Uncovered (2 page)

Uncover

verb
  \
ə
n‘k
ə
v
ə
r

Discover (something previously secret or
unknown).

“I know well what I am fleeing from but
not what I am in search of.”

-Michel de Montaigne

"Are you sure you want to go through
with this, Gemma?" my closest friend implored for the second time since
she stomped into my new apartment a couple minutes ago. Seated right in front
of me on the ottoman, Pen sifted her fingers through her mess of wavy brown
hair before releasing it to fall around the brilliant peacock tattoos gracing
her shoulders. "It's not too late to back down."

"This is something I
need
to do for myself."

Besides, she was wrong—it
was
too late. It had been ever since I received the call four months ago.
"Everything
you’ve been told about your story, your father's story, is a lie. It's up to
you to uncover the truth."

Although I hadn't contacted
Emerson & Taylor to search for him—because really, who would have believed
me—my caller had gotten his wish. His words ignited something within me, a
frenzied need for closure that I'd somehow shoved to the far corners of my
mind. For days, weeks even, the memory of his gruff voice was a constant
distraction, a weight on my body and mind. And though I'd promised myself long
ago that I had put all things concerning my father behind me, I soon found that
nothing could stop me from searching around in my history ... his history.

Not even Penelope
Connelly—the woman who’d been my closest confidant for the last six years.

When I finally broke down and
told her about the call from Emerson & Taylor, I hadn't planned to ask for
help. My intentions were to go to Los Angeles to confront my stepmother on my
own because I’d reached the point where I couldn’t even sleep without my
caller’s words affecting me. But then Pen had reminded me of what happened the
last time I attempted to contact my dad's third, and final, wife. I was sixteen
at the time, my father had been dead for seven years, and I'd just lost my mom
six months before. Maybe I'd hoped to find some semblance of normality with my
stepmother—I was fragile and young and woefully ignorant—but I didn't get the
chance to meet Margaret in person. Instead, she’d sent a lawyer to deal with
me.

I could barely remember the
attorney’s face, or his name, but what he’d said to me had stuck to me like
glue.

"Your name is nowhere
in your father's will, and Margaret has informed me that you and your mother
have been aware of that since he passed away. You are more than welcome to
contest the will, Ms. Emerson, but I'm going to warn you—you'll feel the crushing
reality of all the legal fees before you can bat your pretty brown eyes. Now,
Margaret is prepared to settle with you ... as long as you don't come back with
your hand stretched out. You understand what I'm saying, don't you,
sweetheart?" 

 Whenever I read an article
about my stepmother, or saw her son on TV, that lawyer’s words oozed into my
thoughts, and the night I told Pen about the call was no different. Like
always, my best friend had immediately pulled me from that dark place.

"I think I have an idea."
She had run her tongue over the tiny gap between her front teeth and leaned
into me so nobody else in the crowded bar would hear. “But we’ll need to be …
creative
.”

Her definition of
creative
turned out to be straightforward—she would step out of her “ethical zone” and
get me directly into Emerson & Taylor. She would bypass their security
system and add me as a new hire, taking care of everything from the background
check to a squeaky-clean work history that didn't include phone sex and
escorting under the pseudonym Alice. I’d be given a temporary identity with a
single purpose.

Uncover, expose, and then
get the hell out of there.

The moment I got the call
from the company’s corporate headquarters offering me a job, I turned in my
notice at the agency I’d been working at and set up my life in L.A. so quickly,
my head was still reeling from the whirlwind apartment search and ensuing move.

I thought I was ready.

Except now, I got the
impression Pen was having second thoughts. Why else would she have surprised me
by showing up at my door first thing this morning? Las Vegas wasn’t exactly a
hop and a skip away.

"Pen,” I spoke up, my
voice barely audible, “I understand if you can't help me." She had already
done so much for me I couldn't imagine asking for more. Scooting forward on the
couch, I covered her fingers with mine and gave them a firm squeeze. "I
know how angry Linc will be if he finds out you're hacking again."

