EPILOGUE

 

 

In the movies, after the hero saves the damsel in distress, she wraps her arms around him and gives him a big smooch on the lips. Sometimes, they ride off into the sunset together.

Sitting in Daisy’s apartment, staring at each other across her dinner table, it wasn’t like that at all. No smooching. No plans to hop on a plane for a weekend beach getaway.

Micah had removed her problem. Nathan and Zaluski were both in custody. Alec was dead. No one was threatening her life anymore. But since Nathan owned this condo, she would probably have to move out. The police would seize it. Her now-criminal now-ex-boyfriend wouldn’t be able to financially support her anymore.

And Micah had no idea if Gavin Belmont would actually take any action to help her with joint custody of her son. Micah hadn’t said anything about it to Daisy because he didn’t want to get her hopes up.

The lines of her face all angled downward. Her eyes looked puffy, probably from hours of crying. She seemed like a woman in mourning. He didn’t blame her.

Micah’s phone buzzed, and he read a text message from new friend Layne.

 

FYI, made it to Cheyenne and my meeting just in time to land the biggest security client I’ve ever had. Sorry for the secrecy before, I couldn’t tell anyone until the deal went through. You doing ok? Situation resolved?

 

Micah considered replying, but he put his phone away instead. He’d catch up with Layne later.

On the table before each of them sat a plate of enchiladas. Daisy had barely touched hers. Micah wanted to eat, but the rope burns on his hands made holding utensils difficult.

“You not hungry?” she said.

He shrugged. Didn’t want to ask her to feed him.

“What about cheesecake instead?” she said.

“Can you cut it into little bites?”

She glanced down at his hands, the bandages still wrapped around his palms. “Oh, of course. I didn’t even think about that.”

“It’s no big deal.”

She left the table and disappeared into the kitchen. He waited for a moment, not sure what to do. He hadn’t known what to expect from this evening. A passionate romance to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of this debacle? No, not really. When she hadn’t returned his texts after they’d slept together, he’d known it was a dead end.

But to see her so sad, so morose, was too awkward. He didn’t know how to comfort her.

He joined her in the kitchen as she pulled a big block of cheesecake from her freezer and plopped it on the counter. She took a large carving knife from the drawer and started to cut the cheesecake into slices.

“I haven’t been all-the-way truthful with you,” she said.

Micah tensed his jaw. “Okay.”

She pulled one of the slices of cheesecake aside and cut it into smaller pieces, working the knife quickly along the block. “It’s just that… when I met you, I had these ideas about who you were. As a person, you know.”

“Okay.”

“And then things got out of hand. I learned that I was wrong about so many things. But some things were already set in motion, and that made it difficult.”

“I don’t understand.”

She sighed. “I wanted to tell you before, but…”

Daisy trailed off as she started on the next piece of cheesecake, chopping it into smaller bits. Then the knife slipped. Her right hand pushed the knife between the first and second finger of her left hand, slicing through the groove.

Sounded exactly like driving a blade into a piece of chicken. Micah watched the knife split the webbing between her fingers into two halves before she’d even realized it was happening.

She screamed and shook her cut hand, which made droplets of blood rain down all over the cubed bits of cheesecake.

Micah leaped into action. He snatched a dishtowel from next to the sink and pressed it into her hand. Daisy whimpered and stamped her foot on the kitchen floor.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Put pressure on it here. Do you have gauze or bandages? Hydrogen peroxide or anything we can clean this with?”

“Yes,” she said, her shoulders hitching as she breathed. She looked down at the dish towel, at the blood seeping into it, the red patch slowly growing larger. “In my bathroom, under the sink.”

Micah pressed her uncut hand over the dishtowel and left her there, sprinting down the hallway toward her bathroom. He threw back the door and then kneeled down to open the cabinet under the sink.

As his hand reached out to grip the knob, he heard Daisy running down the hall. “Wait, Micah. Don’t open the cabinet.”

But his hand was already pulling it open. When his eyes adjusted to the limited light inside it, his mouth dropped open. Sitting next to a bottle of hydrogen peroxide was a metal flask, big enough for a pint. Curved to fit the angle of a person’s hip.

And on the front of the flask, the monogrammed initials MM.

Michael McBriar.

This was his flask. Or, it had been. He hadn’t seen this in years, not since he’d been a member of the American branch of Luis Velasquez’s Sinaloa cartel in Oklahoma. Not since before the trial, before Witness Protection.

He lifted the flask. Held it in his hands. It felt like coming home, like a dirty secret kept locked for many years, now suddenly unleashed.

He turned to find Daisy hovering outside the bathroom, clutching her bleeding hand to her chest. Terror on her face.

“This flask,” he said. “How did you get it?”

Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t say anything. Her head slowly jiggled back and forth.

He studied the raised initials. MM. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Had to be this same flask he carried in his pocket, always sloshing with liquid with every step he took.

“You know who I am,” he said, feeling anger rise up from his stomach. He held out the flask. “Where did you get this?”

Her chest heaved. “Please don’t hurt me.”

“Hurt you? Tell me what the hell is going on here, Daisy.”

“I thought there was something strange about you, when we talked in the building that day. The day I met you. No Facebook, no Twitter, no nothing. All those vague comments about Oklahoma. It was obvious you weren’t who you said you were.”

