The Eleventh Hour #3
“Of course not. They’re supposed to represent true love, right?” He said it sarcastically. “The fact that the people are naked just helps raise the collectible value.”
Despite my gratitude for his saving my life, I didn’t like his tone.
It was hard enough to get respect in the art world without somebody else labelling my work pornography.
Although, I suppose without that notorious reputation, I wouldn’t have gotten half as much press as I’d received since getting out of school.
We headed down another floor and I tried not to twist my ankle as we quickly rounded each corner. “I don’t care what you think.”
“If it’s any consolation, the work of Sophie Shaw will be very sought after a couple decades from now. I saw one recently for nearly a hundred grand.”
A hundred grand? I remembered what Anna said to me earlier that evening. That if I was dead, my paintings would be worth way more. Looked like she was right.
“Adam, you have to—”
“Shh,” he commanded. We’d reached the bottom of the stairs of whatever building we were in. He had a gun drawn and, with his back flat against the wall, he peered out of a window to the side of a set of doors.
“They’re out front,” he said. “This is the back exit. I think we have the chance—”
“Adam!” an angry voice bellowed from above us. “Where the hell are you?”
It was Harris. He was awake and he sounded mad as hell. The sound of hard-soled shoes thundering down the stairs echoed around us. Without waiting another second, Adam pushed the door open with his shoulder and we burst outside.
“Stop!” Harris shouted.
I heard a gunshot. Then another.
“Watch out,” Adam snapped, wrapping his arm around me to pull me out of the way. Part of the door frame splintered off as the bullets made contact.
Relying on instinct only, I ran with Adam away from the building and down an alleyway. Several alleyways, in fact, until I was hopelessly lost. It was dark and cold and my feet were burning from running in my heels. I was exhausted and scared and shaking like a leaf.
“Please, stop,” I begged. “I can’t go any further.”
“No, you’re right.” Adam looked around, before putting his gun away. “This is a good place.”
“A good place for what? I need to go home. I need . . . I need to go to the police.”
He shook his head. “They can’t help you.”
“What do you mean they can’t help me?”
“They’re in on this. They know. Maybe not all of them.
But the right people know about auditors from the future.
It’s fully condoned. They understand why the future must be kept pure.
If you go to them, they’ll hand you right over to Harris and the others with no questions asked.
They get the list of any problem cases just like we do. ”
“The present and the future working together for a common goal.”
“Pretty much. The only thing separating us is twenty years.”
“What about the past – all the horrible things that happened then? Why didn’t you kill a few bad-asses – dictators, serial killers – who hurt a lot of people?”
“Because it wasn’t in the Books, of course,” Adam replied simply, his jaw tight. “We only take care of the glitches. Otherwise, the past and the present stand as they are. As they were.”
“So you’d kill me but you wouldn’t go back and kill Hitler because that wasn’t your assignment.”
“We have to operate within a two decade time frame, but even if we could go back further, you’re right. We wouldn’t have killed him without a direct order like yours. But I didn’t kill you, did I?”
My head ached even attempting to wrap my brain around everything, but I tried to think. “I need to go home. Grab a few things. Then I can go into hiding for a while. Maybe I’ll go to Mexico or Brazil or—”
“No, that doesn’t work. They’ll find you.”
“But I have to talk to Anna. I have friends who’ll wonder where I am.”
Adam’s expression was tense. “It’s over, Sophie. Your life. The life you knew. You can’t ever go back to it. Not if you want to live another day.”
I just stared at him. “But I have to.”
“No, you don’t. The life you knew ended the moment that bus was supposed to hit you.
” He rubbed his forehead. “Fuck. Maybe I shouldn’t have done anything.
Maybe I should have let fate run its course.
Dammit, I had to do something, but I wasn’t thinking straight.
I didn’t think through all the repercussions.
” His gaze was intense. He closed the distance between us and grabbed me by my shoulders.
“But I just couldn’t let you die. Not like that. ”
“Why not?” I struggled to breathe as the warmth of his touch sank into me.
Despite my fear and this bizarre and dangerous situation, I found myself oddly attracted to this strange man who’d now saved my life twice.
