SURPRISE! This story is, you may be glad to know, officially taking over my life.
Chapter 22
"Oh, hell." Graham put a proprietary hand on Emma's arm, holding her firmly as he surveyed the unexpected ruin of his domain. "I don't know what – I locked the bugger up properly, I swear!" Something then occurring to him, he glanced around as if in expectation that the escaped miscreant might be lurking just out of sight with a crowbar, and his free hand fell to the holster of his gun. After a few minutes spent canvassing the station, he returned to Emma's side, scowling even more. "Do you mind if we delay the questioning session a few hours? I'd better bloody catch him before he does something worse."
"Be my guest. Actually, I'm on the case as well. I'll come with you."
Before Graham had time to protest – in Emma's experience, chivalrous behavior toward women tended to come arm in arm with the notion that they were frail china dolls who had to be shielded from the brutal masculine realities of sex, swearing, violence, and death – she grabbed the deputy's badge off the chaos of the desk and clipped it to her belt. "There. If anyone bothers to ask, I'm doing this legally. My ATF badge got left behind with the rest of my stuff in Boston – " she aimed a vicious glare at Greg and Tamara, still shacked up in their cozy love nest of a jail cell – "otherwise I'd use that. Let's go."
Graham shut his mouth with a click, then mustered up a brisk nod. "Quite so, Deputy Swan. Right behind you."
Most unwillingly, part of Emma felt a little thrill at those words, and she passed the immediately following moments, consisting of them pelting back down the steps and into the police cruiser, brusquely trying to squash it. Graham laid a trail of rubber as they peeled out, and he glanced at Emma questioningly. "D'you think I should switch on the siren, or would it only alert him that we're coming?"
"Leave it off, definitely." Emma was surprised. Even in sleepy small towns, older male veterans weren't in the business of asking operational advice from young female rookies, and even if Killian Jones had a good fifteen or twenty-minute head start, he was on foot. He couldn't outrun them forever. The discrepancy made her ask, "How long have you been a cop, Graham?"
He took a breath as if to answer, then frowned. "Can't remember. I guess I always have been."
"Well, obviously you weren't always." Despite herself, yet again, Emma slid closer. "You grow up here, I take it?"
Graham's brow wrinkled. "I suppose so."
That was an even stranger answer, and Emma was about to comment on it, but it struck her that she was now the one going against procedure, distracting her colleague with personal chitchat in the middle of an active crime scene, and she shut up and busied herself scanning with binoculars out the window, as Graham slowed the cruiser to a better hunting pace. They combed downtown and the residential neighborhoods, eyeing the car phone as if in fear that it was suddenly going to ring with Jones and a hostage on the other end, but it didn't. They cased the hospital, knowing that his victim and intended victim were there, but likewise turned up nothing. By the time they were in the woods that surrounded the town, peering through the dense green underbrush as if through the jungles of Borneo, Emma was despairing of how impossible it was to conduct a proper manhunt with only two cops in one car. "We're never going to find him like this, Graham. We need to try and phone my people down in Boston for backup."
She determinedly put out of her head what had happened both when she'd tried to call last night, and when the previous backup had confronted Killian Jones in the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel, the way he'd cut through them with a fucking poker. "This guy is way out of your usual league. He's formidable, he's incredibly talented, he's ruthless, and he's insane. I promise you, we're going to need help."
Graham, looking frustrated, nonetheless put the cruiser in park and ran a hand through his curls, disheveling them further in a way that was too damn cute. Not that Emma was looking or anything. "Okay. If you're sure about this. I mean, what is this going to be? Police helicopters or something? Here in Storybrooke?"
Once again, he sounded unsure, almost frightened. Emma frowned at him, then picked up the car phone, dialing for an outside line before entering the direct number for James' office. Surely he'd be there; he was one of those guys who thought that life was intended for work, instead of vice versa. But just as before, it rang and rang with nobody answering.
Emma finally hung up in exasperation, a line carved between her brows. "All right, that's just fucking wrong. I think there's something in this town somewhere that's playing monkey business with the long-distance signal. Can you drive out beyond the limits, so we can see if it works better out there?"
Graham gaped at her. "Leave Storybrooke?"
"Yeah." Emma was getting impatient. "I can assure you, a little thing like a road sign is not going to stop Jones – he could be well down that highway himself by now. And if you want to catch him or call in the big dogs from Boston or anything, we'd better go. Come on." She reached for the automatic transmission, to put it back in drive.
