Nightfire: A Protectors Novel: Marine Force Recon Read online

  “My parents were these—these distant people who showed up now and again. My mother more than my father. I saw him just a couple of times a year while I was in the clinics. And then finally, when I was fifteen, there were no more surgeries scheduled. The doctors said I was as well as I was ever going to be. I was released, free to go home. My parents had moved houses several times. When I got out of the hospital, I was taken to a home I’d never seen before, in a part of town I didn’t in any way know. A bedroom had been set up for me by an interior decorator. That first week was incredibly strange, as I was in a brand-new setting with parents I barely knew.”

  “Where was this?” Michael Keillor asked quietly.

  “Boston.”

  “And yet you speak with a slight English accent.”

  So far, Harry Bolt hadn’t spoken much. There was no doubt he was listening, though. Chloe had the feeling he was listening intently with every sense he had, not just hearing. And yet, though she had Harry Bolt’s full attention, it was Michael Keillor who was asking her questions.

  The reason she spoke with a faint English accent, which she’d picked up subconsciously, was hard to explain, in every way there was.

  She sat there, trying to put the words together. This was so hard. It was a moment of her life she’d tried to understand, tried to forget, tried to forgive. Nothing worked.

  Chloe took in a deep breath, watching the two men. She was taking up their time but there were absolutely no impatience vibes coming from them. She was familiar with people’s exasperation with her when she needed time to think about what she was saying. One of her many, many failings.

  Only she didn’t feel it was a failing here. Both men were watching her, listening carefully to her, allowing her to talk at her own pace. She was all too familiar with people’s body language when she had to think over what she was saying. The impatient huffs of breath, leg-jiggling or foot-tapping. Looking up at the ceiling, looking down at the watch, doodling. She’d seen it all.

  She wasn’t seeing it here. She was seeing two men hearing her out with no signs of anything but interest.

  And since they were, she didn’t stammer. It came out as smoothly as if she were discussing the plot of a movie she’d once seen.

  “I’ll come to that. When I was finally released, because there wasn’t anything else medicine could do for me, it was summer and there was no school. I was actually ahead two grades because about the only thing I could do in the hospitals and clinics was study. I found it . . . hard, being home. My father acted very strange around me and my mother—my mother acted strange when he acted strange. They were both very strange, though I didn’t have much to compare them with.

  “I couldn’t figure anything out. We had these strained conversations about nothing at all. They never asked me any questions, I never asked any of them. They were both gone a lot because of business. It was a little like being back in the hospital, only I was dressed and could go out if I wanted. Then one day, my father came home early.” Chloe closed her eyes. She’d had endless therapy but the memory could still jolt her out of her serenity. In an instant, she was right back there, living it, not remembering it.

  A sunny day in Boston, hot and humid. She’d found a whole wardrobe of pretty summer dresses in her room, an unusual gesture of kindness from her mother. She’d spent so long in the hospital gowns and track suits; the pretty clothes delighted her.

  Being outdoors was still a novelty for her, a treat. The feel of the sun on her face and the breeze in her hair a shocking delight, even on a humid Boston summer day. She’d had on a sundress with spaghetti straps and no bra because really, why wear a bra when your breasts were like two small teacups? The house had a garden, one she delighted in exploring. A Mexican came twice a week to do the heavy lifting in the garden. Mr. Martinez. Diego. Old and kindly, willing to explain to her what he was doing. Telling her the names of the flowers in both English and Spanish. She spent hours in the sunshine with him without ever thinking that maybe she was interrupting his work.

  Coming in from the garden that day with a fistful of asters, flushed from the sun, she came across her father staring at her intently.

  He walked right up to her, looming over her. He’d been a big man, very tall, and he used his size and height to intimidate everyone around him. Certainly her mother was often intimidated, as were the cook and the maid and the few dinner guests they sometimes had. He intimidated her all the time, which she dealt with by rarely being in the same room with him.

  Without really realizing what she was doing, something she recognized only in hindsight and after painful therapy, she had avoided him as much as she could. Walking out of a room the moment he entered, keeping furniture between them, stepping back when he approached her.

  Her skin crawled if he got too close to her. Once, as she brushed by him, the hairs on her forearm rose.

  That day, there was no walking away from him. He cornered her, big hands against her shoulders, pressing her against a red damask-covered wall.

  God, she remembered the instant panic, full-blown, almost outsized for that specific moment, as if this were a situation she’d already faced. Chloe had even sometimes wondered if she was in some way psychic because her nightmares were and always had been of being with her back to a wall and having a huge man attack her.

  She’d had every variation of that nightmare, over and over again. And that afternoon, it became reality.

  “Did he?” Mike Keillor’s very deep voice was low, harsh. The skin was tight over his cheekbones. He’d said something and she’d only caught the tail end of it.

  Chloe blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’ve heard a version of this story a lot of times.” He glanced at his partner without moving his head. “Did your father rape you?”

  Chloe bowed her head. It was that obvious? She looked like a woman who’d been raped by her father? Oh God. She’d worked so very hard not to seem like a victim and yet here was this man, who had only just set eyes on her for the very first time, and he’d pegged her completely.

