Rora didn’t know what had woken her up. But lying in the dark, she tried to adjust to the absolute blackness around her and remember where she was.

The first thing she did was reach to the other side of the bed, but when she found it empty and the sheets unfamiliar beneath her palm, she recalled that Strike wasn’t there. No one was. She was all alone in this isolated place and alone was eerily unfamiliar.

It took her a second to read the glowing numbers on the clock on the nightstand and establish it was just after four-thirty in the morning.

Usually she only woke this early if Strike was waking her, either for fun or to flee. But she sank onto her back and closed her eyes again. Letting her fingertips brush across her thigh, this seemed like a rare opportunity; being all alone with thoughts of her man, she could enjoy a little quality time with herself.

She heard a creak and sat up immediately, clutching the blankets to her chest. Strike had warned her not to sleep naked, though she wouldn’t have anyway, but instinct made her want to protect her body even though it was clothed.

She heard it again.

Quiet as she could, Rora crept out of bed and reached for the jeans she’d left on a nearby chair. She made little noise pulling them on but heard enough from outside the room that by the time she was done, she was sure there was another person in the house.

Strike wouldn’t be so obvious, or make so much noise, if he was trying to sneak up on her and he was the only ally she had left who might be approaching this place that few people knew about.

Leandra hadn’t mentioned any friends and Rora couldn’t imagine anyone showing up for a social visit at this time.

Her switchblade snicked when she opened it. Rora crept forward, one careful step at a time, low, braced, ready for whoever might—

The bedroom door opened, and a bright white light suddenly blinded her. She held up a hand to try to block the beam, but couldn’t make out who was there.

She was about to ask when she heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet being loaded into a gun barrel.

“Did you miss me, Aurora?”

Rora couldn’t say that her fear lessened when she identified Junker’s voice, but it did change hue. Her blade was going to make little difference in a gun fight, so she let her hands fall to her sides and straightened up.

“Junker,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“You led me to exactly what I needed. I always knew you would. Now tell me, where is he?”

“If you’re looking for Exile, he’s not here,” she said. “No one’s here, so if you’re going to kill me—”

“No,” he said with what could only be pain in his tone. “No, Aurora, I don’t want to hurt you… I always felt sorry for you, I always…”

He exhaled, and the brightness of the flashlight beam vanished a breath before the overhead light came on.

The generator was rarely used, candles were preferred for light. But it was there, and although it was hidden at the far side of the house, she wondered now if it had been the generator starting up that had woken her up.

She’d been tearing around the country for so long that she’d lost any notion of familiar sounds or smells, she had to adjust to somewhere new almost every day. The only thing that she’d had with any kind of regularity was Strike and even he hadn’t been a constant.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Aurora. I want to make you understand… I don’t like the way things ended between us,” he said. “Will you let me explain everything?”

She hesitated. “You lied to me.”

“I think we were both guilty of not being honest with each other,” he said. “Let’s change that. Let us go downstairs, have a drink, and lay all our cards on the table.”

Rora wasn’t going to confide in him, but Strike wasn’t going to be there with Bella for hours. She couldn’t let Junker leave, and it seemed unlikely that he’d want to. Keeping an eye on him was the smartest option.

He’d revealed himself to her, so he wanted something, and if she had to keep him talking until Strike could get here, that’s what she was going to do.

 

 

They were wary of each other. Rora tried to hide her suspicion, but this guy had already held a knife to her throat, she didn’t know what he might do next. They’d both left their weapons in the bedroom and gone to the living room. Each sat in an armchair at opposite ends of the long coffee table that stood beside the rug in front of the fireplace.

“How did you find me?” Rora asked.

“I followed you.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “There’s no way—”

“Exile isn’t the only one who can make technology work for him,” he said. “I’ve been following you for a couple of days.”

“How?”

He smiled. “Let’s just say your new friends aren’t as careful as your previous ones.”

Meaning Crescent and Spear weren’t as thorough as Strike in covering their tracks. She’d known they were reporting to their First, but hadn’t thought to warn them to be careful about disguising their digital signature. Rora preferred to think Strike was monitoring them; it made her feel more at ease.

It hadn’t occurred to her to think that Junker might be out there trying to track her down.

“What took you so long to get here?”

“I couldn’t bring my vehicle down that isolated road. For one thing, I didn’t know where it would come out, and I didn’t want to give up the element of surprise.”

It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t figure him out. “So you hid your vehicle and walked? But you missed Leandra, she’s not—”

He scowled. “I don’t care about Leandra.”

“You don’t?”

“Why should I?”

“I thought she was the point of… Wait,” she said and shook her head. “Start at the beginning, you’re clearly not who I thought you were.”

Which meant speculating about his motives, or what she thought were his motives, was crazy. She had no idea who this man really was, and now was her chance to find out.

“Neither are you,” he said, jumping onto the defensive. “I didn’t think for a second you’d be nuts enough to get yourself involved with a person like Exile… not physically.”

