Linda Howard - Death Angel

Her face got even hotter. Exasperated because she was trying to find out something and he was distracting her with sex, she slapped her hand down on the table, the sound like a small shot. “Stay on subject. Why did you look for me again? What tipped you off?”

“I did an Internet check of the newspapers to see if you’d been identified. Instead, I found out you’d survived.”

“What difference did it make, whether I’d been identified or not?”

“It was for my own curiosity.”

That was definitely an unrewarding answer, if she’d been expecting anything heartwarming. She should always, always remember that he didn’t operate on the same level as most other humans. “But you didn’t tell Rafael.”

“Why would I? You survived, and he was permanently in the dark, so I left it that way.”

“Why did you bother tracking me? You paid the hospital bill, that was more than enough for you to do. Why not go your merry way after that and let me get on with my life?” She shot the question at him, determined to get an answer if she had to shake it out of him, though she bet that would be something to see if she attempted it.

“I did an occasional check to make sure you were all right. If you hadn’t seen me tonight, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, but you did and I had to let you know that you don’t have any reason to run.”

“What difference did it make to you whether or not I’m all right? I’m well, I have-had-a job, I have money. You could have checked once, and let it go.” She should let it go, instead of gnawing at the subject, but she couldn’t. On the surface his answers were satisfactory, but she had an uneasy feeling there was more behind what he’d been doing. He wasn’t just anyone; he was a man who answered only to himself, who lived outside the law and wasn’t subject to the usual human emotions. Maybe the reason he’d kept a check on her was for the exact reason he’d said, but maybe there was another reason, one she should fear.

He didn’t answer immediately; instead he watched her with unnerving silence, his gaze hooded. Then he caught her gaze with his and she almost jumped, so unnerved was she by the intensity in his eyes. “I watched you die,” he said softly. “There was nothing I could do to save you, no way I could help. You were so far gone I couldn’t even tell you I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant for any of that to happen. But I saw your face, saw your expression when you looked past me and saw…something else, something that had to be the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen. You whispered ‘angel,’ then you died.”

“I remember your face,” she murmured. “And the light behind you.”

“I sat with you for a while. I touched your cheek. You had no pulse, no breath, and your skin was already going cold. I called 911, and I waited until I could hear the sirens before I left. We aren’t talking about a few minutes, Drea-”

“Andie,” she murmured. “I’m not her anymore.”

“You’d been gone for at least half an hour, and you weren’t submerged in an icy lake to slow all your systems and funnel oxygen to your brain. There was no way the medics could have revived you, and in fact they didn’t. You started breathing on your own, almost a fucking hour after you died, ” he said grimly. “You don’t have any brain damage. Any. Not even minimal. So now I have to believe in miracles, because you’re a living, breathing, walking, talking miracle, and that means there’s something else out there after all of this, isn’t there?”

A luminous smile spread across her face. “Yes,” she said simply.

“Then get used to it, sweetheart, because the miracle has a permanent bodyguard.”

SHE CONTINUED TO sit at the kitchen table after he’d left. They had talked some more, and when he thought he had completely convinced her that she had nothing to fear from him ever again, he’d left. She had actually reached that conclusion way before he had, but he was naturally wary and untrusting.

So many different thoughts were roiling through her brain that she could barely sort them. Her very first thought was one of pure relief: Rafael thought she was dead. She didn’t have to worry about him at all, ever again. He hadn’t sent Simon after her; he wasn’t still trying to have her killed. She was free.

Free! For the first time in her adult life, maybe in her entire life, she was truly free. She had thought she was free when she left Rafael, but now she knew the difference. Being free was about more than just eating what you wanted, or not having to play dumb anymore.

She was free to be happy.

She didn’t think she’d ever been happy, not even as a child. Certainly she’d never been carefree. As a child she had enough food in her stomach and clothes to keep her warm, usually, but she had always climbed out of the school bus and reluctantly trudged up the driveway to wherever her family was currently living, because she never knew what awaited her there. Were her parents quarreling, too drunk to care if their kids heard them call each other whore and bastard? Would supper be anything more than what she could scrounge for herself? Would her dad lurch into her on his way to the bathroom and shove her down for being in his way?

And later, she’d had other worries. Would her mom’s boyfriend of the moment try to shove his hand between her legs when her mom’s back was turned? She’d tried, just once, telling her mother about it, only to be told that she was just like her fucking father and to stop lying. After that, she’d become an expert at avoiding her own home whenever any of the boyfriends were there, and to climb out her bedroom window in a flash if any of them showed up after she was already home. By the time she was twelve she was a master at evasion, at hiding, at getting away.

She’d gotten away, all right, but she’d never been free-until now.

The future stretched before her, not a future without worry or troubles, but a future undogged by Rafael and the fear that he’d found her. At first all she could focus on was the sense of freedom, the bone-deep relief that she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder or offering herself up as bait to set a trap for Rafael.

By the time she showered and dragged her weary body to bed it was after three, but she couldn’t shut her mind off and go to sleep. Too much had happened in such a short length of time; she’d gone from the sheer terror and exhaustion of her struggle with Simon to bewilderment to lust to relief to joy, bouncing from point to point without enough time at any one reaction to even begin to absorb what each one meant to her life from now on.

She lay awake in the darkness, staring at the ceiling and reviewing everything that had happened from the time Simon first grabbed her. Other than her relief at being free of Rafael, Simon was uppermost on her mind.

He put her in a quandary, representing the most potent temptation that she could face. She would never be indifferent to him. If he crooked his finger at her and said “Come with me,” she had no confidence that she wouldn’t do exactly that-somehow she’d have to find the strength to resist him. He was a paid killer; hooking up with him wouldn’t, by any definition, be keeping to the straight and narrow. The hooking up wasn’t the problem, though she couldn’t even think of sex now with anything other than caution, because she’d screwed up so bad in that department before. He was the problem. Who and what he was, everything about him, was the problem.

She had the sudden thought that she should turn him over to the cops, and dread immediately knotted her stomach. She didn’t know if she could do that to him, even though it was the right thing to do. Then she realized that, not only did she not know any of the specifics and therefore couldn’t tell the cops anything that would be of use, what little she did know had taken place outside the country. She didn’t even know what country or countries he’d been in, though she supposed the authorities could find out just by looking at his passport, assuming he didn’t have more than one passport, which she was fairly certain he did. After all, he made a living slipping undetected in and out of countries.