Which is a real possibility.
He stands a few feet away from the bars. Far enough that I can’t lunge for him. Smart man. Even with a bullet in my side it wouldn’t stop me from trying.
“Have you come to play more games?” I ask, my voice polite.
He nods, his eyes a dark and stormy sea.
That makes me laugh. “How far are you going to take this? Or haven’t you thought that far out? Will you make me finger fuck her? Eat her out? Are you really going to stand there and watch as I fuck the woman you love?”
“I don’t love her.” I don’t love anyone, comes the unspoken corollary.
“You’re going to lose her.”
“She’s already lost.”
“Christ.” I shake my head. “When I met you, you were just a stupid kid intent on getting himself killed. Now we meet again all these years later, and you are the same.”
“Spare me the French accent.”
“So you know my true identity.” He doesn’t just know my true identity. He lives it. Which means I need to leave this goddamn cell. I need to leave New York City. Because wherever Elijah North is, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Jefferson isn’t far behind. “And I know yours. Do you think we didn’t run a background check? The good kind. Not whatever you put on the form when you enlisted.”
“Stop.”
“Seeing your mother killed when you were three, that had to be hard.”
He takes a step closer to the bars. “I said, stop.”
“Being beat to shit by the same man who killed her, every goddamn day, that must have been hard. Watching your brothers leave, one by one. They abandoned you.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“You should. They’re not the heroes you think they are.”
“I’ve done things—”
“You killed your father.”
“You think I regret that? You think I fucking regret it? I waited years to do that. Too many years. That’s the thing, you always assumed I regretted that part, but the only thing I regretted was waiting so long. I’m a murderer, Adam. A proud one.”
“If you’re so proud of what you’ve done, why can’t you be with her?”
He glances at her. The faint light from the top of the stairs shines a halo around her dark head. The soft sounds of her snores continue. “If you did a real background check, then you know what wasn’t on the forms. Any mention of me between age fourteen and eighteen.”
My chest constricts, and I force myself to continue breathing evenly. He can hear it, he can sense it, and if he feels even an ounce of pity, he’ll leave. “A runaway.”
“Running implies someone was looking for me. No one looked.”
“No one cared.”
He gives me a sardonic glance. “Are you trying to be my therapist?”
I look up at the ceiling. “Or maybe a priest. Do you have a confession to make?”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice low and thoughtful. “I thought my brothers were heroes. I wanted to be like them. I guess some part of me still does. I thought you were a hero, too.”
“Then you met me in France, and you discovered I was just a dirty bastard.”
“Same as everyone else.”
“That why you tried to steal the diamonds?”
“I stole them for my country, because my commanding officer asked me to. It was a shitty reason, of course. Greed. The same reason your COs wanted them.”
“So does that make us corrupt or our commanding officers?”
“I think it makes the government corrupt.”
“We’re all fucking dirty.”
He glances at Holly again. “Not all of us.”
“This runaway. What did he do to survive?” I keep my voice light. There is no weight whatsoever given to sympathy. No heaviness around the idea of shame.
“The same thing everyone else had to do.” He stares at me as if willing me to understand. Or maybe he really does want me to absolve him. “I dealt drugs when I could.”
“And when you couldn’t?”
He looks away this time. “It was a long time ago.”
“It still haunts you.”
“Why shouldn’t it? I’m unclean. I never should have touched Holly Frank. You never should have made me touch her in that French prison.”
“It’s one of the few things in my life I don’t regret doing.”
He glares at me. “I should shoot you again.”
I look down at the dark stain of blood on my gray T-shirt. “A graze, really. About the same place where I shot you, almost to the inch. As if you didn’t really want me to die.”
“I could say the same about you.”
I smile. “So what’s it going to be? Should I fuck her ass? Maybe tie her up, introduce her to the pleasures of a flogger?”
“Hell.”
“How far will you go, Elijah North?”
“You want to know what line I won’t cross?”
“We both know you aren’t going to let her starve to death.”
“Do we know that?”
“I don’t even think you’d let me die. If I collapsed right now, you’d probably call an ambulance.”
He gives me a dark look. “I wouldn’t test that theory.”
“Where is the line, Elijah?”
“Way back in the distance. I passed it a long time ago.”
“Then you won’t mind if I wake her up right now. You won’t mind if I kiss her, if I touch her, If I fuck her. Right? You already crossed the fucking line, is that right?”
He stares at me, and for a moment I think he’s going to call my bluff.
Then he swears under his breath. “You are so determined to be my mentor.”
“When you stop needing one, I’ll stop being one.”
“Spare me the zen bullshit.” He tosses me something through the bars. I catch a single key. “You can walk yourself back to Brooklyn. Or crawl. I don’t care.”
“Shouldn’t you provide a ride?”
“I had to rough it through the goddamn French countryside. I had to catch us a couple of dormice to eat before we found shelter. You can manage the Lowest East Side.”
“Fair.” I regard the key with suspicion. I may have been willing to mouth off to the man from behind the bars. Prisoners have very little to lose. That doesn’t mean I’m taking my safety for granted. It wouldn’t make sense to turn your back on a tiger. “This is real?”
“Oh, it’ll open the door all right.” He gives a shrug. “As to whether I’ll shoot you in the back, you’ll have to find that one out the hard way.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Elijah
Holly must have been exhausted. I suppose abject terror can do that.
She sleeps for another two hours while I keep watch over her.
I know when she wakes because of the stillness in the air. And because she stops that soft snore. It becomes quiet in the room, with only her stormy thoughts to fill the space.
“Do you think he’ll come back soon?” she asks without turning her head, and I realize that she thinks I’m Adam. She can probably sense my presence, but she assumes I’m him.