A CRY IN THE DARK
Silhouette Intimate Moments #1299
June 2004

The cry ripped through the late afternoon silence.

Gretchen Miller stopped folding her daughter’s pink and white play outfit and looked up abruptly. She held herself very still, listening intently, as only a mother could.

Violet.

Her heart kicked hard. She sprung to her feet and ran across the hard wood floor of her suburban Boston home, toward the staircase leading upstairs, where her daughter napped.

“Sweetheart?”

She heard her husband’s voice, but didn’t slow. Couldn’t. Not when her daughter needed her. After years of longing for a child but believing the miracle would never come her way, she’d dedicated herself to motherhood with a ferocity that even she had never imagined. Gone was the woman whose life had once consisted solely of ancient writings and academic pursuits. In her place lived a mother who thrived on art projects and play dates.

“Violet?” she called, reaching the top of the stairs. She tried to strip the concern from her voice, but adrenaline drowned out her effort. The cry had been sudden and intense, drenched in distress and fear. If her little girl was hurt—

Wide blue eyes greeted Gretchen the second she raced into the pink room with the white canopy bed. Dark tangled hair framed her daughter’s pixy face. She sat in a small chair in front of the art table. In front of her crayons lay scattered across a sheet of drawing paper.

Gretchen drank in the scene—the beautifully, perfectly normal scene–and tried to regain her equilibrium.

“Whatcha drawing?” she asked, moving to squat beside her little girl. With a hand she fought to steady, she gently brushed the hair back from Violet’s slightly pale face.

Her little girl gazed up at her, her eyes darker than usual, her pupils dilated, almost trance-like. It took a moment for Gretchen to realize her little girl was still mostly asleep.

“Come now,” she cooed, lifting her daughter into her arms and carrying her back to bed. She deposited her among the messy sheets and stretched out beside her. “How about we nap together?”

“Everything okay?”

The soft Texas drawl had her glancing toward the doorway. She and Kurt had been married for three years now, but his rugged handsomeness still stole her breath. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “A cry.”

With a gentle smile, he strolled to the bed and leaned down, kissed her softly on the lips. “Looks like everything’s okay now.”

Emotion swarmed the back of her throat. Fighting tears she didn’t understand, she looked at her little girl, sleeping now, her breathing deep and rhythmic, as though five minutes before she’d not sat with crayon in hand. “I hope so,” she whispered.

But deep inside, an innate sense warned otherwise.

#

The remnants of the cry echoed, low, soft, deceptively benign, like the distant rumble of thunder from a passing summer storm.

Standing behind the reception desk of one of Chicago’s elite hotels, The Stirling Manor, Danielle Caldwell ignored the unsettling sensation, concentrating instead on the collection of sun-dappled roses and fragrant lilies. Once, she would have been urgently seeking out the source of the disturbance, crafting a way to help. Once, she would have risked everything.

Once, she had.

Now, she hummed softly as she slid a yellow and pink- splashed rose snow white lilies. Her brother would have accused her of trying to drown out her destiny, but Danielle no longer believed in such nonsense. Destiny, chance, did not rule her world. There were no such things as lucky or unlucky stars. You created your own fate, made your own choices.

Never again would she jump at, chase, shadows. Never again would she splurge on instinct.

But God, the disturbance lingered at the back of her mind, dark and unsettling, choppy like the waters of Lake Michigan on a storm-shrouded day.

She knew better than to look. She knew better than to indulge. But she glanced around the richly paneled lobby anyway, toward the collection of formal sofas and wing chairs situated next to a stone fireplace. A large Aubusson rug stretched leisurely across the hard wood floor. A huge mahogany bookcase held leather bound books.

The scene was perfectly normal, a few lingering guests, a woman curled up with a book, almost a carbon copy of a hundred other afternoons since she’d joined the hotel’s staff. And yet, something was off. Something was different. It was like a movie playing at the wrong speed, motion slowed just a fraction, elongated, jerky. Not quite real.

Because of the man.

