It’s a home.
A place where a girl could grow up happy.
At least that’s what I’ve hoped.
We stand across the street from the house, hidden behind a parked van for someone’s home delivery service, safely out of line of sight from the windows.
It’s chilly in the early morning.
But my entire body feels hot with anticipation, and a little fear.
Fuchsia’s face is stricken, drawn, her eyes a little too wide, her lips parted soundlessly as her throat works in a visible swallow.
Then, “Here?” she whispers, raspy and barely there. “You mean...all this time she’s been here in Seattle? I’ve been miles away, and I never knew.”
“They didn’t want you to know,” I murmur. “They wanted you to believe she was dead. When you were still on payroll, they kept you too busy and out of the country too often to ever think about prying.”
“It worked.” Her lips press together, determined. “I want to see her.”
Shit. I’d be the last man on Earth to blame her, but that urge is exactly what I’m afraid of.
“Fuchsia...”
“If you’ve been watching her here, you got to see her—you can’t have that for yourself and then hold it just out of my reach!”
Her voice rises from its hush, cracks, then drops again, leaving an almost funereal stillness over the silent street where so many people sleep, oblivious to our torture in their beds as they wait for the day to start.
“That’s all I want,” she says more softly, but her voice is still strained—and breaking my heart. “Just let me see her face. She doesn’t have to see me. I’m not insane.”
I hesitate, but fuck.
She’s right.
We came all this way. I’m the one who brought her here.
And I can’t deny her that.
So in the brisk early morning air that still tastes like the night’s rainfall, we move.
I take her hand and lead her across the street.
We’re deathly silent, creeping like burglars around the house, long years of practice making it easy to move without creasing so much as a blade of grass.
We’re sheltered from the line of sight by the fence around the yard as we make our way to the back of the house. A single long, low window looks in on a bedroom past a set of sheer curtains that do nothing to block our view.
They don’t prevent us from drinking her in.
Like she’s water in a desert and we’re desperately thirsty.
It’s very much an ordinary teenage girl’s bedroom—posters everywhere, clothing ranging in trends from pink punk princess to defiant goth-black anarchist and everything in between draped over the chairs and beanbag. I see books left open on her desk, a laptop, a few stuffed animals still holding places of honor on a shelf although she’s clearly decided she’s too old to have them in her bed anymore.
She’s only fourteen.
Only, I say, as if I haven’t counted every day I’ve missed of her life.
She’s a tall girl with her mother’s rangy build but my firm shoulders. A foxlike face relaxed into sweetness in sleep. A mess of black hair spills across her pillow, with a single streak of white starting at her temple and pouring through that river of black like a splash of bright paint.
Our daughter.
Our black hole.
Our hope.
Fuchsia stops short just outside the window, still as a statue before it comes.
Then she makes a choked, hurting sound, pressing one hand to her mouth, her other resting against the window, gloves not leaving a mark on the pane.
I clench my jaw.
It’s hard as hell to watch, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here at her side.
Her eyes glisten, already red-rimmed but now shining, threatening to spill over.
“You can’t miss her,” she whispers, her voice thick and heavy. “One look at her and you know...you just know she’s ours, Oliver.”
She sounds like she’s about to break.
But then she drops her hand, and it’s my turn to have a sledgehammer falling on my heart.
She’s smiling.
Watery, tremulous, but rich and sweet with so much raw, bittersweet emotion. It’s like she doesn’t even know what to do with it, standing there trembling and frozen.
I move closer, stand next to her, looking in at our daughter.
We’re invisible ghosts to her.
She doesn’t even know we’re haunting her.
“Mandolin,” I murmur, sucking in a breath that tastes like a knife. “Her name is Mandolin.”
“Mandolin!” Fuchsia lets out a broken laugh that sounds half like a repressed sob. “Of course it is. Any daughter of mine has to have a name that makes her stand out.”
I probably shouldn’t say what I say next, but fuck it, here goes.
Fuchsia deserves to know the truth.
“She’s with the Lakes,” I say. “They—”
“I remember who they are.” The set of her mouth turns bitter. “Cleaners. The people who made everything disappear when it was time to pull up stakes and move out. I guess my child was just another thing to disappear for Galentron’s convenience.”
“It wasn’t like that, wildcat,” I protest, and she turns a fierce look on me.
There’s so much anger kindling in her eyes.
So much that’s been building for a lifetime, bursting to the surface, irrepressible.
“Is this what they took her for?” she bites off. “So they can turn her into another slave to that vile company? Brainwash her? Were we so obviously about to turn against them that they just had to make sure we couldn’t unduly influence our own damned daughter?”
“Yes,” I answer frankly. “They took her to keep you in line, while grooming her for their own ends. I think the goal was political, at first. Using her keen intelligence to place her in a useful, high-powered position someday. Galentron’s own Manchurian candidate of sorts.”
“No!” Fuchsia flies at the window—and there’s no mistaking her tears now, her sobs, her rage. “I won’t let them—those fucks! I won’t let them slither out of the dark like the snakes they are and make my daughter a part of a new generation of—of—of slaves!”
It’s a miracle I catch her just in the nick of time.
She’s not thinking rationally. Not anymore.
I only have a split second before she manages to slam her upraised fists against the window.
Right before she manages to give us away.
Right before our dream goes up in a shrieking crash and an unpredictable future with a very predictable bad end.
“No!” I snarl, dragging her back, holding on with all my might and then some.
Imagine wrestling a full-grown cougar protecting her cubs, and you’ll have some semblance of what it’s like swinging Fuchsia backward, tearing her eyes away from the only thing that matters.
Wrapping my arms around her from behind, I cage her against me, catching her wrists in my hands and trapping her writhing, thrashing form in my embrace.
It’s a hellish testament to how upset she really is that I’m not bleeding out on the grass from a well-placed kill strike right now.
But I think she knows as well as I do.
We can’t just come charging into Mandolin’s life like this.