Nick was smiling as he walked into his office. He had left Bertie trying to explain the merits of moss to a long-suffering Goodie; who knew how many types of the bloody stuff there were? He opened his laptop and was about to click on the file for the presentation that afternoon when his phone beeped, signalling a text.
I have something.
He blinked at the message. Walker had been on the job for three months now and he had yet to communicate in any sort of positive fashion. The name must have helped. Nick had begun to think of her as Anya since the day he saw her react to it. Even if it wasn’t hers it suited her better than Goodie (and certainly better than Yukanol Fukov – which she was now down as officially with HR).
Send it, he texted back. After a few moments his phone rang in his hand and he frowned. Walker was such a tight-arse Nick had never known him to be the one to phone using his own money, especially not when he would be paying a premium to call from Russia.
‘What?’ Nick snapped down the phone.
‘Nick,’ Walker started, then was silent.
‘Yes?’ Nick said slowly, losing patience.
‘What we’ve found … It …’ Walker trailed off and Nick leaned back in his chair to stare up at the ceiling in frustration. ‘… mate, it’s a little … fucked up.’
‘Just send it,’ Nick gritted out through his teeth. ‘I’m paying you to obtain information for me. The least you can do after months of bugger all is to send what you finally do have.’
‘This woman … is she …?’ Walker broke off and there was another goddamn pause.
‘Is she what?’ Nick asked, starting to get angry now.
‘Is she okay?’ Walker asked softly, and Nick blinked.
‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘I mean … is she …?’ Walker cleared his throat. ‘Nick, I’ve never seen anything like this. What I’ve got, it’s … you need to be careful with this girl.’
Nick frowned. This was the first time he’d ever heard Walker sound remotely unsure of himself. He heard Sam’s voice in his head: ‘Some things are best left buried.’
‘Just bloody send it,’ he clipped, his hand tightening around the phone.
Walker sighed.
‘Okay … right, it’s done.’
Nick didn’t bother saying goodbye, he just hung up and moved to his laptop. The new email was there waiting for him. He hesitated before clicking open the attachment. As the image filled the screen he sucked in a deep breath, and then stopped breathing altogether. He sat completely frozen for at least a minute before he finally breathed out in a rush. He reached forward as if to touch the screen with his finger, but pulled back when he realized what he was doing. His hand instead went to his face and he was shocked when it came away wet from his cheeks. Nick couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried.
‘Hey, big man,’ Bertie’s voice sounded through the monitor, and Nick started in his chair, wiping the tears from his face and slamming down the lid of his laptop. ‘Anything you need me to get ready?’
Nick cleared his throat and straightened his tie, then pressed the button on the intercom. ‘Send Goodie in,’ he told Bertie.
‘You called, High Commander,’ Goodie said as she pushed into the office.
‘Shut the door,’ Nick told her, his voice still slightly rough from the emotion he was fighting to hold back. Goodie frowned at him, but shut the door behind her, walked to his desk and cocked her head to the side.
‘There is problem?’ she asked, and he stood abruptly from his chair to stalk around his desk.
‘Nick?’ she asked as he came towards her, a determined look on his face. When she was within reaching distance he made a grab for her and pulled her into him for a bone-crushing hug. Something eased in his chest as he felt her small body, warm in his arms.
She was alive.
She was here.
She would never be hurt again.
He repeated those three things over and over as he held her. His heart was hammering as if he’d run a marathon, and he was fighting the renewed stinging behind his eyes. It took him a minute but he managed to push it back. When he pulled away slightly and looked down at her face, he saw the soft expression mixed with confusion in her beautiful ice-blue eyes, and a small, bewildered smile on her lips. He felt a shot of pride go through him. Before the last few weeks she did not give anyone soft expressions, she did not allow physical affection, and she never, never smiled. He had done that. He gave her a short, brief, hard kiss, then pulled back again.
‘Are you mentally unstable?’ she asked him, and he laughed, breaking the tension.
‘Maybe a little.’ He kissed the end of her nose and searched her face again before tracing the small crescent scar next to her eye with his fingers. His jaw clenched for a moment before he repeated in his mind the three statements from earlier to calm him.
‘You are weird,’ she told him, and he nodded.
‘You’re not exactly the poster child for normal,’ he shot back, and then watched the smile fade from her face.
‘No, I’m not,’ she told him, her voice back to cold and expressionless as she tried to pull away from him.
‘I’m teasing,’ he said, keeping his arms around her with some difficulty. ‘Normal’s boring.’ She rolled her eyes and he felt the constriction in his chest lighten; eye-rolling was another sign of the new and improved, more human Goodie. ‘Listen, once we’re done with this next meeting would you come over to mine? I need to talk to you about something.’
Goodie shrugged. ‘Okay … is it about your mental health problems?’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Your biscuit addiction?’ she asked, eyeing the nearly empty basket of biscuits and muffins he’d received earlier from a client. ‘Bertie’s red trouser addiction? Your mustard-yellow trouser addiction?’
