Page 31 of Leading Conviction
Sunrise.
Her eyes drifted to the bags beside the door.
“They really are such good brands…” she reasoned with herself quietly.
It’d been ages since she’d had good supplies to paint with. Ever since she’d been on the run, her cache—if you could call it that—had been dwindling. Plus, she needed an outlet, especially since the meeting with BlackStone was bound to be stressful.Andshe hadn’t painted a good Blue Ridge sunrise in a hot minute…
As she bargained with herself, she tiptoed toward the bags beside the door. From what she could tell when she searched them earlier, she had almost everything she could possibly need. Bright, shiny, and new, begging to be used.
It only took half a second more of Tommy’s snoring for her to make up her mind.
She looped the bags around her wrist before opening the door and closing it behind her.
“First, I’ll make tea. Then I’ll test out the brushes… just a little,” she murmured absentmindedly before reassuring herself one last time. “No big deal. No big deal at all.”
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
The sunrise shone brilliantly that morning as Hannah worked, color toning the canvas so the landscape would have a unifying base coat instead of boring off-white. She lost herself in the gentle susurrus of brush against the slightly coarse surface and the repetitive flick of the wrist. Only the rooftop asphalt steadily heating up underneath her made her realize how much time had passed.
She cursed her one-track mind before packing her easel and power walking across the hot roof.
“This thing really could use some earth tones to keep it from reflecting the sun and making it hot as a desert up here,” she muttered before leaving the canvas and paints inside the roof’s stairwell landing and racing back to the room to wake Tommy.
While he was getting ready, she had a few sips of the orange blossom sweet tea she’d set out to cool. It was the perfect combination of citrus and sweet, so she poured a mason jar on ice for Tommy and stored the rest of the pitcher in the refrigerator. Tommy drank the tea in one gulp before they both ran down to the first floor to meet with Hawk’s team with only seconds to spare.
She’d seriously considered leaving him to binge on TV all day, but they’d just abruptly moved across countries yet again. He should have a sense of autonomy over their situation and the meeting with the team about why Hawk had insisted they move to Ashland County would be a good start to giving power back to both of them. Besides, leaving him all alone in a brand-new place with people he didn’t trust was bound to lead to more psychological damage than their lives had already inflicted.
The BlackStone Securities facility was a modern, windowless industrial warehouse that had been fortified into a castle in desperate need of a pop of color. It was a high-tech fortress, too, if the room they were in now was any indication.
Thewar room—as Hawk called it—was a large conference room with the same staid, industrial aesthetic as the rest of the building. There wasn’t much to it other than a massive conference table and a wall of computer monitors.
At the moment, they showed footage from the security cameras positioned around the facility—though not in her room, Hawk had promised—and other places around town. Wes sat at a desk in front of the screens and the rest of the crowd she’d met the night before—sans Marco, who was apparently working one of his other cases—stood or sat around a round conference table.
Once again, all eyes were on her and Tommy as the team waited for her to fill them in on the missing pieces of the last nine years of all their lives.
“So… from the beginning?”
“Are you sure Tommy needs to be here for this? My girlfriend Naomi could watch him—”
“He stays… for now at least.” Her son frowned at the caveat, and she turned to speak to both him and the team. “Our lives haven’t been easy, but I’ve promised my son he would be as informed as possible. He stays until there’s something I feel like I need to filter for him.”
“Fair enough. We’ll keep it PG-ish as much as we can.” Wes nodded.
“Good luck,” Phoenix huffed.
Wes cut him an exasperated glance before continuing. “Start as far back as you think is necessary.”
Her eyes cut to Hawk’s, searching for guidance. But whatever he was thinking was carefully hidden behind his gaze.
She used to know every curve and line in each expression he had. The new fine wrinkles in his dark-sienna skin helped mask any emotion underneath.
What had he been through to have frown lines deeper than the laughing ones at the corners of his eyes? Would she ever know?
“From the beginning…” She trailed off and glanced at Tommy seated beside her.
His arms were crossed in that almost comically serious way he had. At least, it was comical until she remembered it was their fucked-up situation that’d made him that way.
Did she need to go back to the moment Hawk told her he was choosing all of the people in front of her over her? The cause—eradicating human trafficking across the globe—was something she’d supported in the grand scheme of things. But selfishly, it’d never made sense to her that he’d choose a pipe dream over the real-life love story he’d had in front of him. She’d actually begged him to quit and run away with her instead, something she admittedly wasn’t proud of. She’d known it then just as she did now. If he had quit, her father would’ve ruined him, maybe even court martialed him. He’d said as much when she’d pleaded with him to release Hawk from the MF7 contract.
