Disclaimer: The characters belonging to Janet Evanovich are used strictly for entertainment purposes.

…

FromChapter11:

Ranger sat on the edge of my bed and traced his fingers over my knee. I looked at him, but he was looking at Walker and the two were having a wordless conversation. Which meant only one thing: Ranger wanted to talk. To me.

Walker looked from Ranger to me and then walked toward the door. "I'll get the doctor and let him know you're awake." He left before either of us could respond and I turned back to Ranger. He was staring at me with all expression wiped from his face. Uh oh. Definitely time to talk.

…

Chapter 12

Ranger stood and walked over to the window, lifting the curtain back with his index finger to look outside. The sunlight slashed across his face in a bright line and I squinted, watching him. He stayed there for a few minutes — my guess was to settle himself — and then he dropped his hand and strode across the room to sit on the edge of my bed.

"Do you remember what happened?" He picked up my hand and held it tight in his.

I sighed. "Yeah, I heard yelling, stuck my head out of the shower, slipped, and hit my head on the towel rack. Blacked out."

"What about before that?"

"You mean the crazy dreams?" He nodded at my answer. "Yeah, I remember those."

Ranger grew silent, his thumb lightly stroking over the back of my hand. He was staring at the closed curtains and spoke before he turned to look at me. "You asked me to kill you."

"What?"

"After the second dream. You woke, asked to be released or killed." He dropped my hand and made a move to stand, but mine shot out and grabbed his forearm.

"I don't remember it. I do remember the dream and, to be honest, it's not a surprise I said that."

"Damn," he said in a near-whisper. "I waited too long to check on you. When I did, seeing you on the floor, naked, unconscious, bottle of pills by your head… I thought—"

"Shit, Ranger! I wouldn't take a whole bottle of pills. I didn't take even one!"

"I know. They pumped your stomach as soon as you arrived."

"But…"

He leaned over me and lifted a hand to the side of my neck, stroking his thumb along my jaw. The familiar scent of Bvlgari wafted over me and my senses froze. Ranger. My ultimate distraction, above cake, chocolate, and Ben & Jerry's. There was something heady about how his body's chemistry reacted with the subtle fragrance of the stuff. When had he switched back?

"Wait. When did you get the Bvlgari?" I tilted my nose up toward him and sniffed again. God, it was addicting. Only a hint of it gave me a high like nothing else, full exposure nearly made me comatose from pleasure. Maybe having a shrink around wasn't a bad idea. "You didn't have it yesterday."

"Young said smells can help trigger memories. You'd noticed it was missing before."

"So you got some in case I forgot you again." He nodded. Fair enough, though it hurt to think it could happen again. Hurt that he was worried enough to change soaps — not that I minded the change.

"Focus, babe. You said you wanted to die." He tipped his head slightly, pointed look on his face. I begrudgingly dragged myself away from my euphoria and nodded. He sat up slightly and dropped his hand to the bed near my shoulder, eyebrows lowering. "I never should have let you go in there alone after everything that happened, but didn't want to cause a relapse."

"It was an accident!"

"Stephanie."

I looked up into his intense stare.

"You will not be alone until we know how dangerous this other … persona is to you."

Rolling my eyes, I said, "I'm not going to hurt myself."

"Please. Until we know."

I clenched my teeth and then blew out a long, slow breath. "Fine, but I'm not peeing in front of anyone, not even you."

He flashed a small grin at me, but then turned serious and said, "One more question."

"What?"

"What happened to the pills?"

I relayed the story about opening the pill bottle and dropping it. "I got pissed, so I threw the damn thing across the room. That's how it ended up on the floor. Can you just trust that I won't deliberately hurt myself?"

"What about your skin?"

I winced. I'd forgotten the burning pain of my raw skin until then. Damn him. "That was a bad reaction to remembering the dream. Okay, so it was a little over the top."

He kissed my forehead. "Which is why I want someone with you at all times."

"I reserve the right to demand compromise on that."

"Deal." He kissed me, a slow and sensual kiss, and I melted into the bed. The man had very talented lips. "Thank you."

I was overcome. He needed peace of mind and the only way he could get it was for me to agree to his request. It struck me what a heavy responsibility it is to have so much influence over someone else's happiness.

Raising my hand to his cheek, I fingered the red, angry scratches gently, sliding the pads over the rough surface. "I'm sorry I hurt you … and I'm embarrassed about the arm thing, too." I looked away from him toward the window.

"It was a good hold," he said. "Very good."

