Cross Roads, page 24
“We’ll work out what went wrong later,” Curls said. “Right now, we need to decide what to do about the girl.”
“Let’s look for a church and leave her on their doorstep,” Scarface said.
“We’re not leaving her outside,” Savior said. “It’s twenty degrees and dropping. She doesn’t even have shoes on.”
“What about a hospital?”
“Cameras,” Curls said.
“Then there’s only one other thing we can do,” Scarface said.
“No,” Savior said in a mean voice.
“We’re not taking her with us, which means we’re out of options.”
“Do you have the stomach to put a gun to this girl’s head, Lonnie?”
Scarface said nothing.
“Do you, Zora?”
Silence.
“Where does that leave us?” Scarface asked.
“I’ll figure something out. For tonight, she can stay at my place.”
“Not a good idea,” Curls said. “Someone might see her.”
“I’ve got a garage. No one will see her, coming or going.”
“Kids are sneaky,” Scarface said.
“I want my dadi,” she croaked out through her dry, scratchy throat.
“You will. If you’re a good girl,” Savior said. “Can you be good, Anjali?”
She looked into the stranger’s face for the first time. His eyes weren’t kind, but they weren’t cold like his partners’.
Maa always made her promise to be good if she wanted an extra cookie or new toy. Anjali could be good again in order to see her grandmother. Dadi would know how to help maa and pita.
She nodded.
Savior used the cuff of his long sleeve to dry her tears. To the driver, he said, “Drop us off at my house.”
The woman shook her head. “Dispose of her before the boss finds out, Neil.”
“I will.”
* * *
The memory remained clear in Lena’s mind for another heartbeat before it dissipated back into its protective vault where it had slumbered for two decades.
Rohan’s thumbs swiped across her cheeks, then he drew her into his arms. His shirt absorbed the tears that continued to flow. At any other time and with anyone else, she would have felt embarrassed about the avalanche of emotions overtaking her body.
Instead of cutting off her tears though, she let them have their day. Freed Anjali Kumar from her twenty-year imprisonment.
Rohan kissed the top of her head and whispered words of reassurance while he rubbed warm circles over her back.
As if the heavens felt her anguish, they too opened the proverbial floodgate. Rain pounded against the greenhouse windows above, like the erratic blast of a machine gun.
Beside her, a steady stream drenched the panes, obscuring the view beyond. How long they stood locked together, she didn’t know. Long enough for the raging storm to abate to a gentle drizzle.
Lena swiped at her wet cheeks, yet she was reluctant to release the firm, safety of Rohan’s body.
“Can you speak of it?” he asked. His voice low and gentle.
Focusing on his reflection in the window, Lena pulled the memory out of the vault and told him about her parents’ murder and her kidnapping, as if she were placing brush strokes on a new canvas. Hesitant at first, then finishing it with a natural confidence.
To her surprise, Rohan didn’t probe deeper into her parents’ deaths or attempt to pry out more detail about the killers.
Instead, he focused on her.
Anjali Kumar.
“Dadi—is that Asian Indian?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Earlier, you referred to your grandmother as dadi.”
She pulled back far enough to look up at him. “I did?”
He nodded. “You used it quite naturally.”
Indian. She was Indian.
A fresh wave of tears sheened her eyes. Hadn’t she always had an affinity for Indian food and Bollywood movies?
Radiant joy filled her chest.
Were her grandparents still alive? What if Neil had tried to give her to them but they turned him away?
The thought dampened the excitement bubbling inside her. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed belonging to a family. Being part of a unit. Until this moment.
With some reluctance, Lena stepped away and headed toward the kitchen. “If we’re going to dig into my past, I need fortification.” She glanced over her shoulder. “How about you?”
“Got bourbon?”
“Henry McKenna okay?”
He nodded, holding his phone. “I take mine neat.” He slid onto a barstool. “A quick search reveals dadi is a term used in some parts of India for a paternal grandmother.” His thumb tapped over the screen again. “Anjali and Kumar are both Indian names.”
Lena drew a bottle and glass from one of the kitchen cabinets, placing both in front of Rohan. “Knock yourself out.”
While he poured the amber liquid into an empty tumbler and tapped at his phone again, she uncorked a bottle of Merlot. She filled her wineglass to the halfway mark, drained it quickly, and refilled it again.
Warmth soon spread to her limbs and to the tips of her ears. She toyed with the stem of her glass. “My mom was a white woman with beautiful long brown hair. My dad’s skin was brown, though darker than mine. He wore his black hair short, military-style.”
“Did either have a non-American accent?”
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“What about your grandparents?”
“Both brown-skinned like my dad.” She took a sip of her wine. “I don’t recall much about my grandfather, other than his constant smile. As if he found amusement in everything around him.”
“Maybe you were hell on wheels even at four.”
She grinned. “Maybe.”
“You helped your grandmother in the kitchen. Do you remember if she spoke perfect English, broken English, or none at all?”
