Authors: Grace Marshall
‘Where are you?’ Wade Crittenden’s voice huffed out of Carla’s iPhone into her ear. There was no greeting.
She nearly cried with relief. She had been terrified the man would just write her off. ‘I’m nearly at the parking garage of the Pneuma Building,’ she managed, making no attempt to sound any less scared than she was. She wasn’t sure she could have if she wanted to.
‘Park in the reserved section on the ground floor,’ he said. ‘Take the elevator to the basement. I’ll meet you there. And hurry up.’ Then he hung up.
She’d heard Wade seldom bothered with pleasantries. He wasn’t rude. He was just busy. And, frankly, this was no time for pleasantries anyway. Her father liked him, and that was good enough for her. She exited the street into the parking garage, miscalculating the turning ratio of the motorhome and driving the back wheels up across the curb with a loud
kathunk
. She didn’t have to worry about finding the reserved spaces. Wade Crittenden himself was waiting in front of them, pacing back and forth with his arms folded across a dark blue hoodie that looked like a Wal-Mart special. She had also heard he wasn’t exactly the king of dressing for success.
With him directing her, she managed to take up only three parking spaces, before he practically yanked the door open and looked up at her with wide eyes. ‘Give me your iPhone,’ he said.
She didn’t argue, but handed it over. ‘You know, then.’
‘I know,’ he said, nodding her in the direction of the open elevator. ‘Garrett got an email. Well, Kendra did, actually, but they got their BlackBerries mixed up.’
‘Who’s Kendra?’ she asked.
He ignored her question. ‘Clearly this is not from Gleason, and Kendra doesn’t know what’s going on. She has her device turned off. Fortunately, she has Garrett’s BlackBerry, so I can still track her with the satellite, but that still doesn’t tell us where this guy is or if she’s safe.’
‘Who the hell is Kendra?’
‘At Pneuma, I ask the questions,’ he said as he herded her into the elevator. ‘Not you.’ He pushed a button that was not labeled, and they began to descend.
‘You don’t like journalists?’
‘That’s another question you’ve asked,’ he said. ‘I have no feelings one way or another about journalists. We’ll just get more accomplished if I ask the questions.’
He was probably right. While he fiddled with her iPhone, she stood quietly next to him for the rest of the descent, which took a lot longer than she would have expected. She wondered how far underground they were. She’d heard Wade’s domain was called the dungeon. Was that why?
‘You’re the one who exposed the mess at John Day,’ he said, without looking up from her iPhone.
She found herself blushing. ‘Yes.’
If she was expecting a compliment, she didn’t get it. ‘How did you get in touch with this man, and why didn’t you tell anyone?’
She stiffened at the accusation in his voice. ‘
He
got in touch with
me
. And I’m a journalist, so you know why I didn’t tell anyone, Mr. Crittenden.’
He looked up at her as the door to the elevator opened. ‘And yet here you are. Why?’
God, the man was irritating. ‘Because I know the person who wrote those first emails, and this is not him. If this asshole is anything like he sounds, Tess Delaney’s in real danger.’
‘You realize your life is in danger for coming to me with this?’
Suddenly her knees felt weak and she leaned against the wall to steady herself. ‘I get the feeling my life might have been in danger anyway if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted me to do. Look, like I said, I didn’t contact him. He contacted me. I have no idea why, but he did; me and Barker Blessing.’
Wade grunted. ‘And Blessing is already wetting himself demanding police protection.’
‘Has he been contacted again?’ She switched into journalist mode instinctively. ‘He promised he’d tell me.’
‘If he had been contacted, he’d be squawking about it. Loudly.’
The elevator doors opened and they exited. At the end of a long hallway, Wade opened a set of double doors and motioned her through. Two more sets of double doors and a maze of twisting hallways later, Carla found herself standing nearly nose to nose with Ellison Thorne and his fiancée, Dee Henning. The look on Dee’s face was agonized.
‘It’s the same guy,’ Wade said without making any introductions, though at least on her part, none were needed.
Dee gave her a forced smile, but Ellison Thorne offered her his hand. ‘Carla, it’s a pleasure to meet you in person. I wish the circumstances were better.’
