Chapter 14
O nce again something woke Celeste. She sat up from a dead sleep with a sharp intake of breath. As before, something was off. This time it wasn’t a sound, it was something else. But what?
Her teeth chattered and she glanced at the now blank alarm clock. Power’s out. Groggy and freezing, she stumbled out of bed and down the stairs, trailing her hand on the banister so she didn’t topple. Strange how much ambient light things like appliances gave off. Now, with nothing on, it was all inky blackness. She couldn’t see a thing, not the stairs, not even her feet.
She knew by counting how many stairs there were, and she knew when she reached the bottom. Even so she paused, taking stock of the stillness. It was disconcerting how quiet it was without the usual hum of the house.
“Celeste,” Sam whispered, his slight accent making her name into a question.
“Yes.”
“Are you all right?”
Her lashes fluttered. When was the last time anyone asked her that question? She couldn’t remember. “I’m fine. The power’s out.” She started to take a step and paused, remembering she should also check on him. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding amused. Why, she had no idea.
“I’m going to light the heater.” She tried to say it with confidence. Elliot had shown her how, it shouldn’t be a problem. But so far everything in Paradise had been a problem. The house and barn were decrepit, the trees apparently sterile, the equipment unusable. Why should the heater be any different?
It was, though. As soon as she knelt beside it and clicked the button, the flame flicked to life and began to give out blessed heat. Enraptured, she plopped onto the floor in front of it and stared. A minute later, Sam meandered in and gingerly sat beside her, trailing one of the blankets from his makeshift bed on the couch.
“I have made fire,” she announced.
He laughed and offered her half of his blanket. “You are very talented.”
She stared at the blanket, pondering. Sharing his proximity, let alone his blanket, was an intimate thing. She must have hesitated too long because his hand tensed as he held it toward her.
“I won’t hurt you,” he promised, tone soft.
“No, I know. I’m not worried about that.” Finally she took the blanket and eased a tiny bit closer, basking in the warmth from his body without letting on that she was enjoying it. A flame was nice; body heat was better.
“You should be. I’m much bigger than you,” he said, then looked at her askance when she snorted a laugh.
“Sorry, I, uh, am pretty good at taking care of myself,” she assured him.
“I suppose if you worked for The Colonel that is probably true, but it’s hard to believe, given your high level of adorability.”
She smiled a little, staring at the flame. It had been a long time since someone complimented her on her looks, if one considered being called adorable a compliment. Celeste did because she’d been called so many worse things. “That’s part of what made me a danger. No one expects someone who looks like me to be able to…” she broke off, realizing how easily he’d gotten her to open up and talk about her job. Danger, danger, danger. Not only was her life classified, it was fully her own. Information was power. Giving it away put her at his mercy.
“I suppose,” he said agreeably and she relaxed because he didn’t probe further. “This is rather cozy, with the fire and the snow. How long do you suppose the power will be away?”
“I don’t know. People in town made it seem like it could be a while. I have enough kerosene for a few days, and enough food as well. After that…” After that she had no idea. This was her first Montana winter. Learning by doing probably wasn’t the best way with something that could kill you with frostbite or starvation, but she saw no other alternative.
“After that, we’ll tunnel out, if we have to.”
“You’ve clearly thought this through,” she said.
“Life has prepared me for every contingency,” he said.
“Same,” she agreed.
“Sorry to have that in common,” he said, and they sat a few moments in cozy silence. “Do you know what we need right now?”
“I’m going to guess pie,” she said.
“You’re a mind reader,” he said. “Although I feel a little bad that by requesting pie I’m basically making you wait on me.”
“You should,” she said, tossing the blanket lightly at him as she sprang up. She found the flashlight she’d left on the table and propped it upright while she located the pie.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say we can skip the plates. Just bring pie and forks.”
“Now who’s a mind reader,” she said, clicking off the light as she tucked the pie under her arm and faced him. She sat down and he placed the blanket over her lap with his good arm. She opened the pie and set it evenly between them. “If you take more than your share, I’ll know.”
“How will you know? We can’t see,” he reasoned.
“I have special powers, very precise pie measuring abilities.”
“That’s terrifying,” he said.
“You should definitely be afraid,” she agreed. They tucked in and began to eat and that feeling crept over her again, the one from before. Something was oddly familiar about the moment, although she was certain she’d never experienced it before. It was as if she was finally getting a taste of the way things might have been, if her life had been different. As if something inside her recognized something that was happening and wanted to latch on to it. But that was insane. This man was a stranger, the new life strange and untenable.
“You’re scowling. Did you get a bad bite?” Sam asked.
“How can you tell I’m scowling? You can’t see me.”
“I have special powers, very precise ability to read a woman’s middle of the night mood.”
She laughed and it might almost have been a giggle. “That actually is terrifying.”
“I usually save it for the fourth date,” he said.
“Did you leave a wife behind when you fled? A family?” she asked, her smile morphing to a stern frown. What if she was sharing pie and laughter with the sort of man who would leave his family behind to fend for himself?
“No.” He took a couple of bites. She had the sense he wanted to say something and let him stew until he worked up to it. “The whole thing began with a wedding, actually. One I begged off attending.”
“You weaseled out of a wedding and became a double agent arms dealer? That’s some progression,” she said.
“The wedding in question was mine. I faked my death and ran off. Are you okay?” he asked when she began to choke.
“That’s a next level fear of commitment,” she said when she finally worked the hunk of pie out of her throat.
“No, actually. I had no fear of commitment.”
“I sense a story. Please continue, Brother Grimm.”
“For the record, that is literally the nineteenth time in my life someone has called me Brother Grimm.”
“Might be time to enter a new line of work, Death Dealer,” she noted.