Everything about her dadi had fascinated her—the stories she would tell, the unfamiliar words she would call certain things, the lyrical quality to her voice.
“She had a beautiful accent, but I had no problem understanding her. I think she tried to teach me words from her native tongue.”
“Does anything else come to mind?”
“Not right now.”
“My guess is that your grandparents immigrated here, and your dad was first generation Indo-American or very young when they arrived.”
“Agreed.”
“Do you recall anything about your mom’s parents?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing. That’s odd, don’t you think?”
“Not necessarily. They could be deceased or live far away. Or estranged from their daughter.”
“I could have family out there. Family who might still wonder what happened to me.”
He slid his hand over hers where it rested on the countertop. “If they’re out there, we’ll find them.”
“It appears I’m not through with your services yet.”
“You won’t hear me complaining.”
She squeezed his fingers, and her nose stung with gratitude. “Thank you.”
“You’re not alone in this, Lena.” The intensity with which he looked at her penetrated all the dark places in her heart and lit them up. “Never again will you be alone.”
53
Rohan downed the rest of his drink. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to vault over the damn island and kiss Lena until he smoothed away the vulnerability consuming her beautiful eyes.
But he couldn’t. Not yet. He had a few more questions that needed answers.
“Now that I understand the reason behind your lack of digital footprint, care to tell me what happened ten years ago?”
Her expression changed as if a genie snapped his finger and removed all the warmth from her body.
She slipped her hand from his and took another drink of wine. “I’m not sure you would believe me after what I just shared.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
“Neil, the man who . . . ”
“Kidnapped you,” he offered when she seemed to struggle for the appropriate word.
She jerked her head in agreement. “He didn’t leave me on a stoop for a kind-hearted minister to find or drop me off on a street corner near my grandparents’ house, he raised me as his daughter, Angela Jones.”
Rohan thought about the pictures he took of the items hidden away in Lena’s bag. A wilderness drawing signed by Angela Jones and a photo of a white man with a family. Had the younger man in the photo been her captor?
“I remember little about that first year,” Lena continued, “other than that we traveled around a lot. Did a lot of camping. Each time we moved, Neil insisted we get hair ‘makeovers,’ as he liked to call them.”
“Makes sense. He was on the run, from both the law and whoever had ordered the hit on your parents.” He winced as soon as the words came out of his mouth. “Sorry, that was an insensitive way of putting it.”
“But accurate.” She poured him another drink. “Although I feel their loss, I don’t remember them. Not really.”
“What was life like with him?” Rohan braced himself for whatever disturbing stories she would share.
She shrugged, “Normal.”
“Normal?” That hadn’t been the answer he would have selected on a multiple-choice question about Life as an Abductee.
“Normal for me.” She grabbed her glass and the bottle of wine. “Let’s move this hellish slide down memory lane to the living room.”
Rohan took his glass, but left the bottle behind. Oblivion wasn’t his fate tonight. Whether she knew it or not, she needed his analytical mind running at full capacity.
They settled on the plush couch. Lena curled up in one corner and Rohan sat in the middle, facing her, with his left leg cocked on the couch and his left arm resting along the top of the cushions.
“You were saying?” he prompted.
“Neil soon became ‘Dad’ and my previous life faded into a handful of screenshots that, on the surface, I understood more as I grew older, but out of context they made no sense.”
“Were you happy?”
“Happy like I would’ve been if my parents had raised me?” She ran the half-full wineglass beneath her nose, but Rohan doubted she registered a single characteristic, so deep was she in her own head.
“It’s hard to say. There are millions of miserable kids living in good homes with loving parents.” She looked at him, unflinching. “What I do know is that Neil didn’t hit me, assault me, and he rarely raised his voice at me. For the most part, I had everything I needed.”
She balanced her glass on the side of her knee. “Did he hug me? No. Tell me he loved me? No. Shower me with praise? No. But he paid for my art supplies, picked me up from school every day, and doled out encouraging words and smiles when I needed them most.”
Many kidnap victims experienced something known as Stockholm Syndrome, where they developed feelings of love for their captors, because of their dependency on them for everything—food, clothing and, in some cases, permission to talk.
But Lena’s relationship with Neil Jones felt a great deal more complicated due to her young age at the time of the murders and her subsequent abduction.
“Where is Neil now?”
“Dead,” she said in a low, emotionless voice.
“How?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Poison, maybe. I found him tied to his office chair.” She swallowed hard. “Foam bubbled at the corner of his mouth and his eyes were already glazing over.”
Her fingers plucked at a loose thread on the couch arm. “I heard footsteps above me, so I knew it would only be a matter of minutes before the killers would return. I clawed at his bindings, but they were so tight. I couldn’t—” Her breath shuddered out of her lungs.
Rohan removed her wineglass from her hand and set it on the coffee table. “We can stop.”
“No,” she said with an emphatic shake of her head. “I’m okay. Just give me a moment.”
One hand covered her mouth as if holding back a torrent of sickness. The other lay limp at her side.
