Edge of Darkness (23 page)

But the fourth picture was arresting. Taken head-on at what seemed an arm’s length distance but was probably through a powerful high-resolution lens, it depicted a shirtless Jahad on the balcony of a hotel staring straight into the camera. No hat this time, nothing to cover his head or hide his features. Christian felt an odd sort of fascinated disgust, as one might when driving by the scene of a fatal accident, repulsed by the carnage but unable to look away.

His eyes, which read pale silver in the photograph, held the flat, killer gaze of an assassin. His head was snow white and entirely bald—satin smooth, without the telltale stubble of a man who shaves it—and it became clear as Christian studied the photo that Jahad had no eyebrows or eyelashes to speak of. He was, in fact, entirely devoid of any hair at all. The right side of his body from his jaw to his waist was covered in hideous scar tissue, puckered and shiny, and his right hand was little more than a claw that hung at an odd angle by his hip.

But beneath the ruined skin was the impressive, well-developed musculature of a dedicated athlete.

Christian checked Jahad’s stats: six-foot-two, two hundred and thirty pounds.

Big. Almost exactly as big as he was.

A notation farther down caught his eye—
alopecia areata universalis
. Autoimmune disorder that caused a total loss of all body hair.

Wonderful. A bald albino bodybuilding religious zealot with a near-genius IQ and a predilection for sadomasochism, pyromania, and bestiality. He felt a twinge of nostalgia for the old leader of the
Expurgari
, who was just your garden-variety nut job with a God complex.

He closed the files and logged out of his email, then sat staring at the computer screen, trying to concentrate on the job at hand and all that needed to be done. But his conversation with Leander about deciding between the lesser of two evils kept circling his brain, one word nettling him like a burr.

Information.

That was Leander: controlled, calculated, dispassionate. It was the price of leadership, this careful, logical approach to decision making. He couldn’t afford to make mistakes because too many lives were at risk. Too many people counted on him.

Christian, on the other hand, was the second son. Relieved of the burden of power that came with being the Alpha heir, he’d always been the wilder of the two, relaxed and indifferent where Leander was disciplined and reserved. His wild streak had gotten him into plenty of trouble on many occasions, but possibly never as much as the trouble he knew he was in now.

September Jones, whether he liked it or not, had brought him to his knees.

With her sweetness and her smile, with her pride and her passion, with her sharp, scathing wit. Her vulnerability was incredibly alluring, as was her strength. So were all the shadows in her eyes, which drew him like a moth to the flame. A moth that knew it would be burned, but didn’t care.

It came over him then the way the day breaks—slowly, and then all at once.

He didn’t care.

He didn’t care about her past. He didn’t care about his own past. He didn’t care about what he should be thinking or feeling or doing, or all the ways in which they were both broken, or the tragedies that had broken them, or the colossal stupidity of trying to make something work between two people so different.

He just cared about
her
.

He wanted her and he’d walked away.

And damn it all to hell, he knew, even as she was telling him the story, she’d punished herself every second of every day over the past six years for what she’d done—that she was not only remorseful, but
self-loathing
—and still he’d walked away.

“You’re a bloody wanker, you know that, McLoughlin?” he muttered, running a hand through his hair. Abruptly, he stood from the desk, fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket, and began to dial, doing his best to ignore the shaking in his hands.

When he heard the automated message informing him the number was no longer in service, the shaking got just that much worse.

“Tell me again why I agreed to this?”

“Because you love me, that’s why.”

Ember sent Asher a sour sidelong glare and muttered, “Debatable.”

They stood looking at a modest walk-up with a brick façade the color of cinnamon on a quiet, tree-lined street in the Clot district, a mainly residential suburb bordering the Sagrada Família. There was a quaint café next door with a spotted dog sunning itself in an arched doorway, and two old men playing chess beneath a striped umbrella. It was tranquil and idyllic, but to Ember it might as well have been the entrance to hell.

It had taken Asher all of twenty-four hours to find her a psychiatrist, one he claimed was the best in the city. He really wasn’t kidding around.

Standing beside her now beneath the spreading arms of a blooming acacia across the street from the cinnamon walk-up, he gave her a friendly nudge with his elbow. “Go on, chicken. I’ll pick you up after and we can go for
suspiros de monja
.”

Suspiros de monja
—literally translated as “nun’s sighs”—were a golden, crispy, cream-filled dessert made famous by the nuns of the Catalan convents. They were also a potent incentive for Ember, as they were her favorite sweet.

“If I haven’t slit my wrists by then,” she threw over her shoulder as she stepped off the curb and crossed the street. She heard Asher’s low chuckle behind her and kept walking.

The waiting room was tasteful and far more homey than the others she’d haunted. There were no thumbed-through magazines littering a crappy coffee table, no cheap chairs crowded too close together, no hideous pastel prints on the wall. And no aquarium, thank God. Aquariums always made her feel claustrophobic; she couldn’t help but imagine herself as one of the brightly colored, frantically darting fish, trapped forever inside.

