Overture (North Security, #1)

He doesn’t tell me any of those things. His silence is answer enough. My body doesn’t realize it’s lost—the climax builds in pleasure-drenched waves, leaving me panting and sated on the lap of a man who’s just turned me away.

His lips brush my forehead, chaste even as my arousal dries on his fingers. “There is no future for you and me. I’m no longer your guardian. You’re no longer my ward.”

Tears dampen my lashes. “We could make something new.”

He pushes me gently off his lap, and I stagger like a deer on my legs for the first time. “You’re forgetting something, sweetheart. I don’t want that.”

Every molecule in my body shouts at me to push him, to shake him, to make him see that we can work. Whether he’s trying to protect me or protect himself, the result is the same. I can’t make him want this. And I don’t think he’ll ever really see me as an adult while I live under his roof.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN





There are two skulls in composer Joseph Haydn’s tomb. His head was stolen by phrenologists and a replacement skull was put in his tomb. In 1954, the real skull was restored, but the substitute was not removed.


LIAM

My hands are steeped in blood and dirt. I’ve been working through the obstacle course we use for training for the past five hours, pretending that my life is at stake—because in some ways it is. I set every barrier to its highest point, every weight to its heaviest. I’m still alive, which means we really need to make it harder. Torn muscles ache everywhere in my body. I wipe the sweat and grit from my eyes.

I started this afternoon, and the sun set a little while ago. Footsteps approach from the house. My senses are dulled by pain, which is the point.

“Go the fuck away,” I tell Josh. He’s come to check on me every hour, offering water and energy bars and once, the use of his pistol. Finish the fucking job, if that’s what you want, he said. He should have given it to Elijah, who probably wouldn’t mind using it.

“I might,” comes a feminine voice. Samantha. “I have some questions first.”

I drag myself into a sitting position, leaning back against a 4x4 staked into the ground. The world tilts wildly until I close my eyes. Something nudges my hand. A bottle of water. I take a swallow, downing half the liquid before I take a breath.

Samantha kneels in front of me, the way I did so often as she played the violin. She holds out something in her hand, her expression solemn. It’s a couple of ibuprofens. I stare at the pills, so innocuous and small, so ordinary when the world is shattering. I swallow them down and finish the rest of the water. “Thanks,” I say gruffly.

“How did you know my father?” she says, her brown eyes as clear as I’ve ever seen them in the deepening night. “The real answer this time.”

“I wasn’t friends with him,” I admit. “We hadn’t ever met.”

She takes a seat a few feet away, her legs crossed. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her high school crest on it—which makes her look like a child. She isn’t a child anymore, but that doesn’t change what she is to me. Like the bird that fell from the nest before it could fly.

“Go on,” she says.

“He was a spy,” I say, my voice abrupt. Businesslike. Because this had been my business for so long. “He took money under the table from a few different countries, but mostly Russia. It was my job to identify men like that and then eliminate them. But sometimes we would wait. If they could be useful, we’d keep them around, let them lead us to even bigger targets.”

Her eyes are troubled, though she doesn’t look particularly surprised. It’s as if I’m reminding her of something she already knew. Children are smart, even when they don’t know all the facts. They know what’s important. “That’s how you knew him? You were watching him?”

“Those were my orders, except he started getting too erratic.”

She’s quiet a moment. “So your team eliminated him?”

“No, sweetheart. I did that.”

A flinch. “You were just doing your job.”

Even now she wants to make excuses for me. “My orders were to continue to watch him. They wanted to see what happened next. I already knew, and I wasn’t going to wait around. So I slipped a little something into his special dark roast coffee beans, the ones he guarded so fucking religiously that no one else could drink it.”

Her eyes are wide. She knows what’s coming next. “The coffee.”

She never drank coffee with me, not once. Only tea. Some part of her recognized the danger, even if she couldn’t remember why. “I didn’t know that a twelve-year-old little girl liked to sneak a sip of the stuff. Not until I found out she was in the hospital.”

Tears fall down her cheeks. “That’s why I don’t remember.”

“They didn’t put it together at the time. An old man dying of a heart attack. A young girl who’d seen it, passed out with memory loss from seeing something tragic. By the time anyone thought to investigate, he was cremated.”

“Is that why you wanted custody of me?” she says, the words like venom, full of pain. “To make sure no one could run a blood test on me without your permission?”

“Christ. No, Samantha. Any trace would be gone from your system.”

“Then why?”

“Because you deserved a hell of a lot better than a traitor for a father and a bastard for a brother.” I give a humorless laugh, knocking my head back against the splintery wood. “Do you know what I regret the most? Not killing him. I’m sorry I didn’t do it sooner. I had to watch him forget to feed you, forget to clothe you. I saw him leave you at the square in Leningrad while it was snowing, and you weren’t even wearing boots—I couldn’t call anyone to get you because it would prove he was being surveilled.”

She listens to me speak and then gives a brief nod, as if our conversation is concluded. And I suppose it is. This is the only way it could end—with the truth.


SAMANTHA

In some ways the information about my father wasn’t a surprise. I may not have known the specifics, but I knew what kind of man he was. Loyalty wasn’t in his vocabulary. And if I had thought more about it—the money that would come and go. The way he’d buy me a new dress to attend a fancy dinner one week and then leave the pantry empty the next. Alistair Brooks was a desperate man. And I was his desperate daughter, so eager to believe that someone cared about me that I invented stories. If only I could play violin well enough, if I followed the rules hard enough. If I wanted it bad enough, there would be a father to love me.

Growing up isn’t about learning something new. It’s about unlearning the fairy tales you believe as a child. Elijah offered to take me away from here, but I won’t put that between the brothers. Instead I call a cab and pack a single carry-on suitcase. A flight leaves Austin in a few hours that will take me to Chicago, and then on to Tanglewood. I can start my new life there, a little earlier than I had planned. I’m ready.

I put my suitcase in the car and step into the back of the cab. The front door opens, and Liam strides toward me. Don’t ask me to stay, I beg him silently. I’m not sure I can say no. It’s not because I stopped loving him. I think I love him even more now, somehow, seeing him battered and broken against the obstacle course he built himself, beating himself against his own guilt. But he will never see me as a grown woman while I stay here. He will never accept me as an equal while I remain in his custody, if only in body and not spirit.

The only choice is to leave, which means it’s not really a choice at all.

His silhouette breaks from the house, and I realize he’s holding the violin. The Stradivarius. I hadn’t brought it with me. There are violins everywhere, and societies and museums would be happy to loan me a great one. It wouldn’t equal the Lady Tennant, but nothing would.

“Why did you leave it behind?” he asks, his voice hoarse.

“I wasn’t sure you’d want me to have it. After everything that happened.”

His green eyes are lighter than I’ve ever seen them, almost see-through. This is the most he’s ever shown me of him—his past, his emotion. All it took was for me to leave.