DOMINIC (Dragon Security Book 3) (6 page)

Amy

I sat on the edge of the bed, and he pulled up a chair, leaning forward, staring at his hands as he began to tell me a story that felt more like fiction than the truth.

“She was recruited out of college. When she dropped out and told your family that she was going to Paris to study art, she was really in Afghanistan gathering intelligence on ISIS. She and I crossed paths when my unit worked as security for an op she and her partner were running there. Things got a little harry and I jumped in, pretended to be her boyfriend in order to extract her from a bad situation. Her handlers were so impressed with the way we worked together that they arranged for me to travel with her to Paris in order to try to infiltrate a group of students there that were involved in a plot to blow up some important Parisian monuments.”

“Emily went to Afghanistan?”

“She was there for nearly eight months.”

I shook my head, struggling to wrap my head around what he was saying.

“And she just happened to run into you?”

“My squad was tasked with aiding the CIA in gathering intelligence. That was my role there.”

“And she was with the CIA.”

“She was.”

“This is something that happens? People go around pretending to be something they aren’t to trick people into telling them their secrets? Just like that?”

“It’s more complicated than it sounds, but yeah.”

“But what about all her letters? All the pictures she sent home? There were pictures of her on the streets of Paris.”

“Those were real. She did part of her training in Paris, and those pictures she took there. The letters…she gave them to her handlers, and they arranged for the postmarks. It was important that no one knew where she was. It would have placed her in danger if people had figured it out.”

“But we are her family.”

“Anything she told you could have put you in danger. Don’t you see that, Amy? She was trying to protect you as much as she was thinking about herself.”

I dragged my fingers through my hair, trying to get all this straight in my head. I could see those pictures in my mind, see her standing in front of the Eifel Tower, see her outside her apartment building. She’d sent pictures of herself all over Paris, with people she said were her classmates. She looked so happy, so tan and relaxed. Was it all a lie?

And then that afternoon at the outdoor café. I could still so clearly see him lean into her, steal her lips, as she was laughing at something someone else said. And then the horror in her eyes when she saw me watching, speechless, from across the street. That horror disappeared seconds later when she focused on her companions again, leaning into Dominic and whispering something in his ear as she smiled broadly at the woman across from her.

“We had an address. We had phone calls.”

“Think about it, Amy,” Dominic said, laying a hand on my knee. “She never stayed on the phone for longer than ten minutes. She never came home for holidays, even when the Sorbonne’s holidays corresponded with yours. She always claimed not to have the money, but then she paid off your student loans for your twenty-fifth birthday gift.”

“How did you know about that?”

“She told me.”

“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let her do it.”

“I know. So did she.”

“I always thought she did it out of guilt.”

“Not really. She’d wanted to do it sooner, but things were crazy over there. She never knew where she was going to be from day to day.”

“All that time…” I looked down at my own hands, not seeing them—but only empty space filled with distance. I saw wasted time. “I saw her twice in the six years she was over there. And Daddy—she called them every week, like clockwork, telling them how she was working for this artist who was teaching her more than she ever would have learned in the university. He never doubted a word of it.”

“She came back here eighteen months ago, Amy. The CIA reassigned her to an analyst job in Washington after that mess in Paris. But she hated it and resigned. She was working in an insurance office there in Arlington.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone?”

Dominic squeezed my knee, then straightened up. “Because no one ever really leaves the CIA. She knew that her past would follow her, and she didn’t want it to blow back on you.” He studied me a long second. “And she was following up on the Paris thing. She felt like we missed something, and she wanted to finish it.”

“The Paris thing?”

“There was a group of us working on this terrorist cell that we believed was working in Paris. I’m sure you’re aware of the attacks that happened there back at the end of the year? What we were working on threatened to be much bigger than that. Emily believed that what we uncovered was only the tip of the iceberg. She thought with a little time and some intel, she could figure out just how big it really was.”

I nodded, aware that my sister was one of those people who, once she had a bone, refused to let it go until every bit of it was gnawed and gone. But there was something that bothered me.

“You said ‘mess in Paris.’ What did you mean?”

Dominic looked uncomfortable. He studied my face for a long second, his eyes filled with grief and pain and a million other things I couldn’t quite describe. He touched my leg again for a long second, then pulled away as though he didn’t think it was his right anymore.

“You stumbled on us at a very bad time, Amy. Emily managed to keep the people we were meeting with from understanding what was happening, but then she followed you down the street to that little alley and you started in on her, calling her by her real name, calling me by my real name. You blew her cover.”

I shook my head, the memory of that confrontation filling my mind.

“Amy, wait!”

“How could you do that to me, Emily? How could you kiss him like that? How long has it been going on? Were you sleeping with him back in Texas?”

“Of course not!”

“Dominic is supposed to be in Afghanistan! Do you know how frightened I’ve been for his safety? The two of you, running off at the same time. Is this why? Was it all just a lie?”

Emily took my arm, tried to direct me further from the street where people were looking in at us, but I jerked away.

“Is Dominic really in the Army? Are you really going to the Sorbonne? Or was this all just some sort of joke? Have you been laughing at me all this time?”

“Amy, I love you. Dominic loves you. There’s a simple explanation for all this.”

“Then tell me.”

She stared blankly at me, her mouth opening several times, but nothing coming out.

