Crimson Footprints II: New Beginnings (14 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

When Tak returned home, night engulfed the city. Were he pressed, he could hardly account for his whereabouts after leaving his father’s office. There’d been some driving, much of it circular, but there’d been long patches of nothingness, too. Parked on an endless stretch of sand far from his house, he’d looked out at the waters and asked, “What now?”

He was a husband, father, son. Each came with a shitload of expectations. But suddenly, he could only think of his wife.

Tak found Deena poolside and soaking in the Jacuzzi behind their house. Head resting against the ledge, two-tone toffee curls spilled and hung damp from the steaming water. She lifted a sleepy gaze at the sight of him.

Tak peeled off his shoes and stuck feet in the water. Khaki shorts soaking from the damp edge on which he sat. Content with watching his feet submerge, he toyed with just how he should begin.

“I talked to Dad today,” he said finally. “He told me about the prison project.”

Deena lowered her gaze. With it came a silence so long that Tak gave up on earning a response.

“Do you realize,” she said softly, “that I’m a thousand times more likely to murder you because my mother murdered my father?”

Well, he wasn’t expecting that.

“Mariticide,” she said softly.

Tak sighed.

“You’re not going to kill me, Dee.”

She looked up at him. “Your father sent you to talk to me. To talk sense into me.”

“Well, yeah. He’s worried about you. I am, too.”

She stood up, water rushing in currents from her body.

“For twenty-five years I’ve been on my own, since my mother decided I had no need for parents. I put myself through school, got a job at the best damned architectural firm in the world, and oversaw a multimillion-dollar project by my twenty-fifth birthday. I think it’s safe to say I don’t need you or your father wringing hands over me.”

“And that means what? That I forgo my right to worry about my wife? Or him his daughter?”

She looked away. But Tak studied her, studied her till fury melted to uncertain sigh.

“Come here, Dee.” He held out a hand.

“No,” she sulked. “I don’t want to.”

He pulled her to him anyway, suppressing a smile. How long he held her, he couldn’t say.

“It’s no good, baby,” Tak told her and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Any project that has you caging up your own mother is no good. You’ve got to leave it alone. Okay?”

She never did respond.

C
HAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Just as the rain stopped, Kenji came to a realization. He’d lost his mind.

Yearning to have a girl like Lizzie Hammond was like hoping to grasp grains of sand even while watching them slip from his fingers. And while he could fall to his knees and thrash wildly for more sand, inevitably, it too would fall away like the last.

He would leave her alone. As much for her good as his. They could be friends; hell, they were already family. But they could never be more, no matter how many times he thought of those sweet, gold-flecked eyes widening in astonishment at the slightest things, or her little chin, set stubborn in everlasting defiance.

With each day her treatment stretched on he found that his patience unevenly stretched with it. Common sense told him that a decade of physical and mental abuse didn’t unravel with a pill and dose of impatience from him. Skepticism told him that his yearning to hear her voice or see her smile was a testament to his physical attraction and nothing more. But that argument only lasted until 2
p.m
. each day, when she made her daily phone call, causing him to inadvertently smile without a hope of doing otherwise.

In the months they were apart, Lizzie had become an unmistakable part of Kenji’s life. Seven days a week they talked. About small things at first—the niece they shared, the weather, how much they both anticipated their talks. She rarely went out, and so, he’d taken to explaining each day in stark clarity—the bleeding red of sunsets, the molten silver of a storm, bold and ever intensifying. They talked of her treatment and her troubles. Cravings made her fear that she could get no better, no matter how much he encouraged. Kenji learned the name of her therapist—Dave, who was himself a recovering alcoholic. It was with Dave that she talked about her addiction, prostitution, her family, and Snow.

“Sometimes I think that none of this matters,” she admitted to Kenji. “That the moment I’m out, Snow will kill me anyway.”

He promised her that they’d conquer that problem together. Still, he stood ever amazed by the little chivalrous knight inside, eager to emerge for Lizzie Hammond and Lizzie Hammond alone.

They never talked about what they were or weren’t, and for that, Kenji was grateful. There were too many truths in that conversation—about what he wanted, what he anticipated, and what he could fairly expect from Lizzie at this juncture.

C
HAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Deena frowned at the results of the soils samples she’d sent for analysis, taken from one of three future sites for the new women’s prison. The first reported flaky particles, the second excessive moisture: leaving only the third as a true option for construction. She tossed aside the stacks of paper with a snort. When she looked up, Tak looked down at her.

“Working still?” he said and pushed her feet off the coffee table. “Been waiting for you in bed.”

Deena stacked the papers and filed them neatly in her briefcase, facedown so that the bold type stating “Project 9 Women’s Correctional Facility,” would be conveniently out of view.

“Okay. I just had some things I needed to get out of the way.”

Tak dropped down next to her so that the couch jerked with his weight. When he picked up a document labeled “Financial Analysis” next to a box of pizza and a bit of leftover change, she snatched it away, out of fear that he’d read the prison reference underneath.

“Well, you just answered my question,” he said dryly.

Deena shoved it too in her briefcase. “Stay out of my work, Tak. It’s really none of your business.”

“It is when it affects our home life.”

She turned on him. “And who says it does? Your father? The all-knowing Daichi Tanaka?”

Tak raised a brow. “You’re the one who acts like he’s omniscient, not me.”

“Just mind your damned business,” she warned.

Haphazardly, Deena stuffed financial reports, legal reports, building ordinances and designs into a Louis Vuitton briefcase she’d purchased years ago. Though her hands trembled and her temperature rose as if her very body threatened to overheat, Tak sat next to her, a foot propped on his knee, arm draped behind the back of the couch, watching her as if she were only minutely interesting.