Being pressed up close against him didn’t help.
“Maybe you should have. You don’t know me.
Why would you screw your own life up to save somebody you don’t even know? ”
“But I do know you.” Adam looked away and raked a hand through his black hair, his strained expression lit only by the moonlight.
“How?”
Adam reached into the inner chest pocket of his long black coat and pulled out a piece of yellowing folded paper. He handed it to me.
I took it with trembling hands and unfolded it. It was the sketch – the self portrait I’d done last week. The one the little boy had looked at and never returned to me before he’d disappeared. Only now it looked old and faded. The pencil marks were practically too light to see.
“Sorry for the shabby shape it’s in,” he said, a sardonic curl to his lips. “That’s what twenty years’ll do. And I must admit, some of them have been a bit cruel. But I still have it. I’ve kept it as safe as I could.”
I looked up at him. “How . . . How is this possible?”
“What part? How I’ve stared at that drawing of you for twenty years, imagining who you were, what you were like, what you wanted?
How I’ve dreamed about you countless times?
” He laughed, but it was humourless. “Funny how the mind can play tricks on you. One blonde lady who was nice to me all those years ago and I’ve never been able to forget her beautiful face.
Funny how when nobody’s ever been nice to you, you remember the one who was – even if it was only for a minute.
And a little boy’s gratitude can change to something else as he gets older.
Something that makes him willing to fuck up his own life when hers is in danger. ”
The realization hit me like a tidal wave.
It was him.
This handsome, dangerous man with the haunted blue eyes who stood before me in a dark alleyway – the one I couldn’t help but be attracted to even in the midst of running for my very life – he was the little boy from last week on the corner who was missing his dead mother.
“You . . .” But I couldn’t figure out what to say. I was utterly stunned.
Adam paced to the other side of the alley and then back.
“I looked you up ten years ago, thinking stupidly that I’d find you and you’d fall madly in love with an eighteen-year-old kid like me,” he said, with a wry twist of his lips.
“But . . . that’s how I found out you were already gone.
That you’d died the week after I met you and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it because there were no details about the death of Sophie Shaw, the famous erotic artist. But when I found your name in the Books, I knew .
. . I just knew I had to do something about that. And here we are.”
I chewed my bottom lip. “My paintings aren’t erotic.”
“Doesn’t bother you that you were dead, just that I’m labelling your art erotic.” He stared at me for a moment before he laughed. “This is not something you want to argue with me about. I know your work. I’ve studied every piece for hours. It’s incredibly erotic.”
My face warmed and I looked down at the sketch again. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe it.” He drew closer to me until I could feel the warmth from his body shielding me from the cold night.
“So you did all this, you put your own life at risk, because—”
Adam blinked. “Because I’m in love with you.”
My mouth dropped open.
He grimaced and looked away. “I shouldn’t have said that. This is complicated enough without –”
I pulled him closer to me and kissed him, stroking my fingers through his black hair.
He resisted for a moment before kissing me back, hard and deep and filled with need.
He pulled me closer to him so my breasts flattened against his chest and I felt his arousal press against me.
My hands slid down the sides of his face as his tongue slid between my lips to taste me deeper.
A sudden and uncontrollable wave of desire crashed over me. I’d never wanted anyone so much in my entire life. Or so fast. I’d only just met him.
Even though he’d known me for twenty years.
I’d waited so long, painted so many pictures of love and passion, but it had only been a pale representation, a guess of what love truly was. I’d never actually felt anything that powerful for anyone before. Not until now.
Adam was the man I’d been waiting my whole life to find – I knew he was.
Little did I know how I’d end up finding him.
“We need to go,” he whispered against my lips. “It’s not safe here.”
“Go where?”
He pulled the sleeve of his coat up so I could see he wore a strange watch with a large face on his left wrist. He fiddled with it for a moment, carefully turning a gear on the side of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It shouldn’t be like this. You shouldn’t have to leave your life behind, but there’s no other way to keep you safe.”
I thought of the friends I wouldn’t see again. They’d be worried and confused about what happened to me. But Adam was right. I couldn’t go back. My life here was over.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said softly. “Where are we going?”