(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (24 page)

“What if you can’t free us both?” My lips move without thought or understanding, because it’s a dream.

“Then I’ll sacrifice myself so you can get away.”

I shake my head, but he grins and I can see the vampire tooth through the haze. I love his grin. It’s so lopsided and odd. It’s a lie, though. It’s boyish and sweet, but he’s a monster.

He’s my monster.

He runs his hand over my cheek. “I am so glad I found you in the dark.”

I nod, not caring that a tear is slipping down my cheek. I turn, as if purposely looking for something. There are padlocks everywhere on the bridge. They are locked to the railings and iron fencing along the bridge. There are so many I can’t guess: one million locks?

The image fades away instantly.

I blink and realize real tears have run down my cheeks. Pulling out the French passport and slipping it into my pocket, I hurry to the front counter, grabbing a pastry and a coffee. My body is malnourished, but there is something else driving me on. I’m terrified it’s love.

Getting a cab is simple. Getting a plane ticket at the airport would be even simpler, but deciding what to do with the bag of passports and cash is not as easy. I don’t know what to do with them, but I would guess it’s a poor idea to bring them on a plane.

Seeing the sign for a solution, I hurry to the car rental place across the way and decide to do the stupidest thing I can. The navigational map says it’s a seven-hour drive. I know I can drive seven hours.

When I decide to turn my brain off and pretend the whole world isn’t falling apart, the trip is pleasant. It’s refreshing and new to be in Europe, even if, technically, it’s not new to my body. My eyes are dazzled by the old buildings, the Alps, and many other sights, while my mind works out the story. Nothing I create with the mess of details they have given me makes anything resembling a plausible story.

When I arrive on the outskirts of Paris, the navigational system commands me in Italian to take an exit. I follow it through the
streets as they get busier and more crowded. I park the car when the nice Italian male voice tells me I am three hundred meters to my destination. Climbing from the car I stretch and wince as blood starts to circulate through my body more efficiently. I follow the image of the map as I recall it until I recognize the Pont de l’Archevêché. The padlock bridge. I have been here before.

I don’t know when I was here, and I am certain I won’t ever know the truth of it, but the image of thousands of padlocks lining the bridge stuns me to a still silence. Overwhelming awe and an instant respect for love, even the lost and not yet found, fills me. There is nothing I have ever seen that will ever compare to this. The locks are a symbol of hope in a world where I swear there is none. This bridge is a symbol of all the love out there, proving there is so much more than I would have guessed.

I stroll to the exact spot in my odd memory and sit, staring at the Seine and the people walking on the street across from me. Seeing them makes me wonder if they’re normal people or if they have a past of secrets, deceptions, and betrayals like me.

There is no way Derek is coming, but I have to surmise he’s the one I am expecting. But his injuries were serious. He will be in a hospital for many weeks, if he made it at all. I don’t know why but the thought of a world without him burns inside me. I should wish him dead. I should wish them all dead. But I find when my eyes are closed I wish they were here with me. I wish I weren’t alone and afraid and living a web of lies.

“You came.”

I turn, seeing the pale face of a very sick Derek. He is hunched and weak, evoking pity from me instantly. I jump up, forgetting the bag and the lies and the bullshit. “Are you okay?” I am grateful he’s alive. I can’t deny it, and I won’t bother pretending.

He shakes his head. “Did you find everything I left you?”

“You’re alive, Derek. How is that even possible?”

“I left it all there for you, hoping it would give you some closure.” His voice shakes, and I can tell he’s not better—not at all. He shuffles his feet on the old cement and sits down next to me, overlooking the Seine. “Did it make sense?”

I shake my head. “You left me a bag and a box that made everything more confusing.”

He turns, stunned. “You didn’t read the pages?”

“There were
hundreds
of pages. I skimmed and saw shit like
JFK
and
narcissism
and shit I didn’t understand, and I panicked. I burned it all in the safety-deposit box, smoked out that room in the bank brutally, and ran.”

“Why didn’t you use the burn box?”

I sigh. “Why does everyone think I know anything that’s going on?”