He coughed a laugh. “Touché. But enough about you, back to my sad tale. Given the suave way I bumbled into getting shot and passed out on your floor, it might surprise you to learn I was not always a ladies’ man. In fact, brace yourself, I was rather gawky. It’s almost like bringing a child from Jordan to middle school in America is a set up for being an awkward outcast.”
“It worked for me,” she said, and he laughed again, clashing his fork against hers to shush her.
“Do you want to hear my heartbreak or not?” he demanded.
“All of it, in its goriest detail, double bonus points if it still makes you cry.”
“Only at night when I can press my face to my stuffed bear,” he said. He took a breath and stared at the fire, like a Shaman about to deliver an allegory. Maybe he was: The Dangers of Being Born Into a Psychotic Family, Part One. “I met the girl my first day of freshman year of college, and she was adorable.”
“I thought I was adorable,” she muttered.
“There can be more than one adorable woman in the world. Don’t be jealous. I certainly never got shot by her neighbor.”
“We’ll always have that,” she agreed. “Proceed.”
“Wonder of wonders, she seemed to believe I was adorable, too.”
“Are we certain this isn’t fiction?” she interrupted.
He held his fork aloft like a weapon. “One more insult and I will extend this monologue until the power comes back on.”
She zipped her lips.
“Anyway, we were always together after that. Our relationship progressed naturally and easily until we became engaged.”
“And then you realized you’d made a horrible mistake because why marry the love of your life when you could sell weapons to terrorists instead?” she said.
“It’s the classic boy meets girl, boy fakes death, boy becomes a terrorist trope,” he joked, eating another bite. “In reality, it was much more complicated.”
“How so?”
“My father died in a car accident. Apparently he had been acting as the boy with the finger in the dam of family drama because afterward it all came flooding out.”
“How so?” She tipped her head to study him. It wasn’t possible that his family trauma was worse than hers, was it?
“My uncles threatened to murder my fiancée if I didn’t break it off.”
“That’s pretty bad.”
“They actually were terrorists, so I knew they meant what they said.”
“So then you faked your death. I hope you were able to keep the deposit on your tuxedo.”
“Has anyone ever told you compassion is your gift?” he asked.
“One guy. And then I killed him,” she said, deadpan.
“Okay,” he drawled. “Back to me.”
“Pretty sure we never left there,” she groused.
He sighed, annoyed, and she pressed a hand to her mouth, pushing back another giggle-snort. “Anyway, I promised to go away with them, but it wasn’t enough.” His tone turned somber and hers followed.
“They killed the girl?”
He shook his head. “My mother.”
Her mouth made an “O” but no sound came out.
“Everything was rather a blur after that. My mother was gentle and kind, so much that she was able to draw my father away from the dangerous world in which he was raised. We had a normal, loving, carefree life before everything fell apart. The juxtaposition from before to after was too much for my mind to handle for a while. I was angry, to say the least, so angry that I lost my head a bit. In a matter of months I had gone from being in love, being the happiest man in the world to being a desolate, loveless orphan who, in the eyes of the law, didn’t even exist anymore. Instead of rebelling against my uncles, I leaned into it. I became what they wanted me to be. I became what everyone in my life from before would have loathed.”
Celeste understood that sort of anger. “Did it help?” In the beginning she had enjoyed her job a bit too much. The Colonel, prescient as always, took her aside and told her she shouldn’t. Hurting others won’t fix what’s gone wrong in your life. I didn’t recruit you to be a vigilante. Find healing in some other way. This is the job and only ever the job.
“For a time, perhaps. It was an outlet, at least. And the people I hurt were similarly bad people, or so I reasoned.”
“Like Robin Hood,” she said, another familiar path her mind had followed.
“I believe I substituted Batman, but the same basic premise.”
“What changed?” she asked.
He gave another sigh, this one deep and sad. “The girl re-entered the picture.”
“She tracked you down?” Celeste asked, incredulous. Was she impressed or horrified at that stalker level of devotion?
“With the help of the United States Government. She had not been lax in my absence, as it turned out. She became a spy and, as fate would have it, was assigned to my case.”
“ Wow ,” Celeste mouthed, though he couldn’t see. “The chances of that must be astronomical.”
“One would think. Someone up there either loves or hates me very much.”
They stared at the fire a bit in silence, pondering, each wondering about the Someone up there and His role in their lives. And then they gave a collective shudder, remembering all the things they would rather leave unseen and unknown.
“And then what happened?” she prompted.
“Look who is suddenly interested in my story,” he said.
“I’m a diehard romantic,” she said.
“You only tuned in after the romance was over, everyone was dead, and I became a terrorist,” he complained.
“I smell a new plot for Disney,” she said.
He gave her shoulder a light shove. “What happened was this: My uncles were apprehended, and so was I. And then I was let go, with the caveat that I now work for the people who had saved me.”
“And the girl?”
“Chose to remain with my replacement, the guy who has always definitively been on the side of good.”
“Where’s the romance or adventure in that?” she asked, affronted on his behalf. Clearly he still loved the woman and, from what she could tell, he had a lot going for him, terrorist past notwithstanding.
“Women these days. It’s almost like they prefer men who aren’t murderers and international criminals who ducked out on the wedding.”
“You’re probably better off without someone that shallow,” she said, earning another laugh that abruptly faded.
“I’m not, though. She’s married with a baby, and I’m theoretically happy for her. But for me there’s no one else. Not in all these years have I strayed from my loyalty to her.” He reached for the pie and paused when he realized there was only a bite left.
Celeste shoved it toward him. “You’re pathetic enough to need this.”
“Thank you for realizing,” he said and downed the final bite.