Run to You Part Three: Third Charm
Clara Kensie
Part Three in the riveting romantic thriller about a family on the run from a deadly past and a first love that will transcend secrets, lies and danger…Betrayed, heartbroken, and determined to save her family, Tessa Carson refuses to give in to Tristan Walker’s pleas for forgiveness. But her own awakening psychic gift won’t let her rest until she uncovers the truth about her family and her past. And Tristan is the only one who can help her sift through the secrets to find the truth hidden in all the lies…
Part Three in the riveting romantic thriller about a family on the run from a deadly past, and a first love that will transcend secrets, lies and danger...
Betrayed, heartbroken and determined to save her family, Tessa Carson refuses to give in to Tristan Walker’s pleas for forgiveness. But her own awakening psychic gift won’t let her rest until she uncovers the truth about her family and her past. And Tristan is the only one who can help her sift through the secrets to find the truth hidden in all the lies....
Run to You
Part Three:
Third Charm
Clara Kensie
www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)
Dedication
To K:
I.H.Y.D.
Contents
Chapter Thirty-Six (#ube57a6fc-df0d-5cb3-975a-c38eee164ff6)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#uafc73625-7895-521b-946f-99235a9ea6e6)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#u5dce095b-ab68-503e-8383-16be412bf9bf)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#u93f5bc17-d8e7-5669-9ca8-60cfa3527f57)
Chapter Forty (#u4cc5cde1-5e13-51f7-bc81-41634acdefbc)
Chapter Forty-One (#ua5850a82-5adc-50df-becc-a476c00ac50a)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Playlist for Run to You (#litres_trial_promo)
Q & A with Clara Kensie (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Did you hear me, Tessa?” Tristan said.
I’d heard him. He’d just told me that Dennis Connelly wasn’t the killer, my parents were.
I heard him say it, and I tried to tell him he was wrong, that he was lying, but shock and fury and disgust formed a block in my throat, choking off my words, cutting off my air.
“Some of what your parents told you is true,” Tristan said. “Your father was a journalist. He used his press pass to meet politicians and businessmen. Your mom was the special events director at a hotel. She knew when politicians and important people were coming. Your dad used his press pass to meet them too. Then he’d watch all of them with his remote vision. If your dad saw them do something unethical, your parents would contact them anonymously and demand money from them. That’s how they made so much money. Blackmail. Not writing a newspaper column and planning parties.”
I blinked again, slid farther away from him. He was lying. He had to be.
And yet he continued. The putrid, rotten lies, each one worse than the last, came spewing from his mouth like vomit.
“If the victims refused to pay, if they called the police or started investigating who was blackmailing them, your mother would use her PK to give them heart attacks or brain aneurysms. She’d kill people and make it look like a car accident, or illness or suicide.”
I stared at him and tried to let the words sink in.
But they wouldn’t.
Because they were lies. All of them. Every single one.
“I’m so sorry.” He reached for me, but I slapped him away and scrambled off the cot.
“You said you would never lie to me again,” I seethed through clenched teeth. “And that is the most vicious lie I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m not lying. I wish I were.”
“That man came to our house to kill us,” I said. “My father watched him slice open two people with his mind.”
“Dennis Connelly has one psionic ability, and that’s telepathy. He cannot slice people open with his mind,” Tristan said. “Your parents built him up to be some kind of all-powerful, indestructible super-villain. They demonized him to keep you scared and obedient.”
I cringed. That lie was the worst of all. “They would never do that to us.”
“We have evidence.”
“No, I have evidence.” I yanked my shirt up. “That man, that monster, did this to me.”
He touched his fingers to the scars and I flinched. “He didn’t even know you were cut until I told him last week. He thinks you must have gotten cut on broken glass when your father pulled you from the car window.”
“Does he deny trying to kidnap me too?” I tried to growl it, to sound strong and menacing, but my voice came out high and uncontrolled.
“He did put you in his car,” he said. “But he wasn’t kidnapping you.”
“How is locking me in his car not kidnapping?”
“Eight years ago,” he said, “one of our sensors was in Washington, trying to find psionic people. Doing his job. He walked by your dad at a coffee shop and sensed he had some kind of psionic ability.” Tristan sighed and rubbed his eyes. “So the APR sent Dennis and his recruitment team to your house to talk to him. If they found evidence of psionics, they planned to invite him to the APR for testing and possible employment. While Dennis was outside talking to you, his team went inside to talk to your parents. He put you in his car when he heard what was happening in your house.”
I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes. “And what, exactly, was happening in my house?”
“Your parents were killing his partners, Tessa. He was just trying to keep you safe. Then he went inside to help his team, but it was too late. Your parents attacked him, too. Your mom gave him a heart attack. He barely escaped alive.”
The cell fell silent.
His words echoed in my mind, each one like a punch to the chest. I stumbled to the wall and sank to the floor as waves of dizziness brought back the fog. “Liar,” I managed to squeak, before the fog took me away.
