“Sookie even calls her house ‘the Pad’ as if she were still in the 70s.”
Summer shook her head. “I don’t remember, Mom. I mean, I know who Sookie is, and I do love her. But I don’t remember living with her. I don’t remember being in Malibu.”
“What about the private school Aunt Sookie enrolled you in?” Meecham said. “Do you remember anything about Hidden Falls High? Any of the teachers? Any of the students? Any of your friends?”
Again, Summer shook her head.
I couldn’t take it any longer. I knew that Meecham disapproved of my pushing the issue, but I nonetheless stepped forward. “What about me?” I said, my heart pounding as I looked into Summer’s big hazel eyes. “Do you remember me? Dante Black. Remember?”
She looked up at me and furrowed her brow.
“Look carefully at me, Summer,” I said. “Look at me.”
Smiling, she looked deep into my eyes, and for a moment I felt an optimistic stirring in my gut.
She recognizes me, I thought. Her mind has finally cleared, and she knows who I am.
“You do have beautiful and, dare I say, unforgettable green eyes,” she said. “The contrast between your eyes and your jet black hair is startling. Very attractive. I’m sure you’re very popular with girls.”
I waited for the inevitable ‘but’.
“You seem like a great guy,” she went on. “But, I don’t know you. I don’t remember knowing you.”
Even a few months after the accident… I thought as I swallowed the tears that threatened to stream down my face. I closed my eyes to hide my frustration and pain. But, damn it, every time I came, every time I hoped and every time that she told me she had no idea who I was… it was like losing her all over again.
“We were at Black Biotech,” I said softly, once again hoping the name would spark something. “We’d gone up to my office. My father showed up…”
She just looked at me, completely blank. “What happened to your father?” she said after a moment.
Pressing my lips together, I turned away and closed my eyes, hoping to blink the tears away. “He died in that explosion,” I said as I turned to face her once more.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Summer said. Then she cocked her head to the side, her eyes suddenly inquisitive. “You said your name was Dante Black?”
“Yes,” I said, letting my hopes, once again, rise. “Yes. Dante Black.”
“And you said the explosion happened at Black Biotech?”
“Yes,” I said, coming to the side of her bed. I desperately wanted to reach out to take a hold of her hand… to touch her in any way. “Exactly.”
“Black,” she said simply. “Is there a connection… you and this company?”
Another stab in the heart. Another hope dashed. Another moment of thinking I could have her again, only to realize she was lost.
It was torture. It was constant torture, and I knew that I would have to move on with my life at some point.
Just not now. Now, I still need to cling to every ounce of hope.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “My father founded Black Biotech.”
I looked at her, thinking of everything that had brought us together.
A hit.
The Inner Circle.
My father.
He was the one who had initiated me into the Circle so many years earlier.
He was the one who had trained me and who had shown me that a cold, hard heart was a safe one.
But when I received the assignment – the hit on Summer – it was my father who understood the love that I had for her.
He was the one who had come through in the end and had given his life so that I could go on with mine.
Hmph…
But what a shitty life it now was without Summer.
Chapter 1
Dante Black/Parker James
Age 21
London, England
My name was Dante Black, but now I went by Parker James. Three or almost four years have gone by since I last saw Summer Jones bandaged up in bed in San Diego. The pain of her forgetting who I was and her love for me was too much to relive every time I saw her and even spied on her that I finally focused on what I had promised my father: to take down the very people who wanted me and Summer dead.
I’d been spending a lot of time trying to warm my way into the good graces of the woman in charge of the storage building on Eastern Way by the waterfront. I needed to get access to the computer room deep in the belly of the building.
But I also needed a backup plan in case she never let down her guard.
Breaking into the storage building wouldn’t be a big deal. The security, while impressive at first glance, was abysmal when I looked further into it.
Their motion detectors worked in a rather random fashion, going off for no reason, and remaining mute when a motion should have been detected.
Much of it was surely due to a lack of maintenance. A few of the detectors were hanging by a wire. Others were focused on the building itself instead of its approach. And others were so covered with dirt and grime, it was impossible for them to detect anything.
Then there were the numerous surveillance cameras. Turned out that one in three were duds… fakes meant to scare people off.
It was even easier than I had planned to squeeze between two distant cameras while the dud just stared blankly into space.
As a precaution to all this, however, I’d made a few radical changes to myself. Whether it was this mission, or any other, I had to ensure my identity remained a secret.
After all, I was officially dead. In the crumbled ruins of Black Biotech, they didn’t find my body, believed to be crushed to dust during the explosion.
They had found neither my father, nor me.
The perfect cover. Death.
My short-cropped jet black hair was dyed silver with a few streaks of pewter, and I had let it grow out until it fell fashionably just above my shoulders.
Every day I put in dark blue contacts to hide my green eyes and I would occasionally put on a pair of reading glasses to add to the change.
Over the last three years since the explosion, I’d also bulked up. With training and a protein rich diet, I’d added a good thirty pounds of muscle to my frame, and some of that weight had rounded off my usually angular face, giving me a youthful, boyish appearance.
It was all part of the game now. Dead was Dante Black. Long live Parker James.
But in the end, the need to break into the storage building became unnecessary as I got the call asking me to come to ‘fix a problem’.
“Hey,” I said casually to the pretty receptionist behind the desk. “I’m Parker. Parker James.” I handed her a business card with my name and TechUp printed on it.
She took the card and smiled flirtatiously at me. “How can I help you, Mr. James?”
“I got a call about a problem with your computer system,” I said, pointing to my black cap that also had the TechUp name embroidered on it. “I came to fix it.”
Glancing at the computer screen in front of her, she frowned. “It seems to be working fine.” She moved her mouse around and clicked here and there. “Yeah,” she added looking up at me. “It’s seems fine. Everything is working perfectly.”