I turned back to stare at him for a second. "To be honest, I can't believe I was able to overpower you." He tilted his head slightly to the side and fixed me with a small smile. I punched his arm. "I wasn't really able to hold you, was I?"

"You needed to feel in control. It was a great hold for the average person, perfectly executed," he said, taking my hand and lacing his fingers through mine. He tipped his head down and kissed the tip of my nose. "I'm not average." No, he wasn't and never would be. He fixed me with a serious expression and said in a low tone, "Yesterday raised a lot of questions. Young wants to talk to you about it."

I searched his eyes, trying to make out his frame of mind. He was uneasy asking me to talk to Walker, but he believed it was the best option. "Who is he?"

Ranger sat back, licked his lips and curled them into his mouth before releasing them. "He's a military psychiatrist I've worked with in the past. Works mostly unique cases. More importantly, he has experience with people who've lost chunks of time from their lives."

"People like me," I said, admitting to myself that maybe Walker could be a big help.

In a smooth motion, he slipped off the bed and bent down to give me a quick kiss before standing upright again. "Yes, people like you."

"If you trust him, I trust him," I said, holding his gaze to prove I meant it.

The look on his face changed and I couldn't exactly pinpoint the meaning behind his expression. "I'll get him."

…

A half hour later, the doctor had come and gone and Ranger left to talk to Tank and Lester. Walker had taken the chair beside the bed and I wondered why I had agreed to talk to him because he was seriously pissing me off. "No," I said. "I don't have any conscious memories of what happened over the past year. There's no way these dreams were real, I would have remembered."

"They're a little random if they're not real, don't you think?" He leaned back in his seat and studied me. "Not to mention the fact that you thought you were her when you woke up both times. In both dreams, there were two different men who knew this Camila. One of them is someone we know enough about to fill a whole file drawer. A very dangerous man you seemed to trust."

"Gee, that makes two very dangerous men I trust, then." I tipped my head toward the door Ranger had exited, but he ignored my gesture. Ugh! I hated psychiatrists. They wanted you to do all the work and then charged you for it. It brought up a good discussion point for when I had Ranger alone. I wondered how much he was paying Walker to help me. "Look, maybe I just watched too many movies this past year and I dreamed about them."

"Or it's a clue to what happened during that year. A year, I might add, where everyone who knew you as Stephanie thought you were dead."

When the man had a point, he had a point. "Do we have to do this now?" I groaned, rubbing my temples.

"No, but keep this in mind. Everything you saw in your dreams is a potential detail we need to figure out what happened to you. Right now, we have no solid leads other than Seppe, who we believe is the Giuseppe Marotta, the head of the Marotta family and one of the highest ranking members of the mafia in Italy."

I dropped my forehead into my hand. Leave it up to me to make nice with a family member, even if I was out of my mind at the time.

He continued his talk without pause. "Whoever took you hid you so well none of Ranger's International contacts could find you. I don't have to give you a rundown of how many there are, do I?" His crystal blue gaze bored into me and I realized this guy wouldn't let me get away with anything.

I sighed. "No. You don't." Before he rejoined the military, Ranger was an International private investigator slash mercenary who swooped in and did the dirty jobs our Government didn't want to touch. The security business served as an effective cover for him to have a reason to travel into some hard to penetrate areas. It also provided a way for him to have access to a lot of top secret information without anyone knowing about it. He'd never told me the whole story and I'd never asked. Truthfully, I hadn't wanted to know all the details. It was enough to know that when he went away for long periods of time, he was no doubt doing something highly dangerous, completely illegal — technically — and one hundred percent sanctioned by some top government guy. "I know he knows a lot of people in a lot of places."

Walker nodded. "So you understand how frustrating it was for him that no one, anywhere, could find you."

Begrudgingly, I nodded. "Fine. I'll cooperate." For Ranger's sake.

"Well," he said as he sat forward to rest his elbows on his knees, "do you have a last name for Adriano? Do you remember where you lived?"

I shook my head. "I don't know hislast name or anything more than I've already said. I know she was in the house alone when he showed up. Then he made her go running with him. She had to match his pace step for step — I could hear her mentally chanting not to fall behind." My eyes narrowed and I tightened my fingers in the blanket. "He was a real bastard, that's for sure."

"He abused you." His voice had taken on a hard edge and I sensed Walker was a man who believed that men who treated women poorly should be castrated, or worse.

"Her, he abused her. On the day I dreamed about. I'm not sure how often it happened, but her automated responses to everything he said make me think it was frequent. She did seem surprised when he started to actually hurt her, so maybe that was new? The intensity of his abuse … Walker, I've never seen anything like that in real life. It was like he hated her."