* * *
“Tessa?” Tristan’s voice broke through the fog.
I didn’t move. I wanted—needed—to stay in the fog for a while longer.
“I need to tell you something else. About Dennis.”
“No more.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m holding anything back.”
“I can’t handle anything else right now. Please.”
“Okay. When you’re ready.”
* * *
We hadn’t moved in hours, it seemed. I remained huddled in a ball in the corner. Tristan sat on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, head hung low.
Finally he took a deep breath. “Tess—”
“Don’t say it.”
“I need to—”
“I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it. Please don’t say it.”
But whether he said it or not, I already knew what he wanted to tell me. Forbidding him to say the words wasn’t going to change it.
I gave a stuttery sigh of defeat. “He’s your father, isn’t he?”
Please, please tell me I’m wrong.
But he didn’t. He just nodded. “Dennis Connelly is my father.”
Perhaps knowing I was about to cry, he opened his arms in an offer of comfort. I shook my head and pulled myself into a tighter ball and cried alone.
* * *
“How did you know?” Tristan asked from the cot when my tears had slowed to sniffles.
I sniffled one more time. “Back in your kitchen. Kellan called you Junior.”
“Ah.”
I put my head on my knees. I just wanted to go back in time, back to Winterball. I wanted to go back to the running path. Back to laying on his bed with his head on my stomach.
But there was no going back. I was here, locked in a cell with the son of Dennis Connelly.
Tristan was the son of the man who’d tried to kill me. The son of the man who’d chased my family out of thirteen homes in eight years. The son of the man who would soon come and finish the job he started.
I was in love with Tristan Connelly.
“Oh God...” Dennis Connelly’s son leaped off the cot and scooped me up, rushing me to the bathroom and bending me over the toilet just in time. He knew I was going to throw up before I did.
He held my hair back as I vomited for the second time since Kellan had kidnapped me.
No, the third. I had a flash of screaming, screaming so long and so hard I choked and threw up all over his white shirt with the pink embroidered horse, and started screaming again.
But now I was too tired, too broken, to scream anymore. I coughed the last of the vomit from my mouth, and he handed me a plastic cup of water from the sink. “Sip and spit.”
I did, and he guided me back to the main cell. He tried to bring me to the cot, but I pulled away and slunk back to my corner. “Just leave, Tristan. I don’t want you here.”
He walked away but only to sit on the cot again. “I’m not leaving you.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The door to the cell slid open and I startled, lowering the fog, certain it was Dennis Connelly. But it was just a guard, holding a plastic tray. A gun hung in a holster on his belt. I’d seen him before somewhere; his yellow spiky hair looked familiar. I raised the fog again but kept it close.
Spiky Hair nodded to the tray. “Breakfast.”
Breakfast. It was the next day. I’d been in this cell for over twenty-four hours.
Tristan took the tray and placed it on the cot. “Thanks.”
“Congrats on the mission, Connelly,” Spiky Hair said. “Nice job.” His gaze flickered to me in the corner.
Tristan’s face reddened. “Thanks,” he mumbled.
The guard left, the door sealing itself shut behind him. Tristan held out a plate for me, but I shook my head. “How do I know it’s not poisoned?” I was imprisoned by a killer, after all.
He took a large scoop of scrambled eggs from one plate and ate it, then did the same with the other. “Nope. Not poisoned.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and moved from the floor up to the chair. He placed the plate on my lap. I looked with distaste at the eggs, toast and orange slices. “Are my parents getting the same meal?” Mom would hate this breakfast. Rubbery yellow eggs and white bread. She would’ve used egg whites and whole grain.
“They’re probably still unconscious. It takes a long time to neutralize someone.”
“What does that mean?”
“Their psionic abilities are being taken away.”
“You mean, so they can’t escape?”
“And so they can’t hurt anyone.” He looked pointedly at me, as if silently adding, So your mother can’t fly you into a wall anymore.
I blinked. “She didn’t mean to hurt me, Tristan.”
He swallowed his eggs. “I know.”
“She would never hurt anyone. There’s no way my parents did any of the things you said.”
He said nothing to that.
In a display of loyalty to my mother, I pushed aside the eggs and toast, and ate only the orange slices. But because I was weak in both body and spirit, I betrayed her again by eating the eggs. “Does it hurt to be neutralized?”
“No. It’s like blowing out a candle. In fact, your dad’s headaches will probably stop.”
That, at least, was a tiny bit comforting. But my mom’s PK was as much a part of her life as me, or air. She couldn’t survive without it, or want to.
Thank God Jillian and Logan weren’t here. My parents were right to send them away before driving up here. They wouldn’t want to live without their PK either.
The cell door opened again and I jolted, my fork clanging to the floor, and again I lowered the fog. A dark-skinned woman in a lab coat entered, a thick green binder in one arm. “Hello, Tessa. I’m Dr. Sheldon. Do you remember me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She was the one who’d put her palm on my forehead and looked inside my mind. She was gentle. Warm. “Can I see my mom and dad now?”
