Crave

“Why didn’t you tell me,” she said, without looking behind herself.

Daniel took a long time in answering, but he didn’t disappear: Whenever he was around, she could feel the slightest of drafts, and as long as that was brushing the back of her neck, she knew he was still with her.

I thought you would hate him. And then you and he would have no one left.

“So you knew what happened.”

Daniel came around the table, one hand planted on his hip, the other buried in his blond hair so that the curls went halo on him. I was high when it all went down . . . so I just thought it was so funny, Dad bursting in with three guys in black. I figured it was his version of an intervention—all comic-book hard-core. But as they put the needle in my arm, he started to scream and that’s when I realized . . . it wasn’t funny.

Daniel’s eyes met hers. I’d never seen him that way before. To me, he was always so aloof and unemotional. It was . . . the reaction I had been looking for all my life, the visceral love I’d been after. See, I was like Mom, not you and him. I wanted more than that chilly disapproval and I got it, only it was too late. . . . He shrugged. In retrospect, I was too needy, and he didn’t know what to do with a son who wasn’t cut from military cloth. Oil and water. I should have handled it differently, but I didn’t.

“And neither did he.”

It’s not anyone’s fault. It just . . . was.

Grier leaned back in her chair, thinking of the way their family had aligned, she and their father on one side, Daniel and their mother on the other.

It wasn’t his fault, her brother said with a kind of stern tone she’d never heard from him before. The way I ended . . . he screamed, Grier . . . and then as I was dying, I heard him say, over and over again, Danny boy . . . my Danny boy—

As Daniel’s voice broke, she was compelled to get up and go to him. Before she knew what she was doing, she put her arms around . . .

Herself.

Please don’t hate him, he said from the far corner, having shifted quick as a blink.

“Please don’t run,” she countered.

I’m sorry. . . . I have to go . . .

He disappeared before her as if he couldn’t hold his emotions in any longer, his despair lingering in the cold spot he left behind.

She stood for a time, staring at the vacant space he’d just occupied. She and her father had been two of a kind, and in their intellectual accord, they’d locked the others out, hadn’t they. Her mother and brother had taken to their addictions while she and her father had been in lockstep with the law and their careers and their external passions.

She’d known it on some level . . . and maybe that had been part of her drive to save Daniel. Her brother’s addiction and her efforts to pull him out of it had been the link they hadn’t found outside of childhood: She had always blamed herself—and for a brief moment tonight, she had blamed her father.

Now . . . she was angry at that man with the eye patch. Viciously angry. If Daniel had lived, maybe they’d have figured it all out. Forgiven each other, all three of them, for the past. Moved along to . . . something that their family had had only on the surface. After all, privilege and money and breeding could cover up a multitude of problems—and didn’t ensure that the closeness on a Christmas card was actually more than a pose once a year for a photographer.

Shaking her head, she went back to her seat and stared at the dossiers.

Isaac was going to even the score for her family, she thought. By being the one who brought down that maniacal bastard who had killed her brother and all but ruined her father.

Flipping through the photographs, she recognized each of the men now, because she’d gone through the pages over and over again while waiting for Daniel to show. There were a hundred or so pictures, but only a total of some forty men, with multiple shots illustrating them through the years. Out of the lot of them, there were five that she recognized—or at least thought she’d seen before. Hard to know . . . on some level, they looked so similar.

Isaac’s picture was in there and she returned to it. The photo was a candid, caught on the fly. He was looking directly into the camera, but she had the impression he didn’t know he was being photographed.

Hard. God, he looked so hard. As if he were prepared to kill.

The birth date under his name validated the age she knew him to be, and there were a couple of notes about foreign countries he’d been to. And then there was one line that she kept coming back to: Must be provided moral imperative. She had seen the phrase under only two other men’s profiles.

“How are you holding up?”

Grier jumped at the sound of Isaac’s voice, the chair under her butt screeching across the floor. Grabbing her chest, she said, “Jesus . . . how do you do that?”

Because, all things considered, she would have preferred not to get caught staring at his picture.

“Sorry, I just thought you might like a coffee.” He came over, put a mug down, and then retreated back to the doorway. “I should have knocked.”

As he paused between the jambs, he was now just in the hooded sweatshirt he’d used as a pillow, his shoulders oh, so wide beneath its gray expanse. And considering what the last forty-eight hours had been like, he looked amazingly strong and focused.

Her eyes went to the coffee. So thoughtful. So very thoughtful. “Thank you . . . and sorry. I guess I’m just not used to . . .” A man like him.

“I’ll announce my presence from now on.”

She picked up the mug and took a sip. Perfect—with just the right amount of sugar she liked in it. He’d watched her, she thought. Saw how much she’d added at some point, even though she hadn’t been aware of it. And he’d remembered.

“You lookin’ at me?” When she glanced up, he nodded down at the dossiers. “My picture?”

“Ah . . . yes.” Grier tapped the phrase. “What exactly does this mean?”

He walked over and leaned in. As he stared at the details under his face, the tension in him was palpable, his big body tight all over. “They had to give me a reason.”

“Before you’d kill someone.”

He nodded and began to walk around, going over to the wine bottles. He took one out, looked at the label, returned it . . . moved on to another one.

“What kinds of reasons did they give you?” she asked, well aware that his answers about this meant way too much to her.

He paused with a Bordeaux cradled in his hands. “The kind that made it seem right.”

“Like what.”

His eyes flipped toward her and she had a moment of pause. They were so grim and hollow.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

He put the bottle back. Went a couple of feet farther down the wooden racks. “I only did men. No women. There were some who could do the females, but not me. And I’m not going to give you specific examples, but the political-affiliation nonsense just wasn’t enough for me. You kill a bunch of people or rape some women or blow some shi—er, stuff . . . up? Very different story. And I needed to see some proof with my own eyes—video, photograph . . . bodies that were marked.”

“Did you ever refuse an assignment?”

“Yes.”

“So you wouldn’t have killed my brother.”

“Never,” he said without hesitation. “And they wouldn’t have even asked me. The way Matthias saw it, I was a weapon that worked under prescribed circumstances, and he took me out of his holster at appropriate times. And you know . . . I realized I had to leave XOps when it dawned on me that I was no different from the people I was killing. They’d all felt as if whatever atrocities they were committing were justifiable. Well, so did I and that made us mirror images of each other really. Sure, an objective viewpoint would have agreed with me over them, but that wasn’t enough.”

Grier let out a long exhale. He was what she’d always believed in, she thought.