The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (2 page)

The opaque doors of Kansai International’s immigration hall opened to a wall of bodies and a polite crush of expectant faces: the international arrival’s rite of passage. Munroe scanned the crowd and, dragging the small carry-on around the metal rails, continued into the thick of the waiting throng.

Airport lights in the night sky winked through large plate-glass windows, marking another city and another time zone—this one a long, long stretch from the puddle jumps she’d made out of Djibouti, on the horn of Africa where the mouth of the Red Sea kissed the Gulf of Aden, then through the Middle East, and into Europe.

Frankfurt, Germany, to Osaka, Japan: sixteen hours in transit and now the traveling, the running, was finally over. Munroe shoved the backpack’s slipping strap up her shoulder and turned a slow circle, searching, seeking.

For more than ten years, through untold airports and arrival destinations, strangers had peered beyond her with the same hopeful expressions, ever eager to spot a glimpse through closing doors of loved ones still on the other side. Across five continents she’d come and gone, ghostlike and invisible, while others welcomed family home, but this time—this time—a home waited to welcome her.

Not the country, or the city, or the land, or things built upon it, no. If there could ever be such a thing as
home
for a person like her, Miles Bradford was that home, and her gaze passed over the crowd again, seeking him out.

She spotted him finally: a splash of white skin and red-tinged blond hair leaning against a window, his face toward his phone, framed by parking lights and tower lights and shadows. She paused, drinking in memories that laughed and babbled like a brook over pebbles of pain, then maneuvered forward through legs and shoulders, suitcases and luggage carts, and the melee of joy that inevitably accompanied reunions.

She was halfway to him when he glanced up. His eyes connected with hers and the volume of the arrivals area shushed into white noise.

He stood motionless for a full second, two, three, phone paused in its descent to his pocket, grinning as if he’d just unwrapped a much- longed-for Christmas gift. She continued in his direction and he strode toward her, and when he reached her, he scooped her up, spun her in a circle, and drowned her smile with a kiss. She laughed as he set her down and didn’t resist when he lifted the backpack off her shoulder and took the carry-on’s handle.

“Good flight?” he said.

She nodded, unwilling to speak lest she break the spells of touch and feel and smell that whispered against her senses. She breathed him in to make a permanent memory and breathed out the dirt and grime and lies and death that had brought her to him.

Bradford dropped the bags and wrapped his arms around her again. He held her for a long, long while, just as he’d held her in Dallas the night she’d walked away, when he’d known she was leaving and had spared her the agony of saying good-bye. He kissed her again, hoisted the backpack, grabbed the carry-on, then took her hand and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

She followed him to the elevator, fingers interlinked with his, and he glanced at her once, twice, matching her grin each time he did. He hadn’t changed much—a few gray hairs added to his temples, deeper wrinkles in the creases of his smile, and maybe more muscle mass beneath his shirt, though it was hard to tell. He looked good. Smelled good. And in a mockery of their eight-year age difference, she’d aged five years in their year apart—still bore the remnants of conflict that had prematurely ended a maritime security company at the hands of Somali pirates—hadn’t yet fully healed from the assault in Mombasa that had nearly killed her.

A four-day layover in Frankfurt had allowed a respite of hotel luxury; given her time to scrub away the worst of the weather wear, the dust, and the salt spray, and the effects of wide open spaces; and made it possible to trade sun-bleached clothes worn threadbare over the last year for new pieces, better suited to less demanding environments.

She’d come to Japan for him, because he’d asked her to. Because she’d known happiness with him, and loved him, and running from that terror had only brought more pain and death instead of the nothingness she’d sought.

They left the terminal for warm air, thick with the promise of coming rain. Bradford rolled the suitcase between endless rows of cars and finally stopped behind an off-white Daihatsu Mira so small it could have fit in the bed of his truck back in Dallas.

Munroe looked at him and then the car.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “This is the country of itty-bitty things.”

She took a step back and, in an exaggerated motion, turned her head left and then right, where up and down the rows on either side were a vast number of vehicles much larger than the Mira.

