Crowe (Three Bears Tactical #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Noah

The basement had a smell. That was how I knew where I was.

Not a sound, not an image, but the smell.

Damp concrete with something underneath it I’d never been able to name, but that smelled a lot like despair.

In the dream, the smell always arrived before anything else, before the dark, before the fear.

I always knew. There was no confusion, no wondering where I was or if I was dreaming. I was, and I knew it, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying.

I lay on the mattress on the floor and with the thin blanket wrapped around me like a shield in a feeble attempt to keep out the damp, cold air.

The fluorescent light on the ceiling flickered at the far-left corner in a rhythm that had no pattern, like normal.

I’d memorized all of it in the way you memorize things you know you’ll wish you could forget someday.

My wrists hurt.

I didn’t look at them in the dream, the same way I hadn’t looked at them in the beginning, when the marks were fresh. My hands were at my sides, and I kept them there, flat against the thin mattress, pressing down so no one could grab them and tie them together.

From across the basement, someone coughed. I turned my head.

The girl in the corner had her knees pulled up to her chest and her eyes open, watching the light flicker.

She did that sometimes. Just stayed awake and watched it, like she’d decided that if she kept her eyes on it, she could control whether it went out.

At least if the light was on, we could see if anything was coming.

I understood the logic. I didn’t share it, but I understood it.

You found the thing you could control, and you held on to it.

I pressed my hands harder against the mattress.

The door at the top of the stairs was closed. I liked it when it stayed closed. I dreaded the sound of it opening. I learned that the sound changed depending on who was coming and what they were coming for. I listened for it now, the way I always listened, hoping that no one came.

The light flickered. The girl in the corner breathed.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about my mother’s garden, the way I always did when the basement got too loud in my head.

The peonies she’d grown from bulbs she’d ordered from a catalog.

The way she’d pressed the first bloom into my hands when it opened and said, “Tell me what this is saying, Noah.” I was seven years old, and I hadn’t known what it was saying.

She smiled down at me and told me that it said prosperity, good fortune, and a happy life were in my future.

I held the flower in both hands and looked at it seriously because she was the most important person in the world, so what she said mattered.

I was thinking about that peony when the lights went out.

Not the flicker. All of it. The basement dropped into a darkness so complete I could feel it pressing in from all sides, and the girl in the corner made a sound.

Not a scream. She’d learned not to scream.

We’d all learned not to scream. I’d especially learned not to scream for one reason—they couldn’t hurt me.

Not physically anyway, so if I screamed, they would hurt someone else to punish me. It worked. I never screamed.

I sat up.

My heart was pounding. My hands found the edge of the mattress and gripped it. The darkness was everywhere. I hated it when they turned out the lights. It made everything worse. The smell was everywhere. Somewhere above me, footsteps crossed the floor, slow and deliberate, and I thought—

I woke up.

Not gradually. All at once, the dream snapped shut like someone closed a door, and I was sitting upright in my Houston apartment with both hands gripping the sheets and my heart slamming against my ribs.

The light from the lamp I kept by my bed was yellow and warm and mine. I put both hands flat on my thighs, and I breathed slowly in and out.

Where am I?

My therapist’s voice, patient and even, sounded in my head.

I’d fought the questions she wanted me to ask for two months.

They were too simple and felt too much like the kind of thing you say to someone who didn’t know what was real.

Then I’d tried them at three o’clock one morning out of desperation, alone in this apartment with the dream still all over me, and they’d worked, and I’d been using them since.

Where am I?

Houston. My apartment, on the third floor. The lamp was on. The sheets were mine. Gray, jersey cotton, I’d bought them online and had them delivered. The window across the room was locked and had a rod in the track. The deadbolt was thrown, and the chain was on.

Am I safe?

I made myself answer it honestly instead of automatically. Not am I fine, not is everything okay, but am I safe, right now, in this room, at this moment?

The door was locked. The window was locked. I’d checked all of it before I went to bed because I checked all of it every night, in the same order, because the checking was the thing that let me sleep.

I was safe.

What’s true right now?

What was true was that it was—I looked at the clock—four-twelve in the morning, and I was in my apartment, and the basement was almost six months and two hundred and fifty miles behind me.

My heart rate came down.

Not all the way, not for several minutes, but it came down by degrees while I sat with my hands flat on my thighs and my eyes on the lamp, and eventually the apartment stopped feeling like the basement and started feeling like itself again.

I got up and made my way to the kitchen.

It was small, and I knew every inch of it. I flipped on the light over the stove, filled the kettle, set it on the burner, and leaned back against the counter while it heated.

Six months.

I turned the number over in my mind the way I did sometimes, taking its measure.

Six months since the basement, since the rescue, since I’d stood blinking in the blue-white beam of a tactical flashlight while a big man with tattoos and a voice like gravel had said you’re safe now, we’ve got you, and I hadn’t believed it immediately but had eventually, which was the best I’d been able to manage at the time.

Five months since I’d come here. To this apartment, this city, this carefully rebuilt life.

I’d chosen Houston because it was large enough to disappear into and because I’d never lived here before, which meant it had no memories in it.

A clean slate. Somewhere to put myself back together without an audience.

The kettle came to a boil. I made my tea.

It was Chamomile, not at all what I used to drink, but my therapist had mentioned something about associations being possible triggers.

After that, I’d decided to build new ones, to give myself things that belonged only to this life and not to the before or the during. I carried it to the window.

Houston at four in the morning wasn’t quiet.

But then it was never quiet. That was one of the things I liked about it, the low continuous hum of four million people going about their lives, none of whom knew my name or my face or what had happened to me.

I was unremarkable here. I was one person in an enormous city, and no one was looking for me.

That felt like freedom most days, but some felt a lot like being invisible.

I put my hand on the glass. Cool against my palm.

Below, a delivery truck was making its rounds, and a man was walking a bicycle along the sidewalk instead of riding it, and the traffic light at the corner was cycling through its colors for an empty street. I watched it go through twice. Red to green to yellow to red.

I thought about the girl in the corner of the basement and hoped she had a light on wherever she was. I held that thought for a moment, the way my therapist had taught me. Then I let it go.

The flower shop where I worked had a wedding today. A big one. It was going to be a busy day, but I liked days like that. It kept my mind busy and off things I’d rather forget.

I finished my tea at the window and watched the city until the dark started thinning at the edges, then I washed my mug and went to get dressed.