The one item ubiquitous to a therapist’s office in any part of the world was there, however: the round call button on the wall. She pushed it and it illuminated, alerting whoever lurked behind the waiting room walls to her presence.

Before she could plop down onto the comfortable-looking armchair, a door on the opposite side of the room opened and a woman appeared. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, chic and sleek in a navy suit and low nude heels, she was of an indeterminate age somewhere between thirty and fifty. She wore a double strand of pearls around her neck, and Ember knew they were real by the dull, luxe sheen. So were the pearl and diamond studs in her ears, and the very large sapphire and diamond ring on her manicured hand.

Marguerite would be eating her heart out right about now.

“Señorita Jones?”

Ember nodded and the woman stepped forward with an outstretched hand and introduced herself.

“
Estoy
Katharine Flores.
Encantado de conocerte
.”

“
Un placer
,” said Ember as she took her hand, surprised she hadn’t introduced herself as “Doctor” Flores. In her experience, anyone with an MD wore it like a badge of honor. Or a war wound.

“You’re American?” Katharine said in English, sounding equally surprised.

Ember smiled. “And here I thought my Spanish was pretty good.”

“It is,” replied Katharine, still in English. She spoke without a trace of an accent. “It’s excellent, in fact. Where’d you learn?”

“School, mostly, but both my parents spoke Spanish, too. We had a large Hispanic population where I grew up. What gave me away?”

Katharine glanced briefly down at their hands, which were still joined. She met Ember’s gaze again and her brown eyes were sparkling with amusement. “No one shakes hands like an American. It always feels like you’re sealing a blood pact.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Katharine smiled at her. “Does it have to be one or the other?”

Ember released her hand and shrugged. “Everything is.”

Katharine cocked her head and made a very doctorly, “Hmm,” and Ember realized the session had already begun.

“Okay, doc, time to shrink my head. You sure you’re up for this? It’s pretty ugly in there.”

With a Mona Lisa smile and a hand held toward the door she’d just come through, Katharine said, “After you, September.”

Feeling like she was going off to face a firing squad, Ember walked through the door.

An hour later, after her interesting new patient had been escorted out and she sat alone behind her polished mahogany desk, the yellow pad of scribbled session notes beside her and a blank patient file open on her computer, the good doctor pressed the rewind button on the small cassette recorder she used to tape her conversations.

Most new patients had an extreme aversion to being taped at first, eventually learning to ignore the recorder as their trust in the process and in their therapist grew, but Ember hadn’t even flinched when Katharine had asked her permission to use it. This, in itself, was telling. She’d admitted to seeing “a few” psychiatrists in the States, but judging by the practiced way she articulated her responses, Katharine suspected the number was probably in the double digits.

She clearly had extensive experience telling professionals what they wanted to hear.

Surprisingly forthright—especially for a first session—September Jones had spoken openly about the crash that had killed her mother and little brother. She was composed, almost clinical, and there was a slightly faraway look in her eyes as she spoke, as if she were telling a sad story about someone else.

Katharine had seen this before. A well-prepared patient with very strong mental barriers could quite easily disassociate themselves emotionally when speaking about a trauma they’d suffered, especially if it were years in the past. If there were no immediate emotional triggers, she could safely share, as if from a comforting distance.

But the devil was in the details. And after nearly twenty years of practice, Katharine knew with canny precision where the real skeletons lay.

She checked a notation on her yellow pad and rewound the tape to the number she’d written. She pressed play and Ember’s steady voice filled the quiet room.

“…and after that I drove home and picked up my mother and brother, and we headed to the restaurant.”

Katharine heard her own follow-up question. “Do you remember how much you had to drink before getting in the car?”

Here was the troubling pause. It wasn’t long, but it had a sense of fraught heaviness, as if something very important hinged on whatever she said next.

“A lot. Too much. Probably…” Another pregnant pause, and she fumbled her next words. “Um, a whole bottle of…scotch. One of the big ones. The biggest.”

Katharine paused the tape.

There were several things that troubled her about this. The majority of people who were in alcohol-related automobile crashes had little to no memory of the actual crash or the hours leading up to it, especially if they’d ingested the quantity of alcohol September had described. After consuming a large bottle of hard liquor, at her height and body weight, she would have been, as they say, “blind drunk,” yet she’d chronicled in minute detail exactly what had happened before, during, and after the accident.

Also, her mother certainly would have noticed her daughter’s impairment—aside from the slurred speech and affected motor skills, the smell of whiskey on the breath is very distinctive—and protested she shouldn’t drive, especially with August in the car. Indeed Ember most probably would have been unable to operate a vehicle at all, especially to drive twenty minutes out of town toward their destination as she’d later said.

