Page 24 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“Buy you a guy for your birthday?” Nola echoed with a snort. Then she gasped. “Oh God, Jack, don’t tell me you hooked up with some guy you . . . you thought I . . .”
At Jack’s answering silence, Nola began to laugh. “You did! You so did! I need details, right now!”
Do you want something to remember me by? Hawk, beautiful and coy, holding up the camera. Jack’s camera.
Her gaze flashed to the duffel bag, discarded by the front door. “No, I’ve gotta call you back.”
Jack hung up before Nola could reply. She launched herself across the room, fell to her knees, and ripped open the bag, panting with panic.
The Canon was there, in its hard leather case.
The memory card, however, wasn’t.
As she stared down the empty slot in the side of the camera, horror—cold, slimy, and total, like being submerged in a tank of eels—washed over Jack. She broke out in a sweat. Her hands began to shake. Her heart started to race as if she’d been injected with adrenaline.
Set up. Jesus Christ, I’ve been set up!
But by who? And why? She sagged against the wall, hardly feeling the cold plaster against her bare shoulders, and stared down at the Canon in her hands.
She knew she’d made enemies over the years; she’d never shied away from controversy in her career. It could be a politician, angry about one of her scathing op-ed pieces, or one of the many military leaders she’d met during an assignment, and pissed off with her attitude or refusal to listen to orders. It could be a colleague; she knew she wasn’t particularly liked among her peers, for a whole host of reasons, which mainly boiled down to her inability to trust anyone.
It could even be one of the more vocal critics of her anti-Shifter article. Not everyone was on board with the idea that Shifters were mankind’s enemy.
Who was it who’d warned her someone might try to retaliate if she took such a strong stance against the newly discovered threat of Shifters? Who had said to her, “You’re just putting a big bull’s-eye on your back, missy. You see what those crazy animal rights activists do to celebrities who wear fur coats—what they’ll do to you will probably be a lot worse than throwing some red paint.”
It came to her in a blinding flash: old Mrs. Weingarden on the third floor. They’d ridden up the elevator together just after the article had come out a few months back, and the elderly woman had clucked her tongue and shaken her head, wondering why Jack needed to get on a soap box and rant and rave about patriotism and the American way of life. “Warmongering” she’d called it.
Jack understood in a bitter, wish-it-wasn’t-so way that the urge to fly her patriotic flag was tied to her loyalty to her father. He was her only remaining parent, her only remaining link to the time before she was the hollow shell she was now. He’d paid for the best therapists, and put her in private schools, and got her involved in sports, though none of it served his hoped-for purpose of making her forget what had happened.
But he’d tried. He’d tried everything he could. So she did her damndest to make him proud of her, even though she knew it was only a futile attempt to remake a past that had died long ago, and taken her heart with it.
Denial set in.
Jack began to rummage frantically through the duffel, tossing out clothes, feeling all around the bottom, scavenging through the smaller bag of toothpaste and tampons and ChapStick, ripping the whole thing apart.
Finally, the bag was empty. There was no memory card.
She sat staring in shock into the gaping opening. It can’t be. This can’t be happening.
In response to her voice in her head came her mother’s, sneering and quite decidedly filled with glee.
Serves you right. You little whore.
Jack shook her head, shoved away from the wall, jumped to her feet. “Think. Just think,” she said, beginning to pace. “When those pictures get out—because of course they’re going to get out, don’t kid yourself—what am I going to say? How can I spin this? I was drunk? Taken advantage of?”
She paused, considering it. Remembering the total abandon with which she’d participated in the best sex of her life, the brazen way she’d posed, clearly enjoying herself, clearly lucid, she began pacing anew. “Okay, you obviously weren’t taken advantage of. You just had a lapse in judgment. Stress of the job, that sort of thing. I mean, I was shot at yesterday! Of course I wasn’t in my right mind! This kind of stress reaction happens to men all the time, right?”
Even to her own ears, this argument sounded lame. Women were held to a different sexual standard than men, that was the harsh reality. It didn’t matter that she was single and had every right to sleep with whomever she wanted; the press would crucify her. Her judgment, morals, and entire character would be excoriated. A sexy romp with a total stranger while on assignment in a foreign country, with graphic pictorial evidence that she loved every minute of it to boot?
She would be fired. Her career would be over. She would lose everything she’d worked for so long to build. If she were lucky, in six months she’d be working at a fast-food drive-through.
If she were lucky, in a few years everyone would have forgotten that the woman who pushed the President’s anti-Shifter agenda through Congress was a total slut.
Jack’s gaze fell on her laptop. Her heart throbbed inside her chest.
She crawled on her knees to the computer, flipped it open, and turned it on. With a whir it was awake, awaiting her command. With trembling hands, anticipating the worst, she Googled her name.
Nothing new. No headline news, no breaking scandal.
