A Beautiful Lie (Unlocked #1) Read online

  The worst part about my sessions with Tomas was the end. Inevitably, after five or six fifteen-minute intervals, he would end up irritated about something or other that was wrong with the painting.

  “Enough for now,” he told me when I came in after the fourth time. “I’ll see you back there. I need to work on this.” His tortured eyes barely noticed me. A perfectionist, his moods became worse as a project neared completion. I only seemed to upset him when something was wrong with the art. Over my months with him and Eden, I’d learned to know when to go.

  “There’s an envelope for you downstairs on the table,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. He was hunched over the canvas, dismissing me.

  It wasn’t uncommon for him to not be able to stand the sight of me for days after a session. Even a glimpse of my face in the kitchen would send him into a rage. Eden and I had worked out a sophisticated system of eye signals she would use to communicate whether or not I should make myself scarce.

  “Not many girls get to be the muse of a famous artist,” she’d once pointed out. “You should feel honored.” I tried to recall those words whenever I felt the pain of abandonment. That evening, as I thumbed through the envelope counting the money, they felt harder to grasp.

  As I neared the loft, ready to dive into the bed Tomas graciously provided as a part of my contract, a tall figure leaned against the front of the building. “Nina Parker,” the man called out.

  Being called by my legal name was jarring. Nobody called me Nina anymore. I barely even remembered what it felt like to wear that name. Drawing closer, I came face to face with a person who looked oddly familiar. I couldn’t place where I had seen his face before, but I recognized the dark eyes and wavy brown hair.

  “What?” I asked, annoyed at the delay between the front door and my bed. It was nearly three in the morning and the dark streets still belonged to the night of winter.

  He walked toward me, a strange, wild look in his eyes. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid, at least not immediately. But instead of saying anything, the stranger only stared at me.

  “Do I know you?” I asked, my annoyance peaking. Those expressive brown eyes, and that tousled hair. The trimmed goatee. Then I remembered. “You were at the show,” I concluded, reaching into my purse to clutch the bottle of pepper spray that I kept easily accessible at all times.

  I knew exactly who he was. He’d been the prior evening’s stage fuck. It was something I did to really get into character. I picked out the best-looking guy in the audience and performed only for him.

  At that moment, I became nervous. This had happened once before, when one of my victims got too excited. He managed to track me down and find out where I lived. I had seen this particular fan the moment I faced the audience. Alone at the bar, drinking, his eyes boring into me. The fact that he’d been staring at me hadn’t been unusual. I was used to that.

  “Look.” I tried to stop him. “You can’t just go around stalking someone because you saw them do a show tha—”

  “The orphaned Nina Parker,” he said.

  His statement made me freeze, dropping the key I’d had ready to open the front door. Nobody in this city knew about my past, that I was adopted, hell, that I even had a family.

  “Excuse me? Who are you?”

  He leaned against the railing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the door. If he wanted to attack me, I felt he would have already done so. The street was empty, the morning was still dark, and I was being an idiot who wouldn’t go inside.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a very long time,” he stated, folding his arms. He averted his gaze downward, a pained look washing over him. I backed away from my door, too intrigued by this mysterious man who knew so much about me.

  “What do you want?” I was almost afraid to ask the question but it came automatically.

  “I need to talk to you. Where the hell have you been?” he asked, like he had a right to know. Like I was his business or something.

  My face grew hot with the truth. Suddenly, I became aware of the cold morning air nestled between my naked body and my trench coat.

  “That’s really none of your fucking business.” The gall of this guy, to stalk me in the middle of the night then accuse me of not showing up on time.

  He ascended the stairs, eyes full of an intensity so pure, with such ferocity, that I backed against the front door.

  “Do you know what happens to women in the dark in this city?” His breath was hot on me in the night air, a mixture of mint and whiskey. He spoke to me like I was a child who had stayed out past my curfew.

  Even in the dark, I could see how serious he was. Whoever this guy was, he didn’t resemble your run-of-the-mill attacker. His general good looks and apparent concern for me didn’t exactly set off alarm bells.

  Still, I reached to pull the pepper spray out, but his hand restrained mine.

  “Come with me somewhere to talk.” It was not a question, it was an instruction. “I have answers to the questions you’ve had your entire life.”

  The urgency in his voice startled me. “Now? You do realize it’s three in the morning, right?”

  “Nina, I’ve been waiting here since one a.m. I figured you would be home shortly after your show.”

  He said my name with a weighted familiarity, like we were the oldest of friends. I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t. If anything, I was more curious. But I was growing impatient with his unwillingness to tell me what he wanted. My legs ached from walking the city in high heels, in winter no less, and I was freezing, with the absence of clothes beneath my trench coat. Plus, Tomas could show up at any moment. The last thing I wanted was him to find me standing outside, speaking to a strange man in the middle of the night.

  “How do you know me?” I asked.

  “I want to explain all of that you. But this is not the place.” He glanced up at the building. A floor above us, my warm bed waited for me.

  “And this is not the time,” I said, retrieving the key and inserting it into the door. But he caught the door before I could disappear inside.

