A Cry In The Dark

“Look,” she said, standing. Part of her wanted to take his wrist and drag him to the front door, just as he’d led her to the sofa. Another part of her wanted to step closer, put a hand to the wrinkled cotton shirt stretched across his wide shoulders.

She did neither. “I really need to start dinner—”

He swung toward her. “Three days ago Senator Gregory of New York was found dead in his hotel room.”

Danielle went very still. She wasn’t a news junkie, but she’d have to be a hermit to have missed the story that had dominated the media for the past several days. Gregory was a young man, a political golden boy lauded as the next great hope for the country. And he’d been in prime health.

Until he turned up dead.

The hotel room had been locked from the inside, Danielle recalled. They’d had to break down the door to get to him, after he failed to answer the phone. The coroner estimated he’d been dead for several hours before they found him. There were no marks on his body, no signs of trauma or physical distress. The autopsy had revealed nothing.

The man’s heart, strong and healthy, with valves not the least bit blocked, had simply stopped beating.

Her own heart kicked up a notch. “What does that have to do with me?”

Liam scrubbed a hand over his face. “I— Christ, I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. Somehow, she hadn’t figured Liam Brooks, allegedly special agent of the FBI, was a man to admit he didn’t know everything. “Then why are you here?”

He closed the distance between them, making the room shrink with each step he took. She stood fascinated, wondering how he could cover in three steps the same territory that took her at least six.

“A note,” he said roughly. “I received a handwritten note with your name on it.”

Her breath caught. “My name?”

“Your name, and the mention of Chicago.”

And now her son was gone. “I don’t understand.” She’d never met the senator from New York, had no idea how her son’s disappearance could be connected to his alleged murder.

Liam’s expression hardened. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “Neither do I.”

The dark clouds she’d sensed all afternoon rolled closer. She swallowed against a horrible sense of inevitability and reminded herself nothing had changed. This man’s story didn’t change the instructions she’d received, instructions she intended to follow.

“You can see everything is fine,” she said, overriding the voice inside, the one that scraped against her throat, screaming for her to tell him what she knew. Let him help. She’d never been one to play by the rules, after all. She’d always preferred following her own path. Finding a loophole or a workaround.

But with her son’s life on the line, this time she had no choice. “If anything happens, I’ll—”

“Damn it.” He moved so fast she never had a chance to back away. He took her shoulders in his hands, his big, strong, surprisingly gentle hands, and held on tight. “If anything happens, it will already be too late, don’t you understand that?”

She swallowed hard. “I’m sure it’s all just some misunderstanding,” she forced herself to say. She needed him to leave, damn it. “Maybe there are two Danielle Caldwells in Chicago.”

His mouth flattened into a hard line. “You can hope.” He put her Derringer onto the table, then flipped open the wallet with his badge and handed her a small embossed card. “I’m staying at the Manor. Call me if something changes.”

She ran the tip of her index finger along the raised, blue letters of his name. “I will.” The words hurt, because she knew they were not true. She would not call him, would not ask for his help. “Thanks for checking on me,” she said with a casualness at complete odds with the tension arcing between them. Forcing a smile, she led him to the front of the house and opened the door.

He stepped into the hazy shades of early evening. A warm breeze blew in from the lake several miles away. “You’d better go get your son.”

They were simple words. Easy. Casual. And yet they destroyed the tenuous hold on her emotions. “Yes.”

He held her gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, his dark, penetrating eyes lingering on her face, much the way he’d held her hand longer than necessary. “Just be careful,” he said at last, then turned and walked away.

Come back! The words vaulted from deep inside her, but Danielle refused to give them voice. She stood there in the open door of her small home, watching Alex’s neighborhood buddies across the street shoot hoops, as FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks, and any help he might be able to offer, drove away.

She was hiding something. That much Liam knew. She put up a good front, played a good game, but Liam was too well trained to miss the clues. He’d spent years watching people, studying them, analyzing them. He knew how to read between the lines, the lies. And even though Danielle Caldwell pretended valiantly that her life was in perfect order, he’d seen the truth in the way those startling green eyes had glittered, the way her fine-boned hands had trembled.