He sat in a wing back chair near the fireplace, tall, impeccably dressed. His button down was a dark gray, open at the throat. His trousers were black. In his hands, he held a newspaper—the same section he’d been holding for close to an hour.

She’d never seen someone sit so very, very still, for so very, very long.

The disturbing current pulsed deeper. She knew she should look away, quit staring, but the whisper of fascination was too strong. He was tall. Very tall. Too tall, too broad in the shoulder, to fade into anonymity. She’d noticed him, felt the ripple of his presence, the second he’d walked into the lobby. He carried an aura of authority like so many of the powerful patrons of the hotel, but the shadows were different. They were thick and they were dark, and they swirled him like flashing warning signs.

Just like her brother Anthony.

Look away, she told herself again, but then his eyes were on hers, and for a fractured second, it was all she could do to breathe. They were a deep brown like his hair, yet the darkness eddying in their depths defied color.

His expression never changed. There was no amusement at catching her staring, no quick swell of masculine triumph, no discomfort, no irritation, just the cool, impassive gaze of a man who saw everything, but felt nothing.

It was a look she’d never seen before, and it scorched clear to the bone.

Frowning, humming louder, refusing to let the man affect her one second longer, she grabbed another rose, this one a pure deep yellow with a long, dark green stem, and debated where to place it for maximum impact. Until she’d come to work at the hotel styled after an English manor house, she’d never imagined something as simple as a vase could cost more than she earned in a month. Granted, it was lead crystal and made in Ireland, but still. She’d always found old mason jars and chipped drinking glasses worked just fine.

“The lights are on, but apparently nobody is home.”

Danielle looked up to find Ruth Sun, one of the hotel’s long time assistant managers, smiling at her. “Pardon?”

The woman’s dark eyes twinkled. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

Danielle’s heart beat a little faster. Everyone in the hotel knew Ruth had the boss’s ear. She’d been around forever. One bad word from her, and all Danielle’s hard work could be for nothing.

“You know how I get when the flowers arrive,” she said lightly. “Everything else—“

“—fades to the background,” Ruth finished for her. “I noticed.” Her smile faded abruptly, and she reached out to grab Danielle’s wrist. “Dear, you’re bleeding.”

Danielle blinked, stared down at the trail of dark red blood running against the pale skin of her arm. “I. . .” Focused on the man, she hadn’t felt a thing. “It’s just a prick.”

Ruth made a maternal clucking noise, one that should have comforted, but instead unleashed a sharp curl of longing. “You need to get that cleaned up.”

Danielle nodded, but didn’t move. “Did you need something?” she asked. “Before?” When she’d been oblivious to everything but the echo of the cry that had ripped the fabric of the quiet June quiet afternoon, and the man with the disturbing eyes.

“Not really.” Ruth reached into a cabinet behind the long reception desk and came up with antiseptic and cotton. “Just thought you’d want to know someone was asking about you.”

“About me?”

Ruth poured antiseptic onto the cotton. “What your name was, how long you’d worked here, that kind of thing.”

Danielle went very still. She worked hard to keep her face clean of all emotion, but when Ruth pressed the cotton to her skin, the sharp sting made her wince. God, she’d been so careful, covered her tracks so cleanly. “Who?”

Ruth kept dabbing. “A man.”

The dread circled closer, tighter. No wonder she’d been edgy all afternoon. He’d finally come looking for her, the brother she’d not spoken with in two long years. Her heart leapt at the prospect, abruptly slowed. “What did he look like?”

The assistant manager looked up from her handiwork. “I’m surprised you didn’t notice him. He’s been sitting in the big leather wing chair most of the afternoon. Dark hair. Tall.” Ruth let out a dreamy sigh. “Very, very tall.”

With eyes like pools of midnight on a cloudless night. “The guy in the gray button down?” Danielle asked, and her heart beat a little faster. A lot harder.

“That’s him,” Ruth said. “Real good looking guy.”

Intense, Danielle silently corrected. Striking.

Gone.

“All better,” Ruth pronounced, but the words barely registered. Danielle stared across the lobby, toward the elegant wing chair that now stood empty, the newspaper abandoned to the floor.

