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Chapter Five

R omano didn’t know where her brief flash of moxie had come from, but it was gone now. She was curled into the passenger seat, hugging her knees to her chest, her long sable hair hiding her face. And he thought she was crying. Trembling, too.

When they finally hit a paved road, he slowed down just enough to avoid drawing undue attention.

He turned up the heat, but it still didn’t make up for the winter cold coming through the demolished back window.

She must be freezing, as well as terrified.

Not to mention sick. He didn’t know much about those short of breath, chest grasping moments she’d had back there, but he didn’t imagine being traumatized and half frozen was exactly good for them.

He wished she’d speak, strike up a conversation, say something, anything, but he didn’t expect her to.

He wanted to draw her out of her shell and told himself that was just because it would make their forced companionship a little less awkward and tense.

“Are you sick or something?” he asked.

“No.”

One word answers. Great. “Is it asthma?” He didn’t know why the hell he’d asked that. He didn’t want to know anything about Lexia Stoltz, except where her father had hidden his man-made disease. He didn’t care about her health, that was for damn sure.

“PSVT."

“I don’t know what that is.” Let her answer that with one word, he thought.

“Paroxysmal Supraventricular Tachycardia.”

Three words. None of them in any language he spoke, except that last one. Tachycardia.

“That means it’s something with your heart, right?”

“It sounds scarier than it is.”

“Looks scarier than it is, too, I hope?”

She lifted her head a little, so her hair fell back and revealed her face, as she glanced sideways at him.

He shrugged. “When you grabbed your chest back there, it shook me.”

She looked at him a minute, like she was trying to see if he meant it. Then she said, “It’s like a misfiring spark plug. An electrical signal gets garbled, and tells my heart rate to go up too high. I didn’t count, but this was a really good one. Probably around two-twenty.”

“Two hundred twenty? Per minute?” He shot her a look, and he thought his own heart was speeding up a little. “That’s almost four beats a second.”

She nodded. “When it happens, I feel like I can’t breathe, even though I can.

My blood isn’t carrying oxygen efficiently, so my respirations automatically get faster to try to make up for it.

I get dizzy. I feel weak. Simple hyperventilation, but knowing it doesn’t help all that much.

The worst that can happen is that I pass out.

But it’s not damaging my heart muscle or anything, and if I take a simple beta blocker, it’ll convert back to a normal rhythm within a few minutes. ”

“A few minutes seems like a long time to spend in that condition. What if you don’t have a … beta blocker on hand?”

“Don’t worry. I brought them.”

“Yeah, but what if you hadn’t? Or what if you have an episode and I can’t get to the meds for some reason?”

She frowned at him. “You worried about me? That’s kind of funny, seeing as how you’ve basically kidnapped me.”

“I rescued you. You’d be undergoing torture right now if I hadn’t— shit that was a stupid thing to say.” He glanced at her, trying to see if his idiotic words had triggered another episode, but she just rolled her eyes at him as if she knew. “Just tell me,” he said. “I’ll feel better.”

“God knows making you feeling better is my raison d’être. ”

“Just tell me.” He liked that she’d snapped at him. It made him more confident in her ability to handle all this.

“If I don’t have a pill, I can usually convert myself.

Methods that work are bearing down. If that doesn’t work, I slap an icepack on the back of my neck or the middle of my lower back, anyplace that it’s going to shock me with the cold.

It’s the shock that helps. And then if all else fails, I can perform carotid massage, kind of squeezing off the blood supply to my brain for a couple of seconds. That usually does the trick.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“It’s not that bad. The episodes can be exhausting.

And converting back to normal rhythm is scary, because I can feel it.

There’s always a really severe tightening and pain in my heart, just for a second, like someone’s reaching inside and squeezing it with all their might.

And then a little, thump-a-thump, and it’s back to beating normally again. ”

“Isn’t there any way to fix it?”

“There’s a surgery. But I only have a couple of episodes a year. To me, that’s too little to justify letting a surgeon go digging around in my heart.”

“Amen to that.”

Sighing, she leaned back in her seat. He sensed her closing up again, like a flower when the sun goes down. He wanted to keep her talking. “Have you had it long?”