Not sexually, that’s what he was saying. His face screwed up like he was disgusted by the idea. “So I don’t have the smartest taste in men.” According to him. “Everything else you knew about me was true. My search for Benjamin, my work with him, how much I cared about him. You lied about everything. Exile was the only thing I wasn’t honest about.”

“Don’t you see, this has all been about him,” he said, clasping his hands between his knees when he moved to the front of his chair to rock forward. “I started this. I’m involved because of him.”

“Junker, I… I don’t understand. All I know about you is what Exile told me. Your name is Dexter Redd, you studied at MIT, worked in their computer science division…”

“That’s true. That’s all true,” he said, but she was ready for him to fill in the blanks. “What you don’t know is about a year ago, my life changed… everything changed… when I found out who my father was.”

“Your father… I don’t…”

“And that I had a sister. I reached out to Benjamin Gallagher because of her.” Rora waited. It was a technique she’d learned from Strike. Stay quiet long enough and eventually someone else would fill the silence. “Our father was always interested in technological innovation, that’s why he had an interest in Exile, I guess. My sister, she had the same fascination. They believed that technology could bring rewards.”

“Financial rewards,” she said. “Is that what you mean?”

“There is a lot of money to be made,” he said. “Maybe it’s in our genes; maybe that’s why I got into the industry… I’d been searching for my father for years, a decade at least. Obviously, I was devastated when I found out he was dead, him and the brothers I never knew I had… But when I found out about Bella…”

This was a clarity she wasn’t sure she wanted. “Bella is your sister…”

“I knew she was out there, but I first encountered her on the dark web. She was looking for something new and exciting, something powerful. On the grapevine, I’d heard Gallagher was working on something world changing. Once you tell one guy in our field you’ve got something special, it spreads like wildfire.”

And Benjamin was never the most discreet. Rora could believe he might have mentioned the Point to a colleague at a conference or during a late-night call. “You knew about the Point.”

“I didn’t know that’s what it was called. But I wanted to impress her, to prove myself to her as a provider before we met. So, I swore to myself I wouldn’t tell her we were related until I could show her I could provide for her like our father had before he was murdered… I sent her a message telling her about Gallagher. I didn’t know him then, but I made it a point to connect with him, thinking I could get more information about this program he had. At first, I made it seem professional, but we built a friendship. He was vague about his work, but clear in how much he cared about you.”

“That’s why you sent me that message. Benjamin didn’t ask you to look out for me at all,” she said, trying not to be outraged, but he was turning everything she thought she knew on its head.

“He did. Connecting with you was more my idea than his, but it was easy to draw him around to my way of thinking so that he believed it was his idea. You know how easily he was manipulated, which was probably how Bella got him, I don’t know how that went down. I thought you could be useful. You worked so closely with him, I figured that you had to know something.”

Though he seemed sincere enough in what he was saying, she couldn’t deny that there was something cold about the genesis of their friendship and it made her feel ill that Benjamin had been taken advantage of by someone he trusted.

“After he went missing,” Rora said, trying to remember the sequence of events. “I didn’t hear from you.”

“They went off the grid. She had what she wanted, and she was just gone. Bella was good, I don’t know who taught her, but she and Gallagher disappeared.”

Exile probably taught her. Even if he hadn’t meant to, Bella would’ve picked up a few hints. “And that’s when you started to help me.”

“The message you sent asking about Exile surprised me. But when you said you’d heard from Benjamin Gallagher that he needed Exile, I knew that meant my sister needed him. I had to help.”

Feeling angry, and conned, Rora was too numb to really show her outrage. “That was why you helped me. You found Exile and made me lead him to Bella because she wanted him there.”

Junker had been the first to use the words, ‘Black Jewel’ with her. He’d said that Exile had an interest in the Black Jewel and she’d had no idea what that meant. Now she learned it was the Black Jewel who’d had an interest in Exile, Junker had played her good.

“I didn’t expect Exile to be as good as he was,” Junker said. “After you connected with him, you vanished, and I didn’t hear a whisper from any of you… that’s when I cleared out Gallagher’s place and yours… I got nothing and started to get worried. But then, you messaged me. The phone you used to send the message didn’t move, but there was another in the same apartment a while later, I tracked it… until it vanished in the vicinity of a resort Benjamin told me you and he visited.”

The man had done his research. Junker had probably been the one to torch her and Benjamin’s old workplace when he didn’t find anything. He’d have wanted to hide the evidence that he’d been there and probably cover his sister’s tracks too. Junker was good with a computer, but didn’t have great skills as a criminal.

“That’s how you found me at the bus station?” she said. “You tracked me from the resort.”

“I saw you hitchhiking. I almost couldn’t believe my luck when I drove up that road and there you were. I considered stopping, but it was Exile I needed. I followed you from the bus station back to that apartment building, I didn’t know what was inside, so I watched… I saw my sister take you…” His expression became contrite. “I’m sorry, but if you were what she wanted, I wasn’t going to interfere.”

He wouldn’t have known Strike was in Buddy’s apartment, wouldn’t have known that if he’d just hung around he might have located his target. If he had lost track of them after she and Strike connected, Junker wouldn’t have known about Wonderland, that Bella and Strike had already connected and parted, or that Benjamin was dead.

