The Bride Wore A Forty-Four (2 page)

"I know. Sorry, I was being a smart-ass.
Yeah, I feel it." His fingers moved in her hair, either tracing the
outline left by the surgery, or gently massaging her scalp. She
wasn't sure which.

"There's a steel plate in there. Seems to be
the result of me running my life my way. It's been a long, slow
recovery. Mom kind of took over. So far, I don't know, I'm just not
compelled to take the responsibility back, you know?"

"You're scared."

She nodded. "Maybe I am."

He was still running his fingers over her
head, and it was a little more than an exploration. The injury
didn't even hurt much anymore. Hadn't, since the explosion that had
nearly killed her. At least, not since she'd regained
consciousness. Most people acted slightly repulsed if they happened
to touch the place where her skull had been pieced back together.
She'd stopped feeling hurt or angry over that a long time ago. It
didn't do any good to get your skirt in a twist over what was
basically a knee-jerk reaction.

He didn't pull his hand away, though.
Instead, he slid it along the side of her head, then lower, until
his palm rested on the curve of her neck. He stopped there, his
fingers caressing, a very brief stroke against her skin that left
her shivering, then took his hand away.

"You want me to feel anything else?"

"The rest of me is still pretty much intact,"
she said.

He shrugged. "So?"

Her lips pulled into a smile. The first
genuine one she'd felt in recent memory. "You're kinda cute,
Marshall."

"Hell, it's about time you noticed. So are
you gonna tell me how that happened?"

"Nope." She picked up her soft drink and
started for the stair door. "Maybe another time, though."

"I'll hold you to it."

"You do that" She had reached the door and
she looked back over her shoulder. "Thanks for this, Marshall. I
needed a break more than I knew."

"Anytime, Kira. Anytime at all."

She didn't sleep. Not all night It was two
thirty-five, and she wasn't even feeling a little bit bleary-eyed.
Tomorrow she was going to be married.

And tonight she was at the edge of panic.
Something, something deep inside, was screaming to be heard. But it
was garbled and incomprehensible. Something—more than likely—from
the past

She walked barefoot out of her bedroom and
into the hall, down the broad curving staircase of her mother's
opulent mansion, and through the house to the very back, and the
little door that was almost hidden there. Beyond the porch, a path
wound amid neatly trimmed rose of Sharon, every shrub higher than
her head, creating a tunnel-like walkway that led to the garden,
where she would be married tomorrow.

She walked along the path, smelling the
scents of the fat blossoms, trying to imagine herself walking this
same path tomorrow, dressed in the traditional bridal gown her
mother had picked out with its long train and multilayered veil,
instead of the one she herself had liked: short white, with
spaghetti straps and crisscrossing ribbon at the bodice that made
it look more like an antique undergarment than an actual dress.
She'd called it "Goth-in-white." Her mother had called it an
eyesore.

Whatever. It didn't matter. She didn't really
know which one she would have liked better anyway. She didn't have
a preference. She didn't care.

She barely
felt
anymore. She couldn't
remember what it was like to feel, so she guessed she didn't miss
it much. She wasn't excited about the wedding, but she wasn't
nervous about it either. It was what her mother told her she'd been
planning. What everyone seemed to expect. And since she had no
personal preference anymore about much of anything, the easiest
thing to do was comply.

Walking through the flowery tunnel, she
emerged in the circular garden, with its fountain at the center.
The sky above was clear and glittering with stars. No moon tonight,
though, so it was incredibly dark.

A twig snapped behind her.

She spun without forethought, raising one arm
in a defensive position, while jamming the other fist in a powerful
thrust that connected with something, someone. He went down hard
onto his back, and the next thing she knew, she was sitting on his
chest, her knees on the ground on either side of him, her hands
pinning his wrists to the ground.

He blinked up at her, something strange in
his eyes as they held hers. "Kira?"