Liam pushed away from the window of his fourteenth-floor suite at the Stirling Manor and stalked toward the bottle of scotch he’d ordered from room service. He poured the single malt into a tumbler and lifted it to his mouth but didn’t throw the warm liquid back. He wasn’t ready to numb himself. Wasn’t ready to take a short cut and stop thinking.

Wasn’t ready to turn his back on Danielle.

She didn’t trust him, didn’t want his help. She’d made that abundantly clear; he just didn’t understand why. He was one of the good guys, but she’d looked at him with abject horror, as though she’d expected him to suddenly grow horns and do horrible, lewd things to her.

Or her son.

The thought stopped him cold. Her son.

A child changed everything, introduced vulnerabilities sick and sinister and powerful enough to turn even his stomach. When someone became a parent, their personal welfare fell to the background, replaced by that of the child. There was no better way to hurt a parent than to hurt his or her child.

That, Liam knew too well.

Frowning, he picked up the tumbler and tossed back the liquid, savoring the burn clear down to his gut. He was still savoring when his mobile phone rang five minutes later.

He grabbed it from the bed. “Brooks.”

“Tell me you’re not in Chicago.”

The voice was soft but strong, friendly yet concerned, and Liam couldn’t help but smile. Mariah Ingram, fellow FBI agent and longtime friend, didn’t pull any punches. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Liam,” she said in that way of hers, a soft voice that registered like a quick smack to the side of his head.

“Don’t start with me, okay?” He sank down to the bed and leaned against the headboard. It was the first time he’d allowed himself to sit since charging out of the cab from the airport that morning.

Mariah sighed. “Bankston said you took a few days’ leave. But that’s not what you’re doing, is it? You’re not on vacation. You’re chasing shadows again, aren’t you? You’re on another wild-goose chase.”

He stared at the blank television screen, wishing the woman didn’t know him so damn well. They’d worked together off and on over the years, more closely after he’d lost his partner, Paul Lennox, during the investigation into the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the World Bank.

The case had gripped the nation in panic, forcing the Bureau to allocate every available resource to hunting the perpetrator. Other casework, unless there was a clear and present danger, fell to the background. They’d worked tirelessly, sifting through bizarre allegations of conspiracy and treason, corruption that reached into all echelons of the government and, ultimately, allegations of genetic engineering—which had turned out to be true. Gutsy Mariah had plowed in headfirst and proven instrumental in wrapping up the case. In the process, she’d fallen in love and married one of the men at the center of the circus, renowned financier Jake Ingram.

Frowning, Liam reached across the bed to the antique nightstand and pulled open the drawer, retrieved a small plastic bag. Inside, a stack of three postcards taunted him. The first had been in his possession for three long years, since the week before the World Bank case stole headlines and resources. The second had been found stashed in Senator Gregory’s day planner. The third had shown up in Liam’s New York hotel room only the day before, waiting like a pal beneath a little piece of gold-foil-wrapped dark chocolate.

“I received a tip,” he said. The handwriting on the first two was identical, but someone else had penned the third. Someone desperate.

“A tip,” Mariah repeated skeptically.

He fingered the back of the postcard, stared at the image of the obscenely quaint pastoral farmhouse. “He’s back, Mariah.” He didn’t give a damn if no one believed him, if they all thought he was crazy. The truth hummed through him like a chill to the bone. “That bastard is back.” And this time, if it was the last thing Liam did, he was going to stop the man and the syndicate he headed, before more lives were destroyed. “Titan.”

Just saying the name of the reputed but elusive European crime lord turned his stomach.

“You think he’s connected to the senator’s death?”

Liam ran his fingers over the three neatly printed words that had eaten away at him for what seemed like a lifetime.

My deepest sympathy.

He’d never known three little years could drag so slowly.

“Without a doubt.” The fact that the senator’s death mirrored a string of deaths across Europe was indication enough, but the presence of the postcard sealed the deal.

“But why?” Mariah hesitated. “What possible motive could there be?”