  “Tomorrow afternoon then. One o’clock at Ivan’s in the East Village.”

  He didn’t wait for my reply. Instead, he retreated down the stairs to a waiting car.

  “Wait,” I called out.

  He turned.

  “What’s your name?”

  He gave me a smile, maybe realizing that he had me in his clutches.

  “I guess you’ll just have to show up to find out.”

  3

  Luke

  “You want me to convince her to work with us? She’ll never agree to it.”

  Alicia Doyle sat across the conference table, a determined look across her face. She’d issued the challenge the moment I walked into headquarters the following morning, a sort of new year’s gift. Most normal places of employment gave their employees New Year’s Day off. But working for Watchtower had proved to be anything but normal since I’d arrived.

  Frustrated, I looked away and focused my gaze on a framed article from the Times that had recently been mounted on the wall.

  Watchtower Helped Locate 1,239 Missing Persons in NYC Last Year

  “Well, did you keep a door open?” she asked.

  “I’m meeting her for lunch, but I wouldn’t exactly call her cooperative,” I replied. Women rarely challenged me the way that Nina Parker had the previous night. On her doorstep, I’d tried all the old tricks to get her to soften to me – flashing the smile, exuding confidence, and taking control of the situation – but she’d resisted until the last second.

  “It’s a start. Plus, from what you’ve told me she doesn’t have a lot going on right now.”

  She was right. Where I found Nina had bothered the shit out of me. How on earth was a new burlesque dancer living in one of the nicest buildings in Brooklyn?

  Alicia crossed her arms, leaning toward me. “This is bigger than finding Adam’s long-lost family,” she challenged. “The
Board will be more likely to approve the investigation into Blake if we have an insider, someone who can get close to him.” She crossed her arms and considered me. “You do this right, everything changes.”

  I winced at the reminder of my past digressions. The remnants of the previous night’s sin burned in the pit of my stomach. I’d done so much damage to everything in my path over the years that now I was in no position to refuse the job. As much as Nina Parker seemed like a challenge that I shouldn’t get involved with, I had no other option. I owed it to Adam to see this thing through.

  “Hey, you okay?” Alicia asked, considering me with concern. “If this is too much for you, just say so.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, not wanting to dwell on the reality that I was, in fact, far from okay. “You know Adam would kill us if he knew we were trying to do this, right?” I diverted us back to the topic at hand. Adam’s plan had only involved finding Nina. He’d never have signed off on her getting involved with the organization, let alone working against her own father, Patrick Blake.

  “This isn’t your call, Luke. Adam’s not here and we have a serious lead that we need to follow up on. Now are you with me, or no?” She pursed her lips and regarded me questioningly.

  “Fine, I’ll see what I can do,” I agreed. The first step was to figure out just how desperate Adam’s little sister was, and give her hope for something bigger.

  “Get a team together. The Board wants a write-up by the end of the week.” My boss stood up to leave. “Make sure it’s good.”

  “Shit,” I muttered to the empty room when she was gone.

  Carter appeared in the doorway. “That bad, huh?”

  I didn’t have to ask to know that he was just returning to the office after an entire night out in the city. The operations team worked around the clock in shifts, following up on possible sightings of missing people, or monitoring the activity of suspected kidnappers. New York City provided endless work for them.

  “What are you guys working on right now?” I asked him.

  “A few new missing persons cases, a possible kidnapping, a—”

  “I need you for a new case,” I interrupted him. “Alicia just tasked me with getting together an investigative team.”

  “I can assign Steve to you,” he responded, without missing a beat.

  “No, I need you.”

  I hoped flattery would get me places with him. Carter had been a friend since my first day at Watchtower. Though we’d never formally worked together, he didn’t avoid me the way the rest of the employees did. And he was the best at the job.

  He hesitated, caught off guard that I would demand he work with me. “Steve’s great at what he does.”

  “I don’t need great, I need the best.”

  Carter stared me down, silently communicating that I better not fuck him over if he agreed to help me out. “Let me see if I can move some things around. I’ll let you know.”

  No, it wasn’t the resounding agreement that I’d have liked in that moment. But it was movement in the right direction. And ever since my encounter with Nina Parker the previous night, that was all I cared about.

  “You okay?” The entire subway ride to Ivan’s, Alicia’s question replayed endlessly in my mind. I ruminated on what a failure I’d turned out to be. In high school, I’d promised myself that I’d take the horrors I experienced as a kid and turn them into something positive. I’d played my cards right and gotten recruited by the FBI right out of college. And for a long time, I did quality work that had a positive impact on the lives of so many children. Until I was unable to keep it together anymore.

  “Hey man, you okay?” My partner, Agent Logan Klein, peeked into the dark back room at our field office on Chicago’s south side. By then, I’d been up for forty-eight hours straight, following up on every lead I’d gotten on a trafficking operation that spanned from northern Illinois into southeastern Wisconsin.

  “Mmmhm.” My heart raced as my laser focus went over the details on the screen of my laptop once again. So far, I’d identified six motels along Highway 41where suspected criminal activity had taken place. Where perverts had forced minors to grow up too fast just to make a quick buck.