She tilted her head. “Sweetheart, do you understand why your parents are here?”
“No.” I didn’t understand anything anymore.
“I told her,” Tristan said. “But she won’t believe me.”
Dr. Sheldon clucked. “I wouldn’t want to believe something like that about my parents either.” She patted the binder. A series of letters and numbers was printed on the spine: CARS0520. “But we have evidence.”
So Dr. Sheldon was a liar too.
“Any news about Tessa’s brother and sister?” Tristan asked. “Did we find them yet?”
They were still looking for Jillian and Logan?
“Let’s see.” She opened the binder and flipped through the pages. “Their parents gave them all their cash before sending them away on foot. We have an agent watching the house in case they return, but so far no one knows where they are.”
“We’ll find them for you, Tessa,” Tristan said. “I promise.”
Impossible. Jillian and Logan were too smart to go back to our house. They knew better than to return to Twelve Lakes. With all our money, and without me to ruin everything, they could run forever.
“Poor kids,” Dr. Sheldon said. “They must be very frightened.”
Terrified, I was certain. Jillian was probably disguising her terror with anger. Logan was probably not bothering to hide it. But the important thing was they weren’t imprisoned in this horrid APR place, being neutralized. As long as they weren’t here, they would be okay.
Dr. Sheldon held up her palms. “Stand up for a minute. I need to examine you again.” She placed one hand on my forehead and one on the back of my neck, then closed her eyes.
I tried to think about nothing. Just empty space. Fog. As nice as she was, I didn’t want her inside my mind. Tristan was being nice too, and I couldn’t trust him.
After a few minutes, she took my chin in her hand, a frown on her face and alarm in her eyes. “I don’t know what it is that I’m seeing deep in that mind of yours, Tessa, but I don’t like it. You have me very worried. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here for a while.”
She made some notes in the file. “Completely neutral,” she muttered with a pitiful shake of her head, then closed the binder and tucked it in the crook of her arm. With a warning to Tristan to watch me carefully, she left, taking the binder with her.
* * *
Hearing all those awful lies about my parents and the guilt over causing all this misery to everyone I loved made me despise myself. Before Tristan could even offer a comforting word, I went into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. It was the only place I could go to escape from him.
I shed my clothes and stepped behind the shower curtain, then started the water. I washed myself again, scrubbing as hard as I had last night.
When I was five and Jillian was six, we were on a softball team. The Dragonflies. We were the best team in the league, and my sister was the star player, no surprise. She hit every ball. It wasn’t until I hit three home runs in a single game that our parents realized Jillian had been using her psychokinesis to control the ball the entire season. They made her stop. It wasn’t fair, they’d said. It wasn’t right.
My parents were ethical. Moral. Honest.
They had not blackmailed anyone. They had not murdered anyone. They had not lied to us this whole time.
They had not.
I ran my fingers over the scars on my belly.
Shattered glass.
No.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Dressed in my gray prison uniform, I shuffled out to the cell. I stopped short at the sight of Melissa and Philip—no, Amy and Heath—standing with Tristan. Instantly on guard, I lowered the fog, just a bit. Amy and Heath had been in on Kellan’s plot the whole time. Any kindness they’d shown me in Twelve Lakes was fake.
“Oh, Sarah,” Amy said, wringing her hands. “We’re so sorry.”
“Her name is Tessa,” Tristan said.
“That’s right. Tessa.” She brushed my cheek and I flinched. “I just want to check your injuries.”
“I’m fine,” I said, stepping away.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said. “I’m a healer. And Heath’s a safeguard. He feels awful he couldn’t protect you from Kellan. We both do. He sent us away Friday night and said he didn’t need us anymore. Neither of us knew he was going to do what he did.”
Heath, sighing regretfully, shook his head.
“Heath’s a bodyguard?” I asked.
“Not just a bodyguard,” Tristan said, “A safeguard. He protects people from physical and psionic harm. That’s why your dad couldn’t see me with his remote vision.”
So Tristan wasn’t one of the five percent who were immune to my father’s mobile eye after all. No wonder Heath was always around.
Heath clapped Tristan on the back.
“Hey, man. Thanks,” Tristan said, shaking Heath’s left hand with an awkward laugh. The knuckles on his right hand were bruised and swollen.
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Amy sighed. “We’ll leave you alone. We’re just glad you’re safe now, Sarah—I mean, Tessa.”
I didn’t reply, and they turned away. The door sealed shut behind them.
“That day, when I pushed you away from the falling tree?” Tristan said. “The tackle fractured your collarbone. Amy healed it.”
I remembered how she’d run her fingers over my collarbone as I’d sat on her kitchen table, and how the pain had disappeared. “Oh.”
“And Heath was so upset about what Kellan did to you, he punched him.”
