Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel) (13 page)

The lieutenant shoved Isa into a four-by-six-foot cinderblock room. The door clanged shut on a note that set her heart to thudding in her chest. Panic beat frightened wings against the inside of her ribs.

No matter the differences, the room reminded her enough of the prison where Daniel had kept her that her hands shook as she picked up the single thin wool blanket from the cot and draped it around her shoulders.

She had to do something or go crazy trying not to succumb to her own form of post-traumatic stress. She cased the room. That she could walk around was different than Daniel’s prison. So was the fact that she wasn’t bound.

But the isolation and other people treating her as if she didn’t exist? One hundred percent the same. Maybe worse. Rather than treating her like an animal the way Daniel had, the soldiers treated her like she was a monster.

And she wasn’t even the one destroying sacred creatures, much less letting innocent people die.

She hadn’t expected to ever find out there was something worse than what Daniel had done.

Her breath quivered in a visible cloud when she blew it out. She stared at the wall, tracing the pattern of blocks set with mortar. It became obvious that the tiny concrete block building that served as the camp brig had been hastily constructed. The mortar between the concrete blocks wept dark, foul liquid that puddled where the walls met the floor. Cement paving underfoot breathed out water vapor as if still trying to cure in the frigid, high desert spring. Musty water meandered in rivulets across the gritty surface.

As she stared at the floor, her vision shifted. She saw sand and recalled that as a child, she’d drawn pictures in the dirt. Pictures that had come true, albeit, often in unexpected and occasionally deadly ways. That ability had matured into putting Living Tattoos on people.

Time to find out whether she could still draw a picture that would come true on her behalf. She was an adult now, with training and control on her side. Surely she could draw something and have it come true the way she intended. Isa fumbled in her pants pocket for the smooth, speckled granite stone she carried for no reason. A worry stone, Nathalie had called it when she’d seen it. Maybe so. Isa liked the feel of it between her fingers. It reminded her to stay grounded merely by the weight of it against her thigh.

Tucking the blanket up around her, Isa squatted on her heels in the center of the floor and, pressing her rock against the concrete, drew an experimental line.

Granite scored the cement beautifully.

When she couldn’t do anything else, she could still draw.

But what? Nothing remotely Mayan if she could help it.

She’d have one shot, since, unlike her childhood in the desert, Isa couldn’t erase her drawing with the sweep of a filthy bare foot.

If she put just enough intention into the making of the scene, whatever she put on that floor should come true.

Was that magic per se?

Would the soldiers feel it? Would they shoot her if they did?

Did she care?

A vision of the entire containment camp in flames leaped unbidden into her brain.

She smiled. Tempting. Dangerous. She’d undoubtedly kill every unjustly held prisoner here.

What did she want to draw? Freedom. What did that look like? Her walking out the front gate? What about everyone else? Did she owe her fellow detainees anything?

A picture of all of them walking out of the gates? Could she draw that much detail with such crude tools?

Whether she did or didn’t owe them anything, they were safer within the confines of the containment camp, where the portal could no longer destabilize their Ink. At least until Isa could get that damned door locked.

Whether Murmur would help her do that job or not.

His thirst for vengeance was all very well and good. She’d help him get revenge, if she could—Uriel had it coming—but not at the price of more lives.

Very well.

Every Live Ink artist for herself, then.

The sparest mote of power she summoned mingled with the yellow glow of the lightbulb eight feet overhead. Neither offered much in the way of warmth. Enough to keep the water on the floor from freezing. Little else.

The cold gnawed on her fingers as she used her pebble like a piece of clumsy chalk. She dropped it often. Picking it up and pressing another line into the hard floor first made her fingers ache. Then her hand. Wrist. Then, finally, all of her as she pressed her will into each stroke.

As a six-year-old, she’d crouched like this for hours. Two decades on, her body informed her it no longer appreciated the restricted blood flow. Isa ignored it.

The day waxed and waned. Darkness fell outside.

She couldn’t say how she knew. There was no window. No breakfast, lunch, or supper, however paltry, appeared.

Did the colonel think he could break her where Daniel hadn’t? Did he not realize he’d set free the one person who could? Who had?

Isa added a bonus side picture of the colonel bursting into spontaneous flame. But she did it without intent behind it. It was merely a bit of childish revenge.

Somewhere in the coldest hours of the night, when she could no longer feel the hand wielding the stone, Isa took up a song she’d learned from Henry. Remembering how he’d laughed over her tone deafness, she smiled at the portrait taking painstaking shape at her feet. She didn’t give up on the chant.