  “Luke, this has to stop.” Logan approached me and dropped a small plastic bag of white powder onto my desk. “This is the second time in a month I’ve found it in the car. Not to mention all of the times before.”

  He’d been a friend keeping my vice a secret the first time around, and I’d been careless letting it happen again. In my defense, the drugs kept me sharp and gave me the energy to keep going. Time was everything with these cases and if I could save one kid from being violated, I’d snort a mountain of coke to make sure I was there to stop it.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, continuing to review the case file. “Won’t happen again.”

  Logan threw his hands in the air. “It can’t happen at all, Luke. We work for the goddamn FBI. Look at you, you haven’t slept. When was the last time you ate? You’re becoming a liability and everyone around here is noticing.”

  “A liability? I’m the only one doing any fucking work around here!” I burst out of my chair, shouting in his face. “Don’t you see all of the terrible shit happening out there? And where are you? Where is everyone else? I’m the only one with a goddamn care!”

  My partner backed away from me, hands in the air. “I’m not doing this anymore, man.”

  The moment he exited the building, I knew my days with the FBI were numbered.

  The train lurched to a stop at First Avenue, bringing me back to the day’s goal. As I left the station, I recited silent prayers that she would show up at all. Without a doubt, Nina Parker was the kind of girl who would make any excuse to flee. My future professional success was dependent on her agreeing to work with me.

  I got the same feeling that I always did when I crossed the threshold into the East Village. It was home and a complete stranger at the same time. Even though I only lived a few miles from there, it felt like a different world. But if I was going to get Nina to agree to work with me, Ivan’s was the perfect place to do it.

  People knew me there. Hell, Ivan was my oldest friend. It was the place I went as a kid when my mother was off indulging in the cocaine-fueled nineteen-eighties era of New York City, or as an escape when she brought home one boyfriend or another. Ivan’s was open twenty-four hours, and as a kid, he let me stay as long as I liked. He was more than a friend though. Ivan was the closest thing to a father I’d ever had. He gave me advice on asking out the first girl that I ever had a crush on, and offered me my first job as a line cook.

  He knew I was rough around the edges, or trouble, as others called me. But he didn’t care. Without a family of his own, he took me in like a son, and the relationship was constant.

  “Luke!” He beamed when I walked through the door at twelve fifty-eight. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nina sitting in one of the booths, bad attitude written all over her beautiful face. It was important for her to see me in a positive light. I needed to gain her trust if any of this was going to work.

  “Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year, Ivan.” I pulled out a small wrapped box and handed it to him. Like a jackass, I hadn’t been to see him in weeks.

  “What is this? Why you always gotta go and do this kind of stuff?” The old man, burdened by my generosity, sighed.

  “Why did you have to take in a stray like me and give me a job when I didn’t deserve one?” I smiled back, patting him on the shoulder. Each time I saw him, his hair looked whiter, and his face more tired. And each time a new sense of urgency filled me.

  “Oh, enough.” He waved a hand at me. “The usual?” he asked, before walking toward a waiting customer at the counter.

  “I’m meeting someone today, actually. We’ll take some menus.”

  She looked different in the daylight. Her fresh face made her look like the young woman she really was. Every feature, from the long flowing blonde hair, to the pouted lips, to
the black trench coat she wore, accentuated her femininity. Had she not been Adam’s little sister, I might have even done a double take when passing her in the street. In fact, I was sure of it. But sitting in the booth that day she was just Nina, only twenty-three and already more cynical than most. I had my work cut out for me.

  “I’m here,” she greeted me, a tone of boredom in her voice.

  “Happy New Year, Nina Parker.” I kept my voice low and unassuming, taking the seat across from her.

  Instead of acknowledging my presence, she crossed her arms and stared out at the pedestrians walking up and down Avenue A. “You have thirty seconds to explain what this is all about, or I’m out of here. I don’t play games.”

  She was not joking around. Without her making any sort of revelation, it was plain to see that the world had fucked with her enough that she’d have no problem being the one to leave.

  “My name is Luke,” I said. The situation was delicate and the pressure of what this conversation meant for me was bubbling in my throat. Don’t say too little, don’t say too much.

  “And who are you?” she demanded.

  While Ivan’s was the ideal place to get her to trust me, it was not the ideal place to have life-altering conversations. Maybe it had something to do with the lingering scent of burnt coffee or the same group of old men who permanently occupied the booth closest to the kitchen.

  “Hey Luke.” Doreen, one of the waitresses, leaned down to peck me on the cheek. Just like Ivan, she’d been around forever.

  “Hey, Dor. This is my friend Nina Parker.” I gestured across the table. The old woman’s eyebrows raised and a suspicious, pleased smile spread across her face. If Ivan had been like a stand-in father, Doreen had been like a stand-in mother. Sure, I grew up with a mother, but she’d inevitably end up zoned out in front of the television, talking to herself for days on end, or raving at a club all night. Doreen made pancakes and sandwiches. Even at a young age, I could tell that was a more stable career path than my mother had chosen.