Darkness(72)

Cal sat back in his chair. “Ah, but what you’ve got to ask yourself is, who conducted the screening process?”

“We had to go through a ton of government agencies . . .” Her words faltered at the look on his face. “Are you saying our government is involved?”

“I’m not saying anything at all. I’m still trying to work out who’s involved.”

She refused to let him off the hook that easily. “Ivanov and the men who shot Arvid were speaking Russian. How could they be from our government?”

“The international situation tends to get complicated sometimes.” His tone told her that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over, even before he cast a meaningful look at the stew remaining in her can. She had only eaten about half. It was good, and it was still warm, but she couldn’t take another bite. He said, “You should eat the rest of that.”

Shaking her head, she shoved the can across the table toward him. “I can’t. You eat it. You’re way bigger than me, and you need more food. And while you’re eating it you can tell me—”

She broke off as his fingers encircled her wrist, trapping her with her arm stretched out across the table.

“What?” She looked at him in bewilderment, only to find that he was staring down at her arm.

Following his gaze, she saw to her dismay that the lamplight had caught the fine tracery of scars that covered her forearm like a spiderweb and turned them silver.

They were why the extra set of clothes in her backpack had included a white turtleneck instead of a tee and why she almost never wore short-sleeved or sleeveless shirts anymore.

With the help of skin grafts, the scars had shrunk and faded until they were no longer disfiguring, until they were no more than pale, hair-thin lines crisscrossing her right arm, but they were there: a permanent reminder.

Like she needed one. Like she would ever, could ever, forget.

“Those are burns,” Cal said, and ran a gentle forefinger over her scars. Her eyes flew to his. She would have been sucking in air except that what felt like the weight of the whole world had just dropped on her chest, making it impossible for her to breathe at all. “How’d you get them, honey?”





Chapter Twenty-Three





There it was again, that generic “honey” that she didn’t like, only now it didn’t sound generic at all. It sounded almost impossibly tender and like he meant it just for her.

Gina couldn’t say a word, couldn’t move. She felt as if she’d been paralyzed. Steeling herself against the memories of how she’d gotten the scars, she found herself unable to pull her gaze from his. The gold flecks in his eyes seemed to glitter as he looked at her. His lashes were short and thick and as black as his hair, she noted abstractedly. The fine grid of lines around his eyes caught her attention: they were deeper than she’d ever seen them. From concern for her, she thought.

“The plane crash that killed your husband.” Cal’s voice seemed to come to her from across a great distance. “Were you in it, too?”

Pain slammed her. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she would slide right off the chair into a little puddle on the stone floor.

I’m stronger than that.

Gritting her teeth, she jerked her arm free and at last managed to breathe.

“Why would you think that?” Her tone was wintry, hostile—but her voice was hoarse.

He made a sound that could have been a laugh, only there was no amusement in it.

“For one thing, I’ve seen scars like those before. You were showered with burning airplane fuel, weren’t you?”

The words couldn’t have hurt more if they’d been blows. The memories pounded in harder. Pushing her chair away from the table, Gina started to stand up, meaning to walk away, to put distance between them, to go as far from the source of the pain as she could—only she was suddenly too dizzy, and too sick to her stomach, to stand up.

Before she could get herself together enough to escape, he came around the table and crouched in front of her.

He looked as big and immovable as a mountain, she thought resentfully. The sheer mass of him hunkered down in front of her was enough to keep her from standing up and walking away even if she had been able to move, which at the moment she could not. Their eyes were nearly on a level. His were dark and grave. When he reached out to take her hand—she only realized that it had gone ice cold when she felt the warmth of his long fingers curling around hers—she gave him a look of total antipathy as she tried unsuccessfully to tug it free.

“?‘Either we’re in this together, or we’re not,’?” he quoted her words back at her. “Tell me what happened.”

She glared at him. Stupid to be angry at him, she knew, but she suddenly was, because he was dredging up what it had cost her a lot to bury and hurting her in the process. Under the circumstances, though, she knew his question wasn’t out of line. She should tell him. She knew she should. Her answer affected both of them. He needed to understand about planes—about how she felt about planes, about flying. He’d seen her scars now. He’d guessed the cause. All she needed to give him was the barest outline and he would know why stealing a plane and flying it out of there was not going to work for her.

But the memories were sharp as knives, shredding her composure.