“He did?”
“While you were sleeping yesterday. He safeguarded his thoughts, then walked up to Kellan in the lunchroom and punched him in the face. Dislocated his jaw. The healers fixed Kellan right away, but Heath won’t let anyone heal his hand, not even Amy. He’s proud of those bruises.”
Heath had never even spoken in my presence. The idea of that sweet, shy man punching Kellan in my defense filled me with vengeful glee.
Tristan’s duffle bag lay open on the floor, another of his sweatshirts folded on top, this one white with royal blue lettering and a lightning bolt. On impulse, I slipped it over my gray prison top.
“You can make holes in the cuffs if you want,” Tristan said. “You did on my other one.”
“I did? I’m sorry.” I looked down at the sleeves. I’d already started rubbing the fabric with my thumbnails.
“It’s okay. I like it when you do that.”
“Lilybrook High Lightning,” I said, reading the sweatshirt.
“I went from the Lilybrook High Lightning to the TLC Thunderclouds.”
“You told me you were from Milwaukee.”
“Milwaukee is about four hours south of here.”
I traced the blue letters with my fingertip. “Are all the kids in Lilybrook undercover agents?”
He laughed. “No. Most kids in Lilybrook are just regular kids. But the people who work here at the APR are all psionic, and usually their kids are too. We can work here as interns once we’re in high school. I was interning in the lab back in March when Kellan asked me to help him out with his new case. He wouldn’t tell me any details, just that I’d have to live in a town called Twelve Lakes and wait for a family to move in, then befriend the kids to find out if anyone in the family had psionic abilities. I accepted the job. Being an investigator for the APR was all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
“What about school?”
“I was a senior just weeks away from graduation. I had straight As and I already had enough credits to graduate. The APR arranged it so I could finish my senior year by correspondence. But I had to enroll as a junior at TLC because we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for your family. When you still didn’t come by the end of summer, I had to postpone college and be a senior again.” He sank to the cot, chin in hand. “Taking this job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
I refused to be impressed or to feel sorry for him. “I’m sure your father gave you lots of advice.”
He shook his head. “He was against it, even though Kellan told him it was a basic fact-finding mission and he’d arranged for a safeguard and a healer to be my chaperones. Combined with my warning premonitions, I’d be perfectly safe. My dad was still against it, but I was eighteen, so ultimately it was my decision.”
That’s right—Tristan was eighteen. He’d graduated high school. “There’s still so much I don’t know about you,” I said, “and you know everything about me.”
“That’s not completely true,” he said. “I didn’t know your last name until Friday night.” He said my full name aloud. “Tessa Carson.”
“Tessa Lynne Carson,” I added.
“Really? Your initials are TLC? Like the school?”
“Yep. ‘You’ll find TLC at TLC’,” I quoted Twelve Lakes Community High School’s slogan. “I guess you really did.”
He laughed. “TLC. That’s amazing.”
“Why?”
“My middle name is Lawrence.”
“Tristan Lawrence... Oh. We have the same initials.” I was quiet for a moment, and then I decided to be cruel, because for a moment I’d forgotten he was the enemy and his kindness was just another one of his tricks. “But I think for you, TLC stands for terrible, loathsome and contemptible.”
The light left his eyes, and he sank to the cot with a sigh. “I hope one day you’ll change your mind about that,” he murmured.
I just shook my head.
* * *
“You want me to believe my parents are criminals,” I said to Tristan after sitting in silence for a while. “That they blackmailed and murdered people.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to believe that Denn—that he isn’t going to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“You want me to believe the complete opposite of everything I’ve known for the last eight years.”
“Yes.”
“Even after everything Kellan did. Punching me, kidnapping me, holding me as bait. He made me watch his men shoot my parents. After all that, you still want me to believe that my parents are the bad guys.”
Sighing, he ran his hand through his hair. “Yes.”
“If I believe you,” I said, “that means my parents were lying to me.”
“They were,” he said.
“If I believe my parents, that means you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lying to you.”
“But you did lie to me, Tristan Walker.”
He winced. “Yes.”
“So the only thing I can prove is that you are the liar.”
He slowly nodded his head. “What can I do to make things better?”
Nothing he did now could ever make things better. He’d lied to me. Used me. Betrayed me. Tristan was the son of Dennis Connelly. Killer’s blood coursed through his veins with every beat of his heart.
I studied him from the corner of my eye. Legs wide, shoulders slumped, elbows on knees. Head down. Dejected.
He turned his head to look at me, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
He was desperate as well.
I licked my lips. Tristan had used me; now I was going to use him. “There is something you can do.”
“Anything.”
“I need you to help me get that green binder Dr. Sheldon had.”
“Why?”
“Whatever evidence you claim to have is in that binder. I want to see it.” And then I would prove there was no evidence. Once I convinced him of that, I would get him to help my parents and me escape.
And then I would leave him behind forever.
