“I should have searched for you, Lily. And Flame and all the others. I shouldn’t have stayed here, a prisoner really, and believed them all. I really thought maybe I was crazy.” She stared out over the water and her vision blurred. “I should have been there to stop them from killing Milly and Bernadette. They never hurt anyone or anything in their lives. It just doesn’t make sense.”
She didn’t hear the opening or closing of the door. She didn’t even hear a noise as Nicolas gained the roof, but she was aware of his presence the moment he came up behind her. She rested her head on her knees, not turning as he stepped carefully to the spot beside her, avoiding the cracks in the roof.
“I was late. I should have been there.”
Nicolas watched as Dahlia rubbed her face against the collar of the shirt she was wearing. His shirt. It enveloped her completely. He settled close to her. Close enough so that his thigh touched hers. He felt waves of grief pouring off of her, surrounding her. “Your being late is what saved your life, Dahlia. They were there to kill you. That was a hit squad.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But they were there to kill Milly and Bernadette and to destroy my home.” She looked at him. “Why? After all this time, why would they decide to do that? Don’t you think the timing is a bit coincidental?”
Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. He felt a claw tearing at his gut. “I considered that immediately. I think it’s more than likely that Lily dug in the wrong places and tipped someone off that she found you. She inherited everything.
The paperwork is enormous. She found the trust for the sanitarium buried in a lot of legal mumbo jumbo only the lawyer understood.”
“Is she happy?”
“She seems very happy. She’s married to a friend of mine. Ryland Miller. They’re never very far apart.”
“I’m glad.” She looked up at the moving clouds. “Someone needs to have come out of this sane and happy. I’m glad it was Lily.”
“Don’t give up, Dahlia. There are things we can do to minimize the effects of what Whitney did to you.”
She turned her head to look at him. “If there were things anyone could do for me, why was I kept apart from the rest of the world? Why was I raised alone in what was virtually a prison? I could walk away, everyone always reminded me of that, but I really couldn’t, because in the end, it was the only place I had that gave my brain respite from the sensory overload. Now I don’t have it anymore.”
Nicolas felt awkward. If she needed him to shoot someone for her, he was her man, but comforting her was something altogether different. He didn’t like feeling uncertain; it was foreign to his nature. Men didn’t pat women like dogs, did they? He put his arm around her, drew her closer to him. She seemed so fragile he was afraid he might break her. She stiffened immediately, but she didn’t pull away. “You might not have your home, Dahlia, but you have the GhostWalkers. Not just Lily, but an entire family of people just like you. We’ll work through it together.”
Dahlia kept her face averted. She sensed how Nicolas was struggling to find a way to help her and it was endearing, the only reason she didn’t pull away from him and put distance between them. She knew he was trying to comfort her, but the thought of being around people she didn’t know, in a house that was unfamiliar, was terrifying. Dahlia knew no other way of life. The sanitarium and the bayou were her home. She forced down grief and fear.
“I steal things.”
“You do what?”
She wanted to smile at the incredulous tone. “Is stealing worse than killing? I thought it was all bad.”
“You just surprised me.” He didn’t flinch at her candid assessment of what he did, but it bothered him—and people’s opinions didn’t bother him. He had his own moral code, a code of strict honor. It shouldn’t matter what she said . . . but it did. She wasn’t accusing or even judgmental, just matter-of-fact and perhaps that was what got under his skin. That she just accepted what he was. One-dimensional, as if that was all he was. And all he would ever be.
“That’s what I do. I ‘recover’ things. Is that a better way of putting it? Data that has been stolen. I slip into offices and retrieve data from private corporations or even small businesses or anyone else that takes things they shouldn’t.”
“Whom do you work for?”
“Do you think all this time I’ve been working against the government instead of for it?” She turned her head and looked at him from beneath the impossibly long fringe of dark lashes.
“It’s possible.” He tried to assess her tone, but there was little inflection in her voice. She was very closed off to him, making it impossible to read her thoughts. “If it’s a splinter branch, they’re working outside the parameters. What about Jesse? What did he say about them? He must have been in direct contact with them.”
“His orders always came from someone in the military. Jesse was a Navy SEAL. He would never, under any circumstances, betray his country. He’s the ultimate patriotic gung ho male.”
“If he’s military and was a SEAL, we’ll be able to find out about him. I know he’s enhanced, yet he wasn’t part of our unit when we trained together. I’d like to know where he came from and where he trained. Lily suspects Whitney performed the experiment first with the children from the orphanages, with us, and with some others. She’s been working to find all the children. Of course, they’d all be grown by now, and she’s looking for information on whether or not Whitney experimented on others.”
“It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Dahlia looked down at her bare feet. She bent to rub at a smudge on her toenail. “If he believed in what he was doing so much, which he obviously did, would he really allow so many years to go by between experiments? He must have tried it on others.”
Nicolas was listening to the sounds of the bayou. Frogs called to one another. Each group croaked louder than the other, trying to outdo one another, calling for mates. The frogs around the cabin were particularly loud, making a strange, off-key music. Abruptly, the group somewhere out near the strip of land leading to the channel went silent.
Nicolas immediately clapped his hand over Dahlia’s mouth and pulled her backward over the side of the roof. He lay flat, preventing them from being sky-lined. She didn’t struggle. She was familiar with the sounds and knew immediately that something had disturbed the frogs. Nicolas put his mouth against her ear. “Slide down to the window and go in that way. I won’t let you fall. Hand me my rifle. The pack is ready, just get your clothes and be ready to move.”