Unraveling Darkness Page 9

  “Hey, can’t we just use Uber and get a cab?” I suggested, starting to get out of breath. I knew Sarah would be struggling to keep up, too. She was physically fit from her cleaning job, but the strides of the men were far longer than ours and we both had to jog to match their pace, Sarah clutching her bag against her chest.

  Isaac glanced over his shoulder at me, and I thought he was about to tell me not to be an idiot, but a rare smile tweaked the corner of his lips, and he slowed. “Dammit. Why didn’t I think of that? We’ll get a cab out of the city, at least, and I’ll get base to arrange new vehicles for us. Then we can figure out where to take Darcy and her aunt where it will be safe.”

  A rush of pleasure at his praise rose inside me, but I quickly quashed it. I didn’t need Isaac’s approval.

  “Or we could just take them both back to base,” Kingsley suggested.

  Alex frowned. “They’re civilians. We don’t let civilians know that location.”

  “These aren’t normal circumstances,” Kingsley continued. “And we know they’d both be safe there while we track Hollan down.”

  I looked between them as they spoke. I wanted to point out that we didn’t need to track Hollan down—he was in a helicopter hovering above the city—but it wasn’t as though we could get to him while he was up there. I also understood the pressing need to keep my aunt safe. While I was happy to put myself in danger to get to Hollan, I wanted her to be somewhere well out of his reach.

  “I don’t think the boss is going to like it.” Isaac frowned.

  Kingsley shrugged. “Maybe not, but sometimes you’ve got to break the rules a little to do the right thing.”

  I thought there had been plenty of rule breaking going on. Didn’t seem to me like Isaac had any problem on that front.

  “Let’s get the cabs first, and then decide,” Isaac relented. “We’re not all going to fit in one, so we’re going to have to separate.” He shot a look in my direction, and I knew the next line was meant for me. “But it will only be for a short while. We’ll meet up at the outlet mall on the other side of the river. There’ll be enough people around, it’ll allow us to vanish into the crowd. We won’t get noticed and it won’t get flagged up by the cab drivers as somewhere strange to take us.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. Five beefy guys heading to an outlet mall probably wasn’t something they saw every day. But then I realized we were splitting up, and so we wouldn’t be so obvious.

  At any sound or movement coming from above, I found myself lifting my face skyward, checking for the helicopter again. We needed to get off the streets. Our descriptions would be circulating by now. I didn’t want to risk us being spotted.

  Isaac used his phone to call for the cabs. The compact layout of the city meant that one was with us within minutes.

  “You go first,” Alex encouraged us. “We’ll be right behind you.”

  I knew they’d be less noticeable without us, but that didn’t mean I felt any better about leaving Alex and Clay standing on the side of the street.

  “Just go, sugar,” Clay said softly, nodding in the direction of the waiting cab as though he could read my thoughts.

  I had to think of Aunt Sarah. She’d been worryingly quiet throughout this whole thing, which wasn’t like her at all.

  I gave Clay a final smile then followed the others into the waiting cab. A part of my heart was left behind on the street as the door slammed shut and the cab pulled away from the sidewalk. I lifted my hand in a backward wave to Clay and Alex, my neck twisting as I watched them grow smaller through the rear window.

  They look too vulnerable just standing there, though I knew they were perfectly tough, capable men. Plus, they were both armed. That wouldn’t mean much if someone started shooting at them from a helicopter, however.

  Anxious, I leaned forward. “How long is the second cab going to be?”

  “It’s coming soon,” the driver said. “Few minutes, that’s all.”

  “Chill, Darcy,” said Kingsley. “They’ll be fine.”

  I sighed and sat back.

  The flow of traffic heading out of the city was better than it had been as we’d been going in, and we made good progress. Within twenty minutes, the cab pulled up outside the mall. I noticed Aunt Sarah remained quiet, and I wondered what was going through her head. She wasn’t normally someone who held back on what she thought, and I sensed a storm brewing.