Micah looked back at the flask. Thought about the thousands of times he’d lifted it to his lips, let its contents numb his pain. “How did you get the flask?”

“Bought it online with Nathan’s credit card. There’s a group of Witness Protection collectors who trade this stuff.”

A cold chill gripped Micah’s spine. “Witness Protection collectors?”

She winced. “I’m so sorry. I was angry.”

“The blog. The Inside WitSec blog. That’s you, isn’t it?”

She nodded, tears streaming down her face. “You’re not who you said you were, but I see now you’re not who I thought you were, too. It’s all a big mess in my brain.”

“When you said you were going to unmask all those people in WitSec, you were talking about me? I was one of the people you were going to expose?”

She nodded again, said nothing.

“But you had sex with me. Invited me into your home to meet your son. Why would you do all that?”

She shrugged, now openly bawling. “I’m stupid. Like the danger. I shouldn’t have let you meet Caden, but I couldn’t turn you away when you showed up here. I didn’t know you were coming by that day.”

Micah droped the flask on the counter behind him, and Daisy watched his hands as he slipped them into his pockets. Her chest pulsed, her lips curled down in fright.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Daisy. I don’t know why you’d think that.”

“Because I know what you did in the Sinaloa. I know all about it.”

His head was swimming. “I don’t get it. Why the blog?”

“I was angry. Wanted justice. Because my brother never got the chance you did. He never got to escape from the bad people, scot-free. He died because of people like you in the drug business. Yes, he sold drugs too, but if he’d had the chance you got, he could have become a good person. But we’ll never know that now, will we?”

Her tears were like a knife puncturing his chest.

She assumed WitSec was the good life. She had no idea what he’d been through to get to where he was now, but he didn’t want to argue with her. In a way, she was right. She had grounds to be angry. Micah had experienced the grungy side of existence and had lived to tell the tale. Lots of good people didn’t get that chance. Maybe her brother was one of those people, but Micah couldn’t do anything about that.

“I didn’t even know you knew anything about computers,” Micah said.

“I run a few websites to make a little money from the ads. My astrology blog is popular, but the WitSec one was also gaining traction.”

“All those insider details, like the new names of people in the program. How did you know all that?”

“Some of it I got from articles on the internet.”

“But not all of it. Those names are classified.”

“Wait here,” she said, and disappeared from the doorway.

In a moment, she returned, holding a black leather suitcase in her undamaged hand. She set the case on the floor.

“What’s that?” Micah said.

“There was a Marshal named Kevin Neary. He died during a carjacking in DC a couple years ago, and this suitcase was in the trunk of the car when it was stolen. The case made its way to the WitSec collector community, and I bought it. Well, with Nathan’s money, but he didn’t know.”

Micah had never met anyone in the Marshal’s service named Neary. “I don’t get it.”

Daisy sighed. “I spent weeks trying to figure out how to open the case. It had a keypad lock on it, but I finally stumbled on the combination. I was the first person to open the case since Neary died, as far as I know. Inside it was a manuscript, because Neary was writing memoirs about his time in WitSec. He was going to expose everything. But he died before he got that chance, so I did it for him.”

Micah pointed at the suitcase. “Was my story in his manuscript?”

“Bits and pieces, but not your new name. I put the rest together on my own.”

A darkness settled over Micah. If Daisy could figure out who he was, anyone could. His world felt fragile, teetering on the edge of a cliff.

“I trusted you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have.”

No one spoke for a few seconds, and the air between them felt thick, like soup.

“So what now?” she said. Her chest still heaving, her eyes still wide with fear.

He touched the flask with a fingertip. It was his, but he didn’t want it anymore.

“Do you want me to bandage your hand?”

She shook her head.

“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

She shook her head again.

“Then I’m going to walk out the door, and I don’t expect I’ll see you after today.”

She didn’t seem to believe it. “I don’t want you to be angry with me. I wrote those posts weeks ago and had them all scheduled out to publish in advance. I did it before I’d even come to Frank’s office.”

“But then you did come to me to ask for help, even though you knew who I was.”

“I wanted to find out for myself. Face the monster of the Sinaloa up close.”

Micah gritted his teeth. “I’m sorry about what happened to your brother, but I didn’t do that. I hope you’ll decide not to publish my name on your blog. But I know I can’t make you do anything. You should know, though, that if you expose me, it’s not just me who’ll suffer. I have a brother and a sister and both my parents who are still alive. The remaining Sinaloa people will come after them, too.”

Daisy kept her head down, not meeting his gaze. He turned back to the cabinet and snatched a roll of bandages and the hydrogen peroxide, and then set them on the counter.

He walked to her, and she flinched back from him. He didn’t understand how she could be so frightened of him, yet still spend time with him, pretending nothing was wrong. But maybe that explained why she’d been with Nathan in the first place. Her ability to be someone else when necessary.

Daisy the chameleon.

“Goodbye, Daisy. Please take care of yourself.”

She still didn’t lift her head.

He left her there and walked to her door. With his hand on the doorknob, he paused, trying to think of something to say to persuade her. He hoped she wouldn’t publish a post exposing him.

But hoping was all he could do.