He eyed me for a long moment, and I offered him a tiny smile.
“Okay,” he said. “Tonight. After everyone has gone home.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The alarm on Tristan’s phone rang at exactly eleven o’clock that night. “Ready?”
Holding my breath, I nodded.
He rang the buzzer on the intercom, and a few moments later a low voice crackled through the speakers. “Yeah?”
“We need a guard down here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just need a guard to let me out.”
The intercom went silent, and Tristan buzzed it again. “I’m not a prisoner. I work here. I’m an agent.”
“What’s an agent doing locked up in the Underground?”
“That’s classified.”
No reply from the intercom.
Tristan sighed. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“...No.”
“I’m Tristan Connelly.”
“So?”
Licking his lips, he glanced at me. “So, my dad is Dennis Connelly.”
I tried not to show him how much that upset me as the intercom clicked off.
When a few minutes passed without it clicking back on, I said, “He’s not coming.”
Tristan gave me a knowing smirk. “He’s coming.”
A few minutes later, a guard with a thin, weasely face and a stubbly attempt at a mustache opened the door. Tristan took my hand and stepped into the doorway. “Whoa, not so fast,” the guard said. “Warden says you can leave whenever you want.” His eyes landed on me. “But the girl stays.”
Tristan tightened his grip on my hand. “That’s right. She stays with me.”
Weasel Face widened his stance, folding his arms across his chest. “I can’t let her out. Warden said it’s Doc Sheldon’s orders.”
Tristan growled and fisted his hand, but I stepped in front of him. Intimidation wasn’t going to get me that binder, not with this guard. I lowered my chin and looked up at him with doe eyes, attempting to appear as docile and meek as possible. “Please, sir?” I begged Weasel Face, who couldn’t be more than three years older than me. “You’re the only one who can help us.”
He looked nervously down the hall and back to me. I made my lower lip tremble. With one more glance down the hall, he stepped back, waving us out. Tristan squeezed my hand, and we rushed from the cell before the guard could change his mind.
I’d been in the hallway three times before but had never seen it. I’d either been blindfolded, paralyzed by fear, or lost in the fog. This time I purposely raised the fog, enough to clear my mind and focus on every detail, planning an escape route.
The hallway was long, narrow, full of turns. Musty and damp. Gray metal doors, all sealed shut, lined the cinderblock walls.
My parents were behind those doors.
Strutting beside us, Weasel Face watched me with a suspicious frown. I blinked innocently at him.
We reached the elevator. “Wait for us here,” Tristan told the guard.
He snorted and rested his hand on his tranq gun. “No way.”
The elevator doors slid open silently, and the three of us entered. We rode up four floors and arrived at ground level.
We dashed close to the walls. This hallway was lined with closed doors as well, but instead of solid steel, they were made of heavy paneled wood and had brass knobs. Shadows stretched above us as the hall disappeared into complete blackness at the far end. From the other end came the faint tapping of booted footsteps—guards on patrol, perhaps. I tried to breathe slowly through my nose, sure they would be able to hear each exhale.
We neared a door illuminated in red from the word EXIT hanging above it. Tristan seized my arm, pulled me in tight. Weasel Face noticed and gripped his gun.
They were probably right to suspect I’d try to burst through that door and flee, but running hadn’t even occurred to me. I needed that binder. I needed Tristan to know the truth, that my parents were innocent. I marched past the exit without a second glance.
Tristan stopped at the last door in the hall. “This is Dr. Sheldon’s office,” he whispered, and turned the knob. “Locked. Damn.” He turned to Weasel Face. “Do you have the key?”
“Nope.”
Before I could even begin to be disappointed, Weasel Face bent his fingers into a claw and stared hard at the knob. He swiveled his hand in the air, and a few seconds later I heard a tiny click.
“Nice,” Tristan said. “You’re psychokinetic?”
“Kinda. Ferrokinetic. I can manipulate metal.” He pointed to his belt buckle, which was twisted into a big, stylized G. “I just made this tonight,” he said. “It’s for the Green Bay Packers.”
I gave him a whispered, slow ooooo, like I was awed by his handiwork. He beamed and pushed the door open.
Tristan ushered me inside. A computer monitor was on and gave the room an eerie blue glow. The monitor sat on a utilitarian desk, cluttered with papers, pens and old cups of coffee. A garbage can stuffed to overflowing sat in the corner. Black filing cabinets lined the back wall. Stacked haphazardly on top of the filing cabinet was a pile of manila folders with papers sticking out, old date books and a vase holding a dusty silk flower.
And balanced precariously on the very edge of the cabinets were four green binders. I could just make out the code running down the spine of the top one: CARS0520.
Tristan and I glanced at each other, then he turned to Weasel Face. “So, buddy, where you from? Who recruited you?”
“I’m from Sioux Falls,” the guard said. “Ted Rigby found me. I was just working for a mechanic, doing oil changes and pretending to pound out dents. Now I’m here. Wild.”