The quick slice of unease made no sense. “Where did he go?”

“He’s right—“ Ruth’s words broke off. “That’s strange. He was there just a second ago.”

Her heart kicked up a notch. Frowning, she glanced around the lobby, toward the elevator, the sweeping staircase, the elegant front doors. Found nothing. Not the man, anyway. There were other patrons, the businessmen, the elderly couple from Wichita, the honeymooners from Madison, but the tall man with the flat eyes was just . . . gone.

Except she still felt him. Deeply. Disturbingly.

“You going to get that?” Ruth asked.

She blinked and brought herself back, heard the low melody of her mobile phone. Through a haze of distraction she reached for the small black device, for which only three people had the number – her manager, her sister, and her son’s daycare center. “Hello, this is Danielle.”

“Turn around.”

She stiffened. “Come again?”

“Paste a smile on that pretty face of yours and turn around, away from the old woman.”

Everything flashed. The motion of the lobby dimmed, slowed, seemed to drag. “I don’t understand—”

“Just do it.”

Her heart started to pound. Hard. Instinct warned her to obey, even as an age-old rebellious streak dared her to lift her chin and defy. She’d done that before. Many times. And the cost had been high.

Slowly, she turned from the comforting din of the hotel lobby and took a few steps away from Ruth. “Okay.”

“Good girl.” The voice was distorted, genderless.

“Who is this? What do you—”

“I have your son.”

The world stopped. Hard. Fast. Violently. She no longer faced the hotel guests, but knew if she turned around, she would see nothing. No movement. No life.

But then the words penetrated even deeper, beyond the fog of shock and the blanket of horror, to the logical part of her, the part Jeremy had honed and fine-tuned, sharpened to a gleaming point, and another truth registered.

She was being watched. Someone, someone close, knew her every move.

The man. God, the man who’d been watching her, asking questions. The one who had vanished, but whose presence lingered.

“You what?” she asked, slowly indulging the need to look. To see.

“Don’t move,” the voice intoned, and abruptly she froze. “If you want to see him again, you’ll do exactly what we say.”

The world started moving again, from dead cold to fast forward in one horrible dizzying heartbeat. Everything swirled, blurred. Blindly, she reached a hand for the counter. Her son. God, her precious little boy. Her life.

“No cops,” the man continued. It had to be him, she knew. The man from the lobby. The one who’d been watching her. Asking about her. Who’d vanished mere seconds ago. “Call them and negotiations end.”

She wasn’t sure how she stayed standing, not when every cell in her body cried out, louder and harder than the distorted cry she’d picked up an hour earlier. And she knew. God help her, she knew why she’d been on edge. Why she’d been disturbed. Her son. Someone had gotten to her son, and on some intuitive level, she’d known.

But just like with his father, she hadn’t been able to prevent.

“What do you want?” she asked with a calm that did not come easy to her Gypsy blood. She’d been in situations like this before, after all, dangerous, confusing, never with her own son, but she’d gone where law enforcement could not go.

“Call the daycare center. Tell them Alex walked home on his own.”

She swallowed, hard. That was feasible. The daycare center was only a few blocks from her small Rogers Park home. Alex knew the way. He was an adventurous kid, always in constant motion. Clever. Daring. It would be just like him to wander off when no one was looking.

“Then what?”

“Wait for instructions.”

Deep inside, she started to shake. A sick, cruel joke, she wanted to think. A prank. Payback for the sins of her past. But she’d met relatively few people since moving to Chicago, could think of none who would be so cruel.

A mistake, she thought next, but even as hope tried to bloom, reality sucked the oxygen from her lungs. She wanted to spin around and run, to shout at the top of her lungs as she searched for the tall man with the dark eyes, but with great effort, she kept herself very still.

“I’m calling them now,” she said with the same forced calm.

“Good girl.” A garbled sound then, something between laughter and scorn. “Do not betray us, darling. One word about this call to anyone, and your son will pay the price.”

The line went dead. And for a long, drowning moment Danielle just stood there, breathing hard, praying she wouldn’t throw up.

Then she ran.

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