ONCE DESS LEFT THE APARTMENT, we were all on edge.
I tracked her from the city’s security cameras, though with her disguise and her skill at stealth, I could only find her in brief glimpses because I knew exactly where she’d been going.
Julius lingered by his board of army figures, moving them around sporadically as if he had a full mission to plan. He did so with vicious swipes of his hand and a lethal intensity in his expression. I knew he was preparing for the possibility that Dess would be caught.
Garrison strode past me a few times as he paced around the house. He didn’t say anything to indicate he was worried, but the fact that he was so quiet at all instead of snarking away at us showed his uneasiness.
Talon shut himself inside the workout room. Every once in a while, we heard a particularly thunderous sound of his fist hitting the punching bag or the clank of metal weights returning to their racks.
Only when I told everyone that Dess was approaching the covert entrance to the building did they seem to calm down enough to get back to their normal lives. Garrison strode out of the kitchen and toward the roof, almost as if he’d been waiting for this confirmation before leaving the main room. Julius slid his figures back in place and left through the front door, heading down to retrieve her. Talon gave the punching bag a few more swings and then headed into the bathroom to shower.
I couldn’t peel my eyes away from the laptop screen until I saw Dess vanish near the entrance, approaching the spot where Julius would be waiting for her. It didn’t take long before she came striding through the door. She had a pensive air to her that made it hard to tell whether she’d found what she’d been seeking.
She looked at me the moment she entered the room, and the gray in her eyes seemed to lighten. She veered toward me immediately. Julius, coming in right behind her, looked her up and down as if double-checking that she’d returned in one piece before heading to the fridge to grab one of Steffie’s premade sandwiches.
Did he know what Dess had found already, or was she telling me first?
She sat down at the dining table kitty-corner to where I was sitting with my laptop. The guys—well, mostly Garrison—often hassled me about how little I used the workstation actually devoted to my work, but I focused better with the ability to move around as a whim took me.
“I didn’t turn up much, but there was one small thing that might lead us somewhere,” Dess said. “At least the trip wasn’t a total bust.”
“You can show me everything you saw there,” I told her. “There might be more significance to some item than is obvious at a glance.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that. There was nothing. Everything had been cleaned up and cleared out—I mean, the furniture was there, but the drawers and shelves were pretty much empty. There was no sign of the murders either. But someone was monitoring the place—there were new cameras outside and one inside.” She sucked her lower lip under her teeth in a gesture that sent a little flare of desire through me. “All I got was this.”
She brought up a photo on her phone and set it on the table for me to see. It was a symbol carved into a molding somewhere in the house—a teardrop shape with a line bisecting it at a diagonal. And maybe a tiny notch at the lower part of the line? It was hard to make out. But something about the design gave me a vague twinge of recognition.
Where had I seen that before?
“It was in the living room, and also on the bookcase that hid the secret doorway into my quarters in the house,” Dess said. “Maybe other places, but that’s all I found in the time I had. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”
She flipped to the photo of the bookcase with the symbol carved into the dark wood. Seeing it on that surface made something click in my head. I stared at it for a moment longer and then turned to her.
“It’s the same as your tattoo.”
Dess blinked at me. “Tattoo? What tattoo?”
I guessed it wasn’t surprising that she wouldn’t know. She hadn’t known about an awful lot of things her “household” had done to her, and the tattoo had been placed somewhere it’d be almost impossible for her to discover on her own.
“Come here,” I said, beckoning for her to stand. I walked her over to the full-length mirror near the front door and switched my own phone to selfie mode so it would act as a second reflection. “Lift your hair up from the back of your neck.”
Dess looked puzzled, but she did it. And there was the little black tattoo I’d remembered, marked into her skin at the base of her skull where her hair mostly concealed it. Carefully, I parted the strands to reveal the shape a little better, not even touching her skin, and held my phone so she could see the image that was reflected in the mirror.
Dess drew in a startled breath with a hiss. “What the hell?”
“We saw it when we were checking you for injuries after your crash,” I told her. “It’s hard to make out the details through your hair, but it looks incredibly similar to that carved symbol to me. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Dess let her hair fall. Her eyes flashed. “They did this to me. The people from the household—whoever took me. They fucking marked me like I’m their property.”
My chest clenched at her anger—not because it bothered me, but because she was so justified in it. “You’re nobody’s property,” I reassured her firmly. “And you can get it removed. I’m sure there are services that could manage it, just shaving the hair there first.”
But in typical Dess fashion, she’d already moved on to the next part of the problem. She spun toward the table with my laptop. “The symbol has something to do with the people who ran the household. It could lead us to more of them.”
“Absolutely,” I said, glad to have something concrete to focus on that might help. “Send the photos to me, and I’ll get some image recognition searches running.”
