Chapter 7
Audrey climbed out, knuckles white on the cab door.
The pavement shifted, and the comedown fog obscured the lamplights behind her eyes.
Audrey caught her image in the cab window—her eyes shone with a strange gleam.
Alone at night, dogs would flinch or snarl before she was near.
The world sensed what she kept hidden deep: this was someone who did not quite belong.
Alex came around the car. He didn’t hover, and he didn’t touch her.
“How can you be sure about her?” she asked, moving closer, close enough that she was able to feel the heat of his breath on her cheek. “She’s been dead for ten years. I was there, remember?”
Alex faltered. His uncertainty, rare for someone so deliberate, surprised her.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. “And I didn’t want this in your head if someone got inside it.” The words slid under her flesh like splinters, pain prickling under her composed exterior.
Her apartment building rose above them, its glass and brick looming in the humid night. Hundreds of minds buzzed in her skull. Crossing the lobby, voices upstairs spiked, tangling into harsh white noise in her head.
Should we have steak or pasta tonight?
Where is Martin? He should be home by now…
I forgot to…
Her comedown made it worse. While drugs had muted the noise, now, everything crashed back at once. She stopped, scanning mirrors and doors. The sensation of being followed tingled at her neck. Nails dug into her hand. She hadn't imagined it. Had the killer followed them?
They needed to move—immediately.
Alex was unaware of the rush of minds. He moved through the lobby, unfazed, focus fixed forward, a difference she’d always noticed. Audrey put her hands to her eyes, as if to smear the thoughts away. The thoughts multiplied, clashing like wild radio stations, impossible to silence.
Earlier, drugs dulled the noise. Now, everything was exposed nerve.
Alex held the elevator door open. “This is going to sound impossible in your current state,” he murmured. “It’s still true.”
“Get to it,” Audrey muttered, the words slurring. The elevator doors closed shut with a quiet metallic sigh. They didn’t speak. It should have helped, but it didn’t.
Alex exhaled slowly. “A few months ago, Somali anti-terror police issued a warrant for a woman traveling on a fake Kenyan passport,” he said. “She was using the name, Lynn Faye Fisher.”
“Somalia?” Audrey said. “You’ve been digging internationally. That’s not casual research.”
He drew a slim file from his coat and handed it to her. The paper seemed weightier than expected, meticulously copied by someone wary of digital traces.
She struggled with the tab but managed to open the file.
Inside were mismatched documents. Another page listed distant places, making it all feel impossible.
A photo clipped greeted her on the second page.
It was her mother in profile, older, sterner, hair shorter than Audrey remembered.
Her mother wore dark glasses and a scarf, standing by a fenced loading yard next to a convoy truck.
Audrey pushed her thumb to the page. More records were inside, forming a distinct pattern. She looked up slowly. “You had all this.”
“I had enough,” Alex said. “That identity connects to several others over the last decade. One belonged to a dead US citizen.” His eyes hardened. “Sophia Sarafian.”
The air inside the elevator thickened. Dread pressed in, making it hard for Audrey to breathe. New facts collided with old pain, both close to swamping her.
“No,” Audrey said, weaker now. Fire exploded through her memory. Flames crawled up the kitchen walls. Her mother’s silhouette twisted inside the blaze. But she was not running. Sophia hadn’t screamed; she’d just watched.
The fire had never made sense.
“No,” she said again. The word came out too fast. Alex remained silent. His heavy, wordless sympathy pressed hard against Audrey. The silence brought a sharper jab of isolation, making the grief harder to bear.
“She was cold,” Audrey said hoarsely. “Selfish. But a terrorist?”
Still, he said nothing.
Audrey laughed bitterly. “Really, Alex?”
“You hated her after high school began,” he said. “And you said from the start she was involved that night.”
“I said she was involved with him. The man in the backyard,” Audrey shot back.
Alex didn’t fight her on his existence this time.
As the elevator flew upward, she pushed gently at his thoughts, testing the edges.
Her mind was sluggish from the drug, though, and she retreated.
She wanted another hit so badly her teeth ached.
Anything to make this easier. If this were true?
The fire hadn’t been some single, insane explosion of madness.
It had been a move—a piece of a bigger whole.
“I thought you didn’t believe me,” she said.
He looked tired, posture sagging. Honest fatigue, not surprise or defensiveness, made her resentment surge. His regret provoked her frustration, and the questions came unbidden.
