13. Emma
Emma
Alex is gone when I wake, his side of the bed empty and cool enough that he must have dressed and left within minutes of leaving me.
For a long time I don’t move. I lie with one hand tucked beneath my cheek and the other curled into the hollow where his body should be, listening to the apartment do nothing around me.
The sheets still hold his scent, cedar and clean skin, and my thighs carry an ache that has nothing to do with the bruises on my ribs when I shift beneath the blanket.
There are marks on my hips shaped like his hands. A fading bruise sits high on the inside of my thigh where his mouth found me last night, before either of us could remember why this was supposed to be a mistake.
I don’t hate you.
I remember exactly how his face changed when he said it, something moving behind his eyes before he shut it down again.
I remember crying against his shoulder after he made me apologize for ten years he doesn’t understand, and I remember the same man pulling me against his chest afterward, running his hand down my spine, murmuring I’ve got you like there was anything left of me worth holding together.
Punishment, and then tenderness. Hatred spoken over hands that still remember exactly how I like to be touched. And underneath all of it, the truth, still locked, right where it has lived for ten years.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
Dante knows. Mel knows. There are federal agents whose names I never learned who know precisely why Belle Mitchell disappeared from a small town outside Missoula and became a woman who answers to someone else’s name.
Somewhere there are files containing every decision that gutted my life and called it necessary, and I have no idea how many hands have touched some piece of that truth by now.
For ten years I guarded it the way a dragon guards gold.
No slips. No names. No letters, no photographs, no signatures on canvases I used to be proud of.
I taught Liam to answer to a name that wasn’t his.
I learned to stop turning when someone called out Emma like it belonged to me.
I left places before anyone could learn enough to ask the wrong question twice.
I protected the secret because people could die if I didn’t.
Now it’s leaking through cracks I can’t even see.
Dante knows enough to dance circles around it without saying the words outright.
Alex knows just enough to keep digging, which for a man like him is only ever the beginning of a hunt.
Polanski keeps chasing leads that circle straight back to Mark’s debts, and sooner or later he’s going to find the one that connects everything.
If Alex finds it without me telling him first, I lose whatever chance I have left to make him understand why.
I sit up too fast, and my ribs punish me for it.
No, I won’t let that happen. He isn’t going to learn the truth from a report Polanski slides across a desk.
He isn’t going to spend one more day believing that I looked at him when he was twenty-two, dirt under his fingernails and love written across every inch of his face, and decided he wasn’t worth trusting with it.
Last night he asked me to apologize. I did, for everything, and I meant every word.
Just not for the reason he thinks.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand. Bee lifts her head from the chair by the window and blinks at me with the disdain only a cat interrupted mid-nap can manage.
“You’re going to hate the noise, but I need to talk,” I tell her.
She closes her eyes again. Useless, but at least she’s honest about it.
I call Mel. She answers on the second ring with her surname, clipped, which tells me she didn’t see the name on the phone before picking it up.
“Torres.”
She must be in the middle of something.
“It’s me.”
“Emma. Everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“Physically?”
I glance down at the marks scattered over my hips and don’t answer right away.
“Yes,” I say, and mean it, even if it isn’t the whole truth.
“Is Alex there?”
“No.”
“Has anyone contacted you? New faces around the building, repeat vehicles, anything that feels wrong?”
“Mel.” I get out of bed because lying still is making the panic worse, and pad barefoot toward the door. “I need to tell him.”
Silence, heavy enough that I can hear her deciding how to handle me.
“I’m serious,” I say. “I have to tell Alex. Please don’t give me the speech yet. Just listen.”
I walk into the kitchen, which still smells faintly of yesterday’s coffee.
His mug sits abandoned beside the sink, and I’ve reached the point where I can walk past a dirty cup without rinsing it.
Bee trails after me at a leisurely distance, more interested in the promise of breakfast than in my crisis.
I open the pantry. The cardamom jar is nearly empty, which shouldn’t surprise me, since I’ve spent the better part of a month baking Maggie’s cinnamon rolls in Alex’s kitchen like some superstitious part of me believes muscle memory can rebuild a home out of butter and sugar.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I say, and the words break somewhere in the middle.