“Yeah, Rigby’s great. How long have you been working here?”
While Tristan kept Weasel Face occupied, I grabbed the binder, then slipped it under my top, grateful I was wearing Tristan’s huge sweatshirt. Dr. Sheldon’s office was so messy, hopefully she would just assume she’d misplaced the binder. I put a confused look on my face. “I don’t see it.”
Tristan played along, pretending to look around the office. “I don’t either.”
“What are you looking for?” Weasel Face asked.
“Um, my Green Bay Packers sweatshirt,” Tristan said. “It’s lucky. Every time she wears it, they win.”
Weasel Face pursed his lips as he scanned the office. “I don’t see it. Damn.”
I swapped my confused expression for a disappointed one. “I hope the Packers can win without me.”
“Hopefully,” Tristan said, and smiled. We work well together, his smile seemed to say.
Yeah. We do, I smiled back.
Too bad for him this was the last time.
Chapter Forty
Weasel Face—who no longer seemed so weasely—escorted Tristan and me back through the hallways and down the elevator to the Underground. Tristan gave him a handshake and a promise to go out to watch the Green Bay Packers soon, then suggested it would be awesome if he would disable the surveillance camera over the door. With a conspiratorial grin, Weasel Face wiggled his index finger at it. Tristan quickly steered him out, the door sealing shut behind him.
I took the binder from under my sweatshirt and opened to a random page. A black and white surveillance photo of my parents. Young and serious, they were sitting at an outdoor cafe. Mom was absently fiddling with her wedding ring. Dad was looking at the menu. A completely neutral photo, boring really, but it brought tears to my eyes.
I flipped through the pages. How odd to see our real names in print after all these years.
Andrew Carson.
Gwendolyn Carson.
Jillian. Tessa. Logan.
We’d wiped away our identities with each move, and this binder held the only proof of our existence.
Clips from my father’s newspaper columns when he wrote as Xander Xavier.
A picture of our big red brick house in Virginia, standing majestically over an expansive lawn.
My parents’ old financial records. “See, Tristan? They really did make all that money,” I said. “Paychecks. Stock market investments. It’s all right here. All legal.”
“They wouldn’t mark their blackmail payments as blackmail. They’d mark them as stock market investments.”
I glared at him for a full minute before returning to the binder.
Another photo of our house, this time reduced to rubble and ashes.
Pictures of some of the other houses and apartments we’d lived in.
Testimonies from our old neighbors.
A list of our aliases.
Phone records. My parents were right to get rid of our landline.
A list of websites we’d visited. My parents were right to get rid of our internet access too.
Reports from various precognitives and psychics, including a child’s drawing of twelve blue, misshapen circles with wave symbols. “What’s this?” I asked Tristan.
“Twelve lakes,” he said. “That’s how we knew you would go there.”
In the binder, Dennis Connelly had written notes about where we’d been and where he guessed we might go next. We were always careful not to leave anything personal behind, but he still found a few items. Those items he brought back to the APR for psychometric readings, and he also flew psychics out to the homes we’d fled. Several times he’d noted his frustration that the psychics were never able to get a clear reading on our family through the objects or places we’d left behind.
I read every detail of a receipt from an electronics store near our hideout in Seattle, back when we were the Abbott family. My name was Amanda for about ten months. Jillian was Allison and Logan was Alexander. The receipt showed that we’d paid cash for a DVD player and a stack of Disney movies.
One of the papers was a program from a dance recital. The name Renee Roberts was circled on the program—Jillian’s alias in Oregon. My pseudonym had been Rachel, and Logan’s had been Ryan. I’d wanted the name Rebecca but my father had said no. Jillian didn’t appear in the class picture with the other little ballerinas, but my parents had been upset that her name was in print. We’d fled to our next hideout soon after that.
Logan had left behind one of the music scores he’d written when we lived in Florida. Another page was a scan of a painting I’d made in art class, probably when I was eleven. A single petal lying on the ground, broken off from the rest of the flower. What state were we living in then—maybe Missouri? North Carolina? The image on the page was black and white, but I remembered using shades of blue for the petal. It might have been the last painting I’d ever done. It was too painful to paint anyway, knowing my parents would ooh and ahh over it, tell me I was so talented, and then sometime before our next run they would burn it. The canvases wouldn’t fit in my getaway bag, and we could leave nothing personal behind.
Disney movies, dance recitals, art classes. It was nice to remember that a small part of our childhood had actually been normal. How odd to think that Dennis Connelly was the keeper of my childhood memories.
D. Connelly was written on the bottom of the earlier reports. Toward the back pages, his name was replaced by J. Kellan. Tristan’s name appeared on some of the reports too.
My stomach clenched when I saw recent pictures of me. Jogging with Tristan. Walking happily to school holding his hand. In one photo he was laughing as I whispered in his ear. An intimate, happy moment, captured by a long-range surveillance camera.