“Because you do. It’s just stuck in the layers, and I’m trying to help you get it out.” The water, the passersby, and the charming little bridge make it all surreal.

“I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust anything I feel or see. These people could all be part of it somehow.”

He scoffs, wincing a little. “Well, I’m not that good.”

“You’re Doctor Dash. You can do anything.”

He shakes his head. “You should have read the pages, Sam.” His eyes are gray. I should have noticed it before. The green, the joy, is gone. Maybe from us both. “I’m not Dash. He’s dead. I killed him.” He sighs. “I killed him for you. It’s the only way out.”

“What?”

“I killed Ben—Dr. Dash. We were brothers. No one knew. He was the brilliant doctor, and I was the—other brother.” He swallows hard. Something dawns on me, or just repairs itself in my mind.

“You were one of the patients?”

He nods. “I was.” He licks his lips. “You and I were both subjects at Area Seven.” He looks down at the concrete, and I can tell he’s in terrible pain. There’s a glow of sweat across his brow. “You were a
marine with a case of ADD, but you managed it so well. Taking yoga and doing exercises to focus your brain. You had agreed to be part of the program because it was explained to you that we would be used as operatives and in the same situations as SEALs. You wanted that, badly. You were fit and feisty and organized. Your brain was sharp.” The corners of his beautiful lips turn up. “The perfect candidate.”

“What were you?” There is a storm brewing inside me, but I need to focus on something other than myself.

“I was a doctor, just a regular doctor in the field. I followed my brother into medicine, but I didn’t think I had the patience for behavioral work or neurosciences. I had OCD, severe sometimes. I would fixate, almost like an autistic, but I could be talked down. Only my brother ever knew about it.” His voice trails off, making it feel as though we are watching his story and not hearing it. I can see everything he says, and his tone is so calming. “They used us, highly efficient people with coping mechanisms already in place, to create a program. Area Seven was a start of something profound.” Bitterness fills his face. “Then it all started. Isolation, hypnotism, exercises for inducing paranoia, detachment, and disassociation. The science behind it was genius, but the application was cruel.”

My entire body shivers as if it recalls all of those things, but I don’t.

“I killed Ben and took his place.” He looks at me with passion. “I just wanted to get you out. I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know how to save you, so I pretended to be Ben and took you to Seattle and explained that we were doing a training exercise to try to fix your inability to detach fully. Instead, I was leading you back, doing everything in reverse. I have been taking you through the exercises, one by one. Creating a new persona was the hardest. You were truly a blank slate. I programmed you to react to certain words so that pieces of memory would find their way back to you slowly. If it went too fast it could shut down your mind altogether. It had
to be slow and steady, piece by piece. Otherwise, you could end up stuck in this world.”

I lift a hand. “My father never molested those girls?”

He shakes his head. “You’re an orphan. Your parents came to America from England when you were seven. They were a loving couple, adored you. They died in a fiery crash in California, and you grew up in an orphanage. It wasn’t magical or anything to be excited about, but you were never harmed or tortured or made to be anything but a regular girl.”

A sob escapes my lips as my hands cover my eyes. Relief and sorrow fill me. “How could you?” I rock, shaking and gripping myself. “How could you make me think that?”

“I didn’t. It was there already, in your mind and waiting for the moment they needed you. Then they could activate you.”

I sob harder, clutching to my face. “I wasn’t in an accident?”

“No.”

“Angie?”

“A doctor to ensure you were adapting to the life you were told about. Adapting to become the sleeper cell in whatever city they needed you to be in.”

My heart breaks. “My aunt Pat?”

“An actress paid to be your aunt. She was told you were a victim of the life we made you believe you lived. She was paid to be your aunt and to participate in the therapy sessions you were undertaking.”

“Oh God, oh God.” I can’t take any more. I get up, looking around. I don’t know where to run. I don’t know what to do.

“Sam, wait. There’s more. Don’t run yet.”

I close my eyes, letting the whole of Paris spin around me in a violent circle, a vortex.

“There is a way back. The layers in your mind, the subconscious that has been manipulated, it can be healed, I think.”

I scowl, dropping my hands. “To what end? You will give me back
my memories of living in a fucking cell and being tortured and made into this—killing machine who can’t actually kill anything.” Hot tears blind me.

