Hold Me in the Dark Read online

  The laptop was just sliding out of my fingers. I lunged forward and grabbed my end of it again. Because no, dammit, I wasn’t going to leave things that way. It wasn’t right and when something’s not right, I can be a stubborn son of a bitch.

  She tugged again, still looking determinedly away from me. But I held on. I held on until she had to look at me. And then I met her gaze and just looked at her, honest and open. I lowered my head fractionally. I’m sorry.

  And I saw her shoulders loosen, just a little. Her shields inched down.

  I kept looking at her. I drank in those eyes, that face. Her lips were blush-pink and her lower lip had this beautiful, delicate pout to it that made me imagine crushing it under mine. I looked because I couldn’t stop looking. And whatever was on my face, it did what I couldn’t do with words. It told her that I didn’t care about the damn chair.

  Her shoulders relaxed a little more. She looked away and I thought I saw her cheeks color. She looked back at me and nodded.

  That would have to do. I let go of the laptop. She wheeled herself back behind the desk and went to work.

  I walked around to her side of the desk, moving slow so that I didn’t spook her. I couldn’t take my eyes off this woman. Now that she’d unfrozen, she was like a mini whirlwind. With one hand, she attached cables to the laptop. With the other, she typed one-handed, too fast for me to follow. One second, she was spinning the chair around to reach something behind her, her hair whipping out in a dark cloud. The next, she was hauling on the wheels to send her down the length of the desk to grab a flash drive. Only her legs remained still.

  Now I knew why the apartment felt weird, why I felt so tall. The kitchen counters, the stove, the shelves... everything had been lowered so that she could reach it sitting down.

  “You got a warrant?” she muttered as she worked.

  I just looked at her blankly.

  “To search the laptop,” she clarified. “You have a warrant?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have time for that. By the time a judge issues a warrant, that woman will be dead.”

  “Do you realize how many laws we’re breaking?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry. My boss doesn’t know I’m here. I’ll keep you out of it.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about!”

  She was thinking of me? I stared at her, completely disarmed. She looked away as if embarrassed that she’d been caught being nice.

  The thing was, she had a point. Giving a piece of evidence to a civilian, asking her to illegally break the encryption to conduct a warrantless search... when Carrie, my boss at the FBI, found out, I was going to be in trouble... again. But I wasn’t going to let that stop me, not when a woman was in danger. “Thanks,” I said, more softly. “But I’ll take my chances.”

  She frowned, as if she was trying to figure me out. Then she gave me a nod that might have been respect, and got back to work. The laptop powered up and the monitors filled with computer code. She studied it silently for a few seconds, then started typing, her fingers a blur.

  I knew I was staring at her, but I couldn’t stop. There was just something about her that drew me in, hypnotic….

  And then I caught myself. What the hell are you doing, Calahan? The guilt rose up inside, a black storm cloud shot through with flashes of pain. I didn’t deserve her. I didn’t deserve anyone. Not after what I’d done.

  I twisted away and looked for something, anything, to look at instead. The first thing I saw was the chalkboards. “What is all that stuff?” I grunted.

  She didn’t look up. “What stuff?”

  “On the chalkboards.”

  “Math.”

  I scowled. “I know that it’s math. I meant, why’s there a whole wall covered in it?”

  “I’m a mathematician.”

  I blinked. I knew you could be a math teacher, but a mathematician? Someone who just did math? It sounded weirdly old-fashioned, like a wizard or an alchemist. “I thought you were a hacker. That’s why Lily sent me to you.”

  “I’m both.”

  I finally felt strong enough to risk looking at her again. “You’re a mathematician as well?”

  “No.” For the first time, she glanced over at me, tossing her hair back so she could see me. “I’m a hacker as well.”

  For just a second, I thought I saw the ghost of a smile. Then she turned back to her screen and... I could feel a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth, too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smiled.

  I quickly looked back at the chalkboards, angry with myself. I tried to focus on the equations, but I couldn’t even begin to interpret what was there. This woman was a whole different level of smart. Maybe that’s why she felt otherworldly. She spent her life immersed in a world few people understood.

  “All of us hack,” she said. “But Lily’s thing is databases and information. Gabriella is good at penetrating systems. And me, I break encryption. Because encryption is just math.”

  Her voice was amazing. Her accent was from someplace far west, soft and gentle. It made me think of quiet, green places and gentle winds. But at the same time, she spoke fast, as if she resented using slow, inefficient speech when she could be getting the ideas out of her head faster if she was chalking them as equations.

  I couldn’t help it. I had to hear more. I found a stool, pulled it over to her desk and sat down beside her as I listened. I knew it was dangerous. I couldn’t let myself get close. But her voice was addictive.

  “It used to be just your bank and your credit card company that used encryption,” she said as she typed. “But now it’s your hard drives, your email, even your phone. The world runs on encryption—on math. And if you can find the flaws in the math, then you can get right in.”

  Yolanda stopped typing and stared at the screen for a moment. Then her eyes closed and she became utterly still. She didn’t move. She didn’t fidget. She just... thought.

