Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (19 page)

Cass and Jordan arrived at their apartment building, the cab dropping them at the side entrance. They carried their backpacks with the evidence against Hans Kluen stuffed inside Jordan’s. At this bedraggling hour, they both needed sleep and lots of it.

But the moment she and Jordan stepped from the elevator and started for their separate apartments, Cass suddenly stopped. Lying on the floor just a few feet from her door was an elaborate sketch she’d drawn of the
Wicked
time dragon. She’d kept it in an open portfolio of set designs next to the drawing table in her bedroom. There was no reason it should be lying here on the floor unless someone had dropped it on their way out of her apartment. She looked fearfully at Jordan, who was staring down at the sketch.

“It’s yours, right?”

“Yes.”

He spun toward her door and advanced cautiously. Over his shoulder, he said, “Hide in the alcove at the end of the hall and wait for me.”

She not only refused but was fast on his heels, wishing she had her handgun with her.

Seconds later, Jordan pushed open the breached door and they both stopped to listen. Nothing. But Cass could already see the damage, the contents of her home slung about as if monstrous hands had shaken the apartment loose from the building.

Jordan gripped her arm and whispered firmly. “Stay here. I mean it, Cass.”

Against her confrontational instincts, she remained in the doorway as Jordan eased into the room. It didn’t take long for him to search the whole apartment. Afterward, he motioned her inside.

She stood at the epicenter of the quake, surrounded by overturned furniture and ransacked cabinets and drawers, their contents spilled and raked. Even the paintings and tapestries had been yanked from the walls and pawed over.

Rachel
. Cass wrenched herself from the ruins and spun toward the old oak desk. Its drawers were upside down on the floor, but the framed image of a young girl with rich brown hair sat upright, smiling back at Cass. An indestructible taunt. Would Cass ever be free of it? Would she ever take down the picture she wore like a hair shirt?

Jordan looked past her at the photo on the desk. “Cass, there’s enough hurt for today. Let’s deal with what’s here.” He went to the windows and closed all the curtains.

She dropped her backpack on the sofa and wandered about her violated home, unable to summon words. She remembered something she’d read about the
Titanic
survivors taken on board one of the rescue boats. A witness had commented on how still and quiet they were, huddled inside warm blankets, their eyes glazed. They were beyond words, beyond anything that might convey what they’d just endured. Cass understood that.

But Jordan urged her on. “We can’t stay here, Cass. They might come back, unless they’ve already hit my apartment, too.”

But Cass was already moving up the steps to her bedroom. It was the sight of her Serengeti oasis that brought the first cry from her. Only the stars on the ceiling remained intact. Her portfolio files with all her designs were gone.

“It’s them, Cass,” Jordan called from below. “We both know that. That woman knows where I live, and it was my license plate they traced to this building. She was even casing us that day in the rain.” Cass moved to the railing and looked down at him. “But this isn’t about my visit to them that night,” he continued. “These people were looking for something.”
He
whirled around to survey the mess. “And what is it we have that they could possibly want?” he prompted.

Cass leaned against the railing. “What we took from Hans’s study. But how could they know?”

“Unless he told them,” Jordan said flatly. “Would he do that?”

“No.” Though she’d never loved Hans or regarded him as more than the kindly man who was devoted to her mother, Cass knew he cared deeply for her, too. “No, he would never do anything to harm me. There has to be another reason for this. As far as I know, Hans hasn’t been to the beach house in weeks. He couldn’t know we were there.” She looked at Jordan, his chin propped on a fist, deep in thought. “I think we did exactly what Hans warned me about that day at the restaurant.” Jordan looked back up at her. “He said we shouldn’t go knocking on strange doors because we couldn’t know who might answer, or what they might be in the middle of.”

Cass stepped quickly down the stairs. “Jordan, I think we just surprised these people in the middle of something. Made them suspicious that we knew something—even before we did! So they searched us out.” Cass sighed. “Hans was right. We did this to ourselves.”

“And now they’ll think Hans betrayed them to us,” Jordan reasoned.

Cass’s head jerked up.
What have I done? Again. What harm will come to him because of me?

Betrayal carried a stench. Like ammonia, it took the breath away and singed the inside of the throat. Cass knew its stinging condemnation. And then it came—a face swimming up from the deep, its convicting eyes, its gurgling voice.
Adam was the one I loved. And you took him from me
. Then the face sank slowly away. Cass felt a cold weight press against her chest, as if this time she had followed the face to its airless crypt. But Jordan’s insistent voice pulled her back.

“Cass, we have to get out of here. Pack up whatever you need for a few days. I’m going to check my apartment.”

“Wait,” she told him, then went quickly to the third step of the staircase she’d built herself. She tugged lightly on the tread, which looked like crudely laid flagstones, and raised it like a lid on a box—which it was. She reached into the hidden compartment beneath and brought out her small
revolver
. “Take this,” she urged, carefully handing off the gun to him. “It’s loaded.”

He took the handgun, then looked back at her with mournful eyes. “I’m sorry I ever teased you about carrying one of these. I’m sorry you ever needed one.”

She looked down at the weapon in his hand, now pointed at the floor. “When I moved out of my parents’ home and started working at the theaters, I’d have to come home alone at all hours,” she explained. “My father got me into the gun-permit program, bought this handgun for me, took me to the range, and made me learn how to use it safely. Oddly enough, it was one of the most caring things he ever did for me.”

