Legacy(91)

“I, um ... don’t remember sending any messages?” I said weakly. “Maybe you misread an email?”

“I know you don’t feel the same,” he said, and his face was just ... THIS close to me. Like inches. “And I’m totally okay with that. I will follow you into the jaws of death, whatever comes, because I believe in you, that you’re the one who can stop this. But I wanted you to know that ...” He started to incline his head, tilting it to the side. My eyes were so wide, I felt like my eyelids were going to break at any second. His were closed, shut tight, and I was pretty sure my jaw was open just as wide as my eyes.

Still he kissed me, because apparently my lips actually WERE closed, and my eyes followed, and for about a second and a half, which was as long as it lasted, it was really, really good. After that he broke off, and I just sat there, eyes still closed, my head back against the soft, leather padding of my chair.

“I just figured I ought to tell you before this all broke loose,” he said, and I opened my eyes to see him taking slow, small steps toward the door. I watched him go without uttering a word, just staring at him shell shocked, as he opened the door and smiled faintly at me. “When it’s all over, we can talk about this, if you want. Or just ... let it be. Up to you.” With that he closed the door, a soft click that sounded like a vault shutting in my mind, a cascade of emotions running over me, too many, too numerous to count.

I sat in that silence for a full minute after he left, just staring at the door, remembering the kiss, before I finally spoke. “He really does taste a little like the ocean,” I mused, and my fingers found my lips and the warmth and memory of the kiss that lingered there long after Scott left.





Chapter 38




Sierra Nealon

Minneapolis, Minnesota

March 18, 1993



She hadn’t felt the baby move yet, which the doctor had told her was unsurprising. She was only eight weeks along, after all, and they didn’t move until long after that. It was a little disconcerting, though, something she felt like she should be feeling, would hope to be feeling, especially now. It would be just a little bit reassuring.

Fires were blazing all around her, and she was catching lungfuls of the smoke, the dark, choking, chemical kind that came from the walls of the Agency’s office building being fully engulfed in flames. Sierra crawled on her hands and knees, trying to keep underneath the flames that swirled on the ceiling above her, trying to keep from breathing any more of it than she had to. This can’t be good for the baby. Her worried eyes shifted toward the stairwell door just ahead. She was on the fifth floor and needed to get down. She had yet to run across another person, not surprising given the time of night.

The fire had come in one massive burst, an explosion that rocked the Agency’s headquarters, flinging her out of her desk chair and causing her to black out for a moment. When she had come to, everything was burning and she knew she had to get out quickly. She could hear the fire alarms going off faintly in the distance but couldn’t decide if that meant that they’d gone out in this section of the building, or if she was just having trouble hearing. It was a loud explosion, she thought. So loud. I don’t hear ringing, though. Is that a good sign or a bad one?

She reached the door to the stairs and splintered it when it resisted her, breaking through it at the bottom, like she was carving a dog door out for herself. She paused when she punched through, expecting a backdraft to come shooting out at her. She braced to roll aside, but when it didn’t, she finished ripping it from its hinges and crawled inside the stairwell, the gritty concrete texture pushing into her palms as she crawled. Grit and debris dotted the ground, and she steered around the more obvious pieces, ignoring the little flecks of broken glass as they cut her hands.

The smoke billowed up the stairwell, smoking skyward and obscuring the floors above from her view. She got to her knees, then to a crouch, the tight neck of her blouse pulled over her nose. I have to find Jon. I have to protect our baby.

Her life was a succession of surprises of late: marrying Jon, the pregnancy, and now this. I’ve had enough surprises for one lifetime. She held the shirt tightly over her face, trying to let the cloth material filter out some of the acrid smoke as she descended. He’s got to be on the first floor, if he’s still ... She felt a dryness in her mouth that had nothing to do with the heat or the smoke. He has to be. Has to be on the first floor.

She reached the next-to-last landing and hurried down to find the fire door open, the first floor ablaze. The pillars that held up the ceiling were already engulfed in flame, the desks and chairs that filled the bullpen-like space of the Agency’s lower floor a charred mess. It was black ground in the middle, cratered, like a bomb had gone off, and the ceiling was open ahead. Debris tumbled down from an upper floor, and she noticed that the crater opened to the basement.