Spectre of Intention Read online

  “J.C.’s people took a look at your systems. He was trying to find out if any critical data had been compromised.”

  I sat down on the edge of the rough linen seat. The lines across my back where the table leg had caught me thumped painfully. I clasped my hands in my lap and forced myself to concentrate past the pain and the white-hot heat of grief walling me off from the rest of reality.

  “What they found was this.”

  He turned on a file and I found myself looking into my own eyes. Me in the ballroom, me in the interview room, me in the waiting room.

  “Your software only dedicates one line of input from the subject. All other cameras focus on you, your face. It’s your reactions that are being analyzed.”

  I turned my gaze up to him.

  “What good would that do? Did you talk to Paula? That makes no sense.”

  “Arlen is talking to Paula right now.”

  I let my suspicion, my irritation show on my face.

  “Then why did you drag me half-naked through the ship to talk to me about it? You know I don’t know anything about how the software works.”

  “Don’t play dumb, Kaitlin. Don’t tell me you don’t know about this!”

  I shouted right back. “I watch her damn screen while we’re doing the interviews. It doesn’t show my fucking face!” I batted away fresh tears with shaking hands. “I can’t take this from you right now.” I pushed up from the table. “You can take your mistrust and shove it up your ass. I’ve had enough of your goddamn endless suspicions.”

  He stepped over to block my exit.

  “You don’t tell me. Anything. Ever.”

  “I told you everything. You just didn’t listen.”

  I spun around to take the other direction around the table. He grabbed my arm.

  “Kaitlin.”

  I stopped. But I didn’t turn back around. He dropped his hand.

  “I think maybe I did listen. I think I just didn’t understand what I was hearing.”

  Slowly, warily, I turned to face him. He stepped back, gave me enough room to step out from behind the table.

  “Can you trust me just for a second and not flip what I’m saying around or dodge it or redirect it back at me?”

  “Could you do the same?” I asked.

  Cam took a deep breath, let it out.

  “Yes.”

  I watched him carefully. His vague incarnation slowly calmed and those penetrating, twisting attacks softened and faded.

  I nodded to him.

  He wandered toward the living room and I followed.

  “That first time I demanded your secrets, you told me a bunch of disjointed nonsense: Davina hates you and Will. Will is genuine. Arlen wants to fuck me. I thought you were fucking with my head. But then I started watching you. You always knew who had just walked in the room. You could gauge my mood, despite my best poker face. You picked Davina out the second we discovered the hacked-up keypad. You always had an explanation or a brush off. And then I saw you walk through that group of volunteers in the waiting room and I thought it was going to kill you. You’re not reading micro-expressions.”

  Confronting Paula was nothing like being confronted by Cam. I stared at him, clenched my hands on the shirt’s hem to block out the trembling. I told him I’d trust him.

  I shook my head, my eyes never leaving his.

  “What are you doing, then?”

  I opened my mouth, closed it. Jessie had never believed me.

  Cam stepped closer, took my hand, and led me to the couch. We sat down, and I smoothed the shirt down over my naked thighs. Cam’s intention wanted to help me with that.

  I laughed.

  “What?”

  I looked up from my lap. My smile was pained.

  “You’re never going to want to be around me again.”

  “Try me.”

  “I read intentions: what you think you want to do.”

  I had to give him credit. He quickly schooled his disbelief.

  “How?”

  “If you haven’t made up your mind yet, I get just a buffeting of emotion like hot wind or icicles jabbing at my skin. Not that simple, but I physically feel them. Sometimes if they are strong enough they…” I thought of his venomous doubt. “…they can punch their way inside me.”

  “And if I have made my mind up?”

  “It depends.” I looked down at the tips of the shirt tail on my lap, picked at a loose thread. “Sometimes I feel specifically what you want to do. More rarely, I can see your intentions become incarnate and begin enacting it.”

  “Okay, that’s creepy.”

  “It can be. Some people’s passing thoughts can be very private. I do my best to respect that. We’re all human.”