"Stephanie," he began, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.

"Don't challenge me on this. I'm not the type of person to let someone do that to me. I would have found something large and beat him with it first." I stared him down and he nodded slowly. "You'll need some pretty compelling arguments to make me believe it was me."

He accepted my comment with a nod and asked, "Before that incident, she was in a house with Marotta and they walked outside to a cemetery?"

I nodded. "It was his family's private cemetery behind the gardens at the back of the house. The landscape was beautiful, very peaceful. Every headstone had Marotta on it, except the two he'd placed there for her." My head dropped back onto my pillow and I raised my hands to rub my eyes.

"We'll need more details on those two stones to research them. So far we've only looked into the names you mentioned after you woke up, but when we get back to the hotel, I'd like you to tell me everything from start to finish." He stood and placed his hands on the side rail he'd raised when he came in. "They're going to release you soon." He hesitated and said, "We're going to do everything we can to get your life back in order."

"You mean the one that barely exists?"

He reached over and squeezed my hand. "Just think of it as on hold. You've got to keep the faith."

I knew he was right. "I'll do my best."

He released my hand and headed out. Opening the door, he shot over his shoulder before he left, "I'll send Ranger back in."

"Thanks." I dropped my head back onto my pillow and stared at the white ceiling above me. The dreams had to be just some wacky way I put myself into a movie or book I'd read, right? Except, I'd never been much of a reader and it was strange that I'd experienced the emotions like they had really been mine. There was also the strange way I had forgotten who I was and didn't remember Ranger and the guys. That bothered me the most.

My eyes fluttered shut and I drifted off to sleep, trying to wish away the events of the past year, whatever they were. When I woke, Ranger was lying beside me on the bed with his arms wrapped around me. I looked up into his eyes and smiled slightly. "Hi."

"Hi," he said, but didn't smile. The tension in his body alerted me to the fact that something had happened.

"What's wrong?"

He reached up to stroke my face. "I had Tank contact an informant of mine in Rome to dig up information on Marotta. He obtained security photos of you from around the city. Apparently they span back for most of the time you were missing."

I sat up with a worried glance. "He did? They do?"

"That's what Tank said. You're being released from the hospital within the hour. The doctor agreed with Young's recommendation. We'll go over everything with Tank and Young at the hotel. Lester's going to Hilliard to do some searching on the names we have."

With my heart in my throat, I said, "Okay. I'll change."

Ranger gave me a slight smile and slid off the bed. "There's a duffle in the bathroom with fresh clothes." He didn't offer to accompany me inside this time and I didn't know if it was because he was afraid I'd reject him or because he had things he wanted to do while I was busy. The way he began punching numbers on his phone suggested the latter. It was clear he wasn't leaving the room, though, so at least he had listened to me about bathroom privacy.

I stood up and walked to the bathroom slowly. While I hadn't cut myself or even drawn blood, the feel of my skin stretching as I moved caused some discomfort. I was also a little dizzy from my head injury. I hadn't heard him move, but his arm snaked around my waist and he escorted me inside with his other hand holding the phone to his ear. With a kiss to my temple, he slipped out and shut the door.

I changed as quickly as possible into the black loose-fitting yoga pants and pink t-shirt I'd found in the small duffle bag. "Ugh," I said when I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. Pink has never been a good color for me. I shook my head and began to pull on my socks, but winced slightly at the burn of raw skin. Once my feet were dressed, shoes included, I stood and pulled the top half of my hair back into a tiny pony tail. I saw my small pack of makeup in the bottom of the duffle, but ignored it. Somehow, mascara didn't seem powerful enough to deal with the bad day I was facing. I had a feeling my past was about to kick my ass.

When I walked out of the bathroom, Lester, Walker, and Ranger were waiting for me. "Tank's waiting outside with a car," Walker said.

I nodded and looked at each of the guys trying to decide who'd gotten the clothes for me. Using my excellent power of deduction, and counting on the fact that Ranger and Walker had stayed with me and Tank never would have picked pink in a hundred years, I wrinkled my nose at Lester. "Really, pink?" I pointed to the t-shirt I wore.

He grinned and shrugged. "I guessed on the color. You're a girl, pink is a girl color."

"Pink is just washed out red; a sad, sad replacement for the real thing. In fact, it's not even a real color, it's just a poser."

Walker shook his head and headed out the door. Ranger, of course, gave no reaction except for a mild movement of his lips, but Lester gave a short bark of laughter. "Noted for future reference, Blue Eyes."