Graham's hand shot out and covered hers. Not in a comforting or agreeing way, but in a way that connoted no small threat. "We don't leave Storybrooke."
"What?" Emma exploded. "That's bullshit! Get moving! What are you going to do, head back to the station and sit with your thumb up your ass in hopes that Jones will drop by for afternoon tea? Jesus, maybe you need some serious cop lessons after all, because where I come from, that's sure as hell not how we catch bad guys. Or did you think that we could just – "
Staring into his glacial, emotionless blue-grey gaze, however, her angry tirade cut off abruptly. Just as before, her sixth sense was warning her that something was very wrong. Until now, Graham had treated her fairly, gently, and even more than a little flirtatiously, in his sweet awkward puppy-dog kind of way. But looking at him now, it was as if an entirely different person was looking back. As if he was being. . . possessed, or controlled, or something else well beyond the freaky pale. Like Frankenstein's monster coming to life, lightning crackling down the tubes, he swung toward her, eyes gone white and unfocused, and lunged.
"Jesus!" Emma reacted just in time, scrambling backwards across the seat and kicking him in the face, as she twisted around and struggled to unlock the cruiser door, even as the engine whined madly and started to rev. She wrestled the door open, felt Graham's fingers claw at her ankle, and threw herself out headlong, the gravel of the shoulder scraping her face into raw meat as she hit it at a far faster speed than anyone's face was designed to hit a road. She rolled desperately, trying to get clear, as the wheels squealed inches from her head and the cruiser rocked on its suspension as Graham leapt out after her. She pushed herself to all fours, then upright, put her head down, and ran for her life.
Two cracks and bangs punctured the grey, muggy air; he'd actually taken out his gun and was firing at her. Shooting a glance over her shoulder, she saw that he was staring at his own hand in shock as if struggling to regain control over it, as if it had acted completely outside his volition, and jerked in a crazy stutter step around the police car as if some capricious god or demon was tugging on his strings. It was, in fact, the most blood-chillingly horrifying thing she had ever seen in her life, and it made her run, if possible, still faster.
"Emma!" She thought it was him who shouted after her, not whatever Dr. Hyde had just taken him over, but she didn't dare to stop or turn or even slow. She could see the road sign just ahead – Now leaving Storybrooke – and put on a final burst of adrenaline-fueled speed, feet beating a tattoo into the pavement. She could see the car swerving crazily toward her, wondered for a brief and mad moment if Graham was even behind the wheel, and then ran headlong into something invisible, something that felt like sticky treacle, and clawed through it in slow motion, tumbling out on the other side bleeding, breathless, and terrified. Have to get up, have to –
But looking back, she saw. . . nothing. Even though instants earlier, the police car had been about to run her down, the road was quiet and deserted. There wasn't even any road sign. No visible token, in fact, that anything human lived out here at all. Just the overgrown thickets of weeds in the culvert, the hunched mossy trees dark enough to cast shade, the distant, dull shirring of birds and animals. The sun came and went behind a cloud.
There is no such place as Storybrooke, Maine.
Despite the fact that it was close to eighty degrees with drenching humidity, Emma started to shiver uncontrollably as she stood in the middle of the empty road. Despite pinching herself at least three times, she was no longer sure if she was asleep or awake, and didn't think she wanted to find out. The obvious hypothesis, of course, was to walk back toward whatever invisible boundary she'd just crossed to see if the town reappeared, but seriously, how could it just vanish? And even if she got back in, her last sight of it had been of a crazed sheriff with some kind of amnesia and/or mind control putting up a good-faith effort to kill her. Loathe as she was to think about anything from her ordeal, she remembered Tamara's words about how there was something else here (where? Where?) About how they couldn't go in off their guard.
Emma did not intend to go in ever again. Is anyone who stumbles into that place ever allowed to leave? Not a question she wanted to ponder, and it even briefly made her feel sorry for Greg and Tamara. Then her brief moment of empathy blew out like a candle in the wind. They'd made their choice, and nearly gotten her killed too for it.
She couldn't help one last nervous glance over her shoulder. Nothing. No sound but the wind.
Turning away, she started to trudge.