  Cam nodded, leaned against the back of the couch.

  “Who knows about this?”

  I shook my head. “Jessie relied on my ‘intuition’ pretty heavily, but he didn’t really believe me. Gerard—who knows what goes on in that mind? Paula knows.”

  “And Paula’s your software developer?”

  “I can see what you’re saying, but if that were true, our software would be useless once I left the jobsite and it’s not.”

  “It’s not. But it’s not as effective as it is when you are onsite. See, I already talked to Paula. She says she was under orders from Jessie to use separate software that focused on your facial expressions during onsite interviews.”

  He leaned forward again, stopped my fingers from their picking.

  “You are the two percent, Kaitlin.”

  I jerked my hands away and shoved off the couch. I hugged my arms as I paced in front of the sliding glass window. Finally, I stopped in front of the darkness of the window. I pressed my face into my hands.

  “That’s why….”

  Cam rose, came up behind me. He put his hands on my shoulders, pulled me back against him.

  “That’s why what?”

  “He told me to tell Paula, right before he died he told me to tell Paula he was sorry. I thought he meant… I thought he meant he was sorry they didn’t…,” I took a deep breath, “…get more time together. Oh, jeezus.”

  I rubbed furiously at my eyes with my borrowed shirtsleeve. He wrapped his arms around me, rested his chin on my head.

  “Think that’s why they stopped letting you look at the software?”

  I wrapped my hand over my mouth to keep from sobbing. I’d trusted Jessie with my soul. He knew how much it meant to me not to be associated with any kind of crime. How could he do this? How could he do this and lie to me?

  But I knew. I closed my eyes against it, but I knew.

  Paula had told me. That kiss goodbye had told me. He had created me to be pure and unattainable. Paula he could soil as he liked.

  God.

  “I would have done anything for that man. Anything.”

  “Kaitlin, hey.” Cam turned me around, let me burrow into his shoulder. “None of this means he didn’t love you. Okay? Even I know that much, alright? Even me, the plain old mortal.”

  I laughed into his shirt. And me, the Oracle of Delphi, I knew that, too. Somehow, someday, I would figure out how to separate that from the betrayal. Someday soon. Because I couldn’t hate him. I loved him too much.

  Cam pressed his cheek against my hair.

  “I have more questions. No, don’t tense up like that.” He rubbed my back until I found a way to relax against him. “But first I’m going to feed you.”

  “Sacrifice your best goat?”

  Cam chuckled. “Probably more like cheese and crackers.”

  We sat at the dining table with the take from our raid: five stale crackers, a brick of cheese with the mold peeled off, fresh bananas, and a carton of yogurt only a day past its expiration. Cam popped a cracker in his mouth.

  “Now this is living.”

  “You definitely notice flavors more at midnight,” I agreed.

  I bit off the last hunk of banana and let myself experience the bright tang with
its underlying custardy sweetness. I folded the peel neatly on the table. Then I turned in my chair to face him.

  Cam reached out and snagged another cracker.

  “So, when I was talking to Paula—”

  “Is she alright?” I pressed.

  “Uh, yeah, she’s taking everything kind of quietly.”

  “She’s too careful with her emotions. She ends up shattering herself.”

  Cam nodded slowly. “I’ll keep that in mind. Keep an eye on her.”

  “Thanks.” I offered a quiet smile. “So, what did she say?”

  “She said this Mak guy has been stalking you. She said you actually had more than one stalker. Were all six of them in on this? Has this been going on the entire time you’ve been on board?”

  I gripped the sides of my chair; the banana went sour in my stomach.

  Cam frowned. “This has been going on the entire time you’ve been on board.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  I would rather puke. I closed my eyes for a second. Deep breath.

  “The first night they grabbed me out of the hall. They made threats, but I got away. On three separate nights the one named Stephan broke into my room. Mak approached me twice in the food court. The woman, Amilee, got to me in the waiting room a couple seconds before the shooting. She was probably distracting…um distracting me. Gerard said Mak was the shooter.”