The ride to the hotel was silent and uncomfortable, especially after we dropped Lester off at the Hilliard office. I stared up at the building trying to note its characteristics, but it looked like every other ancient building used for office space in this city. Gray stone construction, beautiful attention to detail, and the feel of history about it..

Once in the room, we sat around the dining table with me seated beside Walker, Tank across from me and Ranger standing between us.

"Pull out the images, Tank," Ranger said, crossing his arms over his chest. He was incredibly closed off in that moment, as if I couldn't reach him even if I was inside him. He was in defense mode, so I knew he was stressed about the pictures.

Tank glanced at Ranger and then me. His expression softened and he tilted his head to the side slightly. "You don't know how good it is to see you as yourself again. Watching you freak out, pass out, then wake up and not remember us was freaky. It brought back all the drama from last October: the body, the funeral—"

I snapped my head back having forgotten the conversation from yesterday. "Body?" I gasped. Then I remembered it all. Mary Lou's grief … and Grandma Mazur. With everything that happened after, what I'd learned completely slipped my mind. "You had a funeral for me. With a body that wasn't mine. What a nightmare," I said, then closed my eyes and shook my head. Why hadn't they been able to see that it wasn't me? Why hadn't Ranger known? "I think I need some answers before we break out the incriminating evidence." Not to mention that I wanted to put off looking at those photos for as long as possible. I didn't want to know what I could have gotten myself into when I didn't know who I was.

"Babe," Ranger hesitated.

"No, I need this. This is — was — my life. I think I deserve to know what happened."

Ranger locked eyes with me and then pulled out the chair in front of him and sat down. "How far back do you want to go?"

"Well, I pretty much know you came back to my apartment that night and I was missing. You no doubt searched for me and called up the fires of hell to find me." I smiled sadly. "It doesn't take a genius to figure that much out. Why don't you start with how on earth someone could have confused my body for another?"

Everyone sat back in their seats with somber expressions and Ranger spoke. "We searched for a full month before receiving an anonymous tip that a body matching your description," he paused and I noticed his body tensing. "Turned up in a retention pond near a subdivision outside Trenton."

I scrubbed my hand over my forehead in an attempt to make sense of what he was saying. "But you would have known just by looking at the body that it wasn't me, wouldn't you?"

"No. The body was unrecognizable. The height was right, the hair was right, but nothing else could be determined by sight," he said through clenched teeth and my heart dropped to my stomach. God, to have seen a body in that condition and think it was me? I ached for him and wished for maybe the thousandth time that none of this had happened.

His voice was raw when he spoke again. "The Medical Examiner determined the blood type matched yours. The dental records matched. He was ready to issue the certificate, but I wanted a DNA match. I … wanted to be sure. He was able to make the results a priority. We got the results back in two weeks. The death certificate was issued then."

I sucked in a breath. "October eighteenth," I mumbled, repeating the date Madge Barker had given me. "Oh God…"

"Yeah," Tank muttered. "Dark day in the Rangeman family, Steph."

I felt dizzy. I could only imagine how I would have felt if it had happened in reverse. "Shit," I whispered.

Ranger stood and walked over to the window, looking out over the city. None of us spoke and he remained there for a few minutes. He returned to the table with his blank face in place. "You're obviously not dead, though."

I stared at him, fighting nausea. The implications of how deep this went were overwhelming. Someone had the power to influence the Medical Examiner, and possibly the Forensics lab. I must have gone pale because he suddenly appeared at my side, gripped the back of my neck, and pressed my head between my knees. He lightly massaged my neck and told me to press against his hand and breathe slowly. After a few moments, I gave him a hand signal to let him know I was okay and he let me up.

Tank cleared his throat. "Let's focus on the present for now." He flicked his glance to Ranger's stony posture and then lifted the stack of papers in front of him. "These are prints of the images Spitz emailed me."

I immediately wanted to fast and pray and light a few candles. I didn't know what I'd been up to, but suddenly the prospect of seeing pictures of myself doing whatever it was made me nervous. What if I'd been an assassin and killed people for money, or worse, for pleasure? What if I'd been a stripper … or a hooker? I had no idea, no way of knowing.

My palms started to sweat when Ranger took the stack from Tank and spread them out over the table so they were facing me. I stood up so I could see them and he moved to stand next to me so he could also see them. The first thing I noticed about myself was my hair. In some of the pictures it was shaved, barely longer than a buzz cut. I resisted a shudder and looked through the pictures, noting the changes in hair length.

There was an image of me at a market with a short woman with straight, dark hair and a somber expression on her face. It was the woman from the dream, the one with the baby.