It took Emma the rest of the day to get back to Boston. She walked for a good five miles until the meandering country road funneled into a four-lane highway with signs for places she actually recognized, and then stood hopefully with her thumb out until someone – a family of summer vacationers in a boatlike RV – finally stopped. They were horrified by the mess of her face, and readily believed her story that she'd just escaped from a bunch of crazy meth-head backwooders who'd tried to haul her off to their remote cabin and do God knew what with her. They urgently enquired if they needed to call the police, and Emma reassured them that she'd take care of it. All she needed now was a ride south, as far away from said lunatics as possible.
The family was heading for Portland, but promised that they weren't going to leave her high and dry, and Emma was content to leave the plan at that as she sat in the back of the RV, the family's teenage daughter gingerly dabbing at her face with an antiseptic towelette and jerking her hand away every time Emma hissed. Finally, she ordered her to just clean it, and bit her lip at the sting, until most of the blood had been sponged off. Then they gave her a cold pack from the ice chest to wrap in a towel and hold against her face, and a popsicle to eat. In fact she was starved half to death, having had nothing since the pizza last night before Tamara and Co. kidnapped her, and so they stopped at a Wendy's and bought her a meal.
Emma huddled on the bed in the back of the RV, munching fries, as they swayed along the highway. She couldn't stop herself from stealing continual glances out the window at the other cars, as if expecting to see Killian Jones' face in one of them. She already knew in her gut that he had in fact gotten away, and that she was going to have to figure out some way to track him down. She was already going to be faced with one hell of a mess to explain to her higher-ups, and now that she was increasingly sure that they had somehow been caught in the same trap, that he had been set up by Tamara and Lacey for purposes of their own and might not be after her at all, there was nothing to stop her from working the case again. Of course, James was likely to disagree, but that was a bridge to cross when she got to it. Assuming she got to it.
They reached Portland in midafternoon, and Emma remembered that there was a coach line that ran frequently to Boston. The only problem was, of course, was that she had no money; her wallet had likewise been left behind in her apartment, and she didn't want to ask the family for the thirty bucks it would cost to purchase a ticket. But they insisted, and Emma accepted the money with grudging gratitude. She'd just missed the 2:30 bus, so she waited for an hour, still tense and on edge, then bought a seat on the 3:30 departure and all but collapsed into it.
It was only a two-hour trip assuming no traffic, but it was a Friday in late summer, the construction projects and tourists and weekenders and returning students were out in force, and even an elderly jogger could have outstripped them as they crawled down 95. Emma dozed fitfully, but couldn't sleep; images from the last twenty-four hours seemed to be laser-etched behind her eyes whenever she closed them. Even by her low standards, it had been a fucking bitch of a day, and she could see people stealing glances at her face; she must look like a domestic abuse victim or something. Possibly not that far off. After being Tasered, tied up, thrown in the trunk of a car, witnessing two attempted murders, then running for help, assisting in the hunt for an escaped prisoner before having to fight free and make a break for it herself, walking for miles, fending off questions, and then sitting here broiling in the coach's insufficient air conditioning, Emma was just about ready to kill someone herself.
At last, at long long fucking last, the coach pulled into Boston's South Station at almost 7 PM. Emma stumbled off, jelly-legged, and wondered if she dared to go home. If Tamara and Greg had managed to weasel their way out of their predicament as well, which was difficult but certainly not impossible, they lived downstairs. It probably hadn't been that hard at all, now that she thought of it, for them to set up some kind of rudimentary surveillance operation and keep tabs on everything she brought home from work. They must not have been fooled for a second by her shabby lie about being "Ruth." God. How long have they been after me?
Without a wallet, and hence no T card to catch the train or cash to take a cab, Emma was faced with the unpalatable option of walking – wherever it was she was planning to go. Finally, she decided that she had to risk at least seeing if they were there. If not, she'd dart in, retrieve her stuff (not her phone, seeing as it was now swirling along somewhere in the depths of the city sewer system) and book it out again. If they were. . . well, that was another for the "improvise and then run like hell" section of the plan.
Emma was reeling in exhaustion, so footsore that she was bleeding through her shoes, by the time she was climbing the brownstone's front steps, cracking the door, and peering hesitantly in. She couldn't see any light from Tamara and Greg's apartment, and thus inserted the rest of her body through the space, using only the minimal amount, and bolted up the stairs beyond, to her own. They'd left her door locked, but even she was not completely out of her bag of tricks, and picked at it with her bitten fingernails and oddments in her pockets until she got it open. Then she went inside, collected her wallet, still-packed suitcase, and keys, jumped about a foot when the radiator banged, and scuttled out again.
