Abandoned

years now, running a four-person team including me.

We’re called in for the worst there is. Men and women who murder men and women and (far too often) children. Serial rapists. The people we hunt rarely do what they do in the heat of the moment. Their actions are not a momentary anomaly but a solution to a need. They do what they do for the joy of it, because emptying out others fills them up like nothing else there is.

I spend my life peering into the darkness these people radiate. It’s a cold blackness, filled with mewls and skittering things, high-pitched screeching laughter, unmentionable moans. I have killed bad men and been hunted by them too. It is my choice and my life, and I wake up to it, I come home from it, I sleep with my man and wake up to it again.

So it’s rare that I lift my head and really see the stars. We all live and die under them, but I tend to be most concerned with the dying part. I’ve had dreams of victims, on their backs, hitching final breaths as they gaze up at those ruthless, forever points of light.

Here in Hawaii, I’ve taken time to see the stars. I’ve turned my face to the sky every night and let the stars remind me that something beautiful has already burned far longer than any of man’s ugliness ever will.

I close my eyes for a moment and listen. The ocean beats against the shore outside like an unending exhalation of someone greater than us. If I was certain where I stood on God, I’d think of that sound as His heartbeat. But God and I are on shaky ground, and though we’re closer now than we were years before, we rarely speak.

Something is out there, though. Something undeniable and endless rides those waves into the sand, again and again, in rhythm with the world’s metronome. There is a vastness to the ocean in this place, a purity of sound and color and sweetness too unbearably wonderful to be an accident. I’m not sure it cares about us, whatever it is, but perhaps it keeps the world turning while we make our own choices, and perhaps that’s the best we can ask for.

I open my eyes again and move away from Tommy, slow and quiet as I can. I want to go out onto the balcony, but I don’t want to wake him. The sheets silk across my skin and then I’m free of them. My feet find the carpet floor. The moon lights up the room, so locating the bathrobe (which I plan to steal when we leave) is no problem. I shrug it on but don’t belt it, glance one final time at Tommy, and step out onto the balcony.

The moon, always a disinterested witness, shines over everything tonight, covering the world with its soft silvers and gently glowing ambers. It hangs above the ocean like a ragged pearl, and I study it with muted wonder. It’s just a ball of rock that throws off a cold light, but it has such power when the sky dims. I reach up and pretend that I am brushing my fingers through its illuminations. I almost feel them for a moment. Murky rivers of velvet light.

Because of what I do, the moon has lit my way almost as often as the sun, but it lights a path for the monsters as well. They love the moon, the way it fails to really banish the darkness. I love it too, but it’s as much of an adversary as a friend.

The temperature outside is perfect, and I let my eyes roam across the sky. In Los Angeles, stars are small scatterings of brightness on an ocean of blackness. Here, the brightness gives the blackness a run for its money. I’m able to pick out Orion’s belt just above me, and I track across the sky to find the Big Dipper and, from there, the North Star.

“Polaris,” I whisper, and smile, remembering my father.

Dad was one of those men who get enthusiastic about too many things to ever become really expert in any of them. He played guitar, passably. He wrote short stories that I loved but that were never published. And he loved the night sky and the stories of the stars.

The North Star, I remember him telling me one night, pointing it out. It’s called Polaris or sometimes the Lodestar. Not the brightest star, like many people think. Sirius is the brightest. But Polaris is one of the most important.

I was nine at the time and hadn’t really cared about the stars, but I’d loved my dad, so I had listened and made sure my eyes were wide with wonder. I’m glad I did that now. It made him happy. He was dead before I was twenty-one, and I cherish every memory.

“What you thinking?” the voice murmurs from behind me, thick with sleep.

“My dad. He was into astronomy.”

Tommy comes up and encircles me with his arms. He’s naked and warm. The back of my head finds a place against his chest. I’m only four-ten, so he towers over me in a way that I like.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks me.

“Not couldn’t,” I murmur. “Not the right word. Just comfortable being awake.”

It’s as if I can hear him smile, and this tells me, like so many other things, how we’re getting closer. We’re picking up each other’s cues, reading the signs beneath the surface. Tommy and I have been together for almost three years now, and it’s been careful and wonderful. In many ways, this unexpected love has saved me.

A little more than three-and-a-half years ago, a man I was hunting, a serial killer by the name of Joseph Sands, broke into my home. He tortured my husband, Matt, in front of me, and then he killed him. He raped and disfigured me, and he also caused the death of Alexa, my ten-year-old daughter.

I spent six months after that wrapped in an agony I can’t truly remember now. I can see it intellectually, but I think we have a protective mechanism that prevents us from actual sense memory of that kind of pain. What I remember is that I wished myself dead and came close to making it happen.

Tommy and I had come together in the aftermath. He was ex-Secret Service, and he owed me a favor. I called in the favor during a case I was on, and somehow we ended up in bed together. It was the last thing I expected. Not just because I was still mourning Matt, not just because Tommy was a drop-dead handsome Latin man, but because of what had been done to me.

Joseph Sands had cut my face with a big old knife, and he’d cut it with a mix of concentration, rage, and glee. He left permanent evidence of himself on me, a branding of blood and steel.

The scar is continuous. It begins in the middle of my forehead, right at the hairline. It goes straight down, hovering above the space between my eyebrows, and then it shoots off to the left at an almost perfect ninety- degree angle. I have no left eyebrow. Sands carved it off as he meandered across my face. The scar travels along my temple and then turns in a lazy loop-de-loop down my cheek. It rips over toward my nose, crossing the bridge of it just barely, then changes its mind, cutting diagonally across my left nostril and zooming in one final, triumphant line past my jaw, down my neck, ending at my collarbone.

I remember, when he’d finished cutting, how he paused. I was screaming, and he looked down at me, his face inches above my own. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Got it right the first time.”

I had never considered myself beautiful but was always comfortable in my own skin. After that night, I feared the mirror, like the Phantom of the Opera. If I didn’t kill myself, then at the very least I envisioned a life spent locked away from the eyes of the world.

So when Tommy kissed me—and then later, when he took me to my bed and kissed my scars—well … it was not the kisses but the unselfconscious heat of his need that undid me. He was a man, a handsome man, and he wanted me. Not because I’d been hurt, not to comfort me, but because he’d fantasized about having me and now he could.

Time has passed, and those first moments have turned into something much bigger. We live together. We love each other and have said so. Bonnie, my adopted daughter, loves him, and he loves her back. Best of all, it’s guiltless, blessed by the ghosts of my past.

“Jesus, this is beautiful,” Tommy whispers. “Isn’t it beautiful, Smoky?”

“Unreal.”

“Pretty good idea on my part. Brilliant, maybe.”

I grin. “Watch the ego, buddy. It was a good call, but don’t expect it to bail you out in the future.”

His hands creep around me, finding their way under the bathrobe. “Guess I’ll just have to count on the sex for that.”

“That … could work,” I purr, closing my eyes.

He kisses my neck, and it makes me shiver in the warm air. “So?” he asks.

I turn in to him and angle my head up as an answer. His lips find mine as the moon watches. We kiss, and I feel myself stirring inside as he stirs against me.

“I want it here,” I mumble, my hands in his hair.