Something took over. Something alien,
foreign. As if she were watching the scene play out, but not in
control of it She was leaning lower, pressing her mouth to his. He
tugged his hands, as if he wanted her to let them go, but she
slammed them soundly into the ground again and kissed him until she
felt him start to shake, heard him moan, felt him hardening beneath
her, and arching into her.

He tasted good. She wanted more.

What the hell was she doing?

She jerked her mouth from his, still feeling
his tongue inside her, and looked down at him, stunned to her
marrow. Beneath her was her wedding planner!

"Marshall? Oh, God. Oh, God." She blinked,
unable to hold his gaze as she scrambled off him, and then she just
stood, covering her burning face with her hands. "I'm sorry," she
muttered.

"I'm not."

He had gotten to his feet. His hands closed
around her shoulders, and she forced herself to look up at him.

He was smiling. "It's okay."

"It's not I hit you, and then I—"

"You didn't hurt me. And uh...the rest was my
pleasure."

She lowered her head, but he squeezed her
shoulders. "It's so unlike me."

"How do you know?"

She looked up sharply. "What's that supposed
to mean?"

He didn't avert his eyes; instead, he used
them to probe hers in the darkness. "I know you have some...some
memory loss. From the...accident"

She sighed. "My mother told you. I'm
surprised, she usually doesn't bring it up." She rubbed her arms,
only then realizing she was wearing only a thin nightgown, and
little else. "What are you doing here in the middle of the
night?"

"Just a last-minute check. We want everything
to go smoothly tomorrow, right?"

It was the first time she'd thought of her
impending wedding day since she'd stepped into the garden. She
thought she should have felt guilty. Oddly, she only felt
embarrassed.

She lowered her head, closed her eyes. "I've
gotta go inside."

"Tell me what happened to you, Kira."

She stopped walking, turned slowly to face
him. "Not so much to tell. I was in the wrong place at the wrong
time. There was an explosion."

He nodded slowly. "Where was the wrong
place?"

"A village in Africa. Peter and I were both
there, and so was my father. I was working for an aid organization.
I'm still not clear why my father was there. Peter—had some kind of
business connection there. Anyway, my father and I had gone to the
market for supplies, when a bomb went off."

"I see."

She shrugged. "I don't. I don't remember
anything, except waking up in a hospital a month later." She
thinned her lips. "They told me my father was killed in the
explosion."

He nodded slowly. "That must have been pretty
awful."

She shrugged. "It should have been. I just—I
don't remember him. It's horrible of me, isn't it?"

"It's physical. It's not like you can help
it."

"Doesn't make me feel any better about it. At
any rate, when I woke from the coma, I was as helpless as a
toddler. Mom...she just took over. Brought me home, took care of
me."

"It must have felt good, being taken care of
like that."

She nodded. "I've kind of been letting her
ever since."

"Why?"

She shrugged a little. "Because I don't care.
I don't care about anything."

"Maybe you do. Maybe you just haven't
remembered yet, what it is you care about."

Blinking slowly, she started for the
house.

"What about Peter?" he asked as she moved
away. "Do you care about him?"

She stopped walking, but didn't turn this
time. "I must have once. I was engaged to him before the bombing."
And that a little voice inside her whispered, was why she was
marrying him tomorrow. He and her mother were two things she knew
for sure she must have cared about once. Two scraps of the identity
she had lost. She couldn't let go—they were all she had.

Again she started walking toward the house.
Again, he stopped her, with a hand on her shoulder, this time. She
turned to face him there in the darkness. The breeze came between
them, lifting her hair. He said, "Don't give up on yourself, Kira.
You're in there, you're still in there. And I think you're close to
finding you again."

She stared at him, wondering how he would
know, and then she turned and hurried back to the house, grateful
that he didn't follow her. She kept running, all the way through
the hidden door in the back, and past the kitchen, to the back
stairs and up the first flight, pausing on the landing.