Liam shoved the baggie back into the drawer, pushed it closed and stood. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Then what in the world are you doing in Chicago?”

The bottle of scotch called to him, with its sleek lines and smooth edges, smoky amber liquid, but Liam refused to let himself move. Refused to let himself take the easy way out. To be like his father. “There’s a woman—”

“A woman.” Weariness and concern thickened Mariah’s voice. “Do you hear yourself, Lee? Your job is to bring down Titan,” she reminded softly. “Not play protector to every damsel in distress.”

Images of Danielle fired through him, standing in the doorway of her small frame house with her thick hair falling from the barrette behind her head, slumberous eyes drenched with courage and fear and determination, shadows and secrets and pain he understood all too easily, the gun in her shaking hands.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” he gritted out. He didn’t do rescues. His skill set ran toward the other extreme.

Across the phone line, from her beautiful home in Dallas, Mariah sighed. It was a weary sound, that of a friend’s concern. “You can’t bring her back.” The words were soft but they landed hard. “You have to let it go.” She hesitated before adding, “Let her go.”

This time Liam did cross the room and grab the bottle. He poured, not a full glass like his old man had done, over and over and over, but just enough to take away the sting of the truth.

“I have,” he muttered, throwing back the liquid. He waited for the sweet burn, but the liquid streaked through him like acid.

The urge to run, to pound his feet against the pavement and suck in deep gulps of acrid air, like he’d done that long-ago night, burned through him. He had moved on. He’d had no choice. Time never stood still.

But he would never let go, not so long as the loose ends lingered like smoke after a fire, thick and pungent, oppressive. Damning.

He barely even remembered those first few days and weeks and months. He’d existed on autopilot, behaving like a good little agent, when all the while the memories he tried to scrub away followed him like a starving, rabid animal from case to case, town to town. He learned how to answer his supervisors’ questions, how to feed the division shrink exactly what she wanted to hear, but the truth was never far away. It festered like polluted ground water just beneath the surface, making its presence known during the long dark hours of the night when he would go to extreme measures to find sleep, only to see her as she’d been in the predawn darkness of that last morning. His wife, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, with a sleek ivory negligee draping her newly rounded curves and with devastation in her eyes.

Twenty hours later she’d been dead.

Liam slammed the tumbler down on the elegant cherry sidebar and turned his back on escape. Tomorrow morning would not be one of countless sunrises he’d once greeted with bleary eyes and an empty bottle cradled against his chest. He’d waited too long for Titan to return to lose his edge now.

“What about you?” he asked, shoving the conversation in a different direction as he headed toward the window. Subtlety had never been his calling card. “You’re feeling okay?”

Mariah hesitated before letting him off the hook. She knew what he saw in the darkness. She knew the images that invaded his dreams. “Wonderful,” she finally said. “Hungry as a horse and bone tired, but absolutely, gloriously wonderful.”

Liam stared out over the city, the twinkling lights down below, the glimmer of the moon over Lake Michigan, the high, thin clouds whispering across the darkness. “That’s so great,” he said, and meant it. Once he, too, had wanted a family. Not immediately, but someday.

Titan had made sure that would never happen.

“And Jake?” he asked of her husband. Ingram was a good man, loyal and honorable, surprisingly normal considering the strange circumstances of his birth. Genetic engineering. When the first news stories had broken about the birth of superbabies in the 1960s, Liam had laughed them off, much like Elvis sightings. But then facts replaced rumors and reality overrode science fiction. The government really had experimented with altering genetic makeup—and in a handful of cases they had succeeded. Jake Ingram and his siblings were living, breathing proof of that. “You letting him take care of you?”

Mariah laughed. “He’s doing great,” she said. “Busy, as always. He’s out for a run now, trying to clear his head.”

Liam breathed easier, welcoming the benign, normal conversation. “Something up?”

“Just his imagination,” Mariah said wryly. “I think the prospect of becoming a father is starting to spook him. He came home today convinced he’d heard me crying out in pain.”

“You? Cry out?” Not in this lifetime. Not Mariah.