Mel hears it happen. Her voice changes, not softer exactly, but steadier, the way it always does when she needs to hold both of us upright at once.
“Tell me.”
“He hates me for something I didn’t do.” My hand closes around the cardamom jar like it might anchor me.
“And I keep letting him. He looks at me and sees the woman who destroyed his family. He thinks I killed Mark. He thinks I ran because I never trusted him, that I looked at a construction worker’s son and decided he wasn’t good enough for me. ”
“He said that to you?”
“Yes.”
Mel curses, low and creative.
“He actually believes I thought he wasn’t enough.
” My voice cracks clean through. “I loved him so much I thought it would kill me to leave. I loved him in every motel room we ever slept in. I loved him while Liam cried because he wanted to go home and I had to tell him we couldn’t.
I loved him through ten years of watching him build a life without me. ”
I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, furious at how easily the tears come now, how little control I seem to have left over any part of this.
“And now I’m sleeping with him.”
That earns real silence.
I laugh once, and it comes out ugly. “Yeah. That’s right.”
Bee winds figure eights around my ankles. I slide down the cabinet until I’m sitting on the kitchen floor with my knees pulled up, the jar still clutched in one hand like a totem.
“It isn’t even about the sex,” I say. “That would almost be easier to carry. He holds me afterward, and he falls asleep with his arm around me, like he thinks I’ll disappear the second he lets go.
Then he wakes up and remembers he hates me, and I let him.
I let him touch me while the truth sits right here behind my teeth. ”
My hand finds my mother’s locket at my throat.
“I tell myself I’m protecting him. Protecting Liam and Danny and everyone else this secret is tangled around.
But Dante already knows. You know. Somebody inside the Bureau knows.
Whoever sealed those files knows, and Alex is already digging.
What exactly am I protecting anymore by keeping the one person who deserves the truth blind to it? ”
Mel lets the question sit for a moment before she answers.
“Alex doesn’t have clearance.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do, and you should too.”
“He’s already involved, Mel. He’s been involved since the day Thomas died.”
“I see where you’re coming from.”
“Then why are we still pretending he isn’t?”
“We’re not.” Paper shuffles somewhere on her end of the line.
“When the original protection order was structured, Alex Hartley was someone we were specifically instructed to keep outside the perimeter. His relationship with you, and what he might do if he found out who was responsible, made him too unpredictable to include.”
“He was twenty-two.”
“We were prepared to offer protection for them, but Belle, you didn’t want it.”
“How could I have done that to them?” My voice cracks.
“Especially knowing what I know now. This life would have destroyed them. I was supposed to testify against my uncle, a man who was supposed to still be alive. I didn’t agree to take on the entire Accord.
None of it stayed what they told me it would be.
They had their whole lives ahead of them. He was so young. Danny too.”
“They’re not young anymore.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Because they have resources now. Money. People. Reach. Men like Hartley attract attention, and the last thing the FBI wants is that kind of scrutiny anywhere near this.”
I close my eyes.
“The less he knows, the safer he is. The further outside he stays, the better.”
“That isn’t going to work anymore, Mel.”
She goes quiet.
“He’s already in too deep. He’s digging, and he won’t stop until he finds something.”
“I know.” Her voice softens. “I see that now.”
I rub both hands over my face. “Then what do we do? Everything is a mess.”
Mel does not answer straight away.
When she does, her voice has changed.
“The Accord is moving again.”
My fingers tighten around the phone hard enough to hurt.
“What do you mean, moving?”
“Activity. Someone’s been stirring the pot, and old names are surfacing in places they shouldn’t be.”
“Are they looking for us?”
“Not exactly. From what we’re hearing, they’re trying to rebuild. There are rumors someone is pulling the old network back together, putting people in place, trying to make the Accord operational again.”
I go quiet.
Mel does too, but only for a moment. “Actually… this may work in our favor.”
“How?”
“If the Accord is active again, the situation changes. Alex isn’t just digging into something buried anymore. He could stumble into something current without knowing what he’s walking into.” She pauses. “That may finally give me an argument for bringing him inside formally.”
My stomach turns. “You mean telling him?”
“I mean giving him enough truth that he stops searching blindly.”