"Where are all the patient files?" Mathias Rowan asked, as he and Chase followed her into the area. Frowning, he quickly scanned their surroundings. "Every medical clinic I've ever seen has reams of paper records on hand."
Tavia shook her head. "Not Dr. Lewis. He is - he was - maniacal when it came to patient security. Everything in here is computerized and password-protected."
"Interesting," Chase remarked.
Rowan pulled one of his pistols out of the holster under his black parka. "If you two have things under control in here, I'm going to have a look around the rest of this place."
Chase nodded to his friend as Rowan ducked out to the hallway, but his eyes never left Tavia. He watched as she fired up one of the desktop computers and took a seat in the wheeled chair behind the workstation. When a password prompt appeared, she entered a complicated string of letters and numbers on the keyboard. The machine accepted the code, then resumed its start-up process.
When she glanced over at him, Chase was staring at her with a questioning look on his face. She gave him a mild shrug. "I was here a few months ago during a power outage. When the staff rebooted the computer, I couldn't help noticing what she typed in for the password."
Chase leaned down nearer to her, his big hands braced on the edge of the desk. "That sequence had to be about a dozen characters long."
"Thirteen, actually."
He grunted, eyebrows quirking. "And you remembered it perfectly all this time?"
"I only have to see something once to remember it. That's just how my mind works."
"Impressive." He gave her a devastating grin that made her pulse kick into a higher gear. She wasn't used to having feelings of attraction, but it was impossible not to notice how close he stood to her now. How she could hear him breathing, could practically feel the steady, rhythmic pound of his heartbeat. Or how the thick bulk of his powerful biceps was brushing against her shoulder, each soft friction seeming to enter her bloodstream like an electrical current, as she brought up a login screen for the clinic's records program.
Another password prompt appeared, and this one she fumbled at first, too busy trying to ignore the warmth of Chase's body beside her and the heated weight of his attentive gaze. She tried the code again. "We're in. This is the patient database. I've seen it in use probably a thousand times."
Chase nodded. "Let's find your file."
She typed her name into the search field and held her breath as the screen began to fill with dates and records of her treatments. The data went back the full twenty-seven years of her life. Her entire existence, condensed into several thousands of line item entries stored as bits and bytes on a cold computer hard drive.
All the betrayals, waiting to be discovered with just a click of the mouse.
"Hey." His deep voice was quiet beside her. He rested his large palm over the top of her fisted hand in a gesture that made her feel both comforted and unsettled. "You gonna be okay with this?"
She swallowed. Gave him a shaky nod. "Yeah. I'm fine. I want to know."
Before she could think better of it and change her mind, Tavia clicked to open the most recent record. It was her visit from earlier that week. "I had an appointment with Dr. Lewis about recurring migraines. He treated me for a couple of hours here in the clinic and sent me home with new meds."
Chase eyed the record on the monitor. "Just a few days ago."
Tavia nodded. "And later that night, I was brought into the police station to identify you as the shooter from Senator Clarence's party." It seemed impossible that it was less than a week ago that her world was turned upside down. Less than a week ago that this man standing next to her had entered her life so abruptly. So strangely, darkly unexpected. "Nothing's been the same for me since that night. It won't be the same for me ever again."
Chase's stormy blue eyes fixed on her for a long moment, sober, remorseful. She realized only then that his hand was still resting on top of hers. His pulse beat in his fingertips, and in the heated center of his strong palm. "You wish you'd never met me. Trust me, I get it. I wish that for you too, Tavia."
"No, I don't wish that at all," she said, surprised by how deeply she meant it. True, her life had been thrown into chaos from the first moment she laid eyes on him - when he'd stood in the gallery balcony of the senator's house with a gun trained on a crowd of innocent party guests. She'd thought him unhinged and dangerous, and maybe he was both even now, but she couldn't blame him for any of the mess that was her life currently.
Because of him, she'd had to question her own reality. He'd opened her eyes, and just because she didn't want to see the things in front of her, didn't mean he was at fault. If anything, this deadly, terrifyingly brutal man had saved her life.
She looked at him, taking in the hard lines of his stark, handsome face and the world- weariness of his ruthless, beautiful eyes. "I'm glad I met you, Sterling Chase. Right now, you're the only friend I have."
He stared at her. Then he laughed, low and cynical. His hand withdrew from hers now, leaving a chill behind on her skin. "You should know something about me, Tavia. I don't have friends. What I do have is a bad habit of disappointing everyone around me. Better you hear that now than be fool enough to think you can count on me later."
There was no anger in his voice, only flat statement of fact. She felt sad for him somehow, watching the subtle way he distanced himself from her now. First his withdrawn touch, then his cool warning that felt as effective as a physical rebuff. Even his eyes were shuttered, no longer attentive and open but hooded and dark. Unreadable.
He stood up and paced to the far wall of the room to peer out between the closed metal blinds. "Let's get going," he said, his voice clipped and impersonal. "We don't have much time to take what we need and get the hell out of here."
Tavia went right to work, sending the full contents of her file to the printer in the corner of the office space. As the records displayed on the computer screen, she scanned the data, reading the details of her every visit to Dr. Lewis's clinic. Every medical trial and experimental treatment was documented. Each specialized medicinal serum and bitter pill was noted in the file, along with the results it produced for her condition.
And there were more records associated with her file.
Tavia paused on one of the entries, frowning as she recognized her own handwriting on a scan-captured page. Still another page followed the first. Several more too, all of them produced by her own hand, filled with names and codes and diagrams. She recognized them all, but she didn't remember writing any of it down.