Page 6 of Cuckoo (Kindred)

Returning to her place of employment was supposed to be a comfort that would chase off the demons that had plagued her. It was supposed to bring her peace and restore her to contentment. Except as she stood staring at the shielded window she felt like a detached stranger, irrelevant to the company that had given her purpose for so long, and all of her insecurities came rushing back.

The appeal of the job came in her importance, in her value to the corporation through the CEO. Without this job and with the man gone, the last part of Zara Bandini, corporate lackey, had died too. She’d been struggling with the loss of that part of her identity.

“Zara!”

Whirling around, she cast off her thoughts of Grant and the uncertainty of her future to smile at Julian who was striding toward her. “Hello,” she said when he came to a stop in front of her and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m so glad to have you back,” he said, giving her a pat then turning her body toward her office and walking at her side to accompany her inside. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that things are piling up.”

He didn’t. She knew how the backlog mounted if she chose to go home early one night of the week. That she hadn’t been here for a month left her with no illusions. “I’ll delegate as much as I can. The team works efficiently so long as there’s someone driving them.”

“And there’s no one better at that than you,” he said. “If you need anything signed at an executive level, bring it to me. I’ll act as liaison with the board. It’s not that they don’t trust you—”

“Just that I’m beneath them,” Zara said, nodding and turning to her desk, which was just as she’d left it. With events at Sutcliffe’s compound and Grant’s vicious duplicity, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat at that workstation with nothing but CI business on her mind.

“They want to check everything out before we make any executive decisions. We don’t want anything too drastic to change before the new owner comes in.”

That piqued a different kind of interest, but she tried to subdue her vehemence in the face of Julian’s ignorance. “Have you found him? The new… owner?”

“No,” he said. “Mr. McCormack had a brother, but pinning down his location is proving impossible. He had cousins too. I hadn’t realized he had so many living family members, he never talked about any of them.”

Julian was obviously parroting what someone else had said because he had no close relationship with Grant that would afford him the chance to make such an observation. But Grant was known as a private man who kept his personal life away from work. That there were lawyers probing into his history and his family tree would mortify him, as it would Brodie. Picking up on the similarity between the brothers when she so often noticed their differences didn’t help to assuage her turmoil over Grant’s death.

“You never know, it could be that he finds you,” she said and noted that she should talk to Brodie about asserting his authority over CI before any of the lawyers or board members delved too deep into what he and his family had been doing for the last twenty years.

He smiled. “That would certainly save a lot of time and money,” Julian said, squeezing her shoulder. “Do you need anything? If it’s too difficult being here, we can find you somewhere else to work.”

Again, she felt categorized as the grieving widow when that couldn’t be further from the truth. When she’d heard Grant’s body hit the floor, she’d feared it was Brodie and when she turned to see that it wasn’t, her prevailing emotion was relief. Horrified by such a hideous response to the death of a man she’d been close to for half a decade, she struggled with the nature of her own character and how it had developed since the night she met Timothy Sutcliffe. That was the night her life changed.

“This place is home to me,” she said, glancing toward Grant’s office. “There’s work that has to be done and there’s nowhere else I’d rather do it.”

Getting stuck in a broom closet with a laptop wouldn’t ease her confusion about where she fit in without her corporate identity. She had to sit down and wade into the mounds of work that would have been growing since she and Grant last walked out of here.

If she kept her focus, the structure of CI would help her settle again, she was sure of it.

She was wrong. Every day for a week, she’d gone into CI hoping to rediscover the sensation of fluency. Each day she failed. Struggling to find her identity again in such a familiar place thrust her further into the uncertainty of her future that raised questions about who she was.

Her internal conflict spilled from business to personal when one night she drove the Kindred car she’d been using back to her apartment instead of the manor. That she did it on autopilot betrayed how deep into her subconscious this battle had gone.

Zara hadn’t even considered staying at her apartment. She’d just driven away from CI, parked, and turned off the engine. Then when she got out and looked up, she found herself in front of her apartment instead of at the manor.

Because of Leatt and their mission in New York, she’d called to cancel the listing of her residence using the excuse of not being around to pack up and hand over keys etc. Now she wondered if she’d been entirely honest with herself and the others about her need to retain her apartment.

As she’d ended up there anyway, she went upstairs to look around the space she’d fallen in love with at the first viewing and decided to stay that night. While going through old routines, she considered that it might be easier to “find herself” in the place that had once been her private sanctuary. One night in the apartment turned into two, then three, and then four. Without making a conscious decision, she’d found herself living in her own pad again.

It was dark out and the CI building had been pretty much empty when she left, but she was getting through the work, though that was little consolation. Having parked out back, she ascended the stairs and let herself into her apartment. Closing and locking the door, Zara stopped trying to figure out what she should do next.

She hadn’t been eating much, as food hadn’t been high on her priority list. Indecisiveness was a new personality trait for her to grapple with too. Sort of tempted to work out, because she’d picked up the habit as Brodie’s girl, Zara’s feeble treadmill didn’t inspire her. It was nothing on the fully kitted-out functional gym at the manor. So much in her life had changed quickly. She’d suffered losses but gained so much. Sometimes when looking in the mirror, she didn’t recognize who was looking back.

Sloping toward her bedroom, she figured she’d take a shower and make a decision while soaping herself. It had become another habit to check the chair in the corner of her bedroom every time she entered. Usually she dismissed the piece and went on with her business. Today, she stopped short and dropped her purse at the sight of her man filling the seat.

Contending with her own issues had left her with little mental leeway to think about Brodie’s and the Kindred’s. Though if she had, she’d have concluded that it was only a matter of time before Brodie appeared to chastise her for ducking calls and avoiding the manor.

Maybe some subconscious part of herself wanted this, needed him to show up and shake her because she wasn’t having much luck in doing it herself. She always did feel more grounded when he was around. Even if she was still hesitant to share her vulnerabilities with him, at least he was proving that he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?” he asked, putting on the lamp next to the chair.

“I don’t know,” Zara said in response, and the even tone of his deep voice, which ordinarily soothed her, agitated her insides. Maybe it was arousal, maybe she was wary that he’d take one look at her and know she was having the wobble she’d bypassed after losing Art, or maybe she was scared that he’d look through her and see a fraud who didn’t belong with the Kindred after all.

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