To her right was the hallway. Her bedroom.
The safe haven of her soft mattress and the warm fluffy comforter
she could pull right up over her head. To her left, another flight
of stairs. The third floor. The attic, and the trunks it held.
She'd glimpsed them once, while exploring the place in search of
anything that would trigger a memory. But her mother had caught her
and sent her back downstairs, telling her the attic was strictly
off-limits. "Just for now."

"But I must have had things of my own, things
from...before," she'd whispered to her mother, when she'd first
come home. Everything in the bedroom her mother had made ready for
her was new. Brand-new. The clothes still had tags on them. Even to
the underwear.

"Yes, and you're right Your things are packed
away in those trunks."

"Then shouldn't I—see them?"

Her mother had met her eyes, her own filled
with worry. "When you start to remember the past, you can go
through them. Until then—well, the doctors think your mind isn't
ready yet You don't want to do anything to force it. It could cause
a setback that would make things even worse than they already
are."

She shivered a little, somehow knowing her
mother was right. It was better not to remember. It was easier.

But tonight...tonight she needed to know. So
she turned left instead of right and she moved up the second flight
of stairs to the door at the top. She opened it and walked into the
darkness, one arm reaching out in front of her, searching for a
light, and finally finding one. She flicked the switch, but only
dim light appeared from a single, dust-coated bulb in the ceiling.
The trunks stood in front of her, two of them, and she moved closer
to them, feeling as if she were at the threshold of a doorway with
something frightening on the other side.

Drawing a breath, she knelt, put her hands on
one dusty lid and pushed, but the lid didn't give. The trunks were
locked. Her mother had the keys. She ought to wait until morning,
ask her mother then. She would open them.

"To hell with that," she muttered, and then
almost wondered who had spoken. But she didn't wonder long. There
was a hammer on the windowsill, coated in grime. A screwdriver
beside it She pushed cobwebs out of her face as she went to get the
tools. Then she turned to face the two giant trunks that were the
most recent additions to the collection of forgotten relics that
filled the attic.

The trunks were not old ones, like some of
the others filling the space. They were new, modern, in designer
colors. Junk. She didn't feel any compunction about ruining them.
She bent to the hasp of the first one, positioned the screwdriver,
lifted the hammer, and wondered what secrets she was about to set
free.

Her stomach was tied up in knots. Her heart
beat rapid-fire, and she held her breath as she flipped open the
lid.

Six months. It had been six months since
she'd come out of that coma. A month before that, she had been some
other person, the Kira from before. A stranger. The person who was,
maybe, locked away in these trunks like everything she'd ever
owned.

The lid fell back. She knelt down and pawed
aside the bubble wrap that was lovingly layered over her
possessions. And then she sat very still, just staring.

Her hand trembled as she reached out and
trailed her fingers over the glossy black metal. It was cold, hard,
and unbelievably smooth. Kira closed her hand around the white
grips and picked up the gun. The handle was pearl, she thought at
first, but then decided it was white onyx. An oxymoron.

Kind of like the notion of the woman she
believed herself to be walking around with a .44 Magnum.

And just how the hell do I know it's a .44
Magnum anyway?

In the morning, Kira's bedroom looked like an
explosion at a punk and goth shop. She'd dragged the trunks down
the stairs, using a folded blanket as a cushion to muffle the
noise. Then she'd gone through them in the privacy of her bedroom,
item by item.

There were clothes. Tons of them, but none
that looked anything like the ones her mother had stocked in her
closet. Nearly everything was black, from the sinfully short skirts
to the tight leather pants and tank tops. What wasn't black was
green. There were cargo pants with numerous pockets in six
different styles. There were boots, black ones that looked for all
the world like military issue. And there were straps that she at
first took for some sort of S&M fetish gear, but finally
figured out were holsters for her guns.

Yes. Guns. Plural. In addition to the pair of
matching big black .44s, she'd found a nickel-plated snub-nosed .38
revolver, and a .22 with a twelve-round clip. Beyond those there
were boxes of ammunition, a case containing a detachable scope, and
two knives that looked so deadly they made her blood run cold, one
big and one small.