Another photo of the two of us sitting on a bench under a leafless tree. Ethan’s backyard. That was the night Tristan had told me he loved me, the night I’d told him my real name. The next photo, taken the same night, showed us talking in the back seat of his car. When I looked closely, Heath was in the background in almost every picture, either standing behind a tree or huddling in a car.
For someone constantly on the lookout for suspicious people, I’d been so blind. Blinded by love—I was a living cliché.
The binder held photos of the rest of my family too. Mom and Jillian shopping for Homecoming dresses. Logan looking under the hood of our getaway car in the pouring rain while our mother paced behind him. Only one picture of my dad—he stood on the driveway with his hands in his pockets. It was the only time he’d stepped outside the house in Twelve Lakes, as he’d waited for me to return home from jogging with Tristan, so he could shake his hand again.
With every turn of the page, my heart hurt a little bit more.
The hardest pages to see were the photos of the alleged victims, the people the APR had accused my parents of blackmailing and murdering. Underneath each photo was their name, along with the location, date, and manner of death. Heart attack. Car accident. Heart attack. Fire. Falling down stairs. Heart attack.
Tristan sipped in a long breath when I turned the page to photos of two men. “My dad’s partners.”
The location listed was Kitteridge, Virginia. My hometown.
The date was the day Dennis Connelly came to our house eight years ago.
Their manner of death: Stabbing.
Those were the only deaths that didn’t match the rest.
A brick grew in my throat. Calling the fog in a bit closer, I dragged my sight from the words to the pictures of the two men. Both photos were simple headshots against a plain backdrop, perhaps taken by the APR for their ID badges. The men stared accusingly back at me, the elder man hefty and wizened, the younger man thin and determined.
“That guy?” Tristan said, pointing to the younger man. “He was Kellan’s brother-in-law, but they were more like real brothers. I guess Kellan didn’t want to just apprehend your parents. He wanted revenge.” Hands curling into fists, he muttered, “So he took it out on you. Defenseless you.”
My despair, and the fog, lifted as I realized I didn’t recognize either of those men. I’d never seen them before.
“Ha!” I cried. “I would have remembered three men coming to my house that day. But there was just one. Your father.” I shoved the binder off my lap and onto his, as if it was contaminated.
He licked his lips. “My dad was purposely distracting you.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I slid the binder back onto my legs and resumed flipping the pages. It didn’t matter what Tristan said; I had absolutely no memory of three men in my yard. I remembered only one: the man who’d tried to kidnap me. The man who’d sliced me open.
I vaguely recognized a few of the people in the photos—was that the man who’d sold us our getaway car when we left Montana? The binder said he’d died when he cracked his head open after slipping on motor oil. And the hook-nosed waitress from a Georgia diner a few years ago. She’d died of a heart attack.
I had to stop this. I had to stop looking at these photos. There were too many, and they weren’t helping me prove Tristan was lying. I thumbed through the rest of them as quickly as I could, barely glancing at them—
Wait.
Was that...
Yes. That last photo. The date in the corner showed it had been added to the binder this past Thursday night.
Dr. Fielding. The college professor.
I stared at his picture, the same portrait from his website. Even the words “In Memoriam” were printed on top. But it was the words printed on the bottom that made my breath catch.
I ripped the page from the file. Shoved the binder to the floor. Jumped to my feet and waved the page over my head like a trophy. “I knew it!” I said, my voice screechy and frantic. “You’re lying. And I can prove it.”
Chapter Forty-One
“I’m not lying,” Tristan said.
“Yes you are! This,” I said, waving the photo in his face, “is Dr. Fielding.”
“The college professor?”
I stabbed the words under his portrait with my finger. “He died in Hebron, Iowa, on November twenty-third. My family moved to Twelve Lakes, Illinois, in August. We never went further than ten minutes away from our house. And Iowa was at least two hundred miles away. There’s no way my mom could have killed him. She’s not that powerful.”
Tristan’s face went white.
“I knew you were lying.” I ran my finger down the professor’s portrait. Dr. Fielding had rescued my family after all.
Tristan scrambled to gather the papers that had scattered on the floor and began to read them again. Elated, I held Dr. Fielding’s photo in front of me. I could have kissed it. A hysterical giggle escaped from behind my lips.
They were innocent.
My parents were innocent.
They had never blackmailed anyone.
They’d never killed anyone.
They’d never lied to me.
I turned to Tristan with my hands on my hips and snarled. “Now let my parents go, you disgusting, pathetic liar.”
But instead of being intimidated, he just gave me another one of his sad, sympathetic looks. “You didn’t read the notes on the next page. It says here Dr. Fielding was in Twelve Lakes on November twenty-second.”
“That can’t be true. He didn’t know who we were. We left all of our personal information out of that email, and Logan made it untraceable. How would he know to come to Twelve Lakes?”
He referenced the notes again. “Because your parents called him and told him to come.”