She didn't feel safe until she was at least three blocks away. She knew that she couldn't keep going much longer, but she was still running on fumes, the kind of sick adrenaline that made people do the physically impossible: lifting cars off their kids, climbing tall trees, swimming for hours, surviving in bitter cold. She didn't realize where she was going until she got off the train in downtown Boston, and saw the Renaissance Hotel looming above the waterfront.
If they recognized her as the blonde who'd been in the middle of the crook-catching bust gone horribly wrong just a few days ago, she was screwed, but they didn't. The cheery receptionist checked her in, informed her that they had several lovely rooms available, and even had the decency not to stare at her hamburger face. Emma thanked her with a grunt, took her key card, and staggered into the elevator. She rode up, swiped into her room, shut and bolted the door, and then fell on the bed, too tired even to undress. Unconsciousness was already pulling at her, more alluring than any lover, and she let go and fell into its soft dark embrace.
It was three-thirty the next afternoon when Emma woke up, having neither stirred nor dreamed nor even moved for the past nineteen hours; her catatonia had been so complete that it felt as if she'd been under some fairy-tale sleeping curse or something. Her neck and back were horribly cramped, her face mashed with pillow marks, her hair tangled, her breath horrible, and her aspect otherwise that of a particularly ill-tempered and hideous ogre, but she was alive, and she even felt somewhat better. She padded into the bathroom, undressed, took a very long shower, and ferreted around in her suitcase for some clean clothes. If she hurried, she could definitely catch James at the office; he was always there on Saturdays until at least six PM. And needless to say, she had a whole fucking lot to tell him.
When she'd combed and braided her hair, brushed her teeth, put on makeup, and done a few yoga stretches, she felt almost human again, and grabbed a snack from the hotel bar as she headed out. She was afraid that the ATF offices would have vanished as well, or be surrounded by a horde of raving lunatics with torches and pitchforks, but everything was wonderfully, reassuringly normal. She used her badge to enter with no difficulty, and rode up.
James was on the phone when she knocked on his door, and didn't turn around immediately. He was frowning, taking copious notes on a yellow legal pad, and she definitely thought she heard the word "situation," which, in law enforcement, only ever meant the kind where Murphy's Law applied with a vengeance. She waited until he hung up, then strode in.
"What the – what the!" James had very unwisely taken a sip of Mountain Dew just as she did, and thus baptized his monitor with a spray of neon green soda, dripping down onto his notes. He lunged to dry them off before they could ruin all his hard work, but kept on coughing, staring at her. "Emma? What the hell are you doing here? I told you to leave town, it wasn't – "
"Yeah. That would have gone better if the people you sent weren't complete fucking psychopaths."
Even he was (understandably) taken aback by that, and it took quite a while for the story to emerge in coherent fashion. She told him most, but not everything, of what had befallen her since she'd hung up with him, and watched as his jaw sagged lower and lower. Either he was the world's best actor since Leonardo DiCaprio not to receive an Oscar, or he genuinely had had no idea that Tamara and Greg, whoever and however they were plugged into high-level federal law enforcement sources, were such shady characters. He kept shaking his head over and over. "We worked with these people. We trusted them. And now you're saying their friend was the one who codenamed herself the Librarian to call in this tip about Shamrock – Jones, I mean – and start the whole charade? The hell were they doing?"
"I've asked myself the same question. About four or five hundred times. Believe me."
"Yeah, I bet you have." James leaned back in his chair, rubbing his unshaven blonde stubble and muttering. "Somebody's getting fired over this, trust me. We vet our contractors and our coworkers and everyone who handles the stuff on the ground, but either something major slipped through the cracks or they've got a mole on the inside. Shit. We're going to have to go through the entire damn department and recheck everyone's creds and clearance. And when we're trying to catch a crazy guy to boot, and in the wake of that whole fiasco at the Ren. Shit."
This was Emma's cue. "Yeah, I know. It's going to be a pain in the ass. But you need to get it done, otherwise they – or their friends, they talked about it like there was some kind of organization involved, not just them – could remain happily plugged in and anticipating all our moves. And so. . ." She swallowed. "Send me to hunt down Jones."
James blinked, then stared, then shook his head. "No. Absolutely not."
"Look. You heard that bug recording. With the. . ." Emma's face heated to the approximate temperature of lava at remembering just what James had overheard, and hastened on. "Never mind. I know what you think. Either that I'm in with him somehow, or that he's a personal threat, or that he killed my parents and poisoned me. I can tell you with almost one hundred percent certainty that none of them are true, and honestly? I can't tell you why, but I think I'm the only one who can catch him. You saw the security tapes and everything, what this guy's capable of. What use did my backup do me at the hotel?"
