Claimed (2 page)

I approached the waiting limo driver. “I’m Ellie,” I said hesitantly.

He nodded in greeting. “Ms. Samuelson,” he said formally. “Please, follow me.”

Right. I was about to follow some strange guy who weighed two hundred pounds, almost all of it muscle.
I didn’t think so.
“I’m sorry,” I said firmly, not moving an inch. “I need some information first. Who hired you?”

In response, he handed me an envelope. I opened it right there, under the unforgivingly harsh lights of the terminal, surrounded by carefree children that ran among the weary-looking adults, with the hustle and bustle of an airport as background noise. My fingers shook and my heart raced as I pulled out the folded piece of paper.

The note was in Alexander’s writing.

‘I can’t make the past disappear, bright star,’
he had written,
‘but if I could, I would. I can, however make the present easier. I’ve made hotel reservations for you so you have a place to stay while you find more permanent housing. The limo driver will take you there.’

“There’s more papers in the car, ma’am,” the driver said. “I was just instructed to hand this one to you if you had questions.”

It had been a long flight and I hadn’t been able to sleep at all on the plane. I’d killed Dylan less than seventy-two hours ago. Ever since then, I’d spent more time in the air than I had on land. I was exhausted and heart-sore, and I just wanted to rest. I should have made my own way in San Francisco, but I needed to set my burdens down, even if only for a little while. In that moment, Alexander’s consideration was very welcome.

I missed him already. The smile in his eyes, the warmth of his presence. The way I always felt safe with him, even when I shouldn’t have. So I followed the driver he had sent me, trusting in life just a little. I would have to remember that I wasn’t an assassin anymore. I didn’t need to constantly watch my back. I was choosing a different way of life now.

In the back of the limousine, there was a three-inch binder with my name on it. As the car moved through the city streets, my fingers itched to open it and start reading, but I held off. The streets were dark, lit by short bursts of streetlight. It was raining lightly and I focused on the wipers, swiping across the windshield. Back and forth. Back and forth. Oddly hypnotic.

The temptation to close my eyes and doze off was strong, but I was too much a product of my training. Sleeping in a strange car being driven by a strange man would maybe become possible one day, but it wasn’t going to happen today. So I sat on the edge of my seat, feeling oddly incomplete without a weapon in my hand, while the driver took me to the hotel Alexander had mentioned in his note.

When I was safely ensconced in my room, I finally opened the binder and scanned its contents. As I read, I realized that Alexander had been thinking while I had been numb. He had been planning and plotting, throwing his money at problems that I hadn’t even anticipated in order to smooth the path to my return.

It was all there. A fully manufactured life for Ellie Samuelson. I’d been off the grid for six years and details had been invented for all of them. The Ellie Samuelson in front of me had run away from Cleveland to Chicago when she was eighteen. She’d lived in Chicago for four years before uprooting herself once more and moving to Austin, Texas. Now, she had just completed another move, this time to San Francisco.

The binder contained details I hadn’t even started thinking about. There was a passport, a California driver’s license, my social security card and even copies of my tax returns for the last six years. I had no idea how he’d managed to do that.

Flipping through it absently, I noticed my passport had two stamps on it. It seemed like Ellie had taken a spring-break vacation to Jamaica one year, and had travelled to Canada another year. I smiled at that. It seemed that even fake-Ellie had wanted to travel.

Another section revealed that I possessed two bank accounts. One newly opened account in San Francisco and another more secret one in the Cayman Islands. As befitting a woman who had worked odd jobs for the last six years, the former contained the grand total of four hundred and fifty seven dollars and forty-three cents.

The account in the Cayman Islands however contained the even sum of a million dollars.
My agreed-upon price for being Alexander Hamilton’s submissive for three months.
I stared at that piece of paper, my thoughts a confused jumble. The portion of me that cared about contracts and facts protested that it was too much money. Madame Lorraine’s auction house would be entitled to a portion of my auction proceeds and some of that money had been paid up front to Jenny Fullerton’s account. Of course, since Jenny Fullerton had never been real, I didn’t even know if I could access that money.