"This woman," I said, pointing at the picture of the two of us. "I dreamed about her the night before Ranger came. She must be a friend of mine. I dreamed that we were at her house. She had a baby."

"Have a name?" Ranger asked.

I shook my head and he picked up the photo and wrote on the back with a black marker: Friend of Camila's? I returned my attention to the pictures. There was one of me at a grocery store, another of me at a bank, possibly alone or with one of the people beside me in line. I looked at the rest of the pictures: one coming out of a cinema where I looked to be alone and two at a hospital. The first was me with the man, Seppe, from my first dream and I was in a hospital bed. In the second, I was walking out the door. I knew it was a hospital because of the telltale crosses on the sliding glass doors which obviously led to an emergency room. Beside me, unbelievably, was Adriano. Seeing that picture made my knees weak with trepidation. Dear God, if that was really me and he was real…

I pointed to it, hand trembling, and said, "That's Adriano." I sank into my chair, my legs having given out. The proof was right in front of me. The dreams weren't dreams. They were memories. The reality of what I'd suffered as this Camila person left me cold.

"That's the guy who hurt you?" Ranger asked, pointing to the bastard walking next to me with his arm possessively around my waist, apparently guiding me around the back of an ambulance parked in the bay.

I nodded. "That's him." The table went silent and I looked up into each of their faces. They all looked deadly right now. The prospect that he'd actually done those things to me weighed heavily on my mind and I could tell they were all thinking about it, as well.

The guys studied the pictures of him and I heard Ranger say something to Tank, but I couldn't focus on his words. I apparently married this guy, so I must have loved him on some level. How could I have let him treat me like that? How could Seppe if he cared about me?

In a daze, I mumbled, "The other man is Seppe. He was like a … a father figure to her, uh, me."

My statement was met with silence. I looked up into three different sets of eyes, all staring at me in speculation. It didn't take a genius, knowing that Seppe was a mafia guy, to know that they wondered just how involved I'd been in his life and his business.

Ranger's arm muscles twitched. Oh, he was angry, but I was certain it wasn't directed at me. The pictures confirmed that I'd lived a life as a different person, had connections to a head mafia honcho, and lived in some sort of abusive relationship. I realized, then, the level of patience I'd need to deal with Ranger absorbing all that had happened to me and I resolved to let him work through things on his own because I wasn't sure how to help him when he kept himself so rigid and distant.

Letting go of all my questions for the moment, I studied the picture of me and Seppe again. Something traumatic had happened because not only was I in a hospital bed, but there were tubes and wires connected to me. Seppe sat beside the bed in a chair with his hand gripping mine, an angry expression on his face, and a cell phone to his ear. It was the first time since dreaming of him that I saw him upset and fear blossomed in my gut. The look on his face was murder, pure and simple.

The date on the photo caught my attention just then. I hadn't noticed the photos had them. I checked the others and they all had dates in the bottom right-hand corner. The one on the hospital photo sent a jolt through my body and I sat down, hard, in my chair. It had happened less than two weeks ago. Two weeks, and I didn't remember it.

I sighed in defeat and pressed my fingertips to my eyes to ward off the headache building up rapidly behind the lids.

"Well," Walker said, "you've identified two men who know something about your life this past year. What's more is that we now have confirmation that the dreams are really memories trying to surface."

"Yeah," I mumbled, looking at the photos again. I reached up and slid the photos around so they were in date order and sat up when I was done. "Hey, hang on. There are a few months missing. Look, these are December 2010, here's January 2011 ... then nothing until June 2011. That's a huge gap."

"Right," Tank said, suddenly looking very uncomfortable.

"Talk," Ranger said.

"Well," Tank began, "I have a few more photos in a separate envelope. Spitz said I might want to show them privately." He stared at Ranger, his eyes full of sadness and regret.

"You've seen them?" Ranger asked and Tank nodded. "Give them to me," Ranger said darkly.

The look in Tank's eyes made me nervous. He looked scared, but I was sure it wasn't for himself.

"First. I think that you both should do this together, alone." Ranger studied him and Walker got up and went into the bedroom, pulling out his phone as he went. Tank stood and his hand nervously tapped the edge of the padded envelope. "I don't want you to look into these too closely. There could be a logical explanation. We just need to figure out what it is," he said, stalling.

Ranger snapped his fingers, then opened his hand and held it out to Tank, palm up.

Tank slid the package into Ranger's hand and gulped audibly. My whole body began to shake. Something told me I did not want Ranger to see those photos of me, but I was powerless to stop him.