"Emma. Look. You're in your first year, you're doing what all new agents do. You're going too big. You want to make a splash. Announce your presence with authority, as it were." James made a wry face. "But if you think that after what just happened that I'm letting you go out on your own against a guy who was fully prepared, according to you, to commit at least two murders, then – "
"See. That's the thing." Emma had had a lot of time to think on that snail of a bus ride from Portland, and some of the conclusions had come from there; others had been present in her mind when she woke up this afternoon, without her consciously remembering drawing them. "I don't think they were random. In fact, the furthest thing from it. He's not a serial killer who just goes out and caps somebody in the ass for shits and giggles. I'm not saying that what he did was in any sense of the word defensible, but. . . like I said. I know him. We have a history, even if I will freely admit that I don't remember all of it. And I said earlier that he's crazy, but I'm starting to wonder about that too. I think he is coldly, terribly, horribly sane."
"So – "
"So I'm saying, he can be dealt with. He's not a frothing maniac. He has a code. Some kind of dark honor, almost. And. . ." Emma swallowed. "I know this sounds strange. But I honestly don't think, if it came down to it, that he would seriously, actually hurt me."
James raised a hand to his face, discovered whatever profanities he had been about to utter were entirely inadequate, and dropped it. He blew out a breath. "Emma."
"James."
"Okay. Fine. Convince me. Think like him. You said he escaped. Where'd he go?"
She hesitated, but the answer was clear. "I think he left the country. He couldn't try again at killing Gold, not with the entire town up his ass. Probably busted out of the jail, didn't waste any time at getting out of that crazy fucking shithole while Graham and I were going in circles looking for him, and hitchhiked to some small regional airport. Somewhere they wouldn't be as on their guard. Got a flight out."
"Theoretically, it doesn't matter where he tried to leave. An alert should have come up. We have the FBI on it, they're good at keeping people off planes who aren't supposed to be on them – "
"I'm sure. But let's be honest. If he was coming into the U.S. with the express purpose of killing someone, he probably had prepared some kind of cover identity to get back out."
"True," James admitted unhappily. "Well, that's another count for the charges – forging passports and identity documents and using them to flee abroad. Like you said. This guy is slick. But. . ." He hesitated. "Why haven't we heard of him? I ran the name. Supposedly Killian James Jones, an Irish lad from the little town of Drogheda on the northeastern coast. Doctorate in European history from Trinity in Dublin, a brief posting at Boston College, now a professor at Oxford. All checks out. But there are so many spaces where he's completely blank. Where you'd expect a normal person to have bank accounts, cell phone records, credit card purchases, social media profiles, anything. Just no electronic trace whatsoever. I know it sounds crazy – "
"No crazier than anything that's happened to me recently, I promise – "
"But either Killian Jones is an assumed name in and of itself, or he was born, then vanished, then reappeared in the real world as a grownup and didn't bother with the awkward intermediary stages. I can't find anything listing where he attended grammar school, if he was part of any clubs, did anything as a teenager. Even his parents can't be pinned down. Like I said. Nada."
Emma rubbed her temples. "Haven't we already established that if he is a criminal, and not just a lone wolf out on a long-term vigilante justice crusade, he's really, really good?"
"Exactly. Which is why I still don't want to send you after him."
"Please." Emma leaned forward. "I wouldn't be asking if I didn't think I could do this. I promise. I'm stubborn and I have a lot of pride and I know I just had the battle royale of fuckups, but I actually think that the other people made it worse. If I go on my own. . ."
James looked at her wearily and didn't answer for a very long moment. Then he said, "If you do, it's going to be what I call a discretionary case. Basically, it means if you get your ass in hot water, we can't do anything to help you. In fact, if we're asked about it, we don't even know who you are. You're on unofficial assignment, you can't use department money – you're operating in all respects as if you were a private citizen, except for the fact that you have the authority to arrest him if you do find him. Got it?"
Emma nodded. "Yeah."
"So like I said, if he does go psycho, you don't have the four big guys with guns to bust in. Cavalry ain't coming. Is this really something you can manage?"
She paused, then nodded again.
"Jesus Christ." James raised his hand, stared at it, then commenced hitting himself dully in the forehead with the heel. "Just promise me one thing, champ."