  I grew up in New Jersey near a big steel factory. Every time they fired up the arc furnace, all the lights in the town would dim. I got the feeling Yolanda was a little like that: a brain so scarily powerful that most of the time, it was just idling, leaving her with excess, nervous energy that kept her constantly moving. Only when she was doing math was she truly at peace. And when she was really, really deep in a problem, her brain just sucked in all the energy it could get, leaving none for anything else.

  A minute ticked by. Then ten. She didn’t move. The last thing I wanted to do was distract her, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Jennifer, alone and terrified with that maniac. At last, I gently asked, “How lo—”

  She suddenly spun her chair around, her hair whipping out in a fan, and I had to jump up to get out of her way. She shot off across the room and stopped by the chalkboards. “Read me the long string of digits at the bottom of the screen,” she ordered. There was a noise like thunder as she scrolled the chalkboard to a fresh, empty page.

  I read the number from the screen. Yolanda copied it down and then started writing equations, the symbols coming so fast that the chalk didn’t scrape: it went taktaktak, machine gun bursts interrupted by the occasional slash of a line. I could smell the chalk dust in the air, something I hadn’t smelled since school. I just stood there drinking her in, awed. I was in the presence of something extraordinary.

  She wrote a final figure, then shot back across the room to her desk. There was a rattle of keys and then... like magic, the laptop’s user interface and all its files appeared on her screens.

  I sucked in a huge breath of hope and threw myself back onto the stool next to her. Technically, her part was done and I should take over. But I wasn’t going to sideline her now—she was a hell of a lot faster with a computer than I was. “Check his search history,” I told her. “See if he’s looked up any locations in the Catskills.”

  Her fingers flew across the keys. We were shoulder to shoulder and, as I leaned in towards the screens, I could smell the delicate scent of her hair, li
ke blossoms after the rain, and feel the excited energy thrumming through her body. She was leaning forward, too: we both had that adrenaline high of feeling a case crack wide open.

  “He searched this area three times,” she said, bringing up a map. “And he’s marked a point.” She clicked on it, then switched to satellite view and squinted. “Is that a building?”

  “It’s a cabin! There, there’s a track that leads up to it!”

  I pointed and my hand brushed her bare forearm. For a second, everything just seemed to stop. She was cool and smooth and the touch of her made my head swim.

  Then I got myself together, grabbed my phone and called the cops out in the Catskills. “Lieutenant Falkner? I know where they are. It’s an unmarked road, but I’ve got coordinates for you. Got a pen?” When he’d found one, I held the phone up to Yolanda and she read the numbers off the screen. “Call us back when you get there,” I said, and ended the call.

  And then it was just the two of us, sitting in her apartment. It hit me that I’d said “Call us back,” not “Call me back.” Like we were partners. And it did feel like that. She’d become part of this.

  I pushed the idea away and stood up. I was way, way too attracted to this woman. If I stayed around her, I was going to do something dumb. “Thank you. I’ll get out of your hair.”

  I reached for the laptop, but she slapped a hand down on it. “That’s it? No! I need to know what happens!”

  My stomach knotted. I knew the look in her eyes because I saw it in the mirror every day. She’d become involved. She’d felt the fear, knowing she was the woman’s only hope. Then the high of cracking the case, the one that can become so dangerously addictive. Now she needed closure. But I didn’t want her getting any more involved... with my work or with me. I knew what that did to people.

  “What you did was amazing,” I told her sincerely. She blinked at me and looked away as if she didn’t know how to process that. As if no one ever told her that. “But I can take it from here.” I unplugged the laptop and gently slid it from under her hand. Tucked it under my arm and headed for the door.

  I got three steps before there was a hiss of wheels and she slewed in front of me, making me pull up short. She stared up at me, determined. “I need to know if she’s okay!”

  I felt this pull. Deep and powerful, it went way beyond her looks. She was a firework of a woman, brilliant and quick, enigmatic and exciting. I didn’t just want her, I liked her. And I knew that’s exactly why I should get the hell out of there.

  I looked down into her eyes. New York tipped under my feet and I was falling out of concrete and traffic and crappy air and towards lush green, misty forest.

  What if we need to get something else from the laptop? The location could be wrong. Or the cops could get there and the cabin’s empty. Maybe there’s more than one cabin.

  I told myself that was the reason. The truth was... something important had entered my life. In a matter of minutes, it would leave again and I’d never get it back. I wanted to hold onto it just a little longer.

  “I guess I could wait here,” I heard myself say. “Until they call back.”

  She nodded. Then I looked away, because I couldn’t look into her eyes any longer without saying something I’d regret. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look away, too. So I thought it was safe and I looked at her again, but then she looked at me again and that was it: we were trapped. I couldn’t look away from those damn eyes. I was fascinated by this woman. And every second we stared at each other, the tension was ratcheting higher. She’d started to breathe faster and I had, too. We were breathing in rhythm: when had that started?

  This is bad. I couldn’t let myself get close to her. She deserved much better than a bastard like me. If she knew what I’d done, the secret that ate at me every day…. But I still couldn’t look away. I am out of my depth.

  She broke our gaze and I thought I saw her flush. “Coffee?” she asked.

  I grabbed for something, anything, familiar. “Hell yes, coffee.”

