Page 11 of Fierce

Stalemate

I was home by eight-thirty, but the apartment was dark, and I felt a twinge of alarm.

She’s fifteen,I reminded myself. She’s allowed to go out. But why hadn’t she called me to tell me where she was going? That was our deal.

When I went into the bedroom to change and get ready for a fabulous evening on the couch with my spreadsheet, I discovered differently. I flipped on the light, and Karen moaned and threw a hand over her eyes.

“Oh. Sorry.” I’d already turned it off again, and felt my way in the dark to my side of the bed to pull out the flashlight I’d stashed there. “You not feeling well?”

I crawled across the bed and put the back of my hand to her forehead, and she brushed it irritably away.

“I’m fine. Just a headache.”

“You get your homework done?”

She sighed. “Mostly. I’ll get up early and do the rest.”

I wanted to say something else, but I didn’t. We’d talk in the morning. I changed into PJs with the help of the flashlight and went out again, closing the door softly behind me, to finish that schedule.

When I woke up at six the next morning, sure enough, she was up and sitting at the kitchen table in her school uniform, her mechanical pencil moving methodically down over a sheet of graph paper.

“Hi.” I kissed the top of her head. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t raise her face to mine. “But I’ve got to get this done. First period.” She sighed and put a hand to the side of her head, and I felt another niggle of worry.

“All right,” I said. “Breakfast?”

“Um…can you do a smoothie? I don’t think I can eat anything.”

“Sure.” She was too thin, but then, she’d grown so much this year, no wonder her weight couldn’t keep up. My little sister topped me by six inches already, and I wasn’t sure she’d stopped.

We couldn’t have looked less alike, in fact. Short and tall, fair and dark. I called her my sister, but she was actually my half-sister, nine years my junior. The daughter of my mother and stepfather, both of whom had been gone before I’d turned nineteen. The past five years had been a scramble to keep her. It had been that or foster care, and there was no way I was letting that happen, not to the little girl I’d cared for since her birth almost as if she’d been mine. I couldn’t remember when I didn’t love her, and I couldn’t lose her.

I made her a smoothie, and she flew through her math assignment in a rush and was headed for the subway even before I left. We’d never managed to have that talk, but at least we’d both finished our homework.

At eight-thirty, I’d been back at my desk for a half hour. Martine had come in a few minutes earlier but hadn’t spoken to me yet, and I was making pretty good progress on my stack of work when my phone buzzed. Not Martine; an unfamiliar extension.

“Hope Sinclair,” I answered chirpily.

A male voice greeted me. “This is Josh Logan, Mr. Te Mana’s assistant. He’d like to see you in his office, please.”

“Um…now?”

“Right now.”

“I’ll…be right there.” I hung up, but Martine was at the doorway to my cube, a printout of the schedule in her hand. And if a wrinkle had been allowed to appear on her face, she’d have been frowning.

“When you’re free,” she said, “please come into my office to discuss this.”

Oh, man.My heart skipped a few more beats. “I’ll be in as soon as I’m back,” I told her.

Her beautifully shaped eyebrows rose a fraction. “Oh? Do you have an errand I’m unaware of?”

“I’ve just been called to the—the executive floor,” I prevaricated.

“What?” Her eyes narrowed. “Nobody told me.”

“I don’t know. I just got a call that they needed me up there.”

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