• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

She got to her feet. “And if you’re thinking you need to put me through Testing to be sure I’m solid, I won’t agree to it. I won’t do it.”

Mira kept her hands folded in her lap, kept her body very still. “Do you think I’d put you through that? Knowing you, understanding the circumstances, that I would use this confidence and play by the book? I thought you and I had come further than that.”

She heard the hurt, and the disappointment, and had to turn away from it. “Maybe I’m shakier than I thought. I’m sorry.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her temples. “Goddamn it.”

“Oh, Eve.” Mira rose, but when she reached out, Eve stepped quickly aside.

“I just need to find some level ground. Focus on work, and put this . . . He was training me,” she blurted out. “Training me so he could sell me to other men.” Slowly, she lowered her hands as she stared at Mira’s face. “You knew.”

“I suspected. It made a terrible kind of sense. He could have moved quicker, easier, cheaper without you. You served no real purpose for him. From what I know, what you’ve been able to tell me, he wasn’t a standard pedophile. He had relationships with women as a rule. You were the only child he abused that we’re aware of. And if children were what he wanted, he could have availed himself of them without the inconvenience of having one underfoot otherwise.”

“He kept me locked up. That’s how you train something—brainwash it. You keep it locked up, totally dependent on you. You convince it that it has no choice but to stay because whatever’s out there is worse. You keep it hungry, uncomfortable, and afraid, mix that with small rewards. Punish harshly and swiftly for any infractions, and accustom it to whatever task it’s meant to do. Bind it to you with fear, and it’s yours.”

“You were never his. With all that he did, for all those years, he never really reached you.”

“He’s never let go either,” Eve said. “I have to live with that, too. So does Roarke. This messed him up, maybe more than it did me. We’re okay, but . . . hell, it screws up your head.”

“Would you like me to talk to him?”

“Yeah.” The tension spiking into the base of her skull eased. “Yeah, that’d be good.”

It wasn’t really stalling to go back to her office, add Mira’s comments to her file on Julianna Dunne. It gave her time to smooth out her mood, and to update and copy all updated files to her team and her commander.

When it was done and she heard the general scuffle outside her office that meant change of shift, she programmed one last cup of coffee and stood drinking it at her window.

Uptown traffic, she thought, was going to be a bitch.

In a small office across the jammed street and sky, Julianna Dunne sat at a secondhand metal desk. The door that read DAILY ENTERPRISES was locked. The office consisted of a boxy room and a closet-sized washroom. The furnishings were sparse and cheap. She saw no reason her alter ego of Justine Daily, under which the rental agreement was signed, should waste overhead.

She wouldn’t be here long.

The rent was steeper than it should have been, and the toilet ran continually. The thin, scarred carpet smelled ripely of must.

But the view was priceless.

Through her binoculars she had a perfect view of Eve’s office, and the lieutenant herself.

So sober, so serious, she mused. So dedicated and devoted, worshipping at the altar of law and order. And such a waste.

All those brains, that energy, that purpose tossed away on a badge. And on a man. Under different circumstances, they’d have made an amazing team. But as it was, Julianna thought with a sigh, they were making challenging adversaries.

Eight years, seven months had given Julianna abundant time to examine her mistakes, replay her moves. There was no doubt in her mind that she would have outwitted the cops, the male cops, and spent those eight years, seven months doing what she loved to do.

But a woman was a cagier beast. And the then-freshly promoted Detective Dallas had been cagey indeed. Relentlessly.