Dess did as I asked and sank back into her chair, watching me type with open curiosity. “This’ll work like your facial recognition searches?”
“Exactly. Although it’ll probably take a lot longer for the app to complete the search since it has to check every kind of image it can dig up, not just ones it recognizes as containing faces. But I can leave it running in the background for however long it takes.” I finished the last commands and sat back. No trouble at all.
We sat there for several minutes, both of us braced in case an immediate result came up. When nothing happened, I glanced at Dess with an apologetic twist of my mouth. “Like I said, it could take a while. It’s obviously not a very common symbol if we haven’t found anything right away, but I guess we already could have guessed that.”
She let out a discontented hum, her forehead furrowed. Watching her, the constricting sensation came back into my chest.
I couldn’t imagine what she was going through with so many unanswered questions and so few leads left. I couldn’t think of a single way to ensure we got the answers she longed for or to fix the trust the people in her past had damaged so thoroughly.
But maybe that wasn’t up to me. Maybe she could just use a chance to let some of those emotions out.
“How are you doing?” I asked, nudging the computer aside. It’d notify me if anything popped up, and watching wouldn’t make the search run any faster.
Dess’s gaze jerked up to meet mine. “Me?”
A gentle smile stretched across my face. “Yes, you. You’ve had your whole world upended in the last week. How are you hanging in there? I can’t even imagine how tough it is, even for someone as tough as you.”
The corner of her mouth twitched at the compliment. Then she sighed. “I don’t know. How I am feels like such a complicated question now. I hardly know who I am.”
She paused, and I didn’t rush her. When she spoke again, the words came out in a rush. “I do know that I’m grateful for everything that you and the rest of the crew have done for me. Nobody has ever been here for me the way that you guys have. You’ve welcomed me into your home and done everything you can to help me find answers. It’s just even with all that, the sense of how much of my life is still a mystery won’t stop gnawing at me. I don’t like having all these questions hanging over me with no way to answer them.”
“That makes sense,” I said. I didn’t have any way to hold the gnawing at bay either, though. I made a face at my laptop as if that would encourage it to spew out some results.
But there was one thing I’d been able to offer Dess before that might help now—if not in a concrete way, then at least to allow the time to pass more comfortably.
I stood up again. “It’s hard to focus and come up with ideas when you’re all tense about the situation. There’s nothing else we can do to dig into the problem right now. Why don’t you unwind a little?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Like how?”
I grinned. “I happen to know a TV show you’re very fond of.”
Dess couldn’t suppress the eager spark that glinted in her eyes, even though she made a show of muttering, “Oh, all right,” as she got up. I ushered her over to the sofa and motioned for her to sit down. Then I hustled over to my main computer setup to start the next episode streaming to the TV. I’d already downloaded the entire three seasons that’d aired, as well as a long-lost Christmas special I’d managed to dig up.
There wasn’t much that made Dess really happy, and she deserved all the joy I could provide.
By the time I’d returned to the sofa to the theme song of Spy Times, Dess had relaxed right into the cushions. She stared at the TV avidly, a little smile playing with her lips.
I’d meant to watch the show with her, but the truth was, I wanted to watch her more. My gaze kept sliding back to her no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the goofy storyline.
It wasn’t really her looks. Yes, she was beautiful, from the dark locks of hair that tumbled down her back to the toned muscles and curves of her body honed by years of training. Even her slender but strong hands, capable of ending a life in an instant, fascinated me. But none of those things were what drew me in the most.
There was a stillness to her that I’d never been able to reach myself, a sense of inner certainty and confidence even in the middle of the storm her life had become that called to me like a beacon. I admired the same qualities in Julius, but somehow Dess exuded them even more than our commander.
Just sitting next to her, I absorbed a little of that calm. Her presence grounded me more than anyone I’d ever known. My knee didn’t bounce and my foot didn’t jiggle with the urge to stay in motion as I studied her. I could slow down and sink into the moment in a way that so often eluded me.
And here in this space, it was hard to imagine that anything but the woman sitting across from me mattered at all.
That last thought hit me squarely in the heart. I hesitated, feeling it out.
I didn’t just admire her. I was falling for her.
But what difference did it make if I was? I’d made a few flirty gestures in the past, and she’d demonstrated very emphatically that she wasn’t open to those kind of overtures… from me, anyway. I could still vividly remember the clamp of her hand around my throat. I didn’t want to push her into feeling she had to defend herself from me ever again.
A laugh burst out of Dess at a particularly comical scene, and she glanced over at me to share the amusement. I chuckled too, though I wasn’t totally sure what the joke had been because my attention had been so much on her. But she didn’t appear to notice my distraction. Still smiling, she turned back to the TV.
A swell of resolve rose up inside me. Being her friend might be the closest I’d ever get to her, and that meant it’d just have to be enough.
