
“Star, exclamation point, your aunt in California’s zip code—nine two six one nine, hashtag, all caps KIRK, and two question marks!”
Crack,
she breached it—and his world collapsed inward.