“I think he cared more than you want to remember.”

“We don’t have time to talk about that.”

“So we won’t. But you hold on to this.” He handed the gun back to her and left.

Cass stood like a stone pillar in the wake of him. In the midst of the ruin, there was Jordan. Something strangely warm took hold of her. It seeped through her with surprising speed, thawing the frozen places and thrusting up something foreign through the icy crust. Hope. Just a green tendril of it, but it was enough.

In her bedroom, she shoved clothes, a warm hat and gloves, her old sneakers, and toiletries into a small duffle bag. Everything else she needed was already in her backpack—her phone and the one Evgeny had given them to use, an iPad, cash, credit cards, and IDs. She’d just slung both bags over her shoulders and started down the steps when she heard Jordan calling to her and banging loudly on her door.

When she opened it, he nearly dragged her into the hallway and furiously worked her keys to lock the door again, perhaps in vain. “They’re coming!” he cried. He grabbed her hand, and they bolted toward the stairs at the end of the hall.

Cass glanced back at the elevator doors and saw the up arrow flash red. “How do you know it’s them?”

As he flung open the door to the stairway, Jordan replied just above a whisper. “I just watched two men cross the street and enter the building.
They
left two others hanging back in front of the bakery—a man and a woman.
That
woman!”

They left through the rear of the building, using Cass’s service-door keys to relock it, and fled down an alley with their bags and backpacks, like refugees running for the last flight out. A few blocks away, they finally stopped to catch their breath. Leaning against the back wall of a restaurant, they could hear the clatter of pans in the kitchen and its crew bickering in a foreign tongue. Gulping the cold air, Cass looked regretfully at Jordan. “I’m so sorry I got you into this.”

He shrugged. “It beats selling shoes.” He looked warily around them. “Now let’s get moving before we freeze to this wall.”

“But where?” She thought a minute. “We can’t get to our cars. They’ll be watching the garage. How about Myrna and Reg’s place?” She thought better of it. “No, we can’t invite trouble on them. Maybe a hotel.”

Jordan suggested, “Maybe somewhere between the Jimmy Choo boots and the satin pumps.”

She knew what he meant. “No, Jordan. They’ve got to know everything about us by now, including where you work. We’ve got to—”

The phone in her backpack rang, Evgeny’s phone. She answered quickly, then mouthed
Liesl
. Jordan leaned in close enough to hear.

“Are you home yet?” Liesl asked.

Cass could hear road sounds in the background. “We’re in New York,” she answered, “but not home.” Cass told her about the break-in and their escape from the building.

“So you’re standing in an alley with no place to go?” Liesl asked with alarm. But then the voice grew calm and firm. “Cass, this is what I want you and Jordan to do. Go straight to West Park Christian Church near Central Park. I’ll text the address to you. Go to the small door on the right side of the church and knock. The man who’ll let you in is Rev. Francis Scovall.” She paused. “He was the one who saved me from … the man who saved me today. Ludicrous, isn’t it?”

Cass reeled.
Ludicrous? No word can describe this
.

As if hearing her thoughts, Liesl said, “I’ll tell you that story another time. But right now, you get to the church and stay there. Rev. Scovall is
already
expecting the two of us. He’ll gladly take in two more, I’m certain of it.”

“What do you mean ‘take in’?”

“Into the apartment where he lives. It’s in the back of the church.”

“You mean—”

“I mean you get away from there right now. We’ll join you in a couple of hours.”

Moments later, with the text bearing the church’s address in hand, Cass and Jordan hailed a cab and took off even deeper into the unknown.

“So here we are,” Evgeny said, “the assassin and his former prey riding along together as if there were no hard feelings.” He eyed her slyly. “But we know better, don’t we?”

In the twelve hours they’d been on the road together, Liesl had tried to draw this man from behind his defenses, much like the ones she’d drawn around her own damaged self. It was true, wasn’t it? The harder the shell, the weaker the core. The deaths of so many she’d loved and the wounds they’d borne inside her had made her seal herself off from a persistently threatening world. Until Cade had removed the need for those defenses.

But what about this man beside her? He’d murdered Schell Devoe in her presence and then later come after her. He was a man shielded by weaponry and blind devotion to those whose orders he’d never questioned. Until now. What hid within his shell?

Finally, she answered him. “Hard feelings? For the man who came to save me? No. For the man who once tried to kill me? I honestly don’t know.” She eyed him coolly. “I do know that hard feelings are like the cancer that devoured my mother. God showed me that.”

Evgeny scowled at her. “No talk of God. That’s for children and old women, for those who haven’t seen what I have seen.” He shook his head. “There is no God.”

Chapter 22

I
t was almost midnight Saturday when Cass and Jordan got their first look at West Park Christian Church, a few blocks off Central Park. After the taxi pulled away, they remained on the sidewalk, bags at their feet, looking up at the old brick church and its bell tower. Their faces were so weary and forlorn that if there’d been any passersby, they might have thought the pair homeless and looking for help. Indeed, they were.

“When’s the last time you were in church?” Jordan asked, gazing up at the tower with its arched openings on top.

“My father’s funeral,” she said. “The service was long and tedious with lots of holy-sounding words that didn’t fit the cheating life of Nicholas Alexander Rodino.” She laughed derisively. “My father did use God’s name a lot, though. Every time he cursed me and Mom.” She looked up at Jordan. “What about you?”