  She went over to the kitchen counter and I followed, watching as she brewed it. I glanced around the apartment. Over in one corner was an exercise bike. What’s that for? I thought her legs didn’t work.

  I looked back to Yolanda. I tried to think of something smart to say, but watching her do something as normal as making coffee, sitting instead of standing, all I could think about was—

  “You’re wondering what happened to me,” she said without looking up.

  “What? No!” I lied.

  “Good,” she said, in a tone that said I don’t believe that for a second. She passed me a coffee and offered me milk, but we both took it the same way: black, no sugar.

  I glanced at the chalkboards. “So why math?”

  “Why justice?” she asked immediately.

  I frowned at her, curious. She hadn’t just put up shields to protect herself, she’d wrapped thorns over them to keep everyone away. And it probably worked, with most people. They’d say she was difficult. Grumpy. Not a team player.

  Thing is, that’s what they’d say about me, too. So her prickliness didn’t work on me. Instead of changing the subject, I just watched and waited. And wondered what had happened to her, to make her so suspicious of people.

  She softened and shrugged. “Numbers just make sense to me,” she mumbled. “They fit my brain. I guess I’m just wired that way.”

  “Well, I guess I am, too,” I told her. That was one way of putting it. Another was, when I saw something wrong, I had a total inability to leave it alone and….

  My chest went tight. And someone had paid the price.

  I did what I always did when I want to avoid thinking about something: I went into FBI mode.

  From the number of plates and mugs in the kitchen, she lived alone here and there was no sign of a man visiting: we leave our traces everywhere. It was a lonely existence, way up here in the penthouse, just about as isolated as you could get from the teeming streets below. I wondered if that was deliberate.

  She obviously had a lot of money. I knew the Sisters of Invidia “liberated” money from the bad guys’ bank accounts. The FBI turned a blind eye to that, given the sort of lowlifes they helped put behind bars. But from what I’d seen, Lily and Gabriella weren’t rich on this scale. So where had the money come from? And why did she choose to live forty stories up when she was in a wheelchair? There was so much I didn’t know.

  “Do I get to know your real name?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I’d just like to—” I started. Then my phone rang. I’d been waiting for the call but now I almost resented it because I knew it meant my time with her was over. I put the phone on speaker so that we could both listen.

  “My guys are going into the cabin now,” said Lieutenant Falkner.

  There was a hiss and then we were listening to a live feed of the cops raiding the cabin. We could hear the heavy breathing of men amped up and ready to go. Then the crash of a door being kicked down. The pounding of boots as they ran from room to room. “Police! Show me your hands! Let me see your hands!” Then, “Check her. Check her!”

  I felt something and looked down. Yolanda was gripping my arm.

  “Miss?” I heard a cop say. “Miss? Hold still.”

  There was a big intake of breath and I realized the woman must have been gagged, and they’d just taken it off of her.

  “Miss,” the cop asked. “Are you okay?”

  Yolanda’s hand gripped me even tighter. And without thinking, I put my hand over hers and squeezed.

  “Yes,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m okay.”

  Yolanda and I slumped in relief. I could hear a cop reading the kidnapper his rights. Lieutenant Falkner came back on the line and I thanked him and ended the call.

  I looked down and realized I still had my hand on hers. When I looked at Yolanda, she was looking right at me.

  We could both feel it.

  But I wasn’t going to mak
e that mistake again. I liked her. I didn’t want her getting hurt. And that meant the best place for her was a long way from me.

  I let go of her hand.

  Hurt flashed in her eyes. Then she spun her chair around and shot over to her desk. She picked up the laptop and held it out to me. I took it, feeling like an utter bastard. It’s better this way, I told myself.

  “Thank you,” I said as I opened the door.

  “You’re welcome.” Her voice was carefully neutral.

  I stepped outside, took a deep breath... and closed the door. There. It was done, and I’d never see her again.

  3

  Yolanda

  I WATCHED HIM through the camera all the way to the elevator. Calahan didn’t walk, he stalked. Shoulders squared, slamming each foot down like he was crushing bad guys underfoot. When I lost sight of him, I hurried to the little personal elevator in my apartment and took it up to the roof. I burst out into bitingly cold, damp air. It was September and the sky overhead was the color of dirty ice. I wheeled myself past the doveloft and over to the parapet and looked down at the front of the building. A moment later, Calahan emerged, climbed into a car and joined the slow-moving New York traffic. I watched his car until it was out of sight.

  And then I was alone again. I sighed and then frowned. I was used to being alone. It was my preferred state of being. So why did it suddenly feel different?

  I looked around. My building is right in the heart of Manhattan and from the roof I could see the whole island spread out around me like a map. I could see everything: commuters swarming across crossings, cars moving in long snakes at the whim of green and red lights...I could even see the wind. It was invisible as it blew in from the ocean, but as it hit the grid of buildings and was sliced into a hundred individual breezes, I could see it tumbling trash down the streets and moving signs and banners. At the intersections, it merged again, creating sudden gusts that scattered newspapers and snatched umbrellas. To the people down there, it was unpredictable chaos, but from up here, it all made sense.