In the bedroom Eve stripped off her shirt while Roarke got a wand. Sprawled on the bed like a chunky gray ribbon, Galahad opened his eyes, gave her a long and clearly disapproving look as she peeled off the gel pack.
“That droid had a sneaky left,” Eve insisted.
Annoyed, she reactivated the pack, then pressed it to her jaw as Roarke came back in. He gave her ribs a long and clearly disapproving look before he shook his head.
“And was it worth it then?”
“Not really. I didn’t get enough out, I guess. I thought programming the female would make it more like I was pounding Truman, but that bitch is built. The droid, not Truman.”
She let out a hiss as he passed the wand over her ribs.
“Truman wouldn’t have landed any.”
He said, “Mmm-hmm.”
“She’s a bag of bones. The droid’s solid muscle, an easy buck and a half. With a sneaky left.”
“You dropped your guard.”
“I did…” Damn it. “Maybe. How do you know?”
“Even if I hadn’t watched for a moment or two, I can see the results, can’t I?”
“In some circles, that’s considered spying.”
“As you like,” he said easily. “After I saw it land this one?” He tapped a finger lightly on the cold pack on her jaw. “I took a shower and changed for dinner.”
She couldn’t bitch about that—she sort of wanted to, but she couldn’t find a logical way to bitch about that.
“The comp said I won on points. And it was actually minor to moderate repairs.”
“Well, sit down now, and we’ll finish your minor to moderate repairs.”
When she sat on the side of the bed, Galahad rolled over, squiggled forward, and nudged his head under her hand.
“I should’ve held off, just let Mr. Mira level me off.”
As he passed the wand over her jaw, Roarke’s eyes met hers. “He has a way.”
“I don’t know how he just gets to the core of it, right off. And he said what I didn’t know how to explain, really. I don’t have a choice, Roarke.”
“I know it. I know it as I know you. I wonder how it is it twists me up so much more seeing you tired and hurting inside than it does seeing these bruises. Then again, these bruises heal quick enough.”
He switched from her jaw to her eye. “We’re never going to be all the way done with all the before. It made us who we are, after all.”
“I guess. Mira said … She said I understood someone like Dorian because, basically, I’ve been there. That distrust of authority? I know where it comes from.”
“And still, you chose authority. You chose the police not just as a vocation but a kind of home, and I, for a very long time, chose the opposite of that.”
“We both needed to be in charge, to take the power back. I’d be more than halfway into a burnout if I hadn’t found you. You’d probably have stolen all the art and jewelry in the galaxy if you hadn’t found me.”
“Ah, but that was meant, wasn’t it now?”
She smiled, and with the cat now stretched over both their laps, touched Roarke’s cheek. “Irish woo-woo.”
“Pure fact, and one that speaks to me. What does she say to you, this young girl? Can you tell me?”
Closing her eyes, Eve stroked the cat.
“When I stood over her today with Morris … She looked so perfect, so young and perfect except for … I could hear her think: What would I have done, who would I have been, if they hadn’t taken me? How would I have coped with what they did, if I’d gotten away? I know it’s me thinking it, but—”
“Is it?”
She let it go because the wand felt soothing now instead of achy. “They damaged her where it didn’t show, where you can’t see. But she had a foundation, she had a family, and she’d have gotten through it. Maybe not over it because you don’t. We know that. But through it. They stole that from her.”
“And the other, the one you need to find?”
“Her foundation’s cracked and rocky. I looked at—into—her mother today, and I saw Stella. Parts of her. I’m not going to beat myself up for that.”
“Nor should you. There’s a type, isn’t there? Stella, Meg Roarke, this woman. A mold that makes them vile and vicious.”
“Truman fits it—mostly. She’s not going to smack a kid around physically, like I damn well know Jewell Gregg did with Dorian more than the neighbors ever saw. She’s the type that punches the heart, the self-worth, the trust until it’s all broken and bleeding.”
It made her sick inside, the thought of it, the memories of it.
“It’s worse. She’s not required or expected to love them, right? But she has a duty, and she uses that, twists that to batter where it doesn’t show.”
“You’ll see she’s fired.”