It lifted her slow-beating heart and eased the muscles of her legs and back. They’d long ago given up complaining. They’d gone wooden and dead in protest. As if the whisper of her chant hanging on the visible clouds of breath drove the blood in her veins rather than her heart, her legs and feet tingled.

Almost done.

The scrape of a metal on metal punctuated the Navajo words spilling from her childhood. She didn’t even know what the words meant. Henry wouldn’t have taught her any of the proper prayers. Those weren’t for her.

A child’s nonsense song, maybe? A counting game his grandfather had taught him?

Clang.

The noise tried to penetrate her focus. She kept it at bay with her toneless song.

Another voice joined hers, cutting across the rise and fall of Henry’s words as Isa finished the picture of herself. She was recognizable. As she was, not as she wished to be seen. In the picture, she strode, her hair caked and dirty, her tattered wool blanket fluttering in the breeze of her going.

Now to finish the gates, to make them recognizable so there would be no question of what it was she sought freedom from.

Polished black dress shoes stepped into the middle of the picture.

Her brain stumbled. Isa choked on the incongruity and on the chant. Blinking, she glanced up.

A boulder of a man stood in the dress shoes. He wore a black suit. No pinstripe. He frowned at her.

“Ms. Romanchzyk,” he said. His tone suggested he’d been saying it for some time to no purpose.

Annoyance rocked her.

“Get off,” she growled, rapping icy knuckles against his leather-clad toes. Pain exploded through her fingers.

He started. The motion exposed a fraction of the drawing.

“Ms. Romanchzyk,” he said. “We’ve come to get you out of here.”

His voice tripped a memory.

A boulder in a suit trying to keep her from helping one of Ria’s people. Then he’d said he and his people had wanted a word with her.

She peered at him, suspicion clouding her vision. She snorted.

Same man. She recognized the crooked, been-broken nose above too thick lips. Why was he back for her?

Feds?

Had this thing gone nationwide?

Isa scowled at him.

“Will you get up and come with us? We’d like to get you out of here. It’s a good bet you have hypothermia. If you’ll cooperate, we’ll help you bring charges against the administrators of this camp.”

Not quite the colonel bursting into flames, was it? She’d settle for torching his career.

“I can’t get up,” she said.

The man’s brow crinkled. “Dick. Help me.”

Another pair of dark suit trousers appeared in her limited line of sight. They moved to her side. The one standing on the drawing moved to the other side. They hooked hands beneath her arms and hauled her upright.

Blood crept into cold, rigid muscle tissue. Nerves woke at the influx of oxygen and screamed.

Isa stumbled.

They caught her, carried most of her weight, then hesitated. When she cast them each a glance, they stared at the drawing on the floor.

“That’s an amazing self-portrait, Ms. Romanchzyk. Is it intended to serve a purpose?”

“Preservation of my sanity,” she lied. They didn’t need to know they were the instruments of her will. Maybe because she hadn’t finished the portrait, she didn’t actually get to walk out of the gates. Didn’t even get to walk to their car, really.

They carried her between them.

Somewhere, on the other side of the camp, Isa hoped the colonel was smoldering and choking on his rage at having another prisoner removed from his grasp.

She hadn’t expected her drawing to come true so swiftly. As it happened, she didn’t walk out of the gate with her pathetic wool blanket fluttering like a cape behind her.

The agents swept Isa out of camp like knights who’d ridden to her rescue. They tucked her up in a much cushier blanket and bundled her into the back of a huge black SUV. No identifying marks that she could see. They even gave her a window seat.

The driver, another man in a suit, nodded.

“Water and sodas in the mini fridge,” he said. “Snacks in the pockets of the seats. Help yourself. You’ll feel better.”

The other two men climbed into the car, the boulder in the front passenger’s seat, and the one he’d called “Dick” beside her in the back. It struck her, finally, that none of them wore coats or gloves. No acknowledgment of the frigid mountain spring. Did they not feel the cold?

Whether they did or didn’t, the man in the front passenger’s seat cranked up the heater while Isa glanced at the snack offerings.

Plenty of prepackaged junk food. High fat, high calorie. Just the sort of thing many of the detainees her age might crave. Any of them would have been perfectly safe, sealed as they were, but the moment her fingers brushed the smooth, cool skin of an apple, the sweet perfume of it filled her head. Her mouth watered. She drew it out. Bright, shiny red in the searchlights following the car out the front gate.