  “No,” she whispered, looking at her knees. “Though he tried.” Backbone, Chloe. The voice of Sister Mary Michael sounded in her head, calm and strong.

  Calm. Strength.

  She lifted her head. “I fought back. Which was dumb, because he was a really big man. I should have run. But I didn’t.” She remembered every second of it, vividly. Rage had come ravening up, from some completely unsuspected place inside her, black, blinding rage, an emotion she’d never felt before, certainly not like that. It had been as overwhelming as his blow. “It was ridiculous. My, um, my father was six-two, almost three hundred pounds. He backhanded me. To shut me up, I guess, because I was screaming while I was trying to hit him, hurt him.”

  She’d known in an instant what was going on. Though she hadn’t had sex, had never kissed a boy, had never even touched a boy, she’d read enough, and anyway, instinctively, she knew. Knew that his red face, flaring nostrils and wild animal scent meant trouble. It had come from some place deep inside of her. Through her reading, she even knew what the tent in front of his linen trousers meant. An erection.

  She’d gone into overdrive, kicking and screaming, grabbing a brass candlestick and bashing him in the face with it. His look of astonishment would have been comical if she hadn’t been so desperate. Weak, sick Chloe, fighting back. She’d shocked even herself.

  Her rebellion hadn’t lasted long, though.

  “He broke my arm,” she said. “It had been operated on recently and it broke easily.” Cheap at the price, because he’d stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her, cradling her visibly broken arm.

  Harry Bolt suddenly looked sick. Mike Keillor looked furious.

  “My mother walked in and, without a word to my father, took me back to the hospital, told them I fell down, and left me there overnight. The next day, cast and all, I was on a flight to London, where I was enrolled in the Sacred Heart School for Young Girls, where I b
oarded for the next three years.”

  Chloe smiled. She had no idea if her mother had checked up on the Sacred Heart, if there had been some kind of parents’ site giving ratings of schools for foreign girls, or whether her mother had simply thrown a dart at a page of choices. Whatever, she’d struck pure gold. The years at the Sacred Heart, under the stern and loving care of Sister Mary Michael who had become the mother of her heart, had been the happiest of her life, hands down. The nuns had been warm and welcoming, the other girls from all over the world had provided friendship, and she’d felt at home for the first time in her life.

  “I stayed in England, went to university at University College London. When I graduated, I found a job back at the Sacred Heart, teaching English. I never saw my parents again. My mother and I emailed from time to time, and sometimes she talked about coming over to London, but she never did.”

  She’d sent money, though. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, which Chloe had dutifully banked, spending as little of it as possible. She liked pretty clothes but she didn’t need a huge wardrobe. Her tastes were simple and the account grew and grew.

  She glanced down at her wristwatch. She’d been talking for half an hour.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said, looking up. “I know I’m taking up your time but I needed to say all of that, so you’d—you’d understand.”

  Again, it was Michael Keillor—Mike—who spoke. “Oh, we understand all right,” he said grimly. He shot Harry a hard glance. “Don’t we?”

  Harry Bolt shook his head. Not the no gesture, it was more like shaking himself awake.

  Okay. So far, so good. Chloe’s hands started shaking again because . . . it was time. Her life was going to split in two. If this went well . . .

  Don’t go there. Think of something else.

  But somehow her usual trick of damping expectations wasn’t working. Hope had caught her heart in an unshakable iron grip. While recounting her past, she’d used the old distancing trick, talking about herself as if recounting the story of a remote acquaintance.

  Now the story grew closer, more personal. Possibly with a terrifying ending. Possibly with a joyful one . . .

  She leaned forward a little and so did the two men. Like a group of conspirators, hatching a subversive plot.

  “As I said, I never saw my parents again and we communicated rarely. So . . . I had no idea that they’d died in a car crash. On the eighteenth of April of last year. It took my, um, my father’s lawyer almost a month to track me down. It was end of term at my school so I flew over to—to settle my parents’ affairs.”

  The crumpled envelope on her lap felt like it was filled with bricks. Heavy, lumpy, cumbersome.

  The closer she got to the heart of it, the harder it was to breathe. Something squeezed inside her chest. She watched Harry Bolt’s eyes, light golden brown, watching her.

  “My father hadn’t left me anything in his will, which didn’t surprise me. However, my mother outlived him by three hours and she was his sole heir and I was her sole heir, so the entire estate came to me. Settling the estate was complicated, but I had lawyers and time and a place to stay—their house. Since I was there, I explored. It was a brand-new house. Yet again, one I’d never seen. I put it up for sale but you are probably aware of the fact that the real estate market is weak. I didn’t really care if it sold or not. I gave notice at my school because this was important. I spent all my time sifting through papers and books and objects, trying to get a handle on my parents, trying to get a handle on my past. I took my time because it seemed to me that it was an opportunity to find out things that had puzzled me all my life.”

  She stopped and simply breathed. Her entire life arrowed toward this point and she, who thought out everything so carefully, who tried to anticipate all problems, had no idea what was coming next.

