9
My Candy Girl (Oliver)
My day hasn’t exactly gone as planned.
The original idea:
Track Durham down at the airport before he can make his escape, confirm it’s him, let my FBI contact know, then stand back and watch the bust as he’s dragged off in handcuffs.
The reality:
Intercept the most lethal, highly wanted, beautiful woman in the world before she does something reckless as years of pent-up emotions finally break free.
Nearly die of heartache when she realizes I’ve been alive all these years and never told her.
Hate myself, no matter how necessary it was.
And then forget that hate entirely with the first taste of her lips in fifteen years.
Absence doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder.
Absence makes the heart absolutely fucking ravenous.
I can’t stop myself from looking at her every chance I get, drinking her in, nearly devouring her with my eye as we make our break out of Bellingham and back to Seattle.
It’s not easy.
I wasn’t expecting my FBI man to raise an alarm so wide and loud the entire city would be swarming with police units, all of them racing toward the airfield from every direction, mixed in with those sleek unmarked cars with the tinted windows that just scream Feds—and even a few tactical SWAT vans.
They’re not playing around here.
Durham may be good at making himself invisible, but he’s not unknown to the people who matter.
People who might be just as corrupt as he is but who can’t stand the ego blow of him pulling one over on them with that body double in prison.
They’ll take him down just for the trickery.
Sometimes, spite can be an amazing motivator.
But goddamn, we can’t move two steps without tripping over someone in a uniform.
It’s not really me I’m worried about as we duck through side streets. I’m nobody. I’m dead. I’m a man with a Canadian passport and a history of doing business in security consulting quite often in the States.
It’s Fuchsia I’m concerned for.
I have it on good authority that Durham’s boys fed all the profiles of former Nightjars and Nighthawks to the police as part of a supposed plea deal cut for “him,” even if he’s not the one serving time in jail after settling his devil’s bargain.
Fuchsia also stands out.
She’s too elegant, too striking, too sharp.
All it would take is even one person vaguely recognizing her profile from a dossier to send those screaming cop cars after us. I don’t think even my contact could save us, or would put his ass on the line to do it. With all of those wounded Nighthawks going down, too, we’d just get caught up in the mega-sting as more of Durham’s accomplices.
I can’t let that happen to Fuchsia.
She’s not exactly at the top of her game right now, either.
I don’t blame her.
Too many bombshells in one day.
I’d wanted to break it to her a bit more gently.
Catch her somewhere private, somewhere safe, and tell her the blistering truth.
I know where our daughter is.
After years of searching and data trawling and a little stalking, I’ve found her.
And I’m taking Fuchsia to her right now.
It takes us until almost midnight to get to the outskirts of Bellingham. We’re smaller targets on foot, and we both had to ditch rental vehicles that could be tracked by GPS.
We hide under cover of dingy roadside stands, in side streets, in abandoned buildings, both of us soaked and shivering but enduring.
Even after all these years, we’re still soldiers.
We know how to hunker down.
We also have each other to help keep warm, hands locked and never letting go unless we have to.
Climbing fire escapes. Flitting across rooftops. That spring in my metal leg makes the leap across buildings and alleyways easy.
She gives me that knowing smirk of hers as she goes sailing after me and lands perfectly, lightly, in those stiletto heels, ever the graceful cat who always lands on her feet.
If her pretty smile’s a bit sad, a bit fragile, I get it.
I can’t blame her.
I just hope what I’m about to show her won’t shatter her world all over again.
I’ve left a car with stolen plates on the edge of town, hidden behind a billboard off the shoulder of the road, shrouded by a stand of trees. It’s a dusty old Buick, hardly worth Fuchsia’s refined luxury tastes, but it makes a nice getaway car.
Ordinary.
Unremarkable.
Unnoticeable.
Under cover of darkness, we make the drive from Bellingham to Seattle. It’s quiet, just us and the occasional streetlamp, now and then headlights from the few other weary travelers moving through the predawn gloom.
In the passenger seat, Fuchsia waits with a familiar stillness—it’s how I’ve seen her before missions, before briefings, before debriefings.
She’s closing herself away in case whatever I have to show her hurts.
In case seeing our daughter is worse than never knowing.
In case the hope I’ve given her betrays her, because she just can’t trust anything anymore.