“But why did you rescue me from her?”

“Bella wanted the Point. Exile seemed to have disappeared. You knew about the Point, and what Exile looked like. All I wanted to do was help my sister do what she was struggling to do. I thought maybe I could use your trust in me, in our previous connection, to get Bella what she wanted.”

“You told me you wanted to stop them. That Exile was dangerous.”

“He is. And I didn’t want him to use the program, I wanted Bella to have it and to be safe from him. If it had been up to me, I’d have killed Exile on the spot. But Bella needed him to fix whatever was wrong with Benjamin’s work and he had the processor. It was my plan to wait until Bella had used him for what she needed and then…”

“You were going to kill him,” she whispered. “It was all a lie. Why would you want to kill him? Your sister loved him! I think she still loves him.”

Disgust made him shoot to his feet. “I didn’t know that! I didn’t know about her ridiculous infatuation with him… or yours! What the hell is it about the guy? How does he seduce smart, beautiful women into losing their minds? Why would you share your body with such a monster?”

“He’s not a monster,” she said, but couldn’t be too vehement in her defense of the man she’d have to pretend to hate later.

“He’s the monster who killed my family!”

Oh no. She chilled. At some point through all his investigating, he’d found out that his father and brothers had been killed by Exile. She swallowed. “That’s why you want to kill him.”

“And you could share yourself with him? My sister could? I don’t understand it!”

“He has a way of making us feel… special.”

Junker came to her and crouched down to gather her hands into his. “My sister is special,” he said. “And so are you.” He slid a hand onto her cheek. “You’re beautiful, Rora, and you don’t need him. You deserve better than him.”

It was difficult to let him touch her and difficult not to argue for her love, but she held steady for the greater cause. “I thought we were friends, Junker,” she said. “I thought I could trust you.”

“You can,” he said. “He betrayed you again, didn’t he?” She averted her eyes, but he drew her attention back and rose higher to brush his lips over hers. “I’ll never betray you, Rora… We can work this out together. I want to punish him for what he did to my father and brothers, for duping my poor, naive sister.”

That was clear proof how little he knew his sister, but she tightened her hold on his hand. “That’s why I’m here… why I stayed. I trusted him, and I know I shouldn’t have, but… I thought I could trust him, he made me believe and…”

“You told him where Leandra was,” he said, and she managed to conjure a few tears. “You think he’s on his way here.”

“I don’t know. All I know is he left me, so I reached out to some people who can keep Leandra safe.”

“He used you to get what he wanted. Just like he’s using Bella now because she has the device he wants. He’s a user… Bella wants the Point, that’s all. But I won’t let him hurt her again. I won’t… You do see him for what he truly is now… don’t you?”

So now she and Junker were allies again? Strike would come here unaware of Junker’s presence. They hadn’t discussed him at all. But keeping Junker close was the only way to play this. The whole situation was messed up. Strike was pretending to be Bella’s ally and now Rora had to pretend to be Junker’s.

Strike had betrayed her once, and it had taken a lot of emotional strength to forgive him. Rora had to be confident he wouldn’t do it again or this wouldn’t work. But the last thing she wanted was for him to think she’d switched allegiances and put any doubt in his mind.

But this whole situation had just gotten more dangerous, Junker thought he had the Point and that Bella had the processor, so the only part of his plan left was making the program work. After that, he intended to kill Strike. She couldn’t tell Junker that he didn’t have the Point, but she’d have to play this carefully for the sake of her love’s life.

Rora nodded her head and let Junker keep caressing her face. “They could show up at any time,” he said. “And we have to be prepared… How about I draw you a bubble bath?” He smiled. “I’ll help you relax, like we used to when it was just us.”

She hid her swallow and smiled instead. “Sounds good.”

He rose and pressed his mouth to her forehead for way longer than she was comfortable with. If Strike was in the room, he’d have slit Junker’s throat for sure. But she kept her smile in place and watched him go.

She couldn’t run, she had to be here for Strike. She couldn’t get a message out, there was no phone, so no internet. She had to keep her cool and wait. The clock was ticking, and it would take every ounce of her strength and Strike’s to get through this.

 

 

It was difficult to relax in the tub when she didn’t know what Junker was doing in the house on his own.

Rora didn’t do more than dip herself in the water, but wasted some time loitering in the bathroom to let him think that she was enjoying herself.

He was in the hallway when she came out of the bathroom and though she was taken aback to see him there, she’d be happy if that’s where he’d been the whole time because it would mean he hadn’t been snooping or setting traps.

Going to bed was slightly awkward because he kissed her head again and the way he held her hand made her wonder if he was waiting for her to say something. It was a look he’d given her before and she never knew how to respond to it.

Rora was glad to be in her room, but knew she wouldn’t sleep much. Before Junker had shown up, she’d been anxious about Strike getting here, fearing how this all might come to a head. Now she was eager for him to arrive. Until she could look him in the eye, she didn’t think she’d shake this foreboding from her heart.

She needed her man to anchor her. Sending out a silent message of love to him, she hoped he was safe, wherever he was.