She shouldn’t have come outside, Abigail thought. Her legs didn’t feel steady, and her stomach had begun to churn. She wished she could sit, wished she couldn’t—still—see and hear and feel it all so clearly.
“That’s enough now,” Brooks murmured. “Let’s get you back inside.”
“Ilya came. He’d kissed me, my first. He was so beautiful, and he’d kissed me and made me feel like I was real. I don’t think I’d ever felt quite real. Except when I’d bought the jeans and the hoodie, then when I dyed my hair. Then when Ilya Volkov kissed me.
“That’s not relevant.”
“Yes, it is.”
“He came in, and he was angry. Not that his cousin had been murdered, but because Korotkii was supposed to assassinate Alexi the next night. And I knew the man, the firstman who’d kissed me, would kill me. He knew I was there, and they’d find me and kill me. He cursed Alexi, he kicked him, and kicked him. He was already dead, but Ilya was so angry, he kicked him.
“I saw that in Justin Blake last night. I saw what I saw in Ilya in him. It’s more terrifying than any weapon.”
She smelled her garden now, just a hint of it—spice and sweet—on the air. It comforted as much as Brooks’s arm around her.
“So I ran. I’d taken off my new shoes, but I didn’t think of that. I ran without paying attention to where. Just blind terror, running, sure they’d catch me and kill me because I’d defied my mother, done what I wanted to do, and Julie was dead. She was just eighteen.”
“All right. It’s all right now.”
“It’s not all right, and not all. It’s not nearly all. I fell, and my purse flew out of my hand. I didn’t even know I still had it. My phone was in my purse. I called the police. They came, the police, and found me. I told them what happened. I talked to two detectives. They were kind to me, Detectives Griffith and Riley. They helped me.”
“Okay, give me your keys.”
“My keys?”
“We’ll go inside now. I need your keys.”
She fished them out, handed them to him. “They took me to a house, a safe house. They stayed with me, and then John came. Deputy U.S. Marshal John Barrow, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Theresa Norton. You’re like him, like John. Patient, insightful and kind.”
“We’re going to sit down. I’m going to start a fire, make you some tea.”
“It’s too late in the season for a fire.”
“I want a fire. Okay?”
“Of course.” She sat obediently. “I feel a little strange.”
“Just sit there, rest a little till I’m done.”
“They called my mother. She came back. She didn’t want me to testify, or to stay in the safe house the marshals had waiting, or to go into witness protection.”
“She was worried about you,” Brooks said, as he set the kindling.
“No. She wanted me to start the summer project, to go back to Harvard, to be the youngest neurosurgeon ever on staff at Chicago’s Silva Memorial Hospital. I was ruining her agenda, and she’d gone to so much time and effort. When I wouldn’t go with her, she walked out, as she had the day it all began. I’ve never spoken to her again.”
Brooks sat back on his heels. “She doesn’t deserve a word, not one word from you.” He struck a match to the paper he’d crumbled, watched it flame up, catch the kindling. He felt like that, he realized, ready to flash and burn. That was the last thing she needed.
“I’m going to make that tea. Just rest for a few minutes.”
“I want to tell you all of it.”
“You will, but you take a break now.”
“Are you going to call the marshals? The FBI?”
“Abigail.” He took her face in his hands. “I’m going to make you tea. Trust me.”
He wanted to strike something, break something to pieces, to punch his fist into something hard that would bloody it. She’d been abused as surely as if she’d been found with bruises and broken bones, by a mother who could walk away from a traumatized, terrified child.