"Yeah?"
"I like you. You've got pluck. Toughness. Courage, resilience. It's going to fuck you and fuck you hard. So please." He blew out another breath. "Just don't ask me to come to your funeral."
Despite that utterly pessimistic declaration, Emma felt as energized as if she'd slept another nineteen hours (or at least some). She collected her thumb drive, which contained a multitude of useful programs that a BU friend majoring in computer science had written for her, and plugged into the departmental database. Her fingers flew over the keys as she entered in a series of overrides and hacks, accessing the central terminal of citizen data that ATF had access to, as a branch of the federal law enforcement system. Some was stuff that could be acquired by the general public with a Freedom of Information request, but most was quite a bit more sensitive, and she chewed her thumbnail as she pondered where to start. Finally, following her hunch from earlier, she selected the regional airports within a fifty-mile radius of the part of Maine where they'd been, and started scrolling their passenger departure records for the past three days. She had no idea what she was looking for, only a vague sense that she'd know when she saw it.
As she'd expected, there was definitely no "Killian Jones;" he hadn't tried to travel under his own name (was it his name?) clearly knowing that this would lead him to a not-so-pleasant detention with multiple U.S. intelligence agencies. She knew better than to look at any of the Joneses in general – he was too careful to make a lazy mistake like that. Think. Think, think. Back a few years ago, when he'd bolted from BC, she'd met Wendy – Wendy Darling – who was looking for him. They knew each other. Had some kind of history. And Wendy, of course, was the inspiration for the eponymous heroine in the classic children's book, in –
Emma's eyes flew open. With suddenly trembling fingers, she altered her search parameters, typing in a new first name and struggling to think of what might serve for the surname. Her old roommate, Wendy's granddaughter. . . her last name had been. . . and it just so happened to be Killian's actual middle name. . .
She made one final alteration, and felt her heart seize up.
"Gotcha," she whispered, staring at the screen.
Yes. She was almost sure. It had to be. About three hours after Killian Jones had escaped from the Storybrooke jail, a passenger by the name of Peter James had embarked at some rinkidink little county airport about twenty-five miles away, from whence he had flown to Burlington, Vermont, and then to Montreal, Quebec. From Montreal, doubtless using the Canadian stopover as a way to obscure further tracks, he had departed on a Lufthansa flight to London.
London. It was that piece of the puzzle that confirmed it for her. As much as she searched, she couldn't find anything else, and if so, he had only just arrived. She couldn't know if he was retreating back to Oxford, his home base, or if he intended to batten down the hatches in London and hope that the American police wouldn't come looking for him there. But it was in Oxford that she'd first kissed him and remembered. . . whatever she'd remembered, that confused and chaotic jumble of memories that had driven her to flee in fury and terror. You left me. You hurt me. In Oxford that she'd met that shadow, or dreamed that shadow, or whatever the fuck had happened with him. Never Never Land.
Emma sat staring at the terminal for a few moments longer, then powered it down, ejected her hacker drive, and cleared cookies and refreshed the cache. Once she had a clean OS, she went to Expedia and booked the last seat to Heathrow on a flight leaving Logan International tomorrow evening. Then she surfed to the University of Oxford website and began intel-gathering.
Her cover story would be simplicity itself; she'd pose as a prospective graduate student interested in visiting the university during summer recess, hoping to put together an application by the January deadline, as well as enjoying the beautiful, historic city. Then she'd have to tour the colleges, of course, and particularly the one she was most interested in attending: Wadham. If then she just so happened to discover that Killian Jones taught there, well then. She might ask the head tutor if she could arrange a meeting, or perhaps just happen to find herself in his office. And then, then, they would see what they would see.
Last time she'd gone there unwitting, scared, shattered, and confused. This time she was returning like a heat-seeking missile, hard and determined. She'd do this. She swore it.
"I'm coming for you, Killian," Emma murmured, saving a few talking points to a Word document and transferring it to her drive. As she said it, she was surprised and unsettled to realize that while she meant it as a threat, it hadn't come out that way. Almost a reassurance, a promise, made to him and to herself. That no matter the distance, the space, the time, the difficulty, no matter what lay between, no matter what had happened or would happen, she would find him. As if she knew him. Already did.
She got up. Closed the laptop, shut down the lights, and locked the door. Emerged into the sultry Boston night. If nothing else, still breathing. If nothing else, a survivor. Moving forward.
Wake up, Emma.
Wake up.