“I did hurt her,” Roarke admitted.
“And with the physical and psychic pain merging, you fought back.”
“What’s to stop me from doing just that again?” Eve demanded. “How long are either of us supposed to lie down at night and wait for the battle and the blood?”
“I could give you medications for the short term. Or,” Mira continued, “you could consider something you haven’t yet spoken of. If you recognized your mother, isn’t it possible your subconscious already had when you studied the photos of the woman you suspected was McQueen’s partner?”
“Yeah. I knew there was something, but I couldn’t get down to it. I couldn’t reach it.”
“Consciously. You’re not only trained to be observant, Eve, you’re naturally so. Often uncomfortably so. If you recognized her, added the strain of that to the rest, it’s hardly a wonder it manifested in a traumatic and violent nightmare. She was part of what you hadn’t yet come to terms with, what you continued to block out. The mother, the symbol of everything intended to nurture, to tend, to love and protect.”
“She hated me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I saw it, I felt it. I knew it even when I was—who the hell knows? Three, four, five. She liked to knock me around. She had me because he got the bright idea to breed their own moneymaker. I was less than a dog to her, and the reality of me was more than she’d bargained for. She wanted to sell me, but he wouldn’t. The investment wasn’t ripe enough, not yet. She’d hit me when he wasn’t there, or just shove me in a closet. It’s dark, and there’s nothing to eat. She didn’t even give me a name. I was nothing to her. Less than nothing.”
She took a shaky swallow of wine. “She didn’t know me. When we were face-to-face again, and she looked right at me. She didn’t know me.”
“Did that hurt you?”
“No. I don’t know. I couldn’t think. I just know that for a minute I was nothing again. Like they—she—took everything from me. Roarke, my badge, my life, myself. For a minute it was just gone because she was there. I can’t be nothing again.”
“You could never be nothing.” Roarke spoke in a voice of barely controlled rage. “You’re what you made yourself against the impossible. Even when you were helpless they couldn’t destroy what you are. You’re a miracle. You’re my miracle, and you’ll never be anything else.”
“They’re in me.”
“And what’s in me? You know. You know how I chose to beat it back, and still you’re mine. Of all the choices you could have made, you chose to protect. To stand for the victim. Even her. Now, even her.”
“I saw what she was, in that hospital bed, where I put her. Hurt and bruised and knocked around.”
“The way you’d been,” Mira prompted.
“The way I’d been. And I felt . . . maybe contempt or disgust, studying her like a bug, hoping I’d been wrong, that she wasn’t the one. But I knew she was, and what she was.”
“What was she?”
“Selfish is too easy a word. Selfish and vicious and sly, and still I don’t know how or why.
“So much blood,” Eve said quietly. “At the end, so much blood, and I thought, what’s in it? What’s in the blood, hers, mine? Our eyes are the same.”
“No.” Roarke spoke with absolute certainty. “You’re wrong.”
“She changed the color, but—”
“No,” he repeated, looking into Eve’s troubled eyes. “Who knows yours—and all their moods—better than I? Do you think I haven’t studied those ID shots?”
He remembered what his aunt had said to him on their first meeting, and gave it to Eve, in his own words. “Color changes on a whim. The shape of things counts for more. Your eyes are yours, Eve. The color, the shape, and more what’s behind them. You got none of it from her.”
“I don’t know why that’s important, except I don’t want to look in the mirror and see her. I don’t want you to ever look at me and see—”
“Never.”
“It’s stupid to pick at it,” Eve said wearily. “I know, I do know I’m not like her. Melinda and the kid, they were just means to an end to her. Not human, not important. Her next hit, that was important. Fucking with the cops, that was important. Getting back to McQueen, that was the most important. Weak spot. A certain kind of man, that’s a weak spot, makes her do what’s unnatural to her. Have a child, run errands, fix a meal. Because he makes her feel like the drug makes her feel. She lives a lie, but that’s second nature. Like using and exploiting. She stole another woman’s child knowing what he’d do to her. She left me with my father and she had to know what he was, what he’d do. He’d already started doing it. But she left me with him.”
“As she left Darlie with McQueen,” Mira added.
“Yeah. I knew what she was, and I felt nothing but that contempt. Then I felt sick, then cold. Then I had to step out of it. Had to, because if we didn’t find them, find Melinda and Darlie, without her help, I’d have to work her again. Go back, knowing who and what she was and work her again. But she went to him. Killed a cop without a second thought to get to him. And when I walked into that place, his place, and saw her on the floor, the blood, the death, I felt . . .”
“What?” Mira asked her. “What did you feel?”
“Relief!” It burst out of her. “Relief. She didn’t know me, and now she never would. God, the thought that she might realize . . . I wouldn’t ever have to think of her somewhere in the world. Wouldn’t have to think someday, somehow, she might remember me, might put it together, might know. Use that against me, against Roarke, against everyone I care about. She was dead, and I was relieved.”
In the silence, she pressed a hand to her mouth, struggling to hold back sobs.
“You didn’t say you felt joy,” Roarke said quietly.
She stared at him, eyes wet, shoulders trembling. “What?”
“You didn’t feel joy.”
“No! God. He’d slit her throat like a pig for slaughter. Whatever she was, he had no right to take her life.”
“And that’s who you are, Lieutenant.”
“I . . .” She swiped at tears, looked at Mira.
“It’s an exceptional thing to have someone in your life who knows and understands you so well. Who loves who you are. A very exceptional thing. He asks the question, as I was about to do, already knowing the answer. You felt relief because a threat to everything you are, everything you have, and what you love ended. It ended in blood so you’re struggling to treat her like another victim. She’s not.”
“She was murdered.”
“And McQueen should pay for it. You need to have a part in that not because of the connection, but because she was murdered. She was murdered here, in Dallas, by a man you see as very like your father. You want to walk away from it, and you can’t. Relief won’t stop you from seeking justice for her. That conflict causes you stress, unhappiness, self-doubt. I hope by admitting what you felt, what you feel, some of that will ease.”
“I would’ve put her away, built the case to put her away. I thought there’d be some justice. Locking her up, the way she’d done to me.”
“She chose the monster, again.”
“She thought he was still alive. Richard Troy. I brought him up, testing, I guess. She thought he was still alive. I let her think he’d given us information on her.”
“Well played,” Roarke commented, then lifted his eyebrows at her frown. “Sorry, was that cold? Am I supposed to feel otherwise?”
“No.” Eve looked down at her wine. “No.”
“I wish she were alive, that’s the God’s shining truth. So I could imagine her in a cage for the decades to come. But we live with disappointment.”
“You hate her. I can’t.”
“I’ve enough for both of us.”
“I feel disgust, and—God, I wish I had the words. I feel a little shame, and there’s no point getting pissed off because I feel what I feel. I’d rather feel hate. If she’d lived, I might’ve gotten there. So maybe I feel a little cheated as well as relieved. I don’t know what that says.”
“In my professional opinion?” Mira crossed her fine legs. “It says you have a very healthy reaction to a very unhealthy situation. The two of you have been scraped raw by this, yet here you are. With your cat.”