Another part of me knew that this was what Alexander did. He used his money to make amends. In his own way, this binder, this bank account, these were signs of his guilt about what his father had done to me.

I leaned back against the headboard of the bed and sighed. Guilt wasn’t the emotion I wanted from Alexander, but this binder demonstrated that Alexander wanted to speed my return to whatever passed as a normal life. If he’d had it his way, he would have erased the last six years of my life.

I didn’t want them erased.

The memories would never leave me, but that was okay. Intertwined with the bad, there was also good moments. The first time I beat Lucien in a fight, flipping him over my shoulder and slamming him into the ground. The realization that my body could be trained to be a weapon, not just a vessel for the lusts of cruel men. The unexpected pleasure I’d found when Madame Lorraine’s trainers had tested me and I’d realized that that dominance didn’t have to equate to violence.

Above all, I had memories of Alexander. Memories of drinking wine in a tiny bar in Saint Denis, when he’d been Marc and I’d been Rachel and we’d been two strangers seeking intimacy on a dark night. Images of us threading through a crowded night market in Bangkok, him holding my hand, the two of us laughing and eating street food.

Then, the final conversation. The one that had replayed in an endless loop on the plane, where he’d told me that I deserved to experience a life without the interference of the McAllisters, father and son.

The father deserved to die, but I had fallen in love with the son.

Enough,
I told myself harshly.
Life’s too short for endless regret.

A turn of the page and I was informed I owned a car. Not a sports car, of course. A woman with four hundred dollars in her bank account wouldn’t own anything too nice. My car was a ten-year old Honda Civic, grey in colour, with a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. I saw vehicle inspection reports, titles and California registration information.

I whistled silently. Some of my identity could have been arranged in advance, but anything related to California, he would have only known once I booked my ticket to San Francisco. In the space of hours, while my plane had been in the air, he’d managed to get me a driver’s license and get my car registered and insured. It was hard not to be awed.

I flipped to a different section of the binder and a photo fell out. Sylvia Anliker with a bullet hole in the side of her head, very clearly dead.
Just in case you need closure,
Alexander had written on the back of the image,
justice was served.

I shivered, but I stared at the photo for a long time, imprinting the image on my brain. He had always been scarily observant. I didn’t realize he’d noticed me standing over Dylan’s dead body, burning the scene onto my retina, creating another memory to layer over the remembered days of pain and torture. But Alexander had paid attention.
A frightening amount of attention.

The binder also contained the name of a therapist and the only other note from Alexander.
Dr. Wilson can be trusted
, he’d written.
If you need a therapist, she comes recommended. And you can be open with her.

Open with her.
No doubt that was code for ‘
you can tell her you killed people
.’ I tried speaking those words out aloud in the hotel room. “I killed five people,” I said to the empty space, nestled under a soft silk duvet. “I killed the five men who raped me. I swore to myself that I would get my revenge and I did.”

I hugged my knees to my chest. I tried not to think about Alexander, because that way lay only pain and regret. I fought my urge to fly back to Paris and beg him to never let me go. In San Francisco, I was going to build myself a new life, brick by painful brick.

But I’d left a piece of myself behind in France. In Provence, in the lavender fields behind Alexander’s farmhouse.

***

It was Dr. Wilson who first made me see that I wasn’t really living at all.

After a week in the hotel that Alexander had arranged, I’d found myself a small apartment in the heart of the city. I’d gone to Ikea and bought furniture for my own house for the very first time, but none of it had been bought with an eye to permanence. Some part of me genuinely thought that I was just marking time until one day, I would be reunited with Alexander.

I’d called Dr. Wilson and made an appointment for the same reason. Alexander had given me her number, so Alexander must have wanted for me to call her. If I did everything right, I would be back with him in Paris. That’s what I’d subconsciously believed.

“What if he’s with someone?” Dana Wilson had asked me point-blank, as soon as she’d identified what I was doing. “What then?”

For a few minutes, it had hurt to breathe. The idea of Alexander with another woman was torture to me. “I don’t know,” I’d said finally. My voice had been low. “I guess I’m hoping that won’t happen.”