At the mention of her older brother,
she jerked out of my grip and narrowed her slate blue eyes. "Don't even go
there, Gem. The only way he'll find out
anything
is if you tell him. And
if you do, I'll hurt you." But she bit the corner of her lip teasingly.
"Besides, I'm like Lisbeth Salander and Neal Caffrey mixed up in one
big-boobed package. I'm not worried at all—at least not about myself."

My eyebrow jerked up in
confusion. "Neal Caffrey and Lisbeth Salander?" I purposely ignored
her concern for me. Combined with my own doubts, they were probably enough to
do me in.

"They're—" Tilting
her head to the side, she changed her direction and said, "You know what?
They don't matter right now." She hooked her hand around my slim upper arm
and drew us both to our full height, mine just a couple inches shy of her
five-foot-six. It was a lame running joke between us that she was always two
ahead of me—two months older, two cup sizes bigger, and two inches taller.

"What matters is that
you need to get through E & T's security, then march your ass to HR and
pick up your badge—"

Every muscle in my body
tensed as she essentially gave me a rundown of the message I’d received from
the human resources director. "You
hacked
my email," I
groaned, palming the bridge of my nose for a few seconds. "Dammit, Pen,
really?"

She stepped backwards, her
thin silver bangles clanging together as she threw up her hands defensively.
"Calm your tits, woman! I just logged into the Lizzie email. I mean, I set
it up, remember?" At the shallow jerk of my head, she said, "Look,
I'm just staying in the loop ... if you still want to go through with it, of
course."

"I'm
not
backing
down." Darting past her, I strode around the couch and across my open
living room to the front door; my nude Michael Kors pumps a heavy drum on the
laminate planks. Time was not on my side this morning, and arguing wouldn't
help.

Pausing at the table in the
foyer, I glanced up at the framed mirror hanging directly in front of me. I
caught Pen's reflection—her arms crossed stubbornly over her chest and her
Jolie-esque lips worked together in a frown—and I plastered on a self-assured
smile.

"Whenever you ask me if
I'm still going through with working at E & T to get closer to Margaret,
you know I'm going to counter with this: I
have
to get into that company.
I haven't gotten anything done since I received that call, and I won't
accomplish much else until I get this out of my system."

Her mouth parted in response,
but I powered on. "I know the risk I'm taking. But I just need to know if
there's any truth to—" I gripped the table in support, the blunt angles
digging into my palms. "My dad left me nothing. It hurt like hell then,
but I brushed it off because I was a child. Now, I want to know why. It's not
about the money. I just need to know if something changed."

"Just wanted to make
sure." Resigned, she snatched the remote from the ottoman and threw
herself on the couch, her mid-back length hair hanging over the armrest.
"You can do this."

"I
can
. It’ll be
simple," I repeated while I examined my appearance one final time. I
looked nothing like the little girl Margaret had last seen at my father’s
funeral, and not all that much like the young woman her lawyer turned away
seven years ago, but I was still terrified she would know. That she'd
immediately spot the word
IMPOSTOR
branded all over me—from the straight
blond hair that I'd worked into a sleek ponytail, to my heart-shaped face with
its small nose and full cheeks, and finally my eyes. Brown with amber
flecks—eyes that looked ... terrified.

For a damn good reason.

If this ended badly, if I was
found out, so much ugly would be unleashed I couldn't even stand to think about
it without strings weaving tightly through my ribcage and suffocating me.

I could go to prison for
this.

Smoothing back a nonexistent
stray wisp of platinum hair, I spun away from the mirror. I faced Pen with my
hands fisted by my side. She glanced up from the DVR’d episode of
Sleepy
Hollow
and smiled encouragingly. "You have this. Get in there—"

"And take that bitch
down," I finished breathlessly, and she pumped her fist.