And there were the pauses. Katharine’s intuition was a finely honed organ, something she often referred to as a sixth sense, and those pauses felt all wrong. They didn’t feel like guilty or embarrassed hesitations, or the courage-gathering spaces before a confessional that they should have been.

They felt calculated.

As if September was deciding something.

Or hiding something.

Or lying.

Katharine flipped through the consent and information forms she’d had September fill out prior to leaving and noted the name of her last—admitted—psychiatrist, a Dr. Kensington in New Mexico.

Then she logged onto the Internet to see if she could find a telephone number.

Christian stood outside Ember’s apartment building, gazing up at her fifth-story window. No lights were on inside, which meant she wasn’t home, which—considering she hadn’t been home all day yesterday, either—he found very worrying.

Just as worrying as her disconnected phone had been.

He’d lasted all of two minutes after hearing the recorded message before barking an order at Corbin to get the car. He’d come here first to find no one home, then he’d gone to the bookstore and seen an older brunette, attractive in a severe, femme fatale kind of way, standing behind the counter. He guessed from his conversations with Señor Alvarez this was her stepmother, Marguerite.

He watched through the windows from across the street, but Ember never appeared. Corbin drove him back to Ember’s apartment building, but she never showed up there, either.

He went home. He paced. He spent the night in a fitful, nightmare-riddled sleep.

Now, empty-handed more than twenty-four hours later, he was determined to find out what was happening, even if it meant breaking into her apartment to do it.

He took the stairs three at a time. As soon as he hit the fourth floor landing, he stopped dead.

It sizzled through him with the electrifying intensity of a lightning strike. First it was a ripple of power, still palpable though it was hours old. Then he caught the scent—a complex bouquet of forest floor, masculine musk, and spices—and an involuntary growl rose in the back of his throat.

Ikati
. Male. More than one. They’d been here, and recently.

Hackles raised, ears straining for any hint of danger, he eased silently up the next flight of stairs. At the top of the landing he paused, listening, testing the air, but only that slight pulse of power and the fading aroma of hot-blooded predator in the air belied their recent presence. Whoever it was had been here since he’d last been here. And might, even now, be on their way back.

He looked at Ember’s apartment door and a flash of pure rage crackled through him.

What did they want with her? How the hell had they found her? And where the hell
was
she?

A noise from inside the apartment across the hall snapped his head around. His eyes narrowed and his muscles tensed, but he relaxed a fraction when he heard whistling, then a muffled thump and a low curse as someone behind the door bumped into something. A chair, judging by the way it skittered across the floor. Then a man’s voice, chastising himself for his clumsiness in an aggravated mutter.

“Good job, knucklehead, walk right into the kitchen chair! Is it time for new glasses?”

Asher. Of course, he lived right across the hall.

Christian didn’t waste any time applying his knuckles to Asher’s door.

“Jesus Christ, what’s the emergency? Is the building on fire?” came Asher’s annoyed voice as he approached.

Apparently he’d knocked a little harder than he realized.

He heard the sound of a chain being unlatched and a lock being turned. Then the door swung open and Asher said, “This better be good, Dante, I’m right in the middle of—”

He froze when he caught sight of Christian. His mouth snapped shut, his eyes narrowed, and his jaw went tight.

“It’s not Dante.”

Asher gave him a slow, assessing once over, taking in his livid face, the tension in his muscles, his stance, which undoubtedly telegraphed his readiness to break something.

“Clearly,” he said. His expression hovered somewhere between wariness and irritation. “You look in a lovely mood. Did the beauty salon run out of your favorite conditioner?”

Christian growled, “Where is she?”

Asher crossed his arms over his chest and drawled, “
She?
”

He hissed a slow breath through his teeth, realizing this wasn’t going to be easy. He’d forgotten how viciously Ember’s guard dog protected her. “You know who I’m talking about. Where. Is. She?”

They stared at one another for a moment—fleeting but arctic—until Asher snapped, “She moved! And don’t bother asking me where, because I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to see you.”

Moved. Okay—she was safe. For the moment. Something loosened in Christian’s chest, but tightened again when he absorbed the last part of the sentence. It became slightly harder to breathe.

“You’re pretty sure she doesn’t want to see me, or you’re sure?”

Asher pursed his lips. “She didn’t say those exact words, but it was implied.”

There was another frigid pause as the two of them stared at one another in a jaw-clenching stalemate. Then Christian huffed out a hard breath, ran a hand through his hair and looked at the floor. He briefly closed his eyes, gathering his frayed patience and the ragged edges of his anger with a surprisingly difficult exertion of will, then looked back up at Asher, meeting him eye to eye. When he spoke, his voice came very low.

“You’re her friend; I respect that. I respect your loyalty. But I have to see her. I
have
to. You can help me or not, but I’ll find out where she is one way or another. Believe me when I say it’s in her best interests if I find her sooner rather than later.”