“No. I don’t know. I couldn’t think. I just know that for a minute I was nothing again. Like they—she—took everything from me. Roarke, my badge, my life, myself. For a minute it was just gone because she was there. I can’t be nothing again.”
“You could never be nothing.” Roarke spoke in a voice of barely controlled rage. “You’re what you made yourself against the impossible. Even when you were helpless they couldn’t destroy what you are. You’re a miracle. You’re my miracle, and you’ll never be anything else.”
“They’re in me.”
“And what’s in me? You know. You know how I chose to beat it back, and still you’re mine. Of all the choices you could have made, you chose to protect. To stand for the victim. Even her. Now, even her.”
“I saw what she was, in that hospital bed, where I put her. Hurt and bruised and knocked around.”
“The way you’d been,” Mira prompted.
“The way I’d been. And I felt . . . maybe contempt or disgust, studying her like a bug, hoping I’d been wrong, that she wasn’t the one. But I knew she was, and what she was.”
“What was she?”
“Selfish is too easy a word. Selfish and vicious and sly, and still I don’t know how or why.
“So much blood,” Eve said quietly. “At the end, so much blood, and I thought, what’s in it? What’s in the blood, hers, mine? Our eyes are the same.”
“No.” Roarke spoke with absolute certainty. “You’re wrong.”
“She changed the color, but—”
“No,” he repeated, looking into Eve’s troubled eyes. “Who knows yours—and all their moods—better than I? Do you think I haven’t studied those ID shots?”
He remembered what his aunt had said to him on their first meeting, and gave it to Eve, in his own words. “Color changes on a whim. The shape of things counts for more. Your eyes are yours, Eve. The color, the shape, and more what’s behind them. You got none of it from her.”
“I don’t know why that’s important, except I don’t want to look in the mirror and see her. I don’t want you to ever look at me and see—”
“Never.”
“It’s stupid to pick at it,” Eve said wearily. “I know, I do know I’m not like her. Melinda and the kid, they were just means to an end to her. Not human, not important. Her next hit, that was important. Fucking with the cops, that was important. Getting back to McQueen, that was the most important. Weak spot. A certain kind of man, that’s a weak spot, makes her do what’s unnatural to her. Have a child, run errands, fix a meal. Because he makes her feel like the drug makes her feel. She lives a lie, but that’s second nature. Like using and exploiting. She stole another woman’s child knowing what he’d do to her. She left me with my father and she had to know what he was, what he’d do. He’d already started doing it. But she left me with him.”
“As she left Darlie with McQueen,” Mira added.
“Yeah. I knew what she was, and I felt nothing but that contempt. Then I felt sick, then cold. Then I had to step out of it. Had to, because if we didn’t find them, find Melinda and Darlie, without her help, I’d have to work her again. Go back, knowing who and what she was and work her again. But she went to him. Killed a cop without a second thought to get to him. And when I walked into that place, his place, and saw her on the floor, the blood, the death, I felt . . .”
“What?” Mira asked her. “What did you feel?”
“Relief!” It burst out of her. “Relief. She didn’t know me, and now she never would. God, the thought that she might realize . . . I wouldn’t ever have to think of her somewhere in the world. Wouldn’t have to think someday, somehow, she might remember me, might put it together, might know. Use that against me, against Roarke, against everyone I care about. She was dead, and I was relieved.”
In the silence, she pressed a hand to her mouth, struggling to hold back sobs.
“You didn’t say you felt joy,” Roarke said quietly.
She stared at him, eyes wet, shoulders trembling. “What?”
“You didn’t feel joy.”
“No! God. He’d slit her throat like a pig for slaughter. Whatever she was, he had no right to take her life.”
“And that’s who you are, Lieutenant.”
“I . . .” She swiped at tears, looked at Mira.
“It’s an exceptional thing to have someone in your life who knows and understands you so well. Who loves who you are. A very exceptional thing. He asks the question, as I was about to do, already knowing the answer. You felt relief beca
use a threat to everything you are, everything you have, and what you love ended. It ended in blood so you’re struggling to treat her like another victim. She’s not.”