Page 15 of I Dream of Danger (Ghost Ops #2)

Mr. Bent’s tinny voice was faint, sounding as if he were calling from the dark side of the moon. No—wait. She was on the dark side of the moon, on some cold airless rock spinning in space.

His voice buzzed in her ear again. She couldn’t understand the words but she had to say something.

“Yes, um, Mr. Bent. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said. What can I do for you?”

Oh God, she was so intent on not shaking apart there was no room left to consider her words. What can I do for you? Well, that was a stupid thing to say when the answer was obvious. Pay your bill.

He spoke again, words that made absolutely no sense. “What?”

“I said—” And now Elle could hear the forced patience. He was repeating something for the third time. “I said, Ms. Thomason, that full payment wasn’t necessary, though I do thank you. We had agreed you could stagger your payments.”

“What?” Her head was ringing. Nothing made sense.

“Are you all right, Ms. Thomason?”

No .

“Ah—yes of course. I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A long sigh. “Your bill has been settled in full. And I wanted to thank you because we had made an arrangement to stagger your payments over a year.”

She sat up straight, the words having finally penetrated. “The bill has been paid? In full? Who paid that bill, Mr. Bent?”

He made a startled noise. When he spoke his voice was slow and careful. “You did, Ms. Thomason. Or rather—” the sound of computer keys clacking, “a certain Mr. Ross paid on your behalf. A Mr. Nick Ross.”

The cordless handheld slipped from her fingers, clattered to the floor. Mr. Bent’s voice rose like a ghost’s, calling her name.

Elle wrapped her arms around her midriff, trying to contain the pain inside waiting to spill out. It felt exactly as if someone had punched a huge hole in her, ripping out her heart. She rocked, trying to dissipate the pain.

Of course Nick had paid. He’d come back, briefly. Found her looking like an abandoned stray, bereft of everything, thrown her a mercy fuck, got some groceries in the house, and settled her bill.

Then left, of course. Why would he stay?

At some point Mr. Bent must have hung up because the handset on the floor stopped squawking. At some point, the sun moved across the sky. At some point, she stopped shaking.

At some point she recognized deep, deep in her bones, not just in her head, that Nick was never coming back.

As the light was fading from the sky, it started snowing, and the temperature in the house dropped, became colder yet. When her fingers and toes started hurting, she got up stiffly, muscles and bones aching.

She moved slowly, as if someone had beat her and she was nursing injuries. Someone had beat her, of course. Nick. It would have hurt much less if he’d actually taken a baseball bat to her because broken bones knit, eventually. Broken hearts? Not so much.

An animal instinct told her she’d been grievously wounded. Something deep inside her had been broken. She shuffled slowly through the house, touching things Nick had touched.

There was no energy in her to put the massive quantities of food away. Just seeing all that food made her nauseous. She could barely bring herself to look at it. She shuffled out of the kitchen closing the door behind her.

One by one, she closed every door of the house. All the downstairs rooms, pulling the doors gently closed, hardly realizing what she was doing, knowing only that the house should feel the way she did. Empty and closed.

Somehow it had become dark. She didn’t have the energy to turn on the lights. The darkness somehow fit.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up.

The stairs seemed interminable, like they went all the way up to heaven, though of course there was no heaven.

Just the second floor, and her bedroom. The stairs seemed impossible to climb, though she managed it slowly, step by step.

She’d been doing the impossible for some years now and she could do this, even though each step felt like climbing a mountain.

Her legs were weak and could barely carry her.

Halfway up, she had to sit on a step and rest her swimming head on her knees.

After a while, she got up again, clutched the banister, and pulled herself up, step by step.

Feeling a hundred years old, she finally made it to the top and shuffled down the corridor.

Elle stopped at the threshold of her dark bedroom, closing her eyes and swallowing heavily.

The room smelled of him. Smelled of primal male, of male sweat and sex and some special pheromonal scent of Nick she would recognize anywhere because it had been imprinted on her skin and in her mind.

Oh God, she had to be quick before she broke down and cried.

If she fell onto her bed crying, she would never get up.

She felt that, felt deep in her soul that if she gave in to despair she would never recover.

There was absolutely nothing left in her to resist the darkness. She’d fall into it and never come out.

During the long years of caring for her father there’d been a wall inside her.

Outside she did all the things she should—cared for and loved a husk of a man who didn’t recognize her.

Who had forgotten how to feed himself and wash himself.

Who required the care a baby would, except this was a 190-pound man.

Then a 160-pound man. Then a 120-pound man.