"That's my girl. I'll
stick around for the day, just in case you need me. As long as you don't mind,
that is?"

Picking up my purse and keys,
I shook my head. "Make yourself at home."

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
She returned her attention to the TV, but before I left the apartment, she
cleared her throat tentatively. Lowering my hand from the doorknob, I looked
back at her.

"You're not Gemma there.
Don't forget that,” she gently reminded. “You're Lizzie."

It was something I couldn't
forget. I’d crammed that reminder into my brain ever since she and I came up
with this crazy, messy plan. My name was Lizzie Connelly, not Gemma Emerson.
Gemma Emerson didn’t exist—at least, not where Lizzie was concerned.

Clearing the lump of hysteria
from the back of my throat, I bobbed my head briskly, and Pen’s shoulders
relaxed. "I remembered to be Lizzie a couple weeks ago when I met with HR,
so you don’t need to worry. Besides, this’ll be
simple
."

As I drove from the seaside
Marina del Rey apartment in my leased Mini Cooper, I continued to tell myself
that.

*

Up until a week and a half ago, I hadn't
stepped foot in Los Angeles since I was sixteen—when I hopped a Greyhound bus
from Vegas with the intent of meeting with my stepmother. My parents had divorced
when I was seven, and the moment everything was finalized my tall, dark-eyed
mother had promptly departed the city with me in tow.  She was a model, which
was how she met my father, and at first, we moved wherever her work took
her—New York, Miami, Chicago, but never back to Los Angeles. By the time I was
thirteen, I'd lived in more places than most people visited in their lifetime,
but I welcomed it. 

Mom and I had been a team,
and it hadn't mattered where we lived.

Sin City was our final move.
It had come a couple months before my fifteenth birthday, but we would have
ended up in a new city if my mom hadn’t died a year later. It was one of those
wrong place at the wrong time tragedies I always read about but didn’t think
would happen to us—she’d forgotten her credit cards at home and when she went
into the convenience store to pay for gas, she walked into a robbery that had
already turned deadly.

She was killed. And so was
that team of ours that was my world.

With my mother's entire
family in Ukraine, and relatively unknown to me, I’d stuck around the apartment
we'd shared in North Vegas and prayed the state wouldn't catch wind of me
living alone. The idea of being tossed into the foster care system for two
years scared the shit out of me, but I successfully avoided it. Since my
mother’s death, the only time I had left Sin City, I'd returned almost
immediately—nearly too broke to put food in my refrigerator and still reeling
from my meeting with Margaret's attorney.

But here I was. In Los
Angeles, of all places.

And even though I’d lived in
Vegas far longer than anywhere else, as the early October heat beat down on the
open sunroof, I realized that L.A. still
felt
like home.

Which wasn't a good thing.

There was too much attachment
associated with that word.
Home
.

"Stupid, stupid
girl," I scolded myself over the Black Stone Cherry song pulsing quietly
through my tiny car.

Curling my fingers firmly
around the black steering wheel, I turned the candy apple red Mini Cooper into
the ground floor of the five-story parking garage attached to Emerson &
Taylor, stopping for the attendant on duty. After gaining entrance with the
temporary pass I received from human resources last week, I drove to the first
free space I could find—a spot on the bottom floor, squeezed between a dented
Nissan Juke and a glossy yellow Corvette. As I exited the car, my body trembled
like a leaf inside the high-waist beige pencil skirt and tucked-in white blouse
I'd confidently donned earlier this morning.

God, I was in over my head.

It was one thing to let Pen
hack Emerson & Taylor's security system and get me far enough into the
hiring process that they absolutely had to call me in for the job, but it was
an entirely different matter to present false identification to the human
resources department that would corroborate my new identity.

And yet, I was seconds away
from prancing my ass into that building to do just that. No wonder Pen had
driven here from Vegas. She probably wanted to make sure I wouldn't have a
nervous breakdown that would implicate us both.