Cease and Desist (The IMA Book 4) (33 page)

So unlike him.

Then, he stirred. “Christina?”

His voice. It was so weak.

“Michael,” I whispered. “Please get up.”

He groaned, and tried to shake his head. “I can't.”

This time there was no getaway car. No doctor with his hands tied to contact in a pinch. If I brought Michael to a hospital they would slap him in a cell, no questions asked. He'd spend the next couple of years on death row for all the crimes that he had committed if he pulled through.

I stopped myself, horror filling me as I realized what I'd just thought. If he pulled through

If.

If.

If
.

I hadn't meant it. Hadn't even meant to
think
it.

But once that conditional had entered my head, I couldn't unthink it.

“Get out of here.” The effort it cost him to speak pulled as taut as a wire. “Now.”

I couldn't rescue him, just to see him die. I couldn't save him and then lose him all over again.

“I'm not going to leave you. I can't.”

“Sweetheart,” he said. “Sometimes loving someone means having to let them go.”

“No. I'm not going to let you go. I won't.”

I pressed my lips to his and, as though that were the key to unlocking my sorrow, tears spilled down my cheeks, splashing his face, mixing with the blood and the dirt to wash down his face like messily-blended watercolors.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said hoarsely. “And that's why I want you to live. Don't die with me.”

I sniffled. “You're not going to die.”

“We all die eventually.” His eyes shuttered. “Now. Quickly. My pocket…reach into…my…”

“Pocket?” I whispered.

Michael exhaled slowly, and I waited, heart pounding — please, please, please — for a response, but he was still. So terribly, deathly still.

With a shaking hand, I reached into his pocket.

There was a piece of paper, folded into a tight square. Between the creases a phone number was written. That was it. Nothing else. No other clues.

Nothing.

Just a phone number. I wanted to scream.

His heart was still beating!

I got up, and my head swam with painful vertigo that sent the cabin careening. I grabbed onto the mattress to steady myself, staring at the cheap, mass-produced picture on the wall. A single pine tree, done in charcoal, blackened branches pointing to the bodies of the two men on the floor. One, the man I hated most. One, the man I had come, against all odds, to love.

They lay there, slowly cooling as night descended and a chill whipped through the room from the open door. In death, they were equal. And I found myself thinking, Michael would hate that.

But he wouldn't. He would never hate anything ever again.

I left the cabin. There was nothing for me here. The phone was dead. Adrian had severed the cord before coming in, and he didn't have a phone on him. I'd checked his pockets—and found my necklace. The one Michael had given me, the chain now snapped.

I yanked my hand away as if the opal had burned me —

(You mean the world to me.)

Because, in a way, it had.

A low mist hung in the air. Birds warbled overhead —

My scream sent them flying from the trees.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Hope

I could see why people wandered off into the wilderness to go mad in books. Free from judgment, dissociated from human mores…it was so easy to lose yourself under that great equalizer: nature. Everything was reduced to binary, to instinct

Will this kill me? Or will it help me survive?

Something large and brown rose out of the earth, its sharp right angles signifying it as a man-made edifice, not a natural one. I breathed out a sigh of relief—a cabin. Finally.

I ran up to one of the darkened windows and peered in. Everything was still, and the furniture was covered up with sheets. Some family's winter getaway, I thought, picking up a large rock. I broke the window, and knocked the splintery pieces still clinging to the frame out of the way before climbing in. I hoped I hadn't tripped a silent alarm, but I doubted it. I hadn't seen anything.

In and out, Christina. Make it quick.

There was food stacked outside the kitchenette. Cases of sodas and bottled water, and boxes of microwave popcorn and crackers. If I ate anything, I knew I'd be sick, but I cracked open a water and drank it greedily as I searched for a phone. Being in someone else's home was disorienting. Framed pictures on the walls, a box of toys, a shelf of romance novels. What would they do when they found this place trashed? I knew I should feel bad, but for once, I didn't care.

I felt nothing.

(They're just ends to your means.)

I located the phone. It was bolted to a supporting column in the kitchen. I picked it up and wanted to cry when I heard the familiar dial tone. I could have cried. It would have been my right. But all of my tears had long since dried up. I'd run out of steam.

Carefully, I dialed the number that Michael had given me.

“Hello?” The voice was measured, cautious.

“Do you know a man named Michael Boutilier?”

There was a brief pause. “Who is this?”

“A — ” I hesitated. “A friend. He gave me the number. He said it was…important.”

“Christina?”

It could be a trap
. “Yes. And you are?”

The silence was shorter this time. “Also a friend.”