Rohan angled his leg farther onto the couch, lifted her hand, and sandwiched it between his knee and warm palm.
“When I finally loosened the first knot, Neil garbled out a single word.”
“Which was?”
Her eyes met his. “Run.”
54
Lena stretched out her right leg, giving herself a short reprieve before continuing her story. As difficult as it was to relive that night, talking about it with someone besides the echo of her fourteen-year-old self reduced the ever-present pressure on her subconscious.
“Here.” Rohan released her hand, then patted his thigh. “Put those beauties up here.”
Lena bit back a smile. Pre-two-bourbon-Rohan would never have called her legs “beauties.” She liked this playful side of him.
“There’s no need. If my legs start to cramp, I have a sturdy coffee table to park my feet on.”
“Does your table do massages?” he asked in a silky voice that made her stomach clench. “I imagine standing all day takes a toll on your feet and legs.”
How had he known? Some days, the soles of her feet would go practically numb from the constant one hundred and twenty pounds of pressure on them.
The mere mention of his powerful hands manipulating her sore muscles made her toes curl. Not just because of the relief they would bring, but because she’d wanted those hands on her since the moment she’d caught him staring at her bare feet.
Rohan might spend a good portion of his day at a desk, but she recalled, with great detail, every chiseled inch of his abs she’d been lucky enough to wake up to in the motel. The man took care of his body just as rigorously as he managed his family’s assets.
“You will find, Rohan Blackwell, that I will never say no to a foot massage.”
A sexy grin appeared. “Good to know.” He made a gimme motion with his hand.
Lena shifted to lean her back against the couch’s arm and placed her right leg at a respectable distance from his man parts. The last thing either of them needed right now was an accidental rubbing.
Her black leggings stopped just below her knees, and she hadn’t bothered putting on socks. The moment she settled into position, his hands went right to work.
Immediate bliss shot through Lena’s entire body as he kneaded her nearest calf. A moan escaped her throat, and the arms she’d unconsciously braced at her sides lost their rigidity.
“See, much better than a cold, hard coffee table.”
Despite her efforts, Lena’s knee glanced off the growing bulge in his jeans. “I’ll give you points for the cold table.” She lifted her now heavy eyelids and looked at him. “But, it seems, I can’t get away from hard surfaces.”
His hands stilled and, for an infinite breath, Lena’s heart seized inside her chest.
She reviewed her words, and winced. She’d intended them to be funny. Maybe a little flirty. But on replay, they sounded inane, like the ridiculous drivel inexperienced teenage girls say in the throes of their first crush.
She really needed to stop drinking in high-stress situations.
“Sorry,” she said, preparing to put her feet on the table. Where they should have been all along. “My lame attempt at humor.”
He gripped her legs, keeping them in place. “I’m not done yet.”
When she opened her mouth to argue, his hand squeezed her foot, ripping another involuntary groan from the depths of her greedy body.
“What happened after Neil told you to run?” he asked as he tended to every pressure point in her foot.
“I couldn’t leave him, yet his bindings were too tight.” She closed her eyes and all the fear, helplessness, and self-loathing slammed into her again. “Still hearing the intruders above, I ran to the kitchen for a knife. By the time I returned, his heart had stopped.”
The backs of his fingers brushed her flushed cheek. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine the range of emotions you must have experienced in that moment.”
“Those didn’t hit me until hours later. When I was alone with nothing but my thoughts. His death, and my imminent danger, triggered an ignition switch in my head, and my training kicked in.”
He slanted her a curious look. “What sort of training?”
“Every six months, Neil would force me to go through an emergency evacuation process. Among other things, I had to grab a small metal safe he kept in the freezer and make my way to one of two go-bags hidden in the house.”
“I take it he didn’t explain the true reason for the training.”
She shook her head. “If he had, I might have hated the drills a little less.”
“The order for arrest Izzy mentioned was for Neil’s murder?”
Lena nodded. “My prints were all over the crime scene and a neighbor witnessed me going into the house.” She watched his hands manipulate her muscles. “Calling nine-one-one, then disappearing, didn’t help my case. But I couldn’t leave Neil there. It might have been days before anyone checked in on us.”
Rohan’s warm palm cupped her cheek. “I wish I could have been there for you.”
She lifted her eyes to his. “Me too.”
The moment stretched, and Lena thought he might lean in and kiss her. A few, electrifying seconds later, he dropped his hand and returned to their discussion.
“Whoever Neil worked for must have had enormous resources for him to have felt the need to keep up his vigilance for so long.”
“He never spoke of his life prior to that night, and I never asked. When the memory was fresh, I was too young to care. Then our daily lives fell into a familiar rhythm. I was safe and content and filled my days with school or drawing.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“Do you have extraordinary sensory detection that allows you to hear my thoughts?”
“Yes.” He grinned. “Afraid?”
“More like relieved.”
He raised a brow.
“Now I can curse you without expending verbal energy.”
