Page 6 of Guilty as Sin
Not identical, at least not in their souls. Mirror images. Two halves of the same person. And maybe, just maybe… she needed that other half.
Finally, when she thought Lily never would, her twin said, “All right,” and smiled. Wide and reckless, so she wasn’t the cautious Lily of recent years. So she was the loving-too-hard, feeling-too-deep Lily of their childhood. The Lily Paige loved best of all. “All right. What the hell.”
Paige jumped up, and Lily did, too. Paige held out her champagne glass, Lily touched it with her own, and the musicaltingrang out and reverberated, clear and deep. Like a chime. Like a vortex.
“To the two of us,” Lily said, and Paige looked into her twin’s eyes and said it back.
“To the two of us.”
Jace woke up sweating. He woke up fast. In a single movement, he began to roll, pulled open a drawer, reached for the Glock, and landed in a crouch between the bed and the wall even as he racked the slide.
A hard listen for the sound of breathing, a sniff of the air, then a whine from Tobias confirmed it. He was naked. Alone in the dark.
No threat here. Nothing but the nightmare.
The remnants of the dream lay draped across his vision even now like a black shroud he couldn’t claw away. Andy O’Connor on the ground, sucking air, his normally ruddy face bleached of color, his legs sprawling at an unnatural angle, the bright arterial blood soaking into the khaki-colored silt faster than Jace could work.
In the dream, as in life, Jace had fastened the tourniquet high on Andy’s upper thigh and heard thepop-pop-popof small arms fire on the other side of mud walls that were nothing like shelter and didn’t have a hope in hell of stopping those rounds. Around him, the superheated air was filled with shouts, unseen boots pounding dirt, and the distinctive shake and explosion that was a grenade. Hurled by an Afghan or an Aussie, he couldn’t tell. He worked on, his hands and arms soaked nearly to the elbow in Andy’s blood, and didn’t think about what was headed toward them.Do what’s in front of you. Focus on now.
Fifteen more seconds. Get the tourniquet in place, the wounds packed, and get back in there. Ambushed was a long way from dead. Support was on the way.
“Bad,” Andy gasped. “It’s bad. Tell Cass… tell her…” His hand was on Jace’s arm, gripping hard, his green eyes shining like glass.
“You tell her, mate,” Jace said. The tourniquet was on, but Andy’s other leg was bleeding as well, and a choked scream from the next squatty, dirt-colored house told him he had to get over there. “Hang on and tell her yourself.”
“Tell her,” Andy said, his voice a thread. “Tell her I’m sorry. The baby—”
The flash. The pressure wave, and Jace was falling back. Tumbling again and again, the dust choking him, his hands, sticky with blood, reaching for his weapon and grabbing air.
Tobias brought him out of it. The soft sound of his breathing as he rounded the bed, a press of his warm shoulder against Jace’s thigh, and another whine, more urgent this time.
“No worries, mate,” Jace said. “She’ll be right.”Breathe in. Breathe out.
Darkness around him.Bedroom. Cabin. Montana.He stood up, ejected the magazine from the Glock, cleared the chamber, inserted the magazine again, and placed the weapon in the drawer of the bedside table again, ready for use. Every motion, even done in the dark, deliberate and familiar, practiced tens of thousands of times.Habit. Control.
Afterwards, he swung his arms in giant circles, rolled his head on his neck, and bounced on his heels. Breaking the cycle, unsticking his stuck mind, getting off the hamster wheel. All the tricks.
Someday, he might crack again, but it wasn’t going to be today. Today, he could get out.
He wanted a drink. He didn’t go get one. Instead, he turned on the bedside light, grabbed a pair of track pants and a flannel shirt from the closet, and headed down from the loft and into the log cabin’s single room with Tobias padding silently behind him, a brown ghost. Or a ghost fighter. Jace opened the door of the bottle-green iron stove, concentrating on the resistance of the heavy iron, the smell of clean wood smoke, the frigid bite of the night air, on everything that said he was here and not there. He thrust a couple more logs into the embers, stabbed them with a poker and watched the yellow flame flicker and grow, then shut the stove door and stayed there, crouched on the stone hearth, its surface icy under his bare feet, his hand stroking Tobias’s silky ear.
Touch. Smell. Hearing. Sight. Checking in on his senses, one by one. Rhythmic movement, and a reminder. The dreams were his old reality. They weren’t his life.
“And, yeah,” he told Tobias. “We both know why. That bloody letter.”
That was his trigger every time: the unseen enemy, just out of sight, waiting for the ambush. No matter how prepared you were, reaction was slower than action. And when they caught you at a disadvantage? Good luck catching up.
He’d been doing so well until today. The first letter hadn’t spooked him much. He’d called the mysterious number and had heard nothing but ringing, and when he’d received nothing else from his new—reader? fan? creep?, he’d put it out of his head. He’d cleaned the cabin, cooked a huge pot of stew, and had gone to the gym every day, because whatever he’d told Rafe, he knew he needed to keep pushing, to keep moving forward. He’d thought about getting his hair cut and hadn’t done it. He’d called his mum and dad, and when they’d asked when he was coming for a visit, he’d said, “Soon.” It would be turning winter in Brisbane, and he’d just shaken the snow of winter off his boots. He was ready for summer. Besides, his mum would see too much and say something, and his dad would say nothing, but he’d see, too.
On Friday afternoon, he’d been splitting wood—which sounded unnecessary in May until you lived in the Montana Rockies—and thinking about shaving, which made him think about how much damage it was possible to do to somebody with a multiblade razor. Probably not that much, other than scraping the hell out of them. Just another way technology made life tougher on thriller writers. Cell phones and razors.
It would have to be an old-fashioned single-blade, which was more of a luxury item these days, a throwback. Which Sawyer wouldn’t use. Sawyer was the anti-James Bond.
How about if the villain were the metrosexual type and used a single-blade? Made of platinum? That could work.
He hauled a crudely cut section of wood onto the block, steadied it, raised the axe overhead, and brought it down with measured force.
Crack.The pieces fell from the block, and he hauled up another section.
