Annabel's not safe with me. The full moon is tomorrow, and we're trapped in the city for the night-nowhere for me to run and hunt, to get this aggressive need out of me.
How will I survive the night beside her?
I force a long, deep breath.
Calm the hell down, Charlie.
I've figured my way out of far more difficult situations. I can easily make up an excuse and spend the night in the rental car or get a different motel room.
I return to the room and find Annabel pulling on her clothes with her back to me. Something in her stance-or is it her scent-worries me.
She's hurt. Or embarrassed.
Fuck. I just pulled out and left her. No post-coital cuddle, no thanks, no nothing.
I walk swiftly to her and wrap my arms around her from behind. My lips seek the tender skin behind her ear.
"I'm sorry." Better to own this than to pretend nothing happened. "Being with you is intense for me. I'm not used to experiencing much feeling to anything. I just had to catch my breath for a second."
She turns in my arms. I was right, vulnerability is scrawled across her beautiful face.
"What do you mean?"
I mean I sprouted fangs and almost ripped you apart.
Hell.
"I don't know." I shake my head. "You do something strange to me."
There. That's all true. I'm not going to lie to Annabel if I don't have to.
"I think I should get some air." I release her and pick up my clothes. When I catch the scent of her pain again, I find myself speaking before I can stop it. "Do you want to come with me?"
Great, Charlie. How's that going to work?
But the way her face brightens is worth the difficulty this will cause me. And Lord knows she deserves an outing as much as I do. I pull on my jeans and a worn t-shirt and put on a pair of shoes.
"You hungry?" Because I could eat a freaking T-Rex.
"Yeah."
I pick up the keys to the rental car. "All right, we'll drive to get some food, then find a place to get some fresh air."
She grabs her father's file as we walk out the door. I would tell her to leave it because the goal was to get her mind off this case for a few moments, but I know it won't do any good. She needs to know what's in there. And so do I if I'm going to protect her.
I drive to a diner nearby and park the car. She clutches the file tightly, but I notice she hasn't once cracked it. It's like she's afraid of what she'll find. I can't say I blame her.
Inside I order three hamburgers and a side of bacon. Annabel gets a cobb salad.
"You on the heart-stopper diet?" Annabel teases.
"Yeah. Breaking into the CIA makes me work up an appetite." And the monster inside me needs meat.
"Oh, I thought I did that."
If only she knew. "Oh you did, baby. Believe me. You did."
She draws a breath and looks down at the file on the table.
"Go on," I urge.
She opens it, wearing an expression like someone about to face the guillotine. The file is in chronological order with the last mission on the top. I read upside down as she skims the information.
El Salvador.
Agent forwarded his own agenda, acting outside orders from his superiors to incite violence in the villages. His effort to prevent or delay the peace accord failed, and he was killed by locals in a village where he led a massacre on the indigenous people.
Agent Scape cleaned and covered up the incident. Gray's death reported as a Marine casualty on protection detail.
Annabel covers her mouth with her hand while she reads as if to shield her expression from me. She stares at it way too long, but her eyes are still moving. She must be re-reading. Finally, I reach across and pull her hand from her mouth.
"Baby, there's no telling what spin they put on this. Agents make life or death decisions in the field all the time. I'm guessing if your father went off the rails it was for a reason we don't understand. It's hard for me to imagine an intelligent, well-trained agent would just start promoting his own agenda."
Annabel's lips tremble. Tears swim her in beautiful gray eyes. "Do you think he was hired by someone?"
Damn, I don't want to answer this question. I cant my head to the side. "It's possible, yes."
"But who would've hired him?"
"Could've been a special interest group in our country, could've been an international party with a stake in the continued unrest down there."
"Do you think they know, and that's what they're trying to suppress?"
"Well, we know one thing. They don't want this information out there. Now, if it was just about one rogue agent, I'm not sure they'd go to all the trouble of hunting down a notebook. So, yeah, I'd say there's something more to this story. Something not in this file."
"Maybe I shouldn't have kept looking." Annabel blinks hard but doesn't manage to keep the tears back. They track down her face, and she presses her lips together and looks out the window to the parking lot. As if on cue, rain starts to fall.
"Listen, I'm sorry for what you found in there, but I'm telling you, you can't make any judgments about your father or what he did. He's not here to answer for it himself. I would give him the benefit of the doubt." I pick up her hand. "If he produced daughters like you and Sarah, I find it hard to believe he betrayed his country or sold out human lives. I really do."
Annabel's eyes cut away, bitterness flickering over her face. "We were so young when he died, and he was gone a lot before that. Our mother really raised us."
I consider her for a long moment, torn between forever keeping my secret buried and the burning need to ease her pain, to give us common ground.