  “There was a safe, a big one, like one of those safes in the movies. There was no way I could open it. But the lawyer told me I had a right to have it opened. He gave me the name of an expert. A man who’d done time as a safecracker and was now a ‘security consultant.’ A man you hired to crack into safes, legally.”

  She smiled faintly at the memory. Luigi Zampilli, a short fireplug of a man with the hands of a neurosurgeon. Ten thousand dollars and the safe was open in five minutes.

  The two men were staring at her. It was getting harder and harder to speak. She finished her tea to moisten her throat, wishing she could fast-forward to a quarter of an hour from now when she’d told it all and knew what the reaction was.

  “Inside—inside the safe were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Treasury bonds, ten pounds of gold ingots, the title to a number of properties I had no idea they owned . . . and a black box full of documents.”

  With a shaking hand, Chloe placed the manila envelope on Harry Bolt’s desk and stared at it. Her life in an envelope. She lifted her eyes to his, so like her own.

  “I was adopted,” she said finally, swallowing heavily. “I had no idea, none. When I saw the adoption certificate I felt like someone had hit me on the side of the head.”

  She’d been so shocked she simply sat in an armchair throughout a long day and night, sifting through her memories, letting them fall like the elements of a kaleidoscope into a new pattern, one that made more sense to her, where the old one had made no sense to her at all.

  Adopted. She was adopted. By parents who hadn’t wanted her. That had emerged clearly from her “mother’s” diary.

  “There was only the certificate of adoption, which was exclusively in my mother’s name. But as it turned out, the woman I thought was my mother was actually my aunt. I was my mother’s sister’s child. My, um, my biological mother had been a troubled girl, in and out of rehab, until she finally ran away from home in her late teens. It took me several days to piece this information together, mainly from a secret diary my mother—my aunt—had kept, and from newspaper articles about my real mother’s arrests. After my biological mother ran away, the trail went dead. So I hired a private detective. It took her almost six months to track down . . .” Chloe started trembling, looking at Harry and then Mike, then back to Harry.

  Something was happening with Harry. He had barely spoken. His eyes were almost radioactively bright. The skin over his cheekbones was tight, deep furrows bracketed his mouth.

  “Track down where I came from,” she ended in a whisper.

  Emotion grabbed her throat. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. Could only stare at Harry.

  No point mentioning the thousand false starts, disappointments, dead ends. Chloe’s birth mother had been erratic, mentally ill, with an unerring nose for violent, unstable men. Addicted to every substance going. The reports of the woman’s past made Chloe sick, but she kept digging. Because the truth was better than this . . . this nothing. This huge hole in the middle of her chest and of her life.

  Her P.I., Amanda Box, was a young, savvy woman. A former cop who’d quit because her boss had harassed her. She’d sued, won, moved on. And understood Chloe instinctively. Amanda had worked tirelessly for Chloe. It was very possible that without Amanda’s ferocious tenacity, Chloe wouldn’t be here, about to . . .

  She gulped.

  She watched Harry carefully, heart in throat.

  The thing was, she didn’t know Harry, didn’t know anything about him. Had no idea how he would react.

  This could end so badly.

  She felt as if she were holding her heart out to Harry, literally. A small, pumping muscle, quivering with hope, in her outstretched hands. Dripping blood.

  He could slap her down, break that heart, in an instant.

  However much Chloe sternly told herself not to hope, she couldn’t help herself. It must have been all over her face. It was imprinted in every cell of her body. Wild, outrageous hope that this would end well. Hope of a kind and intensity she’d never felt before.

  She hadn’t hoped this hard for anything, not even when the doctors had told her she m
ight never walk again.

  “Did you?” Harry asked, thick ash brown eyebrows drawn over the bridge of his nose. His voice sounded hoarse. “Did you track down where you came from?”

  Chloe nodded, eyes never leaving his. Trying to read something in his light brown eyes and failing.

  “Yes. Um.” Her throat was dry, palms wet. “As I said, it took my investigator six months. The investigator followed my biological mother mainly through her troubles with the law. My—my mother went west, to San Diego, got married to another drug addict who walked out on her when she was pregnant with me. I was the second child. The first was a b-boy. When I was five, m-my mother’s boyfriend killed her, wounded my brother, hurt me. Badly. That was the—the ‘accident.’ ”

  Chloe leaned forward, hands flat on the desk, so filled with nerves she could hardly sit still. Pressure was rising in her chest like steam. Slowly, so anxious she could barely feel her hands, she slid the envelope over to Harry Bolt. The room was utterly silent. The noise of the thick paper envelope crossing the desk sounded loud.

  “It’s all in there. The P.I.’s report, the marriage certificate and the birth certificates of both me and my brother. The death certificates of my mother and her husband, my father. My mother’s husband’s name was Michael.” She swallowed heavily. “Michael Bolt. They ha-had two children.” Chloe was sweating, felt deep distress and this awful, singing hope. “Christine Bolt and—and Harry Bolt. I was born Christine Bolt.” She met the light brown eyes of the man she was now positive was her only living relative. Her throat tightened. It was almost painful speaking the words. “Harry . . . I think you’re my brother.”

  Harry rose suddenly, face pale, jaw working. “Crissy?” he whispered, voice raw.