Smiling, Bradford shook his head and opened the hatchback. He stuffed the bags into the tiny storage compartment and slammed the door to make sure it shut. “You think it’s funny now,” he said, “you’ll be grateful later.”

“It suits you,” she said.

“Trust me, I asked for something bigger.”

“No, really, it’s very cute.”

He nudged her left, toward the passenger side. He said, “Just keep stroking that masculine ego.”

Munroe sat and buckled, and when Bradford was behind the wheel with his seat pushed back as far as it would go, she stared at him.

“What?” he said.

“Cute,” she said, and then she laughed.

He smiled, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, kissed her lips, and then, palm cradling the back of her neck, rested his forehead against hers.

She breathed him in.

The parking garage, the bridge to the city, and the bright green neon on a giant Ferris wheel became a backdrop, and the last year a waning history, and it was as if no time apart had ever passed between them. This was contentment and peace. This was home.

That part never changed, in spite of everything else that would.

Tiny tugs against the sheets jolted Munroe from sleep, into instinct and terror, fight or flight. Memory rushed in close behind, replacing the past, the dreams, the pain, with where she was and why.

Bradford, beside her, rolled onto his back.

The floor fan shushed in oscillation. The window air-conditioning groaned in a low rumble. She drew in the cool dark of the room’s cocoon to quiet her racing heart. Her body clock, still dragging its way out of Djibouti time, told her that it was barely early morning local time. She didn’t know when they’d finally drifted off—late—and she might have grabbed a couple hours of rest, but she was awake now and that was that. Sleep was a cruel master and a fragile friend.

Bradford’s breathing pattern said he was awake, too.

Like her, he slept little and slept light, but, unlike her, his restlessness was the by-product of years in active combat, not trauma, and he didn’t jerk awake, prepared to kill the person lying beside him.

Munroe breathed deeply, and with a soft, slow exhale the urge to flee and strike receded completely.

This was easy now, compared to how things had once been.

The years, as they faded, brought fewer triggers to yank her back into the brutality of adolescence and the equatorial rain forest and the man who’d beat her with fists and kicks and throws until she’d grown strong enough, fast enough, to fend him off; the man who’d put a blade in her hand and used her body as his carving board until the knife became her own way to salvation.

She was seventeen when she killed him, sneaking after him in the falling dusk, with the wind of the coming storm covering the sound of pursuit. She’d shot him in the back with a tranquilizer gun and stood over him as his eyes rolled up. Had straddled him in the driving rain and slit his throat.

The missionary’s daughter, made to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, had come out the other side an apex predator.

She’d left his body to rot and buried the fear instead.

Time had tempered the rage and violence. A little.

Bradford’s fingers stroked her hairline and traced down her jaw.

The touch came without warning and set her pulse racing again, a rush that would have, in another time and place, thrust her into savagery.

He knew this as well as she did.

Eyes closed, she said, “That’s a very dangerous game you play, Mr. Bradford.”

He leaned in, lips brushing against her cheek and toward her ear. “I’m not afraid of you,” he whispered.

The words reached down to her spine and she relaxed into him, felt the soft burn of his touch, measured his weight and movement, and when he continued down to nuzzle against her neck, she found leverage in his body. She pulled his arm out beneath him, flipped him, and straddled him.

He smiled and said, “Yes, please.”

He was stronger, and taller than her five foot ten by an inch or so. He was former Special Forces, now high-stakes private security—a kinder, gentler term for mercenary—better trained, and had likely killed more people than she had. But he would never be faster. Speed was the skill that kept her alive, speed that had been sliced into her psyche one savage cut at a time.

She would need a few more nights sleeping beside him, a few more evenings of calm contentment, before the animal brain began to purr and stretch and the claws retracted. She brushed a finger along his nose and kissed his lips. “You should still be careful,” she said, then stepped off the bed for the bathroom.

Bradford caught her hand and tugged her back. He studied her. Streetlight and moonlight filtered in through the wide glass window. She knew his thoughts, just as he knew hers: a year could be an eternity when filled with death and the threat of losing what meant most.