“Ellie,” Dr. Wilson had said, her voice gentle. “Listen to yourself. Think about what you are doing.”

And I did. I sat on the beach that weekend and I faced the brutally honest truth. I didn’t need to find out who I was for Alexander’s sake. I had to find out for my own.

I’d been so many people; I’d worn so many disguises. In Berlin for the operation that had targeted Pieter Hoffman, I’d been Maria, a half-German, half-French au pair. For the operation that had taken out Ivan Klimov, I’d been Rachel, the American tourist who had booked a cheap apartment over the Internet in an unsafe neighborhood in Paris. In Bangkok, I’d been Jenny, the trained submissive who had participated in a slave auction to save her dying sister.

What I hadn’t been for a very long time was Ellie Samuelson. It was finally time to embrace her, in a way I could never do while Dylan McAllister was still alive.

I couldn’t live a half-life. I had to fully commit to San Francisco. To my life in this city and to a life without Alexander.

That hadn’t been an easy month. There had been more tears during that time than any other period in my life. But I’d always been a survivor.

I started climbing.

Eighteen months later…

Alexander:

It was supposed to have been a routine trip to Hanoi. I hadn’t been back for a year and a half, but I’d finally resolved to return and deal with the compound. I didn’t need the property and I didn’t want it. Slowly, I’d been divesting myself of all the houses Dylan had owned. Venezuela and Georgia had been the easiest. I had memories of those places, but they weren’t etched with Ellie’s face.

In Hanoi, I would always see the uncertainty in her eyes when she’d discovered the truth of who I was. It was best to sell the compound and erase those memories.
As if they were that easy to do.

“You are very quiet, Mr. Hamilton,” I heard a woman’s voice say. Katrina Tsalev, the newest member of my security team.

“Am I?” I asked quizzically. I didn’t explain the reasons behind my disquiet. She didn’t need to know the details of my life.

“You are,” a cheerful male voice agreed. Luke Wyatt, who had been a part of my team for many years, who had been on the Durov mission, who had guarded the warehouse that Sylvia had died in and who had been at my side through so many other adventures. “I have a solution.” His madcap eyes glinted in amusement.

“Uh-oh.” This was Jean-Luc, my second in command, always at my side. The one person who above almost everyone, I trusted with my life. Except Ellie. She’d come first from the day I’d met her and now she was gone, in faraway San Francisco. I hoped she was living a good life. “Whenever you come up with an idea, Luke, we always fear for our lives.”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” he protested. He held up a dog-eared copy of a guide book. “Hanoi’s supposed to have these beer bars, have you heard of them? You sit on a street corner and drink the cheapest beer in the world.”

I raised an amused eyebrow. Luke could always lighten the mood. “Do you not have enough money for beer, Luke? Are you angling for a raise?” I asked dryly.

He blushed. “No, boss,” he quickly clarified. “Looking for cheap beer is a rite of passage.” He grinned. “Takes me back to my college days, when the women got progressively better looking as the night went on…”

Jean-Luc choked back a laugh. “That’s because you’d been drinking, you fool,” he snorted. “Beer goggles always make them look better. But sure, I’m always game for
bia hoi.
Alexander, Pavel, Katrina, you guys coming?”

Pavel, who was the quietest one of the bunch, nodded his head. “Why not?” he asked.

Katrina looked doubtful. She’d yet to take part in that easy camaraderie that most of my team shared. I resolved to ask Jean-Luc how she was settling down. Her journey had been difficult, but she was among friends now. It was permissible to let down her guard.

“I’m in,” I said. Left alone, I would just sit in my hotel room and brood. In this city, my father had died at the hands of the woman I loved, because he had kidnapped her and raped her and she had sought her revenge. Our worlds had intersected in convoluted, bewildering ways and every time I thought about the past, my heart ached. The clean taste of Hanoi’s local beer would be a welcome respite from my thoughts. I looked at Katrina. “In or out?”

Her brows furrowed, then she too shrugged. “Like Pavel said, why not?” she asked.

