Chapter One
The journal burning a hole in my thigh was blank for two reasons.
One: I was currently in the midst of taking steps toward closure, the very activity the therapist ensured writing my thoughts down would give me.
Two: Men don’t keep diaries.
I could still feel Leila stifling her giggles every time I used the ‘d’ word. I even overused it because after I got her back, hearing her laugh was about as rare as me smiling.
It had been one month since I’d flown home to discover the one thing I couldn’t exist without had been taken from me. The one person who had irrevocably changed my life, chipped at the walls that no one else touched, who moved me in beautiful and terrifying ways, the love of my life…
I nearly snapped the pen in my hand in two. Even after I paid the ransom and watched the culprits drive away, I still couldn’t breathe. Despite the angry red slashes on her neck and beneath her collar fading, I still saw nothing but red, felt nothing but fury when my fingertips touched the fragile skin. And regardless of her insistence that she was okay, the insatiable need to destroy Cole and his sister was as overwhelming now as it had been when that little psycho told me they had my Leila. And no amount of therapy or journaling could snuff out the rage.
Ending them would.
I gripped the leather bound thing, a flicker of satisfaction rippling through me when I imagined it was Cole’s throat my fingers were wrapped around. I could have easily used my contacts for a clean, distant ending to my brother’s story but that was a mercy he didn’t deserve and I couldn’t allow.
He’d looked into my face, and my wife’s face, and lied. I let him close enough that by the time I’d realized my error, it was too late. So it was my turn to be close. Close enough that I saw the moment he realized his death was near and it was at my hand. I needed to see the second the light in his eyes flickered into nothing.
I blinked, the journal sturdier than I’d realized.
It didn’t bend. It didn’t break.
I eased back in my seat, the symbolism of that not lost on me. I flipped it to the first page.
I should write ‘charade’ in big, blocked letters .
My suggestion that Leila and I go to therapy had nothing to do with me at all. I wasn’t the one that had been drugged and bound and-
I drew a deep breath and exhaled. The relaxation didn’t last; jaw locking, teeth grinding. Lay had been hurt and there was nothing I could do to stop it. To look at the strongest woman, no , perso n I’d ever met and see how broken she was behind her forced smiles; the lie behind ‘I’m alright’… With the exception of my reason for being at the edge of the city, the only other way to help her was to make her talk. And since she refused to talk to me, that left therapy.
But Leila would have given me that look if I said she needed therapy. So I told her I needed it, but I’d only be able to face it if she went with me.
Deceptive? Slightly. But she’d done more talking in the therapist’s office in the last week than she’d spoken to me in the past month. And clearly I wasn’t getting off scot free since I had to keep a diary now.
If only the therapist knew the real way I was handling the fallout from the kidnapping.
It would be hard to miss the vehicle my contact drove. It was a decaying, beige colored Chevy El Camino with oversized tires and glittering rims. To further confuse and confound, the man behind the wheel was a flannel wearing stoner named Mike Josephs. He’d gone to MIT and was courted (then offered just about everything under the sun) by the NSA . He turned them down and used his skills for those who could afford his six figure fee.
He was worth every penny.
He found Cole.
I put the journal on the dashboard and watched him park his neon sign of a car warily. He hopped from behind the wheel, stamped out his joint and pulled out a bizarrely professional looking folder.
He slid into the
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