Page 49 of Danger Close
“Yeah?” I said, when she didn’t continue. “When was this?”
“Trinity was ten years old. We were in between Georgia and North Carolina. Or maybe South Carolina?”
Georgialina.The town name blared like a siren in my brain. I’d been there on a mission to kill a domestic terrorist that was building a cult-like following of incel recruits. I’d put a liquid into his cigarettes—just a bit of Paradigm medicine that, once ingested, disrupted oxygen delivery, increased blood pressure. The autopsy reported that his cause of death was a stroke.
Seeing Teri as I ran with a crowd of hardened, leather-clad bikers had knocked me so far off my game, I almost missed the window to complete my mission. I’d assumed that I just missed my family, and was seeing them in the faces of random travelers.
“I had lost my home, and driven all night. I didn’t know what to do. Not really. I thought I had a plan… but then I realized how stupid I was.” She swallowed every criticism like a seed until it grew roots, and tore her apart from the inside out, like a tree that grew in the middle of a ruin. It cracked at her foundations, and I could see her crumbling, slowly, giving in to it.
“I had to stop for gas.” I could hear her tears, even if I couldn’t see them. “Motorcycles lined up at a bar across the street and I thought I saw you.”
The whimper in her voice was devastating.
“I thought that you saw me. Trinity was in the front seat, asleep. I…”
I leaned my shoulder against the doorframe, pressing my forehead against the wood as my heart sank to my feet. My fists clenched as I shut my eyes. The ugly tendrils of guilt wound its way up my limbs, rooting me to the spot.
All I could do was stand there, and take the pain I deserved.
“You… what, Princess?” I prodded. “What happened?”
I already knew. But if she was going to rip my soul to shreds, then I might as well get it full force.
“I hadhope.” I heard her swallow the lump in her throat. “It felt like Christmas morning.”
The pain would never stop, would it? The past was there like a poison that choked us both. So many mistakes. So many misunderstandings. So many missed chances.
“I thought that if I could just get to you, then maybe… maybe everything would be alright. That someone could help me.” She whined.
I’d heard that sound before. It was the sound of her holding back a sob. She’d done it often enough when her mother insulted her in front of me. When her father, in his quest for money, rubbed salt on her every wound.
I hated her parents for it. Now, I could hate myself as well. These tears were because of me.
“I turned off the gas pump. When I looked up again, you were gone.”
I was a coward. I had hidden from her, afraid of the past. Afraid of looking back at that beat-up old sedan, andactuallyseeing her and Trinity. I was afraid of being brought to my knees by feelings I’d locked up ten years prior. Of seeing the missed years of the baby that had grown into a pre-teen without me.
“I think God must hate me,” Teri said. “If there is pain to be distributed, I will get more than my fair share.”
The Teresa Archambeau I knew in Paris had danced in the rain on her one night off. Our date night.
I’d wanted to take her for a walk in the city she adored. A freak downpour cleared the Champs-Élysées of all the musicians and troubadours that catered to the whims of tourists.
I was just a poor young man at the time. My half-brother had found me, and it was my last hoorah before I started working for Paradigm, and my fortunes changed. I didn’t have the funds to take her to a grand restaurant. Not at the Parisian price tags, at least.
But her infectious laugh, herjoie de vivre… it was contagious, heart warming.
“I was born unlucky.” She twirled around, spinning and spinning, her joy calling to me. I was a moth, and she was the flame. “But I have a boy who’s crazy about me, and my luck is changing!”
I was that boy. She didn’t know it yet, but I wasn’t just crazy about her. I was deeply, passionately in love with her.
“I can make my own luck,” she’d said, her face up to the gray clouds. I picked her up by the waist, and held her high above me, just so I could lower her down, our bodies gliding until her feet were on the ground and we could share a passionate kiss.
She’d bewitched me. I washers.Herboy.Herman.
Her husband.
It was the sweetest drug that ever existed. Her unrestrained love for me, for our baby. It was that thing worth dying for.
