Charley and Luke would have found a way to intervene before Mattingly managed to snatch either woman. But still, the potential victims had no idea how close they’d been to a monster.
Let it stay that way, Charlotte thinks, forever.
Feeling the first easing of tension she’s experienced in three days, Charlotte settles into her seat and pretends to watch the film.
It’s a halfway decent flick. She just wishes she didn’t have to watch it with a serial killer.
Again.
Luke Prescott’s only heard the term phantom pain applied to missing limbs, not scars that have recently healed. But there aren’t better words to describe the latticework of fiery pinpricks that ignite down the length of his back whenever he’s under stress. They follow the patterns of the old burn marks from the box spring he was tied to almost six months ago now, a box spring heated by flames his abductors had planned to lower him into face-first.
His abductors are dead, the brief flowering of evil they brought to his hometown stamped out by Charlotte and her wealthy overlord, Cole Graydon. But the pain often returns. It’s not debilitating, but it’s humbling. Mainly because it comes on without warning, announcing his body’s separation from his thoughts and producing a sense of powerlessness he’s come to call, against his will, PTSD.
As he waits outside NorthPark Center, behind the wheel of a matte-black Cadillac Escalade that’s been retrofitted to survive a bomb blast and lined with trackers transmitting everything from its location and speed to its interior temperature and CO2 levels, Luke employs the tactics for curbing his anxiety he’s learned over the past six months.
He makes a mental list of the disfiguring injuries he might have suffered had Charley not saved him when she did. He imagines his face gone Freddy Krueger; his torso coated in mottled flesh. Failing that, he can always imagine the slow, horrifying death he might have endured. But he rarely has to go that far.
Gratitude is the best antidote for self-pity.
Stress can be rechristened as excitement; anxiety rebranded as anticipation.
And what is anticipation really but a form of enthusiasm?
The effort needed to flip those coins from one side to the other is sometimes as simple as a few deep breaths.
Or at least that’s what the Graydon-approved therapist he’s been talking to for half a year now has assured him.
Cole was wise enough to integrate Luke’s therapy into an overall training regimen designed to turn Luke into a one-man fighting force and pivotal asset to Charley’s ground team. If the therapy starts to make Luke feel broken and crazy, he’s almost instantly distracted by a personal training session in hand-to-hand combat or firearms proficiency or a course in drown proofing of the type offered to Navy SEALs. Over the past six months, at various Graydon facilities throughout California, Luke has received training from some of the finest security experts in the world, and the result has, in the opinion of one expert, left him at the threshold of special ops qualifications. To say nothing of the body it’s given him. A body about which Charlotte has said plenty, all of it complimentary.
And therein lies another source of healing gratitude.
Preparing for action while his girlfriend lures a human monster into her trap is exactly what Luke’s wanted since he started training. It doesn’t matter that Cole granted his request out of guilt. (Cole was the one, after all, responsible for the security failures that led to Luke’s abduction.) What matters is that Luke’s finally part of the team. And if the scars along his back are the evidence of what he needed to go through to gain access, then so be it. He’s happy to consider them a brand instead of an injury that’s yet to fully heal.
“Hey, bro,” the voice in his ear says, “how do you get a nun pregnant?”
Luke’s brother, Bailey, isn’t telling his favorite joke to amuse; he’s sending a signal that Cole is up to something at Kansas Command, something he didn’t share with Luke and Charlotte in advance. Jokes, especially the ones so bad they make you cringe, have always been their code, a sign that Bailey’s about to impart secret information in the presence of others. When they were kids, it was the location of a stolen pack of cigarettes they didn’t want their mother to know about. Today, it’s the movements of the mysterious and morally suspect people for which they both work. They’d call them dad jokes, but they never really had