If this was a trap, it was a good one. But why would Michael throw me right into the thick of things?
Fuck it,
I thought.
I'll take the risk
.

“I need you to come get me. Please.”

“Where are you?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Somewhere in the woods.”

“We'll trace the call.”

Could they do that? Apparently so, because a few minutes later he said, in that same impassive voice, “we'll be there in two hours.”

Two hours with the one person I didn't want to face right now: myself.

“Who's 'we'?”

The phone went dead.

I waited.

Two hours later, a car came as promised. The gleaming black surface shone like oil slick under the sun. It was a very nice car, and I was filthy. Once I would have fretted about the nice interior but now I didn't care. A car was a thing, and things were replaceable. Materialism is just an assembly-line driven facsimile of sentiment.

A sudden wave of dizziness overtook me. I leaned against the upholstered seat. There was a water in the cup holder, still ice-cold. The cap broke easily when I twisted, although I checked the rim for signs of tampering. Mercenaries have been known to glue tampered caps back in place. The cap was perfect, so I drank, and the coldness rushed to the center of my forehead with all the force of a battering ram. A ruthless headache followed, swift and unrelenting.

I scarcely felt it.

The car dropped me off at a fairly nice hotel. As I left, the driver's window cranked down and I got a glimpse of oversize sunglasses and a low-slung cap. He pushed an envelope out through the window as he drove away, the rear tires kicking up dust and leaves from the curb.

James Holiday
, it read.
Room 202
.

There was about a thousand dollars, cash, inside, as well. I stuffed the bills back in the envelope quickly, looking around to make sure no one had seen. But as is the case with most individuals, everyone was much too wrapped up in their own affairs to even begin to take notice of mine.

I walked into the hotel and gave them the name and room number. They were understandably skeptical, until I pulled out a few bills. I wished I hadn't had to do that. I didn't want to be memorable. But knowing Michael, he'd probably had the foresight to pay for their silence. Too bad he hadn't also paid for their manners. But thinking about Michael was painful —thinking was painful. Each thought was part of a heavily ingrained neural network, where a harmless passing observation about the color of the walls could lead to psychic pain and grief.

The bellhop led me to my room and like an obedient dog performing a new trick, I peeled off some more bills and handed them to him. Then he went away, and I was alone. I stared at the room. What to do with myself? Clean? Shower? I couldn't rinse away what really tainted me.

I showered anyway, turning the water warm, hot, hotter. Getting out in the sauna my bathroom had become almost made me want to go back in. I wrapped myself in the hotel robe instead and flopped on the king-size bed that was much, much too large for one person. I lay face-down on the duvet, with my head buried in the lumpy pillows, and I drifted into sleep.

I stayed in my hotel room and avoided the rest of the world and wished that I could do the same with my thoughts.

My body healed very slowly. I was terrified something might be wrong, but even more afraid that a doctor might recognize my name and be obligated to take drastic action. My fretting didn't help my convalescence at all. My period was late. First by a week, then by two. I actually threw up, because I was so terrified, which made me even more scared. Scared that I had gotten pregnant by Adrian's rape, because he certainly hadn't bothered to use a condom.

I went to the nearest pharmacy and bought two pregnancy tests. One came back inconclusive. The other, negative. I bought two more, just in case. Both negative. I breathed out in relief and my period came two days later. I bought sanitary napkins from the overpriced shop in the lobby and retired to my bed for the rest of the week. I wasn't pregnant, but God knows what else might be wrong with me. Sexually transmitted disease. Fistulas. Tearing. The possibilities were endless.

Wounds closed, and, finally, stopped weeping fluid. The ones on the surface did, anyway. My nights were filled with nightmares. I lost him again, and again, and again. If emotional wounds manifested themselves like their physical counterparts, my heart was a lesion, riddled by the putrefaction and gangrene of regret and anger, weeping pus-yellow sorrow through the sores.

This was how I had expected to feel when my mother had died. And the fact that I was feeling this way now, about someone else, made me realize how deep my feelings had really run.

I had barely even scraped at the surface of my true feelings for Micheal, and I hadn't even told him how much I had come to realize I had cared.

Now, I never could.

The human capacity for grief is like a muscle; when flexed regularly, it becomes more elastic and its endurance increases. Too much grief, too fast, however, and the delicate tendons — in this case, the complex fibers of emotions that comprise sadness, anguish, and the numb, terrible void of depression — catch, and tear, leaving only an aching sense of brokenness. As with most accumulative wounds, those wrought by excessive grief can often never be repaired.