He pulled her closer.

“You’ll be late for work,” she said.

“They won’t miss me.”

“Let me go with you,” she said.

He squeezed her hand, swung his feet to the floor. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later,” he said. He wrapped his arms behind her and drew her to him.

If she’d trusted him less, if she’d remained guarded around him the way she was in all other aspects of life, she would have sensed what she would only discover in hindsight. Instead she leaned down and kissed him, and he rolled her to the bed, and they both knew that in spite of their best efforts there was no way he wouldn’t be late.

Bradford dressed and, knowing that Munroe watched, his teasing smile turned two minutes into five in a reverse Chippendale segue from pants to shirt to string tie. When he pulled the boots off a shelf, Munroe sat up and said, “No way. You can’t be serious.”

He held the brown ostrich leather out for inspection and dropped into the accent, thickening the honeyed drawl that only ever surfaced when he spent enough time back home around his family. “I hail from Texas,” he said. “There are expectations, and no sense bringing disappointment.”

Tone dry, she said, “You’re missing the hat.”

Bradford reached into the armoire, pulled out a cattleman, slipped it onto his head, tipped the rim, and said, “Ma’am.”

Munroe rolled her eyes and scooted toward him.

In the years she’d known him, his uniform, depending on the occasion, had been jeans and a T-shirt, or camo and tactical gear, and his headgear, when he wore it, was a baseball cap or helmet. Out at his house, where land was plentiful and not all roads were paved, he sometimes wore shit kickers and a hat as mud- and grease-stained as his jeans, but he’d never worn anything like this. Hell, she could count on one hand the people she’d met in Texas who’d dressed like
this
for any reason other than a night out on the town.

“Need to work on your authenticity,” she said.

Bradford grinned, scooped laundry off the floor, and tossed it into a bin beside the cupboard. “No one’s complained about my performance.”

“If they knew better, they would,” she said. “Hey, I brought you something.” Munroe snagged her backpack from the foot of the bed, dragged it toward her, and rummaged through too much traveling crap to get to the bottom, then pulled out a box and handed it to him.

Bradford kissed her forehead, her mouth, and then took the box. “Now?” he said.

Munroe smiled. Nodded. She leaned back to watch as he tore at the ribbon and opened the lid, then chuckled when he laughed, a deep throaty laugh that made her heart hurt.

“You could hardly call
this
authentic,” he said.

“It’s atrocious,” she said. “Found it in a boutique window, as far away from Texas as you could hope to get. Made me think of you in its own weird way. Had to have it.”

He pulled the belt out of the box: brown-red crocodile leather and gaudy aluminum buckle that half filled his oversize hand in an interesting imitation of western wear. “Nice,” he said. “You see atrocity and you think of me.”

“Was made for you,” she said, and jutted her chin toward him instead of pointing, “given your new taste in clothes.”

If she’d known then how prophetic those words would be, and what pain would come of such a harmless gift, she would never have bought the belt, never have given it to him, would have torn the leather from his hands. Instead, she giggled as he pulled off the old and slipped her gift through the loops.

“I love that you were thinking of me,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her again. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Crazy but perfect.”

Smiling made her cheeks hurt. “Go,” she said, but she was reluctant to let go of his collar and he made no effort to pull away.

She shoved him playfully.

Bradford grabbed a phone off a stack of papers on the floor and tossed it to her. “My numbers are already in,” he said. “Charger’s in the kitchen. So are the instructions if you need them. I’ll call you when I’m on my way home—maybe seven or eight.”

She walked with him to the front and stood there in his T-shirt long after the door had shut, because he hadn’t really gone. The cues reached out to her automatically, silences and lack of vibration on the floor, on the door: subtleties that most people would absorb without thinking if they were accustomed to listening for them, but most people weren’t.

The door opened again and Bradford stuck his head inside.

“I missed you,” he said, and he closed the door before she could reply. To the empty space she whispered,
I’ve missed you, too.