“Since my teens. It used to drive my father crazy, having to take time off work to run me to doctors and hospitals before we had a firm diagnosis.”

Romano noticed her hands clasping each other more tightly as she spoke. Her father sounded like a real piece of work. “So, stress brings it on?”

She shrugged, opening her eyes again, even looking at him for a second. “It’s one trigger. There are others. I’ve had it just happen in my sleep so …”

“Before I came, when was the last one?”

She closed her eyes. “The morning I found my father in his bed.”

Romano found himself envisioning her, alone in that oversized log cabin, finding her father that way. According to the information he’d been provided, she’d adored the man.

“I’m really sorry I brought that up,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

At least she was talking. When she talked, he could focus on her words, her tone.

He could hear more than people said, picking up on inflections and shifts in volume and air to sound ratio.

He’d always been able to do that. It had made him a better agent.

Of course it wasn’t 100% accurate, but he considered it his superpower and he trusted it.

When she went silent, it was easy to start searching her eyes and imagining he could read every emotion in them. Way too easy.

Stress-induced, she’d said. Well, then, it was no wonder she’d had an attack.

She’d certainly had some stress in the past few hours.

But it couldn’t be helped. He had to get the formula, and he had to find, identify, and kill the international criminal known as Mr. White. Lexi and her heart be damned.

“So where is this safe-deposit box located, Lexi?” He asked just to see if she’d tell the truth, because he’d felt something off about that.

“New York.”

He nodded. “Right, right, I saw that. First National, right?”

She nodded.

“Which branch?”

“You didn’t see that on the receipt you found?”

“No.”

She took a few steadying breaths. He figured she was calling on the hidden reserve of strength she kept locked away somewhere inside her. He wondered if she’d stumbled onto it by accident when he’d caught a glimpse of it before, or whether she’d always known it was there.

Her eyes were trying to be strong, but there was fear behind them. “If you’re done rescuing me, I think it’s safe to let me go now. Okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t need me. I’ll tell you which branch and give you the key, but only if you let me go.”

Her tone was unsteady, her breathing had a hitch in it.

He studied her in short glances while driving.

Damned if she wasn’t up to something. He could read her like a book.

“I thought you’d want to go with me. Seems like you’d want to see what I find in that box for yourself, especially since you’re so sure it’ll prove your old man innocent. ”

“Whatever you eventually find is going to do that.”

“So how do you know I can be trusted to report what’s really in there? How do you know I won’t lie and ruin his impeccable name, no matter what I find?”

“What would you have to gain by doing that?” she asked.

He glanced at her, shrugged. “If I had something to gain by it, I wouldn’t tell you what it was.” He had to be careful with her. She was smart. Maybe smarter than him.

Definitely smarter than him.

She bit her lip, shook her head. “I’m just not cut out for this.”

“No, most people aren’t.” He sighed hard, almost regretting that he was about to drag her with him into hell. But he didn’t have a choice.

“Look, Lexi, if I let you go, those guys will track you down. It won’t matter where you go or how well you think you can hide.

Sooner or later, they’ll find you, and try to force you to tell them what they want to know.

They’re not going to believe you don’t know anything.

And even if you somehow managed to convince them, they’d kill you anyway. ”

She shook her head. “No one’s that brutal.”

“Trust me. I know exactly how brutal they are.”

“You’ve dealt with them before?”

Her eyes took on a new look, a curious one.

He clamped his jaw, deliberately not looking at her.

He didn’t want her digging into his mind, much less probing his pain.

He needed his pain. Wendy, Justin and Jackson deserved his pain.

And Lexi’s brown eyes might be powerful enough to see right into the black, bottomless pit of his grief.

She’d look into the empty socket where his soul used to live.

It was gone now. It had died with his little boys.

“You’re not gonna be safe until I get that formula to my boss. I’ll let you go then. Until that point, you’re stuck with me.” He glanced her way. “Now, how about handing over that key?”

She shook her head.

He sent her his meanest glare, but it was ineffective since she refused to look him in the eye. “How about telling me which branch, then?”

“I’ll tell you when we get to the city.”

“Care to explain your reasons?”