That was how I felt now. So many terrible things had happened to me but I had never given up hope before because I had always believed that good would triumph in the end. In the movies, having a cause makes you untouchable; it supersedes life and death, giving you a higher purpose that guarantees that you'll live long enough to fulfill your destiny — at least until the next sequel.

For the first time, however, I saw my future as bleak. I had no college education and I no longer had any friends. Half the people I had been closest to in my life were dead. My father was still alive, but he had a new family, and his wife would not want me and my baggage complicating their comfortably predictable lives.

I was completely, and utterly, alone.

My despair was inscribed plainly upon my face. People asked me if I was all right, if I needed help. “Are you feeling all right, dear?” one elderly woman asked me, on the one and only time I visited the hotel pool. “The wine won't help,” said a man, when I ordered a glass at the lounge.

“Fuck off,” I'd told him, relishing the look of shock that appeared briefly on his face, before it subsided into anger and then, to my shame, disgust.

“Bitch,” he said, stuffily, and I fought the urge to slosh my wine in his face.

But that meddlesome man had been right, in a way. I was making a spectacle of myself. Soon people would talk about the disturbed girl residing in the hotel, if they weren't already. I would get kicked out — or worse, call attention to myself. Adrian Callaghan was dead, but his men were still very much alive. He was not beloved, but they had to keep up appearances; I had assassinated their leader, and they had to avenge his death, or else risk looking cowardly and weak. I was living on borrowed time.

So I withdrew to my room, cloistered away in the darkness with the curtains drawn and the blankets pulled over my head as days passed into weeks into months. Or so it seemed. I didn't exactly keep a diary calendaring the passage of my heartbreak with empty pages.
Day 1
, it would read.
Christina is depressed. Day 30. Christina is still depressed.

Real grief was too subtle, too refined, to be reduced to such physical measurements. What I had lost was not tangible, although I felt it like a constant weight hanging heavy in my chest. No, this — this was a fine and delicate suffering which wormed into my brain like an anesthetic, numbing off all my senses one by one, turning colors into gray scale, light into shadow, and food into ash. In this vacuum, misery thrived, and I was too exhausted to do a thing about it. Too exhausted, even, to weep.

As I slunk to the ice machine with my little metal pail, I noticed two teenage girls staring at me. With their bright clothing and frosted hair, they looked like tropical birds. I heard them whispering — “crazy” “murderer” “look at those
clothes
” — and decided I had worn out my welcome at this hotel I could not even be bothered to remember the name of.

Day 31
.
Christina is still depressed.

I checked out of the hotel. “We hope to see you again,” said the concierge. What a liar. I was glad I had stolen so many of their soaps and shampoos, and the bathrobe, too. They could all go to the devil.

With some of my mother's money, supplemented by a few odd jobs, I got an apartment in Mexicali. There was a booming industry there for skilled individuals, particularly in languages (especially Spanish), and technology. Given my abilities, it was a perfect fit.

I should have been thrilled. Finally, I had achieved what I had desired my whole life. Freedom. Independence. A room of my own. And on a distant level, I was pleased. But any joy I felt was tempered by the sad realization that I had nobody to share any of this with.

Pretty soon, I fell into my old, hermetic ways. I didn't leave my apartment if I could help it. I began watching my fellow apartment residents through the blinds. I knew I was acting paranoid, but I didn't care. I felt justified. The IMA and their associates were everywhere, and could strike at any time. Those very same neighbors who had sex with their windows open, or who stole other people's laundry, could all be mercenaries perfecting their disguises.

Because the men and women at the IMA were skilled actors. If they were following me, I wouldn't realize. Not if they truly didn't want me to. Not until it was already too late.

I found myself staring at my locked door, the single deadbolt. If they were following me, that lock wouldn't stop them. It cost $10 at a Home Depot, tops. A single well-placed blow could dislodge it, easily. Why, Michael could —

My heart gave a dangerous hiccup as my brain backpedaled frantically.

No,
my insidious brain whispered.
Michael can't, and he never will again.

I couldn't let myself think about him, but everything reminded me of Michael, and the more I commanded myself not to think about him, the more he became the only thing I could picture. His face. His eyes. His odd laugh. His smile.

No, no, no
.

The walls of my apartment blurred and seemed to slant sideways. I sucked in a deep breath and  braced myself against the door jamb. As I looked at the darkness staining the walls of my apartment, I realized with a sinking sensation how crazy I had become. Madness lurked in every room, filled with obsession and indulgence and self-righteous despair.

I made myself walk out the door, into the blinding sunlight. I had grown so brittle from breathing in stale air and self-perpetuated delusion that I half-expected to burn up into smoke and ash.