He followed her through a security room filled with cutting edge surveillance equipment and noticed that most of it was deactivated. Snarls of disconnected electrical wire were everywhere.
At the top of the stairs, he looked around, fascinated. Tamar’s living space was exactly as he would have expected. Minimalist, severe, and yet subtly opulent. The lines were clean, the grain in the blond wood paneling swirled voluptuously. There were incredible vistas outside each of the huge triangular windows. He had never seen it, but he felt as if he recognized it. Like her, it was uncompromising, stark, and beautiful.
He passed a room crowded with an uncharacteristic clutter of color: toys, books, mobiles, pictures. A small form hurled itself out the door and smacked into his legs.
“Val! Val!” Rachel crowed, clutching at his thigh.
He was gratified at the warmth of her welcome, and the sudden upwelling of tenderness he felt for the little girl took him by surprise. He picked her up and hid his face against her curly head for a few seconds, until the shaky, misty feeling passed. “Hello, little sweet,” he whispered.
A stocky older woman with a black and white bun stopped at the threshold, staring at him with wide-eyed curiosity. Had to be Rosalia.
“Rachel and I are old friends, Senhora,” he explained in Portuguese, kissing the top of Rachel’s head.
Rosalia was charmed. “Ah! So you are this Val that they tell me about, eh?” She shot Margot a delighted look and winked broadly. “Good, then! Go up and talk to her. She is too sad. She needs cheering up from a handsome young man like you.”
That remained to be seen, he reflected bleakly. He passed Rachel to Rosalia, soothing her protests with a promise to come back and play later. A promise he desperately hoped he would be able to keep.
“Come on. I’ll show you the way,” Margot said.
He followed Margot down the hallway, leaving Rachel’s loud squawks of disapproval behind. They climbed up a spiral staircase. The cells in his body were shaking apart in fear and dread, and he spoke just to distract himself from the feeling. “How has she been?”
Margo glanced back over her shoulder. “Hmm. Not great, in my book. You’d better ask her yourself. We’ve been taking turns, parking our butts here to keep an eye on her, and she hasn’t had the energy to kick us out yet. I think she’s working up to it, though.” Margot stopped in front of a carved wooden door, and gave him a speculative look over the flame-colored curls on her daughter’s head.
“Don’t startle her if you can help it,” she advised. “She’s jumpy these days. Not sleeping much.”
“You mean, she might kill me by mistake?”
She smiled as she pulled open the door. “You said it, not me.”
Tamar was wearing headphones and bending over a jeweler’s bench, her back to them. She wore drawstring pants of undyed linen that hung low over her hips and a shrunken black T-shirt that did not cover her navel or conceal the deep, feminine curve of her hips. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung in a thick, loose mahogany braid.
She was lost in her work, swaying sinuously to music only she could hear. So thin. Her arms, so narrow. There were livid surgical scars on her right arm. The McClouds had told him about the surgeries to repair torn, mangled tissues, ripped tendons.
He stared at the scars, tight-lipped. His throat ached.
Margot cleared her throat. “I guess I’ll just leave you, then. You’ll want to talk to her in private, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it’s best,” he said. “That way, we don’t both have to die.”
Margot choked on a short burst of laughter. “Good luck.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
Val just stared. After weeks, his eyes were starved for the sight of her. Every perfect detail. The upright straightness of her back, the creamy texture of her skin, the perfect lines of her cheekbone, the way her plain work clothes draped and clung to her graceful curves.
He felt helpless, lost. He had no plan of action, just hunger, and incoherent longing. He could think of no way to get her attention without giving her an unpleasant adrenaline jolt, so he elected to wait. She had a sixth sense, just as he did. She would feel his gaze soon enough and turn around.
And he would know if life held any hope of happiness for him.
No. It was not a matter of hope, he told himself, resolute. It was a battle of wills. She could accept his love, or she could kill him. Killing him was the only way she would be able to get him out of her hair. Those were her options. It was very simple.
He was not leaving this place unsatisfied.
How could a man declare love for a thing like yourself? Men don’t love women like you. They use them and discard them, like the trash that they are.
Tam tuned the insidious ghostly voice out with effort. Fuck off, Novak, she whispered silently. You’re dead. You lost the game.
Evil old bastard. At it again. Chipping away at her, from the inside. None of it is true, she reminded herself. Don’t be fooled. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let him win. He would not drag her down with him now, when she was home free.
On the outside, anyway. On the inside, she was a ragged mess.
She dragged her attention back to the music blasting into her headphones and focused on the bracelet she was working on. The evil, whispering voice was backing off with time, but oh, so slightly and oh, so slowly. Every time she spaced out and stared blankly into space, which was often, Novak’s raspy voice was there to fill the gap, whispering his constant stream of cruelty and filth.
Damn. She had to get over this. Rachel was traumatized, too, and Tam had to be strong for her. She could not afford to whine and mope.
But oh, God, it was hard. She weighed two tons. She felt so tired, so sad and empty. The fucked-up arm and the near-lethal dose of poison on top of it all had wiped her out. So did pining for Val. Not twenty seconds passed that she was not thinking of him, dreaming of him. Lusting for him, too, now that the worst of the poison had worked itself out of her system. She was starting to feel almost human again, even a little bit female, which meant that erotic dreams of him had begun to torment her, along with the hideous nightmares. She’d be hard put to say which type of dream was the most upsetting.
He had not called or texted or e-mailed. Granted, neither had she. She’d grabbed Rachel and run, over oceans and continents, as soon as she’d been capable of standing. Well before the doctors had wanted to let her go.
She could not bear to see him. She’d been in overload. Poisoned, polluted, sickened by everything, herself included. It had overcome her. The poison she’d swallowed, being slimed by Georg, having Rachel taken, threatened. The mental poison that Novak had force-fed her. Those videos, playing and playing in her head.
And that last awful conversation she’d had with Val. He, spitting with rage and betrayal, handcuffed to the bed. She, spraying a drug into his face so she could run off and murder someone.
All things considered, they had issues.
She couldn’t bear the thought of him looking at her the way she felt. She flinched from being seen by anyone. It hurt, it burned. The only reason she permitted it at all was for Rachel’s sake.
That was why she allowed the McCloud contingent to hang out here, always underfoot and driving her slowly but surely bugfuck. So that Rachel would have one more healthy, sane point of reference, besides the long-suffering Rosalia. She could not trust herself to be one. On the contrary.
She’d thought about contacting Val by e-mail, with the electronic distance giving her a little emotional protection. Had even gone so far as to pull up the Capriccio Consulting Web site contact page on