She snorted her agreement. “Exactly.” Then she sobered. “It really rattled him, though. He’s been acting weird all evening. Worried. He even called his brothers and sisters to make sure they were okay, convinced that if it wasn’t me, it must have been one of them.”

“Sounds like that man needs a vacation,” Liam said, then wished he hadn’t. The last time he’d planned a vacation—

He broke the thought off. His last planned vacation no longer mattered. He’d never taken it, never wanted another since, never taken time off from the Bureau.

Until now.

Frowning, he let his thoughts return to the woman with the wild hair and slumberous green eyes, the one who’d angled her chin and insisted everything was fine, even after pulling a gun.

She was so lying.

The wind whipped off the lake and sent sand dancing in a frenzy of motion. High, thin clouds played hide-and-seek with the stars and the nearly full moon. A strawberry moon, she knew. In just a few days the June full moon would ride high in the sky, its rosy hue pulling tides and disturbing sleep, filling emergency rooms and keeping the cops on their toes.

Danielle shivered. She’d been born under a full moon, the cold moon of December. The winter equinox. Full-moon babies are special, she remembered someone telling her once, a voice from a distant past, a life she remembered only in shadowy fragments and horrifying splinters. The life before she and her sister had crouched in a closet, hidden among their mother’s clothes, breathing in her scent of fresh gardenia, while in another room, Deanna Payne screamed and begged, cried, then went horribly silent.

Danielle swallowed hard, forced back the memory. She didn’t want to think of her mother’s murder tonight, didn’t want to think of any death. Not while Alex’s life hung in the balance.

The chill needled deeper, despite the warm, muggy air blowing off Lake Michigan. She wrapped her arms around her middle and glanced at her car, parked in a deserted lot a hundred yards away. Uncertainty stabbed her throat. She’d feel better there, secure in the small front seat, with locked doors on either side of her, much as she’d felt that night in her mother’s closet.

But the caller had been clear.

“Midnight,” the mechanical voice had intoned shortly after sundown. “Come alone, walk to the water’s edge and wait.”

So she stood, and she waited. Beyond, waves swished and crashed against the rocky shore, sending an occasional spray of cool water against the back of her arms and legs. All the while she scanned the beach, watching, waiting, fighting memories that grew stronger with every gust of the wind. A storm was pushing close.

Just like the memory.

“Sailboats!” The moment Danielle released a four-year-old Alex from his child seat, he bolted from the car and ran across the dirty sand. His little legs moved with an uncanny grace, much like his father, carrying him closer to the edge of the lake—and the small drop-off.

“Alex!” Danielle raced after him, her heart pounding so hard it hurt. He was so like his father, in so many ways. Bold, daring, fun-loving. Except Alex was alive, whereas Ty was dead. “Alex, stop!”

Her son kept running, right up until the last minute, when laughing, he skidded to a halt and spun toward her. “Can I have a sailboat, too?”

Breathless, she caught up with him and pulled him to her, hugged his little body to her legs and fought a stinging wave of emotion. “Someday,” she promised thickly, because she knew if it was something Alex wanted, he, like his father, would find a way to make it happen. Even if it proved to be the death of him. “When you’re older.”

He pulled back and gazed up at her through his father’s crystal-blue eyes, uncannily wise for a boy so young. “Mommy, why are you crying?”

The question, pure and innocent and impossible to answer, pierced her heart. “It’s just the sand,” she said, blinking against the moisture, the truth. “I got some in my eyes.”

Alex nodded sagely. “Here,” he said, shoving his little hand into the pockets of his baggy denim shorts and pulling out the pair of Spider-Man sunglasses she’d bought him the week before. “Maybe these will help.”

They had. Much to a laughing Alex’s delight, she’d slipped his small sunglasses onto her face, and the two had settled down for a picnic.

Swallowing hard, Danielle refused to indulge the surge of emotion. Now was not the time for memories. Now was not the time to fall apart. She had to be strong now, for Alex, even if that meant going against every instinct she had and standing alone on the beach in the middle of the night. The clouds had grown thicker, blotting out much of the moon’s gauzy light. If she turned, she knew she would no longer see it playing on the surface of the lake.

