Chapter Thirteen
Kirsten sat at the dinner table frowning over the information Zach had sent them about the assistant. “I’ve never seen her in the office, but it’s been a few weeks since I was there.”
“What about phone calls? Emails?”
Kirsten shook her head. “I’ve always dealt directly with Dr. Leigh. She might have mentioned an assistant in passing, but it’s not someone I ever had any contact with. Not something I’ve ever really thought about.”
Ellis didn’t sit. She could feel him wanting to pace, but he remained standing in one place, leaning against the counter in the kitchen. A caged energy pumping off him.
“If this assistant is somehow part of this threat, I have to believe it’s without Dr. Leigh knowing. She…she would have had a lot more questions about me remembering, about where we are, about everything if she was connected to a threat.” She looked up at Ellis hoping for disagreement.
She got nothing but blankness. “Unless the assistant is doing her dirty work.”
Kirsten didn’t like it. It felt so cynical. So unnecessarily complicated, but she also understood that some of her feelings probably stemmed from the kind of naiveté that came from not remembering.
Ellis was an FBI agent or had been one. That meant he understood threats and the lengths people were willing to go to. He understood complicated scenarios. Far more than she did.
“Zach’s private investigator is currently following her,” Ellis continued. “We’ll wait to hear if there’s any kind of connection to the men we know would be a threat. It’s the first step, and then we decide what the second step is once those answers come in.”
She frowned at him. “I don’t like how you said that.”
He expressly did not meet her gaze. “Said what?”
“The men we know. Like there’s ones we might not? Other…possible threats besides these people you investigated that didn’t get put away.”
Ellis blew out a slow breath. He moved into a seat at the table and interlocked his fingers on the surface in front of him, before he met her gaze.
It was what she might call a very law enforcement look.
There was a detachment at its core, but also an attempt to be…
not comforting, exactly. Just very clear.
“The most obvious source of this threat is someone from the Caruso family, but I worked a lot of cases. I’m sure I made a lot of enemies.
It’s more of a long shot, but I don’t want to rule anything out.
We can’t act on hope. We have to act on facts, and those are very hard to come by at the moment. ”
She hated the idea of him having more enemies. Of this being more complicated. Of…feeling like this extraneous thing. Somehow involved, but not part of it.
Was that a real feeling, or an old one? She knew he used work to walk away from her in their marriage, or she wouldn’t have said and felt what she did earlier. So was this just an echo of that?
She studied him, tried to settle into the feelings—just like she had before. It seemed to work, to open up something inside of her. There wasn’t anxiety when she remembered—not when she was around him anyway. It was more a state of calm. Like she felt safe enough with him to remember.
Unless the remembering got too intense, then the anxiety seemed to take over and push the memories and feelings back.
So she tried not to resist the feelings that came, to not let fear of intensity block things.
There was clearly a lot of turmoil when it came to Ellis and his job—and she didn’t think it was just because of what had happened.
No, there’d been turmoil in him taking the undercover case that had led them here.
“Was it worth it?” she wondered aloud, not sure exactly what she was asking. Nothing so specific. Just…in general, maybe.
“Was what worth it?” he asked, studying her dubiously.
“Your job? The danger? Undercover work away from your wife and putting yourself at risk, when you could have…just had a more normal life?”
He inhaled deeply. And he definitely didn’t look at her, but she could tell he was taking the question in, considering it.
“I put a stop to some bad in the world. Maybe it’s a drop in the bucket. At the time… I did think it was worth it. Necessary. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t worth anything.”
She could feel his inner pain over that, and she knew… Even if she didn’t remember their whole life, or him totally, she knew, deep down. “Yes, it was worth it. Is. Doing good is worth it.”
He looked up at her, and she wondered if he knew she saw every question in his eyes. If he understood she felt an echo of the deep, overwhelming pain she saw reflected there.
Or did he think he was hiding it?
She got to her feet, went with instinct and crossed to him. She leaned down, pressed a chaste kiss to his cheek as she squeezed his shoulder. “I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
She didn’t look back. Didn’t want to. She’d offered him what she needed to, and if it wasn’t what he needed, well… She just didn’t know how to find the balance in that yet. She was still figuring out her own needs or…something.