“Absolute priority. But it’s not enough. She’s already damaged Dorian Gregg, and God knows how many others.”
Fury simmered inside her again.
“I recognized her, too, damn right I did. I had a couple like that. Like a wrong cop, they fuck it up for all the ones who do the job.”
He rose, walked to open the panel that held the bedroom AutoChef. Eve checked her ribs—definitely better. Her jaw—absolutely less swollen.
“I’m making time to dig into it, see if I can hang her up on anything illegal. She’s going to lose her job—Gregg defrauding the PPO, and Truman not verifying? Yeah, she’s gone, but unless she took a kickback, not a crime on her part. Even if I find something, it’s probably a slap on the wrist. Not enough.”
Roarke came back with two glasses filled with a peach-colored liquid.
“Is this a soother? I don’t need a soother.”
“We’re splitting one. It’s a new flavor. It should taste a bit like a Bellini.”
She knew he’d found a way to get around her with the whole splitting thing, so she took a sip. “I haven’t had that many Bellinis.”
“We’ll have to remedy that.”
“Anyway, it’s okay.”
“Not bad at all,” he agreed. “Civil suit.”
“What?”
“When you find Dorian, she can file a civil suit against Truman. CPS will get dragged in, but they should have done a better job overseeing this woman, shouldn’t they? And a good lawyer’s bound to find a few more children—perhaps adults by now—who have similar stories. Class action suit.”
The idea added a zing to the soother. “Sue her lazy, fucked-up ass.”
“I’ll wager a court would levy more than a slap on the wrist. Unlikely she has the funds to pay off a judgment, but it would make her life hell for quite some time. Then, you have a good friend who excels at exposés.”
“Nadine.” As she rolled it around, that simmering fury turned to satisfaction. “She’d lap this right up. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you have to focus on finding her, and on finding who abducted her and Mina, who killed Mina, and if there are others being held. This is extraneous.”
“Also brilliant. It’s handy having a business genius around.”
“Absolutely true. Finish that up now. We’ll do another round with the wand in the morning after you’ve had some sleep.”
He shifted the cat, then got up, set the wand aside.
Eve considered as he took off his shirt. “I think since you did the wand thing, the soother thing, you should finish me off.”
He angled a look at her as he took off his shoes. “Emotionally, physically, or sexually?”
She wound a finger in the air. “All of that.”
“Feeling better, are you now?”
“Nothing hurts.”
“I’d like to keep it that way.”
“If you don’t think you have the finesse…” She lifted her shoulders.
“Aren’t you the clever one?”
He unhooked his belt, then gestured for her to stand as he took off his jeans. He stepped forward to unbutton hers, added another gesture for her to lift her arms.
She wore a simple white sports bra, wiser, he thought than her usual support tank that would have put pressure on the ribs. Eyes on hers, he peeled it up and off, slowly, before cupping her breasts, sliding his thumbs over them.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, met his mouth with hers. He tempered the heat she put into the kiss, kept it soft, gentle, deep. When his hands glided down her—butterfly wings—her arms tugged to take them both to the bed. But he held her in place so they stood, body to body, as he nudged her jeans over her hips.
His mouth moved from hers to brush lightly, lightly over her jaw, then to her throat where her pulse beat. She ran her hands over his shoulders, then they locked there when he skimmed his lips over her breast. A feather of a touch that tripped her heartbeat while her hands skimmed through his hair to press him closer. Closer until he took more, until he felt her heart sprint under his lips.
When once again she would have pulled him down to the bed, he turned her until her back pressed against the bedpost. Then his hands, his lips traveled down so he treated himself to the taste of her skin. He could never get enough.
The length of that narrow torso, the hard body under soft flesh, and the quiver he could bring inside that tough, disciplined body all enchanted, aroused, overwhelmed him.
She felt those clever fingers ride her jeans down her legs, then slide back up her thighs until her legs went weak and wobbly.
He could make her float, make her want to float, weightless and weak and willing.
Then she was bared to him as his mouth found her, as his tongue slipped over, around, into her.
