J Ward - Crave

“We’re safe down here,” he said, nodding to an air vent up by the short ceiling that had two little red flags trembling on its breeze. “The HVAC system draws blocks away from here, so there’s no worry of a contamination. There’s also a tunnel out and a radio-wave transmitter that will scramble our voices if we’re being recorded.”

The tunnel was a news flash and Grier looked around. As far as she could tell, all the shelving was bolted in and the floor was solid stone, but given the other little tricks in the house, she couldn’t say she was surprised.

Isaac spoke up. “If I was to go to someone and talk, who would it be?”

“That depends on how-”

“What about Mother.” As Grier cut in, cut off, derailed, she stared at her father’s face, looking for subtle twitches around his eyes and mouth. “What about when she died. Was that really cancer?”

Although it had been seven years ago, those horrible final days were still so vivid and she sifted through them, looking for cracks in the walls of the events, searching for places where things that seemed one way were really another.

“Yes,” her father said. “Yes… she… Yes, that was the cancer. I swear.”

Grier exhaled and found it hard to imagine that she was actually relieved by that dreadful disease. But far better for Mother Nature to have been the culprit. Far better that that tragedy didn’t need rewriting. One was more than enough.

She cleared her throat. Nodded. “Okay, then. Okay.”

A warm palm covered her own and squeezed. As her father’s hands were both on the table, she realized it was Isaac. When she looked over at him, he broke the connection, his touch lingering just long enough so that she knew he was with her, but not so much that she felt restrained.

God, the contradiction of him. Brutal. Sexual. Protective.

With a mental slap, she refocused on her father. “You were in the middle of saying something?”

He nodded and pulled himself together before glancing back at Isaac. “How far are you willing to go?”

“I won’t comment on other operatives,” Isaac said, “but when it comes to my assignments, I’ll go all the way. The things I did for Matthias. What I know about him and his second in command. Where the two of them sent me. The trouble is, it’s a patchwork-there’s a lot that I only know part of.”

“Let me show you something.”

Her father got up from the table, and before she could see what he did, a section of shelving came forward and wheeled left, exposing a safe set into the stone walls. The sturdy door was opened by his handprint on a panel and the inside was not very big-little more than the dimensions of a legal pad horizontally and no greater than six inches high.

He came back to the table with a thick folder. “This is everything I’ve been able to piece together. Names. Dates. People. Places. Pehaps this will help jog your memory.” He tapped the front cover. “And I’ll figure out who to go to. There’s no way of knowing for sure who’s involved in Matthias’s inner circle-government conspiracies have thick roots, but also tendrils you can’t see. The White House is not an option, and it’s a federal issue, so state contacts won’t help us. But here’s what I think…”

Her father’s voice grew more powerful with each word, the gathering strength of purpose turning him into the pillar she had always believed him to be. And as he spelled out plans, she felt a shift in the center of her heart.

Although that was just as much because of something Isaac had said. None of us know what we’re getting into until it’s too late…

Her brother had been a beloved junkie, an addict of the first order who likely would have died by his own hand at some point-although that was not a justification for what had been done to him, simply the reality of what the situation had been. And she had been surprised, at the time, with how upset her father had been at the loss. He and Daniel had had no contact for at least a year before that horrid night: after the latest stint at yet another high-priced rehab facility had fallen by the wayside, her father had hit the wall as a lot of parents and family members did. He’d given all he could to his son, limped through a decade of patches of recovery that gave treacherous hope, but were inevitably followed by long, dark months in which no one knew where Daniel was, or even whether he was alive.

Her father had been inconsolable at the death, however. To the point where he had spent a week sitting in a chair with nothing but a bottle of gin by his elbow.

And now she knew why. He believed he was wholly responsible.

As she watched him speak, she noted the age on his face… the wrinkling around the far corners of the eyes and the mouth, the slight droop of the jawline. He was still a handsome man and yet he’d never remarried. Was it because of the mess he was in? Probably.

Definitely.

Those signs of aging on him were not just a matter of time passing. It was stress and heartache and…

Shifting her focus to Isaac, his narrow and laserlike stare was intense, his pale irises positively glowing with a go-to-war light. Funny, he was nothing at all like her father in terms of background, education, exposure, experience. And yet they were identical in so many ways.

Especially united in the common mission to do right.

“Grier?”

Shaking herself, she glanced at her father. He was holding something out to her… a handkerchief? But why-

When she felt something hit her forearm, she looked down. A silver tear was collecting itself after the fall from her eye, coalescing into a little shimmering circle on her skin.

Another one dropped and messed up all its effort-but then the pair joined forces and the critical mass doubled.

She took the handkerchief and dried her tears.

“I’m so sorry,” her father said.

She mopped her face and refolded the fine linen, remembering him doing exactly the same when upstairs in the kitchen.

“You know what,” she murmured. “Apologies don’t mean a thing.” She laid her hand on the file he’d put on the table. “This… what you two are doing… this is everything.”

The only thing that could have made any of it right.

To cut off the conversation, she cracked open the cover…

She frowned and leaned in. The first page was a printout of four mug shots. All men. All of whom looked like different ethnic versions of Isaac. Underneath the pictures, in her father’s handwriting, there were names, dates of birth, social security numbers, last sightings-although not every one was complete. And three of them had DECEASED across the bottom.

She flipped to the next page and the next. All the same. So many faces.

“I want to bring Jim Heron in on this,” Isaac said. “The more who come forward, the better-”

“Jim Heron?” her father said. “You mean Zacharias?”

“Yeah. I saw him earlier tonight and the night before. I thought he’d been sent to kill me, but it turns out, he wants to help me-or so he says.”

“You saw him?”

“He was with two guys. I don’t recognize them, but they look like they could be XOps.”

“But-”

“Oh, my God,” Grier whispered, moving one of the sheets closer. “That’s him.”

As she pointed to one of the pictures, she heard her father say, “Jim Heron is dead. He was shot in Caldwell, New York. Four nights ago.”

“That’s him,” she repeated, tapping at the picture.

Isaac’s voice sounded confused. “How did you know? Grier… how did you know?”

She looked up. “Know what?”

“That’s Jim Heron.”

Moving her finger aside, she saw the name Zacharias below the picture. “Well, I don’t know who he is, but that’s the man who showed up in my bedroom last night. As an angel.”