  I opened my eyes, stared at my knees willing myself not to lose the banana. Cam was so angry. I wiped the sickly sweat from my face with the sleeve of his shirt.

  His voice was quiet when he spoke. “Why didn’t you tell anybody about any of this?”

  “I told Jessie some of—” I had to stop and bite my lip, had to keep it together.

  “And he didn’t tell me?”

  I looked up. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know, so we can frickin’ stop playing this game? You said you would trust me, but you’re sitting there playing cat and mouse. What was in the report about me that made you so damn suspicious?”

  Cam dropped back in his chair. His face was so neutral, but his emotions raged like a war between heaven and hell. Then abruptly he reined it in. The battle didn’t stop, but he made his decision over the top of it.

  “Alright, just that the federal government had issued you a new identity at the special request of some Senator with a really good committee seat.” I raised an eyebrow. That was news to me. “And at the time, I’d just gotten a report saying there was a plot to steal prisoners out of the canisters. Rumors in the prison system. Talk about an insider.”

  “That’s why they’re here. Davina told them that I would be here with access to the schematics.”

  “So now you know what I know. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

  Nope, couldn’t sit still anymore. I got up and stood at the back of the couch with my back to him. My fingertips traced the cold, smooth standard issue upholstery.

  “I know them.”

  “You know them!”

  “Not all of them. I…from before. Stephan…I ran away from Stephan.”

  “Ran away. The name change.”

  I nodded. I pressed my fist against my stomach. Prayed he wouldn’t ask for more. I almost wished Ashley would come back to life and take over, let me escape. Like the coward I was, I reached for her. But she was nowhere inside me anymore. I was on my own.

  Cam came to stand beside me, just outside the periphery of my vision. He reached for me. I flinched, scooted further down the couch.

  “Kaitlin what happened? What did he do?”

  “I don’t talk about it. I think it’s time for me to go.”

  I made a break for the door. He was already there. He leaned back against the door.

  “How ’bout we make a trade? I tell you the real reason it’s so hard for me to let my guard down and then you do the same.”

  Right now, all I wanted was to make it through that door. I was done. I didn’t know what he planned to do with my pathetic confessions, but he had enough as far as I was concerned. He could either destroy me or spare me. I had no control over it now.

  Cam reached out, tugged at the collar of my shirt, traced the V of exposed flesh at the neckline. My blood warmed despite my queasy, cold fear. But his intention wasn’t thinking sex. His intention was looking everywhere, but at me.

  “You know I…I used to be married. Straight out of the academy. We’d been married a couple years and I come home after a shift. The house is empty. I’m looking everywhere. I call her, and the number is disconnected. Then I get to the kitchen. There’s a pad on the table. There’s a note. Says she lost the baby—I didn’t even know we were expecting. Asks if I could sign the divorce papers. That’s it. That was three years ago. Nobody could understand why I would go for a job like this, totally isolated in the middle of the Pacific. Well, that’s the story I don’t tell them.”

  I stared at him. He could control that matter-of-fact look on his face, but he couldn’t control the wrenching pain on his other face, the ghostly tears. I reached up to where his fingers toyed with the button on my collar. I wrapped his hand in both of mine. He’d lost his baby and his love. I’d lost my innocence and my life.

  Okay.

  “I fell in love with the bad boy. I was just too naïve to understand he really was bad. He was into breaking and entering—home safes were his specialty. And he was into drugs and alcohol. The thing is…he was also kind of like me. He can’t read other people, just me. But he can do more than read me, he can climb inside my head, manipulate me, control me. And when we’re linked, he acts like an amp for what I can do. I can read people far away; I can see intentions become incarnate; I go all oracle with these crazy visions. So, he would use me as a lookout. But I hated it. I hated what I’d become. And one night he gave me a gun. That freaked me out. I got so distracted that I didn’t notice this girl come in.”

  I had to stop for a minute. I let go of his hand to rub my face.