***

Jean-Luc led the way to an intersection in the old town that he swore served the best snacks.
Bia hoi
was a Hanoi obsession and it seemed that this particular place had earned quite a reputation. The place was already crowded with locals indulging in an after-work drink. I took my seat in one of the knee-high plastic chairs that dotted the intersection, and the other four followed. A smiling young woman was instantly at our side, holding a tray filled with the light fresh brew. At our nods, she set a glass down in front of each of us and added a bowl of crunchy peanuts.

“You pay extra for the food,” Luke read from his guidebook. “Wait, it says here that each glass of beer is forty cents. That can’t be right, can it?”

“Forty-five in this place,” Jean-Luc took a long sip, almost emptying the contents of his glass in one gulp. “And still dirt cheap. And Luke, if the peanuts are too expensive for you, it can be my treat.” His voice was sarcastic and I grinned.

Pavel drained the contents of his glass. Luke reached in front of me for the peanuts. Katrina opened her mouth to say something when I heard a pop, followed by the sound of glass shattering. “Down, down,” Jean-Luc yelled. I could see his hand pull his own weapon from its concealed holster under his grey linen jacket.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw blood spread on Luke’s shirt. It grew bigger and bigger, and his eyes began to shut.

It was impossible to ignore the truth. Luke had taken a bullet meant for me. I had an enemy that we had not prepared for. Nobody should have known we were in Hanoi, but yet it appeared that somehow, our movements had been tracked. Our trip was suddenly anything but routine.

I couldn’t worry about any of that right now. I held Luke’s hand as Jean-Luc, Katrina and Pavel returned fire. “Hold on, kid,” I told him.
Please don’t die.

***

“Find out who did this,” I clenched out, hours later. Luke was in the ICU, on a ventilator, his life hanging in the balance. Everything should have ended with Dylan’s death. My quest, my atonement, it should have all been over. Selling the property was just a final nail in the coffin. I was finally ready to go out and seek a normal life, one where I woke up in the morning and headed to the neighborhood
boulangerie
, and brought back croissants for the woman I loved. One with flaming red hair and a husky voice, a half-smile and green eyes that had sparkled with amusement and turned hazy with lust. Though she was probably forever out of reach.

***

Luke had survived, but three weeks later, when a name was revealed, I found out that Ellie wasn’t out of reach, not anymore. Because the name we’d uncovered was one that she was linked to.
Lucien.

“The same name came up when we probed at Ellie’s cover story,” Jean-Luc said, repeating the obvious.

“I know.” I was reeling, my mind filled with fear for Ellie.
What was she mixed up in and was she okay?

“Do you think she’s involved in this attempt on your life?”

“No, of course not,” I said automatically. The words had emerged instinctively, but as I said them aloud, my mind agreed with the conclusion my heart had drawn. Ellie had had many opportunities to kill me when she’d been my submissive in Paris. She could have killed me any of the nights we lay asleep in each other’s arms. The day I’d handed her a gun so she could shoot Dylan, she had a weapon in her hands and spare bullets in the magazine. But she hadn’t ever been interested in ensuring my death; I had never been her target.
She had only wanted to avenge her past.
“Who is this Lucien? How is it possible we don’t know anything about him?”

Jean-Luc looked frustrated. “I don’t know,” he said. His fingers were clenched into fists at his side. “Alexander,” he started. His tone was serious. “Until we find out more, everyone close to you is at risk.”

I knew that. In Paris, Sasha and her little boy Andrei were potentially in danger. In London, Anton would need to be warned, though he was more than capable of taking care of himself. And above all, I feared for Ellie. “If she knows who Lucien is…” my voice trailed off, my mind shirking from voicing the next words. Ellie’s life was at risk.

I had tried to forget her. I had genuinely thought she’d be better off without me, without a constant, ever-present reminder of what my father had done to her. My heart could not tolerate her being hurt in the slightest of ways.

But her absence had caused a wound that had refused to heal with the passing of time. My heart pounded in my chest. For a year and a half, I’d let her go, but I couldn’t stand back and leave her unprotected. That would
never
be an option. She was too precious to me.

“She needs to be safe,” I said to Jean-Luc. My voice didn’t reveal any of the uncertainty I felt, any of the panic that was gripping my heart. “Bring her in.”