‘Not all of us dress almost exclusively in black, Goodie.’ She snorted and he smiled. ‘Tell me you’ll come over later.’
‘Of course I will,’ she said, giving him a squeeze and then pushing away from him. ‘Now get your shit together or you’ll be late.’ As she left the room Nick closed his eyes, brought one hand up to the back of his neck and the other to rub his forehead. It was no good. That image was there to stay. It would haunt him until he died.
Thousands of miles away in a brutally cold, unrelentingly depressing part of Cherepovets City, Walker stared at the photograph in his hand and shuddered. The little girl standing in the centre of the photo was looking straight at the camera. The one eye not swollen shut was cold and blank. She was covered in blood, and it was only just possible to make out the white blonde of her hair. Her feet were bare and her torn, dirty, blood-soaked clothes hung off her tiny frame. Her jaw was tight and her mouth was a thin stubborn line. Instead of the fear and pain you would expect to see in her face there was anger, defiance. But that didn’t change the fact that she was just a little girl. Walker took a deep breath and stared instead at the other image he was holding. The woman in it had the same white blonde hair as the child, the same defiant expression.
‘I hope you’ve found your peace,’ he muttered at the image before shoving them both into the file he had compiled. Nick better know what the fuck he was doing.
*****
Casual affection.
Goodie had had so little of this in her life that it was coming as a bit of a shock to the system. Nick seemed to thrive on it, and slowly – very slowly – Goodie was starting to see why. The Night of the Gogal Mogal had been a turning point for her. Since then she had been allowing Nick to gradually chip away at her defences. And since the night with his friends she was starting to trust him. He cared about her. It didn’t help that all day it was her job to watch him. She found very small things about him were ridiculously attractive: his forearms as he pushed his shirt up, his hair ruffled at the end of the day, his five o’clock shadow, his fucking dimple. So Goodie had made a decision: she wanted Nick; all that was holding her back was fear; and Goodie was no coward. Katie’s words from three years ago had been drifting through her brain more frequently now: ‘You can feel, just like anyone else. You could live a different life if you wanted.’ Could she? After all this time, could she try for a different life?
‘Yo,’ she called as she pushed through the door to Nick’s flat. He emerged from the kitchen looking harassed.
‘Shit,’ he said, poking his head around the corner from the kitchen, ‘hold on.’ He ducked back out of sight and Goodie frowned at the smell of burning as she walked down the corridor.
‘What happened here?’ she asked. All the kitchen counters were covered with debris, every single pot and pan was dirty, and a stressed-looking Nick was extracting something ominously black from the oven. He scowled down at the offending casserole dish and then heaved a huge sigh.
‘I wanted to make you a Coulibiac.’ He shrugged as her eyebrows went up. ‘I mean, you seemed to like the Gogal Mogal and you said you wanted to remember more about your mother, so I called Mum and this was the only Russian dish she knew to talk me through.’
‘My mother may have stretched to Gogal Mogal but I have a feeling that Russian-style home cooking will not remind me of her,’ Goodie said, softening her words with a smile. Nick rubbed the back of his neck and grinned sheepishly.
‘Sorry, stupid idea.’
‘Not stupid … I just had a different childhood to you.’
For some reason Nick’s expression darkened and he clenched both hands into fists at his sides. ‘I know, Goodie, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about. You see, I know this chap … he’s pretty good with finding out about –’
‘Shhh,’ Goodie whispered; she had come around the kitchen island to stand in front of Nick and put her fingers on his lips. She didn’t know what he was banging on about, but it could wait. ‘I love that you try to do this for me,’ she told him, the fingers on his lips moving to slip into his thick hair and pull his head down to hers. Over the last month kissing had been a regular thing but Nick always put a stop there. Tonight Goodie was determined: she was not going to shut down and go somewhere else in her head, she was not going to just go through the motions with him, for the first time in her life she was going to allow herself to actually feel something for someone.
‘I want you,’ she whispered into his mouth, and his whole body jerked in reaction before he lifted her up and sat her on the island, shoving pots and pans aside and sending them clattering to the floor. One of his hands went under her T-shirt and the other into her hair and he kissed her almost desperately before he leaned back and ripped her T-shirt up and over her head. He swallowed as he looked down at her and she could see his mind working behind his beautiful eyes. He wanted her but he wanted her to stay here with him, he wanted her to really feel something. Goodie had never encountered any man who even gave the vaguest of shits where her mind was at, once she was willingly half-naked, and she felt her chest tighten as she looked up at him. Sitting up, she framed his face with both hands and stared into his eyes.
‘I’m here with you,’ she told him. ‘I will stay here, I promise. I want you.’ He scanned her face for a moment. Whatever he saw there must have reassured him because he then picked her up with her legs straddling his waist and walked her to his bedroom.