I shook my head. “Stay away from me. I don’t want to ever see you again. As far as I’m concerned, you’re dead. I no longer have a sister.”

“Amy!”

I walked away, never looking back. I could hear her crying; I could hear the sobs wracking her body. I told myself I didn’t care, but I heard them for a long time in my dreams. Still do sometimes.

“One of the guys we were with…he followed her and heard what you said. If not for Emily’s handler—he was across the street and was able to call for backup—they would have gotten word to their superiors that we were CIA. They arrested him and his friends, called it a success despite the fact that even Emily’s bosses suspected there were was more than what they were able to get out of them during interrogation. All in all, fifty people were arrested out of that operation. But Emily felt like she could have gotten more, could have stopped the attacks that happened this year, if she hadn’t allowed you to blow our cover.”

“So she’s dead because of me.”

“No,” Dominic said, reaching for my hand. “She’s dead because she found more than she’d expected to. Because she made the choice to go rogue. Because she didn’t allow me or Edgar or anyone else help her.”

I shook my head, thinking of those sobs, of my sister’s heart breaking behind me. I pulled away from Dominic and stood, needing to move. I went into the bathroom and began gathering my things, shoving them into bags. Dominic didn’t try to talk to me. In fact, he left the room, giving me a few minutes to process.

“Let me drive.”

He hesitated, but he handed me the keys. We were on the road not ten minutes later. He watched me in the darkness of the car, but exhaustion finally overcame him, and he stretched out in the small space of the passenger seat and was asleep before we hit the city limits. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d told me. I was glad to have the activity of driving because I was pretty sure I would have gone insane if I’d had nothing but my thoughts to keep me busy.

My sister was a CIA agent.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. One day we were all college students, all three hanging out together on campus, working at pretending to be adults. Then Dominic failed his economics class for the second time and decided that school just wasn’t his thing. I was scared and frustrated when he told me he’d joined the Army, but proud, too. Emily was with me when I watched him get on that bus that took him to basic training, holding my hand and telling me it was going to be okay.

And then she left two months later.

It was an honor to study at the Sorbonne—even if it wasn’t technically the Sorbonne anymore. We were happy for her. Once again, I stood and watched someone I loved go away, standing in the airport with my parents. Then I returned home and finished the last of my junior year and my entire senior year of college all by myself. To begin my life without the two most important people in my life.

She was CIA. She was trying to save the world from terrorist, and I was here, teaching high school student about Shakespeare. And he was…what? Fighting terrorists on the ground and helping her with her intelligence gathering. They were heroes, and I had the nerve to turn my back on them, accuse them of something ugly and push them out of my life.

Who was I to do that?

The sun was coming up as we passed through Tucson. Dominic grunted as he slowly began to wake.

“What time is it?”

“A little after six.”

He sat up and studied the road signs for a moment. Then he pointed.

“Get off there.”

“Are we stopping for breakfast?”

I hadn’t eaten in nearly forty-eight hours. It was partly my fault, but that didn’t do anything to calm the ache in my belly.

He shook his head. “We need to get rid of this car. Someone might have put two and two together by now.”

He gestured toward the exit he wanted me to take. I slowed the car as we came to a stop sign. He pointed several more times, guiding me into a residential part of the city. We cruised up and down the streets for quite a while before he finally saw what he wanted.

“Pull to the curb.”

He reached into the back seat and grabbed his duffle along with a couple of my Walmart bags. Then, just like we belonged and it was our right, he climbed behind the wheel of a car that some unlucky person had started, but then left for some reason. Maybe he was letting the engine warm up. Or he’d forgotten to kiss his wife goodbye. Whatever it was, the car had the keys in it so we wouldn’t raise eyebrows if anyone happened to get too close.

Dominic drove away as casually as can be, rejoining the interstate and taking us through a long string of tiny towns on the way to El Paso.

“You’ve done that before.”

“I’ve done a lot of things.”

I agreed with that. I studied his profile in the morning light, admiring the way his nose seemed to balance the symmetry of his face perfectly. I remembered the first time I saw him it was from this angle. It was in freshman English and he was sitting to my left with a group of frat boy want-to-bes. I was staring at him because I’d never seen anyone quite as beautiful as he was, and he looked over at me, a soft smile bringing out the deep dimple in his left cheek. I blushed, thinking he’d make fun of me with his friends. But he didn’t. He followed me out into the hallway and asked if I’d like to get a coffee with him.

He didn’t even like coffee.

“Do you still hate coffee?”

He glanced at me. “Not as much. The Army teaches you to tolerate a lot of things you never thought you could.”

“I always wondered why you asked me to coffee that first time rather than lunch.”

“Because I didn’t have enough money to pay for us both to eat. I thought coffee would be cheaper.”

I laughed. “You didn’t have to buy me anything. I would have gone and sat in the park with you.”

“I wanted to impress you.”

“Just looking at you was impressive enough.”

“I could say the same.”

I blushed even as a flattered smile burst over my face.

The road hummed under us, the car riding smoothly over the asphalt. I sat back a little, trying to find a comfortable position.

“You should get some sleep. We have a full day ahead of us.”

“What’s next?”

“We go to Emily’s apartment and see if we can find what it was these people were after.”

“The terrorists?”

“Yes.”