  “I came this close to shooting her in the face. The bullet hit the wood door frame. She started screaming and there was blood everywhere. He told me the fucking thing wasn’t loaded. That night I stopped wondering how the hell I was going to get out of that mess. By the end of the week I’d packed my bag, left a note for my mom, and hitched a ride out of town.”

  “Wow.” He used his finger to raise my chin. “Wow. How the hell did you get from there to here?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t. Jessie…” Jessie. I saw his face and my heart squeezed so tight tears wobbled again. I laughed. “I cased him for weeks. When I finally moved in on him, I worked him over good. I was so helpless and pathetic. By the time I was done, he had no choice but to ride to the rescue. He put me through rehab. I got access to a workpad, started doing research, convinced him to change his business model over to security technology. When we started landing contracts, he wanted to hire me officially. That’s when he gave me the new name.”

  I twisted my head away. “He gave me everything. Everything. And I gave him Mak.”

  I lost it. I stopped even trying to hold it back. Jessie was gone. He couldn’t be gone. I needed him. Every day I needed him. He couldn’t fucking be gone!

  Cam pulled me to him and I wrapped myself around him. And felt his tears wet my hair.

  “You should probably get some sleep. I’m going to have somebody bring your things up here. And we’ll have to do something to improve your personal security at least until these guys are caught.”

  I frowned into his shirt.

  “Gerard already tried an oh-shit button. Stephan lifted it before I could use it.”

  “Then we’ll come up with something more subtle.”

  I straightened and pulled away. I saw the dried flakes of blood left behind on his T-shirt. I gestured at the mess.

  “You mind if I use your shower?”

  “Come on.”

  He led me down the hall. Strangely his bathroom was smaller than mine
. But copper tile shimmered in clever geometric patterns over the floor and lower walls, giving it a far classier look. Cam pulled me inside.

  “I do believe this is mine.”

  I looked down as he released the first button on the shirt. Though the fabric didn’t move, his intention caressed my breasts ever so gently. I bit my lip. Cam drew his finger down the newly exposed skin until he reached the next button. A little twist and it came free. He traced me down to the next button, then the next, then the next. With just a little nudge, the fabric fell from my shoulders, slid down my arms, fluttered to the floor. His intention took a little nibble of first one nipple, then the other. My center clenched. He hooked his fingers on the sides of my lace panties and pulled them from me, waited patiently until I stepped clear of them. Then he tossed them away.

  He rose.

  “I need to make a few calls. Get an update on the search.”

  “Um-hmm.”

  I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him in.

  “Then you might want to tell your intentions to keep their hands to themselves.”

  I pulled his head down to mine and let him know with a kiss just how much havoc they’d already caused with my hormones. I felt him go hard against the softness of my stomach. By the time he drew his mouth away, he was breathing fast. He rested his forehead against mine with a groan.

  “You are a wicked, wicked woman. Are you seriously going to send me out there with a hard-on?”

  He glided his hands down my bare back, cupped my ass and began kneading. His intention was already sliding inside me. My head fell back as I moaned. Cam leaned in to graze my neck with his teeth.

  “This…is definitely something I’m going to have to explore. But now at least I know I won’t be suffering alone.”

  “Oh, god, and you call me wicked.”

  I drew my head up and he pulled his hands away. His intention stole one last caress as he slipped out the door.

  “Cheating,” I called after him.

  I heard him laugh.

  I slipped into his bed naked.

  And alone.

  The feel of those crisp, cold metallic sheets sliding over my hot aching body brought a hum of pleasure to my lips. The room, my head, felt so blissfully empty. I no longer had that sensation of an overcrowded brain—Kaitlin and Ashley battling for control of my psyche. They weren’t gone, not completely, but they had lost reality over this last week. Maybe Jessie would be disappointed that I’d never grown to fill out Kaitlin like he’d hoped. But I didn’t think so. I think he’d be happy I could finally stop fighting just to be. That I’d finally settled on a me.