  We climbed out, Isaac paying the driver. People milled around, many clutching takeout cups of coffee, others already holding bags with store names scrawled across the front. People ate breakfast and sipped coffee while perched at the outside seating of a couple of restaurants. Wooden planters and young trees interspersed the brick and concrete. A small fountain was supposed to give the calming sound of running water, though the melodic tinkle was drowned out by the music from the various stores, the chatter of early shoppers, and vehicles parking nearby. It would be easy to blend in here, though, and allow us to regroup and decide what was going to happen next.

  Were they really going to take us to whoever was Isaac’s boss? I didn’t know how I felt about that—nervous and unsure. I wanted the five guys back to myself again, and didn’t want to have to deal with anyone new. What if their boss said I wasn’t allowed to join them when it came to taking down Hollan? He could block me out of this whole thing.

  The taxi drove away, and we waited for Alex and Clay.

  “Can you call them?” I asked Isaac, clenching and unclenching my fists, my neck craning for any sign of their cab.

  He nodded and pulled out his phone. He swiped the screen a couple of times and then placed it to his ear. Someone must have answered right away as he said, “Hey, how are you doing?” He waited for a moment, listening to the reply, and nodded. “Okay, nice one. See you in ten.” Isaac looked to me. “They’re on their way. Let’s get coffee and breakfast while we wait.”

  “Yeah,” Kingsley agreed. “I could eat a horse.”

  He looked like he was capable of eating one, too.

  My aunt raised her hand as though she were in school. “I’d like to find the bathroom, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” Isaac said. He jerked his chin toward Kingsley. “You can take her.”

  She folded her arms, her lips pinched. “I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I’m more than capable of taking myself to the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Isaac shook his head. “Not happening.”

  “I’ll go with her,” I volunteered. “I could do with going myself.”

  Isaac looked between us. “I still want Kingsley to go. It’s a precaution. He won’t come in with you, just make sure no one suspicious is around.”

  I looked to Lorcan, hoping for a bit of backup, but he shrugged his apology. I understood their concerns. My aunt didn’t exactly buy in to all of this yet, and we didn’t know how far Hollan had spread his net. I thought we were pretty safe, having lost him downtown, but there was always the risk we’d been followed. Plus, I remembered the incident with the trucker the last time I’d been to the bathroom. Maybe Isaac was more worried about a repeat of that happening than he was about what Aunt Sarah might do, or Hollan’s people showing up.

  “It’s okay,” I told her, catching her eye and holding it. “It’s better this way.”

  She pursed her lips and glanced away in a way that told me it wasn’t okay. What else could I do, though? Let her go home and allow Hollan to get her?

  I touched her arm. “Come on.”

  Knowing there wasn’t much more we could do, she allowed me to guide her into the mall. I looked for signs for the bathroom, spotted them, and followed the directions. Kingsley stayed a couple of steps behind us, and I couldn’t shake the feeling we had a bodyguard.

  We reached the door which led onto the bathrooms, and I turned to Kingsley. “We won’t be long.”

  He nodded. “I’ll be right here.”

  I led the way, pushing inside. A woman was standing at the sinks, fixing her lipstick
. She glanced over and gave us both a small smile, before smacking her lips together then moving past us to leave.

  Sarah spotted the window on the other side of the bathroom and left me to hurry over to them. She reached up to where it was ajar a couple of inches, and started to yank at the top.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed, glancing anxiously back at the door.

  “Seeing if there’s any way out of here.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  She gave another look at the window, which hadn’t budged. “Apparently not,” she replied, though it wasn’t quite what I meant.

  “It’s okay,” I said, helpless, unsure what she was even trying to escape from. “It’s only Kingsley out there.”

  My aunt put her hands on her non-existent hips. “I really don’t like this, Darcy. I know you want me to trust you, but please try to see it from my point of view. You go missing for days, have the FBI asking after you, and then you turn up with men who think nothing of waving guns around and stealing cars. You tell me Hollan was responsible for killing your father, but where is the proof?”