Before she could enjoy the fact that Ellison Thorne,
the
Ellison Thorne, knew who she was, she noticed Harris Walker sitting in front of a very large computer screen.
‘Damn it, Wade, if he’s not lying,’ Walker said, ‘if he is Edge, how can that be? He’s supposed to be dead.’
‘Kendra’s not the only one who’s good at reinventing herself,’ Wade said.
‘Who the hell is Kendra?’ Carla asked, but she had pretty much already figured that Kendra must be Tess Delaney’s real name.
‘From the look of these emails and texts, I have no doubt they’re written by the same man,’ Wade said, handing Carla back her iPhone. ‘I’ve got police in Santa Monica investigating and I’ve contacted the detectives Kendra used to find this Edge as well as some of my own contacts in the area. At the moment, though. I think it’s a pretty good bet this is Edge.’
‘She’s still not answering.’ Dee said. ‘I’ve called her house, but there’s no answer. I only hope she’s gone somewhere else, anywhere else. She’ll touch base soon because she has my car, but in the meantime, she might go out to Harris’s place. That’s often a place where we run away to, all three of us.’
‘If he knows her, he’ll know that,’ Harris said. ‘Thing is, Kendra’s unpredictable. She might just take a flight to Spain and call us when she gets there.’
‘I wish to God she would,’ Dee said. ‘At least she’d be away from him.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Wade said. ‘If he’s been in her house, we can’t predict how much else he knows or how easily he can track and follow her. Best find her ASAP.’
The elevator had only gone one floor when Kendra punched the stop button. For the first time she could ever remember, she didn’t know what to do. When her anger at Garrett had dissipated a little bit and it sunk in that the stalker had been caught, that Tess Delaney could go back to her life without Kendra as a front person, that Garrett really didn’t need her any more, she suddenly felt awash in a sea of emptiness. He didn’t need her, that’s what it all boiled down to. Now everything was over, he really didn’t need her. And she wanted him to. Dear God, she wanted him to. Ellis needed Dee. He’d announced it right in front of the whole world. And Dee needed him back. There was nothing wrong with that. It’s exactly what every person in the world wanted, what Garrett believed everyone could have. He really did believe it. And he’d wanted her to believe it too. He told her she deserved romance. Then she’d run away scared.
Maybe she’d just take Dee’s car back home. Then maybe she would talk to her friend, the one who would know something about being brave enough to go for the happy ever after, the one who would never lie to her and never steer her wrong.
She shivered and, for the first time since she’d left Garrett’s, realized just how cold and wet she was from her mad race to and from the car in the rain. She pushed the button on the elevator and it began to ascend again. She’d just change clothes, then she’d call Dee.
It was only as she turned the key in the lock she realized that she had Garrett’s BlackBerry instead of her own, and there were at least a dozen messages, and that many missed calls and texts from her device. She smiled down at the screen. Perhaps it was fate. She’d have to get in touch with him now. Anyway, when she moved back to Portland, when her world fell apart around her, she had made herself a promise, that she’d never run away again. She’d come pretty damn close to breaking that promise just now. She was just about to send him a text when the first text from her device came up.
Kendra, don’t go to your apartment! I repeat DO NOT GO to your apartment.
You’re …
She never got to finish the text.
‘She’s at her apartment,’ Wade yelled into the phone to Garrett. She just got there. I’ve got police on the way over. And it looks like you’re about ten minutes out or so.’
‘I know! I know where I am,’ Garrett yelled back. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
‘Carla Flannery is here and her emails and text from the man match what you got.’
‘Dee and Ellis?’
‘They’re here, and Harris,’ Wade said.
Garrett white-knuckled the steering wheel and drove faster. ‘Wade, if she gets in touch with you first or anyone there, I need you, all of you, to tell her something for me.’ He didn’t wait for Wade’s response, but ploughed on. ‘Tell her I love her.’ He ignored Wade’s uncomfortable sputterings at the other end of the phone and continued, ‘Make her listen, Wade. Make her listen and don’t let her be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid. Tell her I need her to know. Tell her that, and the very second I see her again I’ll tell her in person.’