She cared for him, dealt with doctors and medical bills and running a household.

But there was always the wall she could retreat behind, and behind that wall she was still Elle Thomason, a young girl, and then a young woman with a young woman’s dreams. Behind that wall, if she could get her father to sleep fitfully, she could read books and laugh at TV shows and get indignant at the news she read off the net.

There was a duty-bound robot in front of the wall, but behind that wall was a person—Elle Thomason.

That wall was shattered and there was no place to hide now. Nothing between her and cold reality.

Elle needed to get away from here. She needed it like she needed air.

If she continued staying in this cold, dark, and empty house with her father’s ghost and the memory of those few hours with Nick, hours in which she’d felt warm and sexy and alive, in which she’d been a woman and not a pathetic discard, she would die.

She’d simply curl up into a ball trying to protect her shattered heart and never get up again.

Her will to live was almost gone and she had to leave this place before it sucked the marrow of her bones.

There was no plan. She was operating entirely on instinct. Some sluggish yet stubborn part of her that insisted on movement, on escape.

Packing—that wasn’t hard. Her wardrobe had been whittled down to basics.

And she didn’t want to carry much, anyway.

The down coat with the ripped sleeve she should have worn to the burial, two sweaters, three pairs of jeans, warm pajamas, socks, underwear, boots. Everything fit into a large backpack.

She looked around her room carefully. The bed was rumpled, unmade.

It was almost like a religious ritual with her to make up the bed as soon as she got up, but there it was—blankets and sheets tossed every which way.

She could see semen stains, and a darker splotch that was her blood.

For a second the desire to walk over and bury herself in the bedclothes, curl up on the bed and breathe in the smell of Nick was nearly overwhelming.

That way lay madness, though. She’d lived far too long with madness, knew exactly where that led. It led to death.

There was no life in here. Just sadness and despair. She closed the door quietly and walked back downstairs.

What else would she need? Documents. She hesitated in front of the study door, then pushed it open.

It had been her father’s refuge. Later, it became a place of torment as she tried to jam the square peg of their penury into the round hole of her father’s endless needs. She swallowed and walked inside.

During her childhood she’d loved coming here. The room always smelled of books and lemon polish and the flowers Mrs. Gooding cut from the garden. Now it smelled of mildew and dust.

She checked for the thousandth time their bank account.

There was only a couple hundred dollars in the account, free and clear now that the funeral was paid for.

And there was the mortgage. Three years ago she’d had to get a mortgage on the house as her father’s medical needs ballooned.

The bank director—whose son Daddy had helped keep out of trouble with some minor drug dealing charges—had been very difficult to deal with.

She’d gotten the mortgage at ruinous terms, and was deep underwater.

The mortgage was worth much more than the house.

The house was falling down and needed new plumbing, a new roof, and a new boiler. A new everything, really.

Well, the bank could keep the house. She would simply walk away. Others had done it and she would too.

She needed some form of ID, but what? She’d never gotten her driver’s license, and had never been abroad so she had no passport.

Rooting through the drawer she touched a small box and brought it out.

Her mother’s documents. Her mother’s passport, driver’s license and Kansas ID.

All expired, but still. She looked exactly like her mother.

Many people had commented on it. The driver’s license photo was from when her mother was 35 and Elle studied the photo.

Her mother had actually looked younger at 35 than she did at 20.

Her mother had been a lawyer. As a professional, she’d kept her maiden name.

Laura Elle Connolly.

It was doable.

She could even keep her name, say she used her middle name. That’s who she would become. Her mother. She’d become Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle.

The wind rattled the windows and she shivered. It felt like she’d been cold for years. Wherever she went, she wanted the sea and warmth. Either Florida or California. There was a quarter on the desk and she held it in her fist until it warmed up.

Heads, Florida.

Tails, California.

She flipped it, watching it spin end over end until she caught it and opened her fist.

Tails.

California it was.

Two years ago, she’d taken down one of her father’s favorite books, a first edition collection of Oscar Wilde’s poems. Inside she’d found two crisp new hundred-dollar bills.

She’d kept them in the volume, vowing to use them only in the direst possible emergency.

Well, that emergency was here. The money went into the backpack.

She hoisted the backpack over her shoulders, walked out the front door, down the sidewalk to the street, and left the keys in the mailbox.

The Greyhound bus station was ten blocks away.

She’d checked, and a bus was leaving for San Francisco at 8 p.m. and the fare was more or less half of what she had.

Laura Elle Connolly, known as Elle, walked out of her old house and her old life, turned right, and began the long walk to the bus station and to her new life.