So she brushed her teeth and changed into the pajamas she’d been using. She crawled into bed and used some of the techniques Dr. Leigh had given her to fall asleep when she was anxious. Count backwards with careful, slow breaths.
She wasn’t anxious exactly. No, there was something more settled about how she felt up here, but she hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.
So the techniques helped, she thought, because she didn’t remember falling asleep when she awoke with a start. She looked around the dark of the room.
Something…something had woken her up. Her heart started to beat hard against her ribs. Someone was…here. Moving around the cabin.
It’s just Ellis. But what noise would Ellis have made to wake her up? What if something had happened? What if—
This had happened before. The realization hit her with the force of a blow. Terror swept through her, and only remembering to count her breaths helped her from panicking.
“It’s just Ellis,” she told herself, out loud. And even though her limbs shook and she wasn’t sure her knees would hold her, she tossed the covers off and sat up.
There were no other noises. No, wait, there was a faint…rustling. Like water running? “Just Ellis,” she whispered. Over and over as she got to her feet, crept closer and closer to the door that would lead out to the main part of the cabin.
She didn’t see light at the crack under the door. No one was out there.
Or is someone out there to hurt you? She squeezed her eyes shut because she was…imagining things that didn’t quite make sense. Maybe she’d had a dream and that had woken her up. Maybe the images were a dream.
A memory?
Did she hear whispers now, or was it a memory? She opened her eyes. The room was still dark. She should crawl back into bed and count until she fell asleep.
But what if something was wrong out there?
Be brave. You have to be brave. It sounded like someone else’s voice. Like Ellis’s. Like he’d told her that before.
She frowned. It had been a moment like this. Darkness. Terror. And him telling her to be brave. Desperately.
It was something about the idea of Ellis being desperate that gave her the strength to push open the door. The living room was dark, but the tiny light above the stove was on, illuminating Ellis.
Relief swam through her, except he turned. He was holding one hand with the other, and blood dripped from his hand to the floor.
She could see it was a minor injury. Rationally, she knew it. But something was happening in her body. She was rooted to the spot. Something painful throbbing at the base of her skull.
Blood gushing out of his shoulder. Lying there, pale as death. The sensation of falling, falling…
But his shoulder wasn’t bleeding. She was on her own two feet.
“I was just trying to get a drink of water without waking you up and screwed that six ways to Sunday by dropping the glass.” He was wrapping a washcloth around his bloody hand. She could hear him, but his voice sounded briefly muffled.
Blood. Whispers. Dark. Being woken up. Fear. Terror. Panic.
Falling.
It all bubbled through her. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t seem to think through all the feelings assaulting her.
“I’m sorry if I scared you. I finally found a bandage, so I’ll be done banging around here in a second.” He lifted it, began applying it to his hand.
She wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t. She had to, but she couldn’t.
“You’ll have to be careful in the morning. I think I cleaned up all the pieces of glass, but you never know.”
He bent down, disappeared behind the counter. Rationally she knew he was wiping the blood off the floor. Irrationally, she felt alone and whimpered as she struggled to pull in a gasping breath.
He immediately popped back into view and began to cross to her. “What is it?” he demanded.
But she had no words for what was happening to her. And she was in the dark. Even as he came to her, she was in the dark.
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.” His arms came around her. Held her, tight and strong, one hand moving up and down her spine. She could feel the stubble of whiskers against her temple, feel his breath against her hair. “It’s all right, baby. You’re safe.”
Safe. And she felt it. She would have relaxed into all that safe, all his strength and warmth, but the extreme emotions swaying back and forth seemed to create a kind of emotional whiplash sickness.
She pushed away from him, dashed into the bathroom, and threw up. Retched and retched until there was nothing left.
She clutched the sides of the toilet, too many images swirling in her mind, like some horribly grotesque carnival ride of blood and terror and…
Ellis placed a cloth against her forehead with one hand, held her hair back out of the way with the other. He kept assuring her everything was okay in that low, steady voice, even as her body seemed content to shake itself apart.
She remembered the night he’d been shot. No dream. She remembered…being woken up in the dark. She remembered.