“It will take away the false walls built in your mind.”

“How do you know?”

He shudders. “I did it on myself first. How do you think I remember meeting you in the dark?”

The words have no meaning to me.

“I love you, Sam.”

“You don’t know me.” I turn and run. I know he can’t follow; his injuries are too severe. People become a blur and direction becomes a circle I run, chasing after myself in many ways.

When I think I am nowhere and everywhere all at once, I stop, heaving against the brick wall of the old building next to me. I grip the bag he left me, the one with all my identities in it. Which one is real? Are any of them? Was I an orphan? Was I the perfect candidate because no one would miss me?

I sink onto my heels, leaning and deep breathing. My head feels like it might explode, but in my heart I want to know the truth. I have come this far in the rat race they have set me up with. I want to know who I am and who I was and how I got here. I want to separate the fact from the fiction.

I get up, and as I walk down the alley I open the map app on my phone. I use it to get back to the bridge, feeling defeated and stuck at the end of the road. I am only halfway when I hear his voice again. “Trust me, I swear I will make it all better.”

I look up, seeing a red spot on his shirt where his wound has obviously opened. But he offers me a hand, ignoring his own wounds. I walk to him, feeling a weepy silence overpowering me. I don’t take his hand; I don’t trust him with that part of me.

We stroll the street to a dark car parked across from the bridge. He holds a hand out. I pause. “Who was Rory?”

“CIA. They all were. It was a full op for them. They didn’t know that they were being used to run a scenario with you. They don’t even know Pat is an actress. They think I am Dash, gone rogue with you.”

It doesn’t make sense. “Rory said we were together, we were partners once, we had a past.”

He nods. “You were operational then. It was the first phase of the training. You were pulled into a special-run program, a branch off the tree that was Area Seven.”

“Rory is one of us too?”

He nods. “Rory’s final phase was to leave you to die in the burning house. Randall was one of the doctors in charge of the assignment. He was to Rory as I am to you, in charge of your file.”

“Did we kill Randall?”

He nods.

“And the other man?”

He nods again. “No one but Rory and Antoine know you exist now. That’s the beauty of a top-secret assignment—very few people are in the need to know.”

“I don’t know if you’re lying to me.”

He opens the door and smiles weakly. “You will.”

When we get inside the car, a man drives us out of the city. He doesn’t speak. None of us do. I should have run. I should have kept running. That thought eats away at the rest of my mind, becoming my entire obsession. Derek’s hands grip his legs, like the pain of his wounds is too much for him to take.

“You need a doctor.”

He shakes his head slowly, his eyes darting to the driver. “Just going to take a few weeks to heal fully.”

The driver doesn’t look back. He doesn’t notice us. He takes an exit off the small highway we’re on and ends up driving down a country road. Expecting to see random farms, I am surprised by the
beautiful chalets, old stone mansions, and vineyards. It’s amazing, even if it can’t get my mind off the situation I am in.

He slows as we near a large stone arch. Part of me hopes we turn into the archway, and part thinks the opposite. Turning down a driveway toward an old mansion doesn’t bode well for me getting my memories back. In fact, it seems likely something contrary to that will occur.

But he turns into the archway, making a lump form in my throat. I am going to be murdered or something worse. I have been tricked again. Well, if I’m honest I’ve been tricked again and again and again and again, and I have let myself be tricked.

When there are no options on who to trust, you trust the lesser evil. The castle-like mansion we come upon when we crest the hill makes me think I might not have chosen the lesser of my evils.

It’s creepy, laden with moss, vines, and gargoyles. I hate gargoyles. I think I do, anyway.

Fuck it—who cares what I liked or hated before? I hate them now. They’re creepy. And only creepy people would put them on their house. The French estate is creepy.

That’s a bad sign . . .

When the driver stops the car I can’t feel my legs. Fear has settled in deep. Derek takes my hand in his, squeezing tightly and pulling me through the door. When I get a good look at the driver my stomach starts to sink. He’s familiar. All familiarity makes me nervous. It means the person has been part of the charade since at least midway.