When did you stop believing I was wrong? Or when did you decide knowing mattered more than telling me?
“You weren’t just trying to get me out,” she whispered.
He stared at the elevator numbers instead of her. That alone made Audrey’s anger flare hotter.
“You were investigating me.”
His silence was a confession, but she thought he might apologize.
He didn’t.
The elevator dinged, and Alex walked into the hallway like he lived there. “Pack what matters,” he said, motioning for her to follow him. “I think Sophia found this address. We’re staying at my place.”
“Wait,” Audrey said, grabbing his sleeve before the elevator doors could close. “Show me something I can actually understand.”
He gave her a long look. Audrey thought he’d deny her, but finally, he took the file, flipped to the middle, and drew out three photographs.
The first was a long-lens shot from across the street: Sophia was exiting a black SUV outside a warehouse with no visible signage. She wore gloves, and even at a distance, her face was hers. Older, yes, and harder, but hers.
The second was even more disconcerting.
It was a still frame from CCTV footage with a time stamp in military format. Her mother was standing in front of a freight elevator, head turned just enough for the camera to catch her mouth, one hand lifted as if she were speaking to someone out of frame.
The third looked meaningless—just a cropped image of a clipboard. But Audrey saw the destination code in the lower-right corner.
Tolusa.
She looked up so fast her eyes swam. “This city?”
Alex nodded.
“She’s been here.”
“Yes.”
“How recently?”
“Within the last ten days.”
The file shook in her hands. “Then why the hell did you allow me to keep walking out here?”
His back stiffened. “Because I needed to know whether she was hunting you, watching you, or waiting for someone else to flush you into the open. Tonight answered that.”
His response made her stare; she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You allowed me to be bait.”
His mask returned, hiding everything. The blankness was worse than denial or anger. Betrayal twisted inside Audrey, mingling shock and rage in her belly.
“I kept eyes on you.”
Her cold, furious glare followed him into the hallway.
Alex’s condo reminded her of sandalwood and expensive soap. She dropped into one of the sleek chairs at the glass table. She searched for a cigarette. In her unsteady hands, the lighter sparked twice before catching. Finally, smoke wafted toward the ceiling.
“So she’s alive,” Audrey said, blowing smoke in his face.
“Yes.”
“And you’ve known this.”
Alex loosened his tie, a habit when he was unsure. “I knew pieces of it.”
“Don’t do that.” Her voice was quiet, yet deadlier. “Don’t start carving this into sanitized words so you can live with yourself.”
She flipped to another page: a customs declaration and a memo on a cargo route. One name was crossed out, replaced in black ink.
“How long?” she asked.
“Audrey—”
“You were building this while I was still inside, weren’t you?” she said. “You were asking me questions about the fire, about my mother, about what I remembered. And all that time you already suspected she wasn’t dead.”
“I didn’t know that then.”
“But you thought it.” Her eyes burned. “You thought it and said nothing.”
The quiet that came was answer enough. Audrey barked an ugly laugh. “Unbelievable.”
“You were unstable,” he snapped. Finally, he looked at her.
“You were isolated. Doped. Under surveillance. One wrong move might have cost you your hearing. I was not going to put ‘your mother may be alive and operating under false identities throughout multiple countries’ into the head of a woman the court already thought was delusional.”
“Then maybe you should have met me at the prison gates as you promised.”
His face changed then. She tried to read him, but his emotions cycled too quickly for her to get a clear answer. At first, she thought it was guilt, but a trace of pain that hit close enough to wound, and sympathy almost surfaced in her anger.
“I tried.”
“No, Alex. You didn’t.” Tears burned in her eyes. “Trying means showing up.”
She looked at the papers, forcing herself to breathe. A date on a manifest grabbed her attention. It was from her last hearing.
Her heart sank. “She left before I got out,” Audrey whispered.
“Yes.”
“She knew.”
“Yes.”
“She knew I was walking.”
“Yes.”
Every answer from him landed like another nail sealing her coffin shut. She paused her questioning to give him a chance to start talking, start explaining himself.
But he didn’t.
Audrey crossed to him before she could think better of it and ripped the rest of the file from his hand. Pages spilled over the counter. Photographs skidded across the granite surface. She grabbed the nearest one and held it up between them.
“Say it,” she demanded. “Say that this is her.”
Alex glanced quickly at the image. “It’s her.”