  I tapped the side of my head. “It’s in here, Aunt Sarah. I remembered seeing him. I caught his reflection in the glass door while Dad was dying, but I must have been so traumatized, I blocked it out. But Kingsley helped me to remember it all. He’s a trained psychotherapist. He hypnotized me, and I remembered, just like I remembered the code dad gave me before he died. That’s the reason Hollan is after me now. He’s got the memory stick dad took, but it’s encrypted with the code he told me.”

  Her lips were pinched, the fine lines around her mouth spanning out and deepening. “How much can you trust this Kingsley? You say he hypnotized you into remembering, but have you ever heard of fake memories? A clever therapist can put ideas into your head, so you think you remembered something, but it was actually planted by him.”

  I remembered thinking something similar when hypnosis had been suggested to me, but I still shook my head. “No, they wouldn’t do that. I trust them.”

  She spoke in a harsh whisper, trying not to be heard while also trying to get her point across. “Why? Isn’t it convenient for them that you trust them and give them the code, and think Hollan is the enemy? What if he isn’t, and these men are the bad guys? What if Hollan is keeping the memory stick safe from them, and he wants to get hold of you to keep you safe, too.”

  For the first time, a thread of doubt sewed across my heart. No, that wasn’t how it was. And yet I couldn’t stop my mind from going to how this whole thing had started. They’d held up Hollan’s vehicle, had shot FBI agents, then taken me and kept me in a cellar for three days. If I was looking in on this situation, I’d be telling myself to run for the hills as well.

  Could I really trust them at all?

  The idea filled me with a deep unease that I didn’t want to think about too hard. My aunt had a point, and she didn’t even know about the ‘being held in a cellar’ part. I imagined she’d beat the crap out of the guys if she ever found out. And while I completely understood her point of view, I couldn’t believe they were the bad guys. I’d seen how they’d looked at me, how they’d touched me, and spoke to me. They acted as though they cared, but was that just a part of my fucked up brain? Had they twisted me during my time in the cellar? I’d worried about Stockholm syndrome, where a captive ends up sympathizing with their captors in order to get through their ordeal, but I didn’t think I was actually a victim.

  I didn’t want to lose my trust in them. Didn’t want to lose them at all.

  My anger toward my aunt grew. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It wasn’t a fake memory. I was there, and you weren’t. I saw Hollan in the house the same night Dad died!”

  “Maybe he was taking the memory stick to keep it safe?” she suggested. “If you did see him, you don’t know he was there for a bad reason.”

  I glared at her, my fury ice cold, lodging in my heart. “He left me there, holding dad in my arms as he died. He didn’t stop to help us—to help him. It was the neighbors reporting gunshots and glass breaking that called the police there, and they were the ones who found me. He was dead by then. You know that, don’t you? If Hollan was there, he let a man die in his teenage daughter’s arms. You think those are the actions of a good man?”

  She shook her head, took off her glasses, and rubbed her hand across her face. “After you went missing, Special Agent Hollan waited until he was invited into the house, and then he gave me nothing but help and reassurance.”

  “Aunt Sarah, Hollan is the one I’ve been hiding from.”

  “Honestly, Darcy, I don’t know what to think right now. This whole thing is all kinds of messed up.”

  “Yeah, I’m perfectly aware of that.”

  My tone was cold. A part of me wished I’d never bothered coming back to the house. I’d only done it because I’d wanted to protect her, though the guys had done it because they’d thought my aunt could be used to get to me. I knew what I was most angry about, and it wasn’t only that she didn’t fully believe I’d seen Hollan that night. I was angry because she was trying to change the way I felt about the guys, and I didn’t want that. Not even in regard to Isaac.

  I cared about them, and the thought surprised me. I got the feeling they cared about me, too, but maybe that was the Stockholm syndrome coming into play? Was it possible to still have Stockholm syndrome days after you’d been allowed to walk free? I could understand if I was someone who’d been kept for years, but not after a matter of days.