“Okay. Okay. God!” She had to wrap an arm behind her, around the post to stay upright. “Wait until—”
But he didn’t wait, so the orgasm spread like a fever, so it rocked through her, left her gasping. Helpless, desperate, thrilled, she moved against him and took more.
“Again.” He nipped at her inner thigh, then soothed that tiny, glorious pain with his tongue. He’d take all she had, then find more. When she came again, quaking with it, crying out from it, he slid slowly up her body and set off a storm in her with his fingers.
“Take me now,” he said as he slipped, slowly, slowly, into all that heat. “As I take you. Where we stand. Together.”
She saw his eyes, only his eyes, that wild, wonderful blue. And she knew love so keen she wondered it didn’t slice through them both.
Perhaps it did.
So she wrapped around him, her body pulsing like a heart, and took him as he took her.
Eyes open and locked.
When he dropped his forehead to hers, when he found the ability to draw breath back into his body again, he gathered her up. Her body felt so lax, he wondered she didn’t just pour like rainwater through his hands before he got them both in bed.
There he drew her against him, stroked her back.
“Enough finesse for you?”
“Any more, I’d be in a coma.”
He felt the cat leap back onto the bed, take his place.
All’s well then, he thought, as she fell asleep in his arms.
The dream didn’t surprise her. She’d expected it. But even in the dream she willed herself to handle it, not to let it weaken her.
Maybe she hadn’t expected to find herself in that room in Dallas with the red light blinking, the air so goddamn cold. But it didn’t hold the terror for her it once had. She wasn’t a child now, and Richard Troy was dead.
She’d killed him, after all.
She stood there, in the room of so many nightmares, dressed in black, her weapon in place, and waited for Mina Cabot to speak.
Mina stood in her school uniform, her hair bright and shiny and smooth, her eyes bold and alive.
“You think you understand me? You came from this. I didn’t. I had family who loved me. You didn’t. I had friends and a nice room of my own. You didn’t have anything. What do you know about me?”
“I know they took all of that from you. I know what that’s like.”
“You didn’t have anything to take.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. Something I don’t know I know.”
“They wouldn’t have taken you and dolled you all up. You weren’t pretty.”
Eve glanced over as Mina pointed, saw the pale, skinny child she’d been. The dirty hair, the hopeless eyes.
“Guess not.”
“He’d’ve sold you on the cheap. All broken and used up.”
“He’s the one who broke me and used me up. They didn’t break you, did they? Not until the end.”
“I had brains, and something to get back to. You didn’t save me.”
It hurt, even in the dream, it hurt. “You’ve got me there.”
“She’s not going to save me, either.” Dorian stood beside Mina now, her hair groomed into perfect curls. She wore the same school uniform.
That was wrong, Eve thought. She hadn’t gone to private school.
“She doesn’t even know if I’m dead or alive. What does she care?”
“I’m here because I care.”
“Bullshit!” Rage, Eve recognized it as it slapped out at her. “You’re here because they pay you. Like they paid the cops to drag me back to that shithole so my mother could collect her stipend.”
“I put your mother in jail.”
“A lot of good that does me now. You can just fuck off. I can take care of myself.”
Were teenage girls really that bitchy? Eve wondered. Or did she just see them that way?
“You want to be pissed at me? Fine, but I’m what you’ve got. You think I don’t understand you? She does. And she’s me.”
She looked at the child she’d been, cradling her broken arm while blood dripped from her hands.
“It’s going to get better,” Eve told her. “You’ll be okay.”
“Bullshit!” Dorian shrieked it this time. “You’re lying to her. How’s it better to get tossed to strangers who don’t give a shit? If they’d known what she did, they’d have tossed her in a hole. Killer! Killer! Killer! At least I never killed anybody. I didn’t do that!”
Mina stood, the blood turning her shirt red around the spear through her chest.
“This really sucks, and you didn’t stop it. You didn’t stop any of it. So…”
“Just fuck off,” the girls said together.
She woke with sunlight trickling into the bedroom and a fully dressed Roarke sitting behind her.
“There now, just a dream.”
“I know, I know. I’m okay. Damn it.” She sat up, laid her head on his shoulder when he put his arms around her. “It wasn’t that bad. Well, bad, but not … I don’t know.”