But she didn’t turn, wasn’t about to look away, not for one fraction of one second. Her brother thrived on wide-open spaces, couldn’t stand being confined. But Dani—

She heard it then, just a soft sound, a slight disturbance to the cadence of the warm breeze. Footsteps.

Finally.

Her heart slammed hard against her ribs. Once, she’d hidden from her nightmares. Once, she’d run from her fears. But now she didn’t hesitate. She slid a hand to the gun at the small of her back and pivoted to her left.

Nothing. Just shadows shimmying across the sand and rock that locals called a beach.

“Who’s there?” She stripped every ounce of emotion, every ounce of fear, from her voice, but not her body. Jeremy had taught her how to use both.

The wind whipped up, sending sand and whispery raindrops against her face. She blinked against the sting but didn’t look away. “I did what you asked, damn it.” She squinted, seeing nothing but sensing the presence. Shaking, she stepped toward it. “What do you want with me?”

She realized her mistake too late.

“Well, well, well,” came a low voice from behind her.

She spun, but he was too close, too fast. He caught her before she could lift the gun, knocked it from her hands. She lunged after it, but his foot came down on the Derringer before she could make contact. Panic backed up in her throat. She tried to dance out of his way, but before she could move, before her heart could so much as beat, he snagged her wrist and dragged her toward him.

For a cruel moment time stood still. The gently falling rain, the gusty wind, the fury of the waves against the shore all faded into a void of nothingness. She struggled to breathe, to think, to formulate a plan, but intuitively she knew this was not a man she could outrun.

“Where is he?” she bit out with a bravado she didn’t come close to feeling. Refusing to cower, she forced herself to look up and felt the breath leave her lungs on a painful rush.

A grim smile curved FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks’s mouth. “Is this how you greet everyone, Danielle, or is it just me?”

Chapter 3

No. Denial screamed through her. Her throat knotted. Her stomach clenched. Danielle stared up at him, his big body blotting out the lingering light of the moon, reducing the world, the night, the beach, to just the two of them. One man. One woman.

She’d forgotten how tall he was. Or maybe, safe and secure inside the four walls of her house, she hadn’t realized the threat. But here on the beach, with the dark lake gaping on one side and the deserted strip of Lakeshore Drive stretching along the other, over a hundred yards away, awareness hit like a swift blow to the gut. Liam Brooks, or whoever he was, had taken her son.

Her mistake burned.

This man had been in her house. She’d had him in her grasp, but instead of leveraging her advantage, she’d let him disarm her. She hadn’t even put up a fight when he’d put his hands to her body. She’d let him touch her, hold her hand. Worse, far worse, she’d let the warmth of his body seep into hers, let it dull her senses, her defenses, as she’d wondered for a few crazy minutes what it would feel like to lean closer, to accept his lies as truth and—

“I’m here,” she said, lifting her chin. The wind whipped harder, blowing long strands of tangled dark hair into her face. She made no move to push them back. “I’m here just like you instructed. Now where the hell is he?”

The man from the hotel, the one who’d come to her house, who’d touched her and lied to her, who claimed to be with the FBI but who knew things there was no way he could know, lifted a hand and eased the hair behind her ear. “It’s your little boy, isn’t it? He’s in trouble. Someone’s taken him.”

It was the gentleness that got her. It was the gentleness that pushed her over the edge. “Is this how you get your kicks?” she asked hoarsely. “By playing twisted mind games?”

Through the darkness, she would have sworn the hard lines of his face gathered into a wince. “I’m not playing, Danielle.”

The words, so soft and grave and ominous, chilled. “Then what do you want?” The question ripped out of her, followed by a sobering truth. She would do anything—anything—to bring her son home safe and sound. There was no price she wouldn’t pay. No sacrifice too great. Nothing she could lose that mattered more than Alex.

But Liam—if that was really his name—said nothing. He just looked down at her through those dark, somber eyes of his.

“Is it me?” she asked, ripping at the buttons of her shirt. “Do you want me? Because you can have me, right here and right now.”