  “You’ve been dreaming about her again,” he said quietly. An observation. An accusation.

As a little girl, she used to relive the same moments in her dreams: strange men, her mother’s screams, Deena running, running, running. And then the bang.

There was always the bang.

“I have not,” Deena snapped, voice betraying with the slightest of a tremble.

Tak picked at a piece of lint on his jeans. “All right then,” he said, “tell me what else is happening at work.”

She hesitated. “Your father is thinking of expanding into Sydney.”

“And you?”

“I think it’s great.”

Tak sighed. “Of course you do.”

Suddenly, he was on his feet. Deena looked up at him in wonder.

“What does that mean?”

She stood, never at ease with a man towering over her.

“It means Shanghai, Copenhagen, Houston, and now this.”

“Now what?” Deena demanded in exasperation, though she suspected she knew.

“You’ll want in. Ground floor. Site development. New hires. All of it.”

He searched her face. “Yeah,” Tak said, “just like I figured.”

But Deena shook her head. “And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with ambition?”

“Ambition?” he cried. “Is that what has you seeking new and better ways to punish your mother? Out to show you’re even more of a heartless hard ass than the original Tanaka?”

Deena rolled her eyes. “Listen, Tak. Don’t make this about whatever happened between you and your dad, okay?”

Disbelief etched his face. “You have got to be kidding me.” He stared at her but a moment before stalking off in a huff. Halfway gone, he turned back.

“You know, your family could use some of that passion and perseverance that you’ve got on short order for work. Maybe even a little of that devotion. As it stands, I haven’t quite figured out how to be both mother and father, much as Tony and Mia would appreciate it. The excuses you give for them? The total absence of discipline, no matter what it is they do? Yeah. Turns out it doesn’t help much.”

Deena gasped. She lacked passion, perseverance, and devotion when it came to him and their children? After all they’d endured to be together? After all this time, he still needed her to prove something to him?

She had only two words for that.

“Fuck you.”

Tak threw up his hands in surrender, turned, and stormed off. When Deena headed for the bedroom, it was just in time for him to brush past her, favorite pillow and blanket in hand. Seconds later, he slammed the door to a guest room behind him.

~*~

Darkness.

Darkness and the wail of a baby: as sharp and piteous as that of any wounded creature. Deena couldn’t find the baby, and blackness engulfed her, consuming with eerie totality. It was more than a light extinguished, more than the mere absence of it. This dark meant emptiness. Emptiness, isolation—except there was the child that sobbed. Where was she? How was she? And why wouldn’t she stop crying?

Panic seized Deena, thrashing her heart and forcing tears to her cheeks. The baby. She was expected to get the baby. Mommy said to hurry.

“Dee! Dee, wake up.”

Deena’s eyes flew open to face Tak staring down at her.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

She sat up.

“The baby,” she said. “There was a baby—”

He shook his head.

“Was a dream. You’re awake now.”

He brushed dampness from her face. 

Deena snatched free, her wound renewed with the memory of his earlier words.

“I know, I’m awake now,” she snapped, embarrassment fueling her anger.  

Tak stared at her, disbelief plain. “All right then,” he said. “Guess I’ll head back to the guest room.”

He stared at her and she stared back.

“Night,” Tak said and slammed the door behind him.

~
*
~

Deena rose in the morning and dressed to a silent home. Having woken late, she missed the morning rush where Mrs. Jimenez hurried food down the children’s throats before ushering them out the door.

Going in late would mean another late evening, later than usual this time. She needed to notify the state that they needed a new round of possible sites for the prison less she be forced to go with the only one even remotely acceptable. There was also the need to visit a construction site in Hialeah, where a miniature plaza was being built in accordance with her specifications. There was the expansion report from Jennifer Swallows—hopefully Daichi would want to move on her results quickly. Deena knew that she did.

Dressed in a featherweight wool suit from the Armani collection, she ventured to the living room for the purse and change she’d left near a half-eaten pizza the night before. Mrs. Jimenez had removed the box, as expected, but moved the money and purse, it seemed, too. When asked about it, she directed Deena to the master bedroom for the handbag but warned that she’d seen no money on the coffee table.

It was an oddity. Not only was their no cash in the living room, but there was none in her purse either. She hadn’t the time for a bank run. Food sources at construction sites were notoriously fickle—chances were there’d be little more than a poorly cleaned truck serving lukewarm sandwiches and taking cash only.

Deena ventured to the study, where she found Tak facing a blank canvas.

“Did you take my money from the coffee table?”

He sat on an oak stool with his back to her.

“Nope.”

“And from my purse? Did you take—”

“If you lost your money, Deena, there’s some in the top drawer of my dresser.”

She pursed her lips in irritation and stomped off for the room again. Once there, she threw open the drawer in question, sifting past stack after stack of neatly folded Calvin Klein boxers, and coming away with nothing. She returned to the study yet again.

“There isn’t anything in the top drawer! And I had money last night—”

“If it isn’t there, then you’ve already spent it. Now excuse me, but I’m trying to work, hard as you may find that to believe.”

With a humph of disbelief, Deena stomped from the room a second time, rocking the door on its hinges when she slammed it. It flew open again, quick, surprising her.

“If you can find time in your oh-so-important day, you’ll want to be here for the meeting with Tony’s social worker!” Tak shouted after her. “It’s only required to adopt your nephew!”

Before she could retort, he shut the door in her face.