He disconnected and tried to breathe around the tightness in his chest. He wished to God he had ignored Don and marched right out into the rain after her. How could he have let this happen? Hadn’t he loved her almost from the beginning? He just didn’t want it to be her; he just didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. And now, there was no one in the world he wanted to love but her, now there was no one else he wanted to give that satisfaction to. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t! He’d waited his whole life for Kendra Davis and he would do whatever he had to do to have her safe and sound and back in his arms.
He hadn’t expected her or he wouldn’t have lingered. But when the key turned in the lock, when he knew the inevitable was about to happen, everything in him went calm. It was fate, wasn’t it? Fate had delivered her into his hands early, a reward for all of his patience, for all of his hard work.
She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her cell phone. He was slightly out of her line of sight, still sitting in front of her laptop where he had been gorging on everything he could possibly discover about Kendra Davis – not the reinvented one, not the one pretending to be someone else, but the real one, the genuine article, the woman beneath all those layers, and oh, how he had longed to know her, to uncover her, to lay her bare to her very core.
And this, this was that magical moment, that split second in time before the world changed forever. This was the tipping point. She still didn’t know he was there. She still thought she was alone and safe, and because of that, she was still so completely, so exquisitely at her ease that he wished he could freeze-frame the moment, he wished he could somehow capture it for posterity, so that he could bring it back and relive it time and time again long after he was finished with her.
But of course it couldn’t last; the second would pass, and soon enough she would know. He watched with his heart in his throat, he waited for that instant when she knew. And when it happened it was a subtle thing, so minute at first that he almost didn’t catch it, so miniscule the change that he sat frozen on the edge of the seat, not even daring to breathe, sat until his eyes burned from not blinking. And then he saw it; her agile fingers on the BlackBerry faltered. Her shoulders tensed. She sniffed and caught her breath. Her eyelids fluttered and her lovely full lips parted in a little gasp of surprise, as though she had just remembered something – something terrible.
For a second, the world shattered around her into a million shards of disbelief and horror. For a second, her mind rebelled, denied that this could be happening, denied that he could actually be sitting here in her home, in her space, that he could actually be – real. For a second, her body threatened to rebel as well, to allow itself to be overwhelmed by fear, to pass out on the floor, there at his mercy, to vomit the fear that raged through every cell of her body, to completely shut down. For a split second, she tried to wake up, certain it was a dream. But it wasn’t. It was the nightmare she would have to deal with. And that all of this could happen in her head in less than the time it took to draw a startled breath would have astounded her in different circumstances.
She had but a second before she lost control. She knew he’d take from her as much as he could. She knew what she did in that second she had left could keep her alive.
He’s here.
With the last shred of calm she could manage, she sent the text, took a deep breath, then turned and grabbed for the door. But she had locked it behind her, a habit her mother had hammered into her head from the time she was little, and he was on her before she could get it open. His breath too hot, exactly as she remembered, his scent both acrid and sweet, cloyingly sweet, exactly like before, his grip harsh, deliberately cruel, the horrid tattoo on his biceps swelling as he pulled her to him. As he tackled her from behind and pinned her arms to her side, she fought back the urge to gag at the scent of him. It hadn’t been a bad scent when she first met him, it had meant nothing, but it soon came to mean fear and threat and despair. And worse than anything, it came to symbolize loss of control.
Think, Kendra, think!
she yelled inside herself. She had to stay focused. That was all she had; the only control left to her was not to panic, not to let him choose what went on inside her head. She relaxed in his arms and, with a hot palm, he smoothed her wet hair away from her ear and stroked her neck. She could feel the heat of him, too humid, too close.
‘Not Bird Woman any more, I see.’ He curled his fingers in her hair so tightly that it almost hurt. ‘And now, you’re not Tess Delaney any more either, are you? I heard the news. Tess is rid of that horrible email stalker. I was so relieved when I heard. I knew with him out of the way, I’d have my Kendra Davis back and all to myself very shortly.’
‘I’m not your Kendra Davis,’ she half whispered, managing to sound much calmer than she really felt.