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“I’ll walk you up,” he said abruptly.
Yikes. She didn’t want him to leave, but neither did she want him in her apartment. He was so big and bloodstained and unfathomable. He could contaminate her nest. Infect it with danger, uncertainty.
Aw, hell, the damage was done. And she couldn’t refuse him.
“OK,” she whispered, but he was already out the door and circling the truck, bundling her out onto her shaky legs.
She wouldn’t have made it up the staircase, anyway. His arm clamped around her waist and took most of her weight off her feet.
She had a blank moment as she stood there, staring at the locked door. Keys. Her purse. He’d just explained that they were light years away, in another universe.
“I take it you don’t have a spare under a plant?” Mr. Big said.
She shook her head. “My landlady lives downstairs,” she said. “But I can’t…” She looked down at her disreputable self.
“No,” he agreed. “You can’t.” He bent down, peered at the lock, then fished for a pocketknife and pried a narrow hooked thing out of it.
In a couple of minutes, the door swung open. The familiar scent of vanilla and rose potpourri wafted out. She stumbled forward.
Mr. Big grabbed her arm, pulled her back. “Me first. Just in case.”
His gun appeared in his hand. Her eyes skittered away from it as he slunk into the dimness inside. It didn’t take him long. Her place was small. He came back, waved her in. She fumbled for the light switch.
He clashed with her place. He looked so dense and vivid, prowling around among the light colors, the sheer curtains. Her place looked even smaller with a huge, shaggy, slit-eyed, bloodstained guy stalking through it clutching a gun.
Twitching curtains aside, squinting out windows, he stared at everything as if he expected something to jump out and bite him. He ran his fingers over a fuzzy afghan that was draped over the sofa. Poked a squishy pillow, prodded the floppy silk flowers that dangled off a shelf. He peered at her bookshelf, Carrie’s prints, Josh’s weird, abstract art photography. And the family photo gallery over the couch.
“That the guy?”
He’d found the one of Justin that she hadn’t gotten around to ditching yet. “Yes. How did you know?”
He shrugged. “He looks like an asshole. You should take it down.” He removed it from the shelf and handed it to her. Becca tossed it into a wastebasket, frame and all. Nothing to do but agree with him.
Her life before Nick seemed like something that had happened a long, long time ago. She was embarrassed, when he stared up at the stuffed animals on the shelf, the battered ones Carrie and Josh had played with when they were tiny. He probably thought she collected them. Babyish, but people did it.
He made no move to go. She pondered the options. There were no social rules for what had happened. Should she offer him a drink, as if he’d just brought her home from a date? Should she, what, make him coffee?
This was her last chance, though, to ask the question that would haunt her forever if she didn’t. Even though she was afraid of the answer.
She clutched the edge of the table for support, and swallowed several times. “You said, um, that lives depended on this operation. That you’d traded them for mine.”
His eyes narrowed. “Yeah,” he said, warily.
She took a deep breath. “Whose?”
He was silent for so long, she’d concluded that he wasn’t going to answer at all. She was about to pass out from holding her breath.
“I was overstating it,” he said. “She’s probably already dead.”
Her eyes popped open. Something twisted, knife-sharp, in her chest. “She?” she whispered.
His jaw tightened. A muscle twitched. “A little girl,” he said. “Abducted last year. From Boryspil, in the Ukraine. Her father was an undercover cop. He was helping me. Someone ratted him out. He was killed. I don’t know where the security leak was. But I know it was my fault.”
Her throat tightened, started burning. She waited for more.
His shoulders lifted. “There’s no reason to think she’s still alive,” he said. “But I promised her mother…I was hoping I could tell Sonia something. Put an end to the wondering. I won’t be able to do that now. But fuck it. I probably wouldn’t have been able to anyway.”
She pressed her lips together, hard.