  We fell silent as another woman pushed into the bathrooms. She gave us a cursory glance, and we pretended to wash our hands until she vanished into one of the stalls.

  “Even if I agreed with you—which I don’t,” I added hastily, “Isaac and the others aren’t just going to let you go home.”

  “And that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know?” she said, giving me that same look as she used to when she knew I’d done something wrong as a teenager. “Men don’t get to tell a woman what to do, just because they’re bigger and have a gun.”

  I hardened my jaw and lifted the back of my shirt. “I have a gun, too, Aunt Sarah.”

  Her eyes widened. “What are you doing with that, Darcy?”

  “They gave me one to protect myself with. This isn’t about them trying to use us. They are genuinely trying to protect us.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  A bang on the bathroom door made us both jump. “Everything okay in there, ladies?” called out Kingsley’s familiar baritone voice.

  “We’re coming,” I chirped. I shot my aunt a look that I hoped told her to behave herself.

  We’d had a role change, with her the one most likely to cause trouble, for once.

  Chapter Eleven

  We left the bathroom, and Kingsley shot me a quizzical look. I shook my head briefly, widening my eyes to try to tell him not to say anything. Thankfully, he kept his mouth shut and didn’t question why we’d taken so long.

  Together, the three of us went back to where Isaac and Lorcan were waiting. I was relieved to find Alex and Clay had already arrived.

  Alex gave me a smile and a nod, and Clay slung his arm around my shoulder and yanked me against his side.

  “There you are,” he said. “We missed you.”

  I grinned up at him. “I missed you guys, too.”

  I felt better having the two of them here again. A part of me felt unnerved when we were all apart, like important parts to an otherwise well-oiled machine were missing. Was that how the others had felt when Isaac hadn’t been with them when I’d first been taken? Was that why they’d been so unsure of how to treat me?

  My aunt’s words wiggled like maggots through my head, trying to infect my brain. These weren’t the bad guys, no matter what she thought. I was sure of it.

  Isaac looked to Kingsley. “Everything all right?”

  Kingsley nodded. “Sure.”

  Why did I fee
l like a lot more was said in that small exchange of words? I watched as Isaac’s gaze flicked to my aunt, who still stood with her arms folded and her lips pinched. They were worried she was going to cause trouble, and, truthfully, so was I. At least she hadn’t tried to get the attention of the mall security or anything yet. If she did anything to get the others in trouble, I’d feel responsible.

  “So,” Kingsley said, “what’s the plan?”

  “He’s sending someone in to pick us up. They shouldn’t be too long.”

  “That’s good.” His gaze flicked to Aunt Sarah. “And what are we doing with Darcy and her aunt?”

  “They’re coming with us.”

  His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “To the base?”

  “I assume so. I didn’t get much more information other than to hang out here and that they are sending someone to extricate us.”

  “Okay. We might as well get comfortable while we wait. Any idea on the ETA?”

  “Should only be an hour. Not much more.”

  “Well, I’m starving,” I said, putting my hand to my stomach. “Did we even have breakfast? I’m losing track of meal times.” I looked to Sarah. “You must be hungry, too. We whisked you out of the house before you’d had time to eat.”

  I wanted to take care of her, but wished I could shake the guilt. I felt it from all sides—from the guys for getting my aunt involved in all of this, and from Aunt Sarah for putting her through everything. Deep down, I knew it wasn’t my fault, but that didn’t stop me feeling that way. A part of me also wished I’d never had to pick up my aunt in the first place. Things had felt less complicated—or at least as uncomplicated as they could be in this situation—when I hadn’t needed to take her opinions into account.

  Clay jumped up. “I’ll grab a heap of coffees and breakfast sandwiches as takeout from the coffee shop over there. I’m gonna guess we don’t want to eat in just in case our ride shows up.”