They could have done anything to it.

Were they playing out a twisted version of
Snow White
, poisoned apple and all?

Or could she admit they had no reason to drug her?

They’d already succeeded in obligating her to them by driving her out of the camp. They seemed intent on taking her back across the mountains to Seattle.

If they took her home, she’d have no choice but to pledge her undying loyalty to them.

Isa supposed, looked at that way, the apple was drugged with carefully calculated consideration, designed specifically to put her in their debt. Just like the rest of their rescue.

Very well.

She bit into the crisp, juicy flesh.

There were as many ways to discharge debt as there were for her drawing to have gone so wrong that Isa stumbled out of one prison, right into another.

They didn’t take Isa home. They raced the sunrise back to Seattle.

The sun won, lighting up a brilliant blue sky studded with glowing clouds. The driver pulled into the parking garage beneath a set of condos that overlooked Pike Place Market and Puget Sound beyond. The two who’d brought her out of the camp escorted her into the elevator. One of them presented a key fob to a reader pad on the elevator control panel. It beeped and the floor numbers lit.

He pressed the button for the top floor.

They unlocked and led her into one of the penthouse condos. She counted three other doors in the hallway.

“We’d like you to stay here,” the boulder said. “Rest. Recuperate. Enjoy yourself.”

“What do you want?”

He spread his fingers as if to assure her he had nothing to hide. The smile on his lips looked as if he hadn’t practiced the expression often or long enough for it to occur naturally.

“We’d like you to hear us out,” he said. “But not before you’ve had a chance to recover. You have some important decisions to make. We’d like you to be fully rested and clear headed when that happens.”

“Hello?” a male voice called from within the depths of the condo. Footsteps on polished beige stone sounded behind her. “You must be Isa. Welcome home.”

Isa turned.

A ruggedly handsome man, with gray eyes, sandy brown hair, and a chalky voice, stood looking her up and down, a faintly indulgent smile on his lips. He bore such a striking resemblance to Steve that Isa had to bite back a laugh.

“Who are you?” she said instead.

He held out a hand. “I’m Max. I’m here to take care of you.”

Isa clasped her hands behind her back. “I think I’ve got a lock on taking care of myself. Thanks.”

“You’re exhausted,” he said, his tone soothing. “You’d probably kill for a long, hot shower.”

“Don’t tempt me.” She might not stop once she started.

He grinned. Like Steve, that smile transformed him. But he wasn’t Steve.

While her heart skipped in reaction simply because he was attractive, Isa shook her head. “This won’t work.”

“What won’t work, Ms. Romanchzyk?” the suited boulder asked.

“Whatever research you did on me to find and create what you imagine will leverage me into doing whatever it is you want.”

“You seem to believe you know something about us, Ms. Romanchzyk.”

“That’s right. I do.”

Max raised an eyebrow.

The agent shifted. “I’m afraid Max’s presence is nonnegotiable. Rest . . .Where are you going?”

“To the car,” she said, already shaking, and ready to stagger with nausea. “I decline your offer.”

“Wait. Ms. Romanchzyk, is your objection to Max personally?”

“No.”

“What is your concern?”

“Disinclination to be manipulated.”

The agents traded a glance.

“If we take you back to the camp, you’ll be returned to the brig. It is entirely possible that you’ll die there,” the boulder said.

“I appreciate the fact that you’d report the colonel for abuse of power before that happened,” she said. “Hope my dripping sarcasm won’t stain this nice stone floor.”

Dick’s brows lowered.

The boulder scowled and flicked a glance at Dick. Their lips tightened just enough for Isa to catch the misgiving in their expressions.

“Our mandate requires a certain amount of discretion,” Dick said. “If you’re determined to return to the camp, we will not interfere.”

His tone indicated that he expected her capitulation.

Isa inclined her head. “Understood.”

“Wait,” Max protested. “Will you accept visitors?”

“Yes. In fact, I’d like to see Troy and Nathalie.” And Steve. But she didn’t think they’d be all that keen on letting the police know where she was, much less who had her. She almost added that if they really wanted her indebted to them, they’d bring Ikylla and Gus, but a sudden stab of circumspection stopped the words on her tongue.

What would they do to the animals to ensure her compliance? Not even she was selfish enough to put her family in that position. Not to mention the fact that she had doubts about her stability if they threatened her dog or her cat.

“Recover,” the boulder said, his placating tone sandpaper on her breastbone. “We’ll discuss our options when you feel more yourself.”

