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“Yes, with an ‘e,’ is that right? I’m not from New York.”
“Shocked face.”
The woman smiled, then looked down. “Oh, would you look at that?”
Instinctively Jayla looked down, bent over a little.
It hit her like a hammer. Maybe it was a hammer. Pain exploded, the world spun, going red at the edges. She tried to cry out, but only managed a moan.
Something – someone – shoved her, yanked her. She fell hard, hard enough to steal what little breath she had still in her lungs.
“I’ve got her, honey!” The twangy voice came as though through a tunnel, a tunnel flooded with water. “Let’s go, I’ve got her. Told you to let me pick ’em, Darryl. I’ve got a knack.”
Somebody laughed. Even as she whimpered, tried to turn over, the hammer struck again, and knocked her into the dark.
8
Eve woke to the familiar. The scent of coffee, Roarke, already dressed in one of his master-of-the-business-universe suits on the sofa in the sitting area working on his PPC as the screen, on mute, scrolled with financial data she’d never understand. And the cat sprawled over the top of the sofa like some feline potentate.
Really, it didn’t get much better.
She lay still a moment, taking it all in – and still he sensed she’d waked as his gaze shifted to hers.
“Good morning.”
“It feels like one,” she decided.
She pushed up as nothing beckoned more alluringly that the scent of coffee. Since he’d gone for a pot, she walked over, poured an oversized mug, and gave herself that special glory of the first morning sip.
“How many countries and/or off-planet stations have you talked to this morning?” she wondered.
“Only Italy and Olympus. It’s a slow day.”
“In your world,” she countered as it was barely six a.m. “Shower,” she declared, and took her coffee with her.
Next to coffee, real coffee, pulsing jets and raining showers of steaming hot water equaled the finest start to any morning. There were days she didn’t think twice about it – such things had become routine. And other days she remembered, with brutal clarity, the cold, the hunger, the dark spaces, the painfully bright ones.
She had a flash of the room in Dallas – red light from the sex club blinking, the frigid cold because the temperature gauge was broken, the hunger gnawing like a rat in her belly fighting with the avid fear her father would come back drunk, but not drunk enough, and hurt her again.
She’d been eight, with hunger, fear and pain her constant companions.
Why should she think of that now, on a good morning with hot water flooding all over her and the clean, faintly green scent of the shower gel rising up with the steam?
She’d dreamed, Eve realized. No, not her old nightmare, not that horrible night she’d killed Richard Troy as he’d raped her. But he’d been in there, somewhere.
Her first instinct was to dismiss it – she couldn’t claim to be over the years of trauma, but she’d learned how to cope with it, to put it in its place and move on. But dismissing it gave it – him – too much power, and might subvert whatever her subconscious had worked on while she slept.
So she let her mind drift, let her thoughts play back as she stepped from the shower into the drying tube. And while the warm air blew around her, she heard music.
The cello. He’d played the cello. A requiem, Dorian Kuper had called it as he sat, wearing black tie, teasing mournful notes out of the instrument with the bow and his skilled fingers.
A requiem for all.
She’d seen the faces of the dead, sitting quietly in the audience of what had been the opera house, all dripping, glittering chandeliers and gilt. With each of the dead spotlighted in icy-blue light.
See me. Stand for me.
So many of them, she’d thought. Those known victims, the others she believed had been.
