Page 55 of Thorn

Honey stepped forward. “What is it?”

Thorn had to step to the end of the bed to make room for his teammate. They were tightly packed into the tiny space.

“Here are the scars that Lynx was telling us about. Lynx said the caregiver had mentioned burn scars on her feet. Roxanne seemed to believe they were from the accident that killed Juliette’s mother. What do they look like to you?”

Honey pulled a flashlight from his pocket to shine onto the silver marks that curled from the pads of her feet, up her ankles and over the tops.

Honey’s face turned to stone.

“Torture?” Thorn asked.

“Yeah,” Honey said softly. “I’d say that’s right.”

To the RN in Northern Virginia, an accident was probably a fine explanation for these scars. But Thorn had seen this too many times to be mistaken. Too many men who fought next to him had survived torture sessions with their feet that looked just like this with methodic burn stripes. But he’d never seen it outside of the Middle East.

Thorn wondered if the amnesia Juliette experienced following her brain surgery wasn’t the kindest thing that could have happened. Torture was a hell of a burden to carry through life.

Thorn saw that she had a nightgown hanging on the towel rack. He pulled it down and dressed her in it. He laid a cool cloth over her head and tucked the sheet and blankets up under her chin. It was the most he could do when she was all but passed out.

He needed IVs.

She needed lab work.

She needed a damned hospital.

But here they were and here they’d stay.

Thorn’s gut said this was a big mistake.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Thorn

Paris, France

Sunday, Eleven Hundred Hours.

“Zoe, hey, sweet heart,” Gage said.

The team huddled uncomfortably around the monitor, which rested on the narrow desk top in Juliette’s room. There was nowhere for them to sit, even on the floor. Crammed into the tight space, they had tried to angle the monitor so that they could see Zoe, Gage’s fiancée, very soon to be wife, talk them through the results of the blood tests she’d conducted. They whispered into their communications systems so as not to disturb Juliette or have her overhear what they were saying.

“Hi, Gage.” Zoe offered up her gentle smile. “Hi, Thorn. Hey Honey.” She wiggled her fingers at them. She was sitting at Nutsbe’s desk in the Panther Force war room, talking over the encrypted computer connection.

“We really appreciate you doing this for us,” Honey said. “I hope it didn’t put you in a complicated position with security issues.”

“It’s fine,” she said. Her long black hair was pulled back in a bun, and she wore black rimmed nerd-girl glasses on a delicately featured face. “I was able to get a quick turn around on my request to let you see what information I pulled up.”

“Did you share that with the CIA as well?” Gage asked.

As she turned around to look at Nutsbe, Thorn saw confusion on her face.

Nutsbe leaned down. “I’m sure that our reports will be shared with the CIA.”

Nutsbe had probably come to the same conclusion as their field team, the access to support here in Paris and in Brussels was provided by CIA. It was very likely that they were also the signatory clients. It was really the only group that made any sense.

“So anyway.” Zoe turned and picked up some papers and shuffled them into her lap. “I have the results. As you know, I can’t compare two different people’s blood samples in my apparatus. But I can send the two separate samples into the BIOMIST system. Once I did that, I tasked the computer to find any individuals that were affiliated with David Dubois, and I got a subset of zero. There was no one else in my system, including Juliette DuBois, that had a familial blood marker match.”

“Juliette isn’t his biological daughter,” Gage said.

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