Isa snorted. “Say ‘no’ when it’s what you mean.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You have no intention of letting me see my friends,” she said. “So just give me the rules that’ll keep me from being shot so I can go get that shower.”

He traded a glance with Dick, who examined her with a furrow between his brows. “There seems to be some confusion. We got you out of the camp. This isn’t a prison.”

She lifted one eyebrow. “So you won’t try to keep me from walking out the door, going downstairs, and going home?”

“No.”

Sincerity like a choir of damned angels rang through the palatial entry hall.

Isa wilted.

Of course they wouldn’t stop her. Because the second she turned up at Nightmare Ink or at her apartment, the AMBI would be waiting to take her back to the camp.

“What did you do? Steal me? Make it look like I escaped? Why weren’t the soldiers shooting as we drove out the front gate?”

“You seem to have the wrong idea about us,” the boulder said. “We’d like for you to stay here where you’ll be safe and comfortable. None of us wants to take you back to the camp.”

“Ask us for anything you’d like that is within our power to supply—we may yet be able to arrange a meeting with your friends,” Dick added.

Indebting her to them again, they imagined? There was one test she could conduct. “California roll from Okari Sushi,” she said. “And my painting gear.”

“Not your pets?” Max asked as if he’d read her mind.

Her heart stumbled. Calling her bluff? She shook her head. “I haven’t heard your proposal yet. Until I have and we all understand the price tags each of us would impose . . .”

“California roll and paint?” Dick said, one side of his mouth twisted upward. At least he had a sense of humor. “Is that why your hands are blue?”

“Please stay,” Max said. “I know these past few weeks have been confusing.”

Her diaphragm kicked out a laugh at the understatement.

Tension ran out of the two suited agents. Dick’s shoulders eased lower. The boulder’s expression smoothed to impassivity.

“You’re tired,” Max went on. “Angry. I’d be pissed as hell if I were in your place. Richard. Lawrence. Gentlemen, we’ve done a poor job of assuring Ms. Romanchzyk’s comfort.”

Isa eyed the agents.

Dick nodded. The boulder, Lawrence, she assumed, looked away, his lips pressed thin.

A bubble of caution burst, coating the inside of her skin with sticky fear. Just who was running the show here? It hadn’t occurred to her that an agent put in place to “take care” of her would outrank the front men. Her prejudice?

“I’m going to show Ms. Romanchzyk what she needs to know about her new home,” Max said. “If you’ll excuse us?”

“Excellent suggestion,” Dick said. “Is one order of California roll enough?”

She nodded.

“What kind of paint?” Lawrence asked.

“I prefer acrylic,” she said, glancing at the polished stone floor. “Has the advantage of cleaning up with water.”

Max chuckled and held out a hand.

Isa forced a smile that made her cheeks cramp. Stepping away from the door, she held up her blue palms. “The other advantage of acrylics. They don’t stain skin or transfer to other people.”

The two suited agents slipped behind her and out the door.

Nodding, Max dropped his hand back to his side. “I won’t touch you without your permission.”

“Thanks. Please understand it’s nothing at all personal.”

“This way,” he said, turning to lead her down the hallway. “It is personal, isn’t it? For a moment, when you first saw me, I saw recognition in your face. Then anger. Why?”

“Because someone, I suspect you, went to way too much trouble to find my boyfriend’s twin,” she said as he took her into a master bedroom furnished with gray stained wood and gold fabric. “As if he could so easily be replaced.”

Max shot her a sideways glance. “You’re saying you were attracted enough to think of me romantically? I’m flattered.”

“Given that I haven’t had a shower in more days than I want to contemplate? I doubt it. “

“Shower through here.”

The gleaming white-and-black subway tile bath echoed with their footsteps.

“You’ll find everything you need in the way of clothes,” he said, pointing out the walk-in closet.

She glanced in. Slacks. Dresses. Skirts. They all looked familiar somehow. Not that she owned crisp linen trousers or wool pencil skirts. Not when she dealt with paint and tattoo ink on a daily basis. And all too often, with blood and mythical creatures given unnatural life.

A pair of cowboy boots caught her eye. Her pulse stuttered. They were perfect replicas of the boots she’d lost the day Daniel had kidnapped her—the boots Henry had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

How the hell had they known what those boots had meant to her?

Frowning, she forced her gaze away from the polished, pointed toes. Deal with why the clothes seemed so familiar. She brushed blue fingertips down the silk of a dress the color of rich chocolate. Recognition hit. Her browser history. She snorted, dropped her hand back to her side, and made herself turn away.