She eased back, pressed a hand to her head.
“Headache. Not a question, I can see it.”
“It’ll be all right.”
He rose, went to the AC for coffee. And bringing it to her, took out a blocker. “Take it, or no coffee.”
“That’s just mean.” She took it, and the coffee.
“You got a full night’s sleep before it hit you,” he commented, and had her checking the time.
“Shit! I’ve got to get moving.”
He simply put a hand on her shoulder to hold her in place. “You’ll take a moment to tell me about it.”
“I need to wake up, grab a shower. I’ll tell you.”
“All right then, with breakfast.”
“Can it be waffles?”
He pressed curved lips to her forehead. “It can. Get your shower.”
Not as bad as he’d feared, he thought when he walked to the AutoChef to program breakfast. He’d checked on her during his early-morning conference calls, and she’d slept peacefully.
So it had hit sometime after he’d left his office and come back to the bedroom to find her muttering in her sleep, and the cat butting his head against her shoulder.
But not that bad. She hadn’t been shaking, and the request for waffles meant she didn’t feel ill.
He dealt with breakfast, and telling himself—perhaps with partial honesty—he’d save her time, laid a work outfit on the bed for her.
When she came out wearing a short, cream-colored robe, he sat with the cat curled in his lap while the morning stock data scrolled on the wall screen.
“This thing’s silk, right?”
“It is, yes.”
“Is it sexy?”
He gave her a studied look and sipped his coffee. “What’s in it is.”
“Come on. Is it like fuckwear?”
With a laugh, he sat back. “A loaded question if I ever heard one, but we’ll treat it seriously. In my view it’s subtly sexy.”
“Kind of classy, right?”
“As I see it, yes. It suits you.”
“Nobody’s going to accuse me of being classy.”
“You’re in a class by yourself.”
After a quick snort, she grabbed her PPC. “Look at this underwear.”
“What a fascinating start to the day.” He took the PPC, nodded at the image. “Yes, I remember this from your board.”
And if he hadn’t, he thought, the bloodstains on the bra would serve as a clue.
“Set that aside a minute. Is it fuckwear?”
“Ah, Christ.”
“I know, I know, but put that aside. Just judge the pieces on their own right now.”
“All right then. They’re provocative, certainly, and designed to enhance the body. Given the color, the touches of lace, I’d say subtle again, and yes, classy, even romantic. On an adult woman.”
She punched his shoulder. “Yes. On a kid, not subtle or classy because just wrong. But they still have that … Mavis would say vibe. I get that vibe. Or it hit me when I put on this robe. It’s not bang me against the bedpost.”
“Did that.”
“That wasn’t banging,” she corrected, taking the PPC back. “And maybe I’m putting too much into a couple scraps of silk, but I think they wanted more from her than banging. Banging’s easy. You don’t have to spend a couple grand on underwear for that. And this had to be like daily wear, right? Like you buy me stuff like this—and some of it’s straight fuckwear. I’m not stupid. But for work? I’m not going to wear anything like this on the job.”
Thinking, thinking, she set the PPC down again. “Anyway, I’m going to get dressed before waffles.”
Roarke pointed toward the bed. She looked at the clothes laid out, then looked back at him.
“Seriously?”
“A time-saving offer only.”
“Accepted,” she decided, and took his coffee, finished it off. “I’ve got too much jumbling through my brain to think about clothes anyway.”
“Let me see the ribs first.” When she rolled her eyes and opened the robe, he set Galahad aside and rose to give them another pass with the wand.
“Bruising’s nearly faded off.”
“They feel okay. Not bullshit,” she said quickly. “If somebody punches me in the ribs, I’m going to feel it, but otherwise they’re okay.”
“Don’t drop your guard. Swelling’s down,” he added as he passed the wand over her jaw. “Your eye’s bloomed a bit more, but it’s not swollen. I’d tell you to give the eye another pass this afternoon, but you won’t.”
“I will if I remember.”
He kissed it lightly. Just, she thought, as Dennis Mira had.
“You’ll do.”
He went back to sit as she wiggled into the simple cotton briefs he’d set out.
“See,” she said as she pulled on the support tank. “You know.”