“But...how would my parents know about him back then?”
He shrugged. “Maybe when Jillian was piggybacking he was able to see inside her mind. Or maybe your parents didn’t trust her, so your father still watched her.”
If that was true, then my parents had mistrusted the wrong daughter.
“It says here your mother arranged to meet him at the coffee shop in the town square,” Tristan said. “The security cameras show him getting there at 10:54 a.m. He waited for two hours, and when no one showed up, he left.”
“See? My parents never met him. So they couldn’t have killed him.”
He read the notes. “Your mom came in at 11:06, bought a cup of coffee to go, then went home. She never spoke to him, but she was close enough to plant an aneurysm in his brain. Aneurysms don’t necessarily kill right away. She probably chose that method so he wouldn’t die until he got home.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”
“Sorry, Tessa. For a minute there, I really thought the APR might be wrong about your parents.”
I sat down hard on the cot. “This file is fake. It has to be.” I grabbed it from him and flipped through the pages, almost tearing them from the binder.
“My parents donated to charities,” I said. “They gave money to anyone who needed it. Once when we were on the run, driving through Massachusetts, we were at a motel and the manager was kicking out a woman and her two little kids because she couldn’t afford to pay. My parents gave her enough cash to stay in a different motel, a better motel, for a month. If they were killers, they wouldn’t have done that. They wouldn’t.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Tristan said.
I tried again. “What about the police detective and the FBI agent we asked for help?” I said. “My dad watched your father kill them, he watched your father slice them right down the middle, and each time, I watched my dad. He could not have faked the horror in his eyes. My mother could not have faked her tears. She was hysterical, Tristan.”
He only shook his head with a sorrowful sigh.
Memories. All I had were my memories of my parents’ altruism and my father’s horrified expression as he witnessed those murders. Those memories were enough evidence for me, but they wouldn’t be enough evidence for Tristan.
I was no longer happy that Jillian and Logan had escaped. Selfishly, I wanted them here, with me. They’d help me prove our parents were innocent.
But Jillian and Logan were gone. I’d have to find the proof myself.
* * *
Shaking off my despair, I studied the notes in the binder again. Kellan wrote how he could not use his telepathy to read our minds in case one of us could sense his intrusion. He recorded his plans, from hiding a tiny camera under our front windowsill to record our comings and goings—it must have been Kellan’s handprint on our window—to pulling the wires in our getaway car in an effort to provoke my mom or brother into using psionics to fix it. But with my mother standing watch and clearly ready to attack, and still not fully informed on all of our powers, he had decided not to move in.
The bulk of his strategy involved Tristan prying information from me. It was those notes that made my stomach churn.
A note written by Tristan, on the day we met for the first time: Followed targets 4 and 5 as they left the house and went running in park. Made first contact with target 4. She resisted conversation. —T. Connelly
A note written by Kellan, from the night of Ethan’s party: Instructed agent to tell target 4 he has fallen in love with her to prompt her to confess her own secrets. Partial success. —J. Kellan
“Our whole relationship was set up,” I said, my voice small. “You manipulated every moment of it.”
“Tessa—” He took my hand.
I jerked it away. “I think you mean ‘Target 4.’”
He grabbed my hand back. “No. I mean Tessa. I love you. That is not a lie. I wanted to tell you, but not because Kellan said to. I wanted to wait until you knew the real me.”
I knew the real Tristan now, and he was a liar.
“Tell me, Tristan.” I narrowed my eyes. “Was the tree almost falling on me part of the plan too?”
“God, no. We’d never purposely put you in danger like that.”
“And what would you call this?” I waved my arms around the cell.
“This,” he said as he copied my movements, “is the first time in your entire life you haven’t been in danger.”
I rolled my eyes.
He roared then, a frustrated, furious growl, and jumped up. “It terrified me when you told me some man was hunting you, Tessa! The first thing I did was call Kellan to demand an army of guards to protect your family until we found him. But before Kellan answered, I saw the name you wrote in my notebook. Dennis Connelly. My father.”
He slapped the wall. “So I hung up on Kellan and called my dad. All missions are supposed to be confidential, but I told him everything. That’s when he realized which case I was on, that I was on a criminal case, his old case. Kellan was lying to us all along, and your parents were lying to you.”
His anger scared me a little, and I shrank back. He sank to the cot and raked his hands through his hair. His next words were gentle. “When I was ten, my dad went out of town with his team on a simple recruitment mission. That afternoon, some guards came and brought my mom and sister and me to the APR. They told us my dad had a heart attack and his partners had been killed. We were never told any details except they were interviewing a potential psionic subject, and something went wrong and the subject and his wife attacked them. They stabbed his partners to death, and they suspected they actually gave my dad that heart attack. The healers healed my dad, but he was weaker than before. He spent the rest of his career here trying to find your family and bring you and your siblings to safety, until my mom finally convinced him to retire so he could rest his heart.”
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