“What?” Max asked.

“I’m glad someone found a practical use for the NSA’s spying program.”

“That was cell phones.”

She awarded him a raised eyebrow.

He chuckled. “I got the clothes wrong, didn’t I? They weren’t things you wanted but couldn’t afford, where they?”

“No.” She had no intention of volunteering that her browser window-shopping had been a glimpse of a life different than the one she led, if she’d made different choices. If she’d gone to college and gotten an office job maybe. If she didn’t have pets. If she didn’t draw things that came to life. Choices she had no intention of ever making.

“I’m usually very good at finding keys,” Max said, propping one shoulder on the door frame and crossing his arms. “To people. It’s a gift, I guess. But you’re a contradiction. You don’t really want to be alone. Oh, you’re used to it. That’s in your file. And you’re right. We do know a little about you. Everything I’d seen in your file suggested that you consider Steve Corvane someone safe. Someone you can turn to. Yet you never let him in and I don’t know why. Is that why you object to me? Because Daniel Alvarez broke you and now you can’t let anyone in?”

Isa straightened her spine. “Resident psychiatrist, too? Am I supposed to collapse in a teary heap and beg you to hold me?”

Max held up his hands at her approach and backed out of the doorway.

“Daniel couldn’t break me,” she said. “I was broken long before he showed up.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Max said. “Your childhood doesn’t matter. Not to me.”

Meaning what? That he’d seen the AMBI’s file on her? Knew about the murder charge? Imagined that he knew what might drive a six-year-old to wish her nineteen-year-old cousin dead? Yet another picture she’d drawn that had come true. Her cousin, falling from a construction scaffold. He had. And he had died. He’d just taken three weeks to do it.

“You want me to stay and let you go on looking for a key to me? I’ll give you the key. Explain. Who are you people? What do you want with me? Be straight. That’s my price tag,” she said, stalking past him.

He trailed her to the bedroom door.

“I’d like that shower now,” she said, holding the door wide for him.

“I apologize,” he said, his velvety voice quiet. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Sure you did,” she said as he exited the room. “Emotion, any emotion, is a tool, a key, if you will. I know that. And now you know I know that.”

He peered at her for several moments, hesitating as if he wanted to say something more. Instead, he nodded once. “I’ll make coffee.” He walked away.

Max’s words—
Never let him in
—echoed inside her skull, running around her mental picture of Steve.

Dick entered the condo as Max strode past. Neither man acknowledged the other.

“Ms. Romanchzyk, Okari Sushi is closed,” Dick said.

The word
closed
thumped Isa, center mass. Hiro-san, Oki’s father, had a Live Ink tattoo. She flashed on the quarantine center where so many people and tattoos had died. Had he and Oki’s mother been picked up? The blood ran out of her head.

His gaze slid left and his head tilted slightly that same direction as if he listened to something she couldn’t hear. “There’s a sign on the door saying they are closed for vacation.”

“They don’t vacation,” she breathed. “Not in five years.”

“Then I’d say they were overdue, wouldn’t you?”

Of course they weren’t, and both Dick and Isa knew it.

“Can we bring anything else?” he asked.

Numb, Isa shook her head, then froze. “Yes. George Tollefson. Give me an hour to shower, but may I see him? He’s here already.”

Dick frowned. “Who told you—”

“Lawrence,” she said. Right before Ria had murdered one of his own gang members. “He said George had recommended me.”

“One hour,” Dick said.

She shut the bedroom door. No lock. Not on the bathroom door, either. Filled with misgiving, she went to the shower.

Not even limitless hot water could drive away the internal-to-her cold. Or wash away the blue stain on her hands. It had spread. Streaks reached up the insides of her wrist as if the pigment were poison aiming for her heart.

If what the woman at the camp and her tattoo had said was true, nothing would warm Isa, save facing the spirits of the Mayan underworld.

Isa shut off the water. Wrapped in an oversized robe, she combed out her snarled hair. She found jeans in the drawers lining one wall of the walk-in. T-shirts and sweatshirts were thin on the ground. She finally settled for a blue silk button-down atop a form-fitting blue tank.

Every fiber tugged her toward the cowboy boots.

She clenched her teeth and yanked her sneakers back on.

Max had done better than he’d imagined at ferreting out keys he could use to unlock her. If he ever found out that she would fall at Murmur’s feet begging him to hold her—Isa broke off the mental image and shuddered.