He’d gone for brown trousers. Not Feeney’s shit brown, but something that edged toward copper. And the shirt—nearly the same cream color as the robe—had needle-thin stripes of the copper and some navy. Navy, she assumed, because of the navy jacket. She strapped on her weapon, added the belt—also navy, with a copper buckle—the navy boots with thick copper soles, then the jacket that hit at her waist.
“This jacket has the magic lining, like the coat.”
“It’s a prototype,” he told her, removing the domes on the breakfast plates. “Removable, so transferable. Something we’re working on.”
“Huh. It’s really light.”
“In testing and simulations it blocks a full stun, a blade, and, should it come up against someone who’s managed to get hands on a gun, a bullet. Of course, I’d prefer you not put any of that to the test, but in case.”
He poured her coffee. “Now, tell me about the dream.”
“Right. Mostly annoying,” she began as she drowned the waffles in syrup. “It was in Dallas, in the room in Dallas.”
“Ah, Eve.”
“No, it doesn’t hit me like it used to. They’re dead, they’re dead and gone. I’m not saying it was sex on a tropical beach, but I handled it. First it was just the victim, just Mina.”
She told him as she ate, occasionally stabbing a fat berry between bites of syrup-soaked waffle.
“They were pretty damn bitchy,” she added, waving a piece of bacon that had Galahad’s nose twitching as he started casually toward the table.
And stopped dead at Roarke’s warning look.
“I know it’s me bitching at me, really. My subconscious and all that. Or how I figure thirteen-year-old girls would bitch. I mean, what do I know? The only thing I remember about being thirteen was it meant five more years until I could get out.”
She crunched into the bacon. “But I figure my brain worked out some truths. Mina had something to get back to. And if Dorian felt—feels—anything like I did, getting out’s enough.”
“You put them both in school uniforms.”
“Yeah, because I think that’s probably how it works. You’ve got a couple of girls or a handful, they’re all the same. Products. The underwear though, that’s different. Major expense. Investment,” she said again. “It’s like the robe. It feels good against the skin. You feel a certain way when you have it on. I put on my underwear for work, I feel a certain way. Put on the fancy stuff for under the fancy stuff, that feels a certain way. Maybe you don’t really think about it, but you feel it.”
“The uniform strips the individuality. Under it, the silk, the sexy accustoms you to that feel, that mood?”
“There you go. A kind of mind game. Some want someone they have to force, even hurt. That kind of power and dominance. But you can get an LC to role-play.”
“Not the same,” Roarke commented. “You don’t own an LC.”
“Okay, true enough. But why pay big bucks—and it has to be big bucks—to rape and brutalize when you can grab up a street kid for nothing? If you want a sex slave, a product, wouldn’t you pay more for one that does what you want, how you want it?”
“You think this is some kind of training. Target attractive young girls, lock them away from the familiar, indoctrinate them. The uniforms, the food, the hair and skin products.”
“Punishments, too. The carrot’s no good without the stick. Think of the military again, the old ‘drop and give me twenty.’ They have to break you down to build you up in their image, for their needs.
“A girl like Mina, who looks like Mina, who sells as a virgin, but one with sexual knowledge, one who’s gotten used to being photographed in the sexwear, or naked, or in sexual situations. You program a sex droid to be and do what you want, right? This could be like that, but with human girls.”
With a shrug, she polished off the waffles. “Or I could be way off base. But … Coincidence is bullshit, and it’s not bullshit that Mina Cabot and Dorian Gregg, same age, no prior connection, were both abducted, most probably from different areas, and both ended up in New York.”
She pushed up and began to load her pockets for the day.
“I’m pulling Willowby in, the SVU detective McNab knows. She may have some insight. I’ve gotta go.”
Roarke shot the cat another warning look before he rose, rounded the table. And laid his hands on Eve’s shoulders. “Take care of my cop.”
“I’ve got a magic shield.”
“I haven’t come up with one for that face of yours yet.” So he kissed it. “Wand that eye.”
“I will.” If she remembered, she thought, and left him.
In the car, she contacted Detective Willowby, asked for a meet, then drove through the gates.