the limo.
“Don’t go yet,” he said to his driver. “Don’t go.”
Leena cried, louder and louder, and Alik had no idea what he was expected to do. He looked out the window, and he didn’t see Jada. She was gone. Somewhere into the shopping center they were near, he imagined, but he didn’t know where.
Unless she’d hailed a cab and simply left them both. It didn’t seem like something she would do, but he admitted, willingly, he knew nothing about emotion. About mothers who stayed with their children.
Jada wasn’t even Leena’s mother. But he was her father.
He didn’t know how to comfort a child. He didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. No one had held him. No one had sung him songs or rocked him until he stopped crying. It was very possible he had never cried.
Leena on the other hand, did. Quite well.
He had always intended to hire a nanny, and when he’d gone out into the hall he’d felt, for the first time in his memory, like he was in a situation he could not control. And when he had seen Jada slumped against the wall, crying into her hands, he knew he’d found the solution.
But then she’d left. She wanted more, and he had no idea what more it was she wanted.
Alik had given up on emotion long ago. His body had put all of that into a deep freeze, protecting him from the worst of his experiences while growing up. And by the time he hadn’t needed the protection anymore, it was far too late for anything to thaw.
He experienced things through the physical. Sex and alcohol, and, in his youth, various other stimulants, had done a good job of providing him with sensation where the frozen organ in his chest simply did not.
It was how things were for him. It was convenient too, because when he had to carry out a mission that was less than savory, whether on the battlefield, as he’d once done, or in the boardroom, as he did now, he simply went to his mind. Logic always won.
And after that, there was always a party to go to. He’d learned how to manufacture happiness from his surroundings. To pull it into the darkness that seemed to dominate his insides and light the way with it, temporarily. A night of dancing, drinking and sex. It created a flash, a spark in the oppressive dark. It burned out as quickly as it ignited, but it was a hell of a lot better than endless blackness.
Except he didn’t feel vacant now. He felt panicked, and he found it wasn’t an improvement. Without thinking, he undid Leena’s seat and pulled her into his lap. She shrieked and jerked away from him, and with that came a punch of something—emotion, pain—to his chest that nearly knocked him back.
As afraid as he was, she was just as scared. Of him.
“Mama! Mama mama mama.” The word, just sounds really, came fast and furious, over and over, intermingled with sobs.
He tried to speak. To say something. But he had no idea what to say. What did you say to a screaming baby? He’d never wanted this. Never imagined it. He truly might have turned away if not for Sayid. If not for the conversation they’d had when he’d left Brussels.
“You have to claim her, Alik. She is your responsibility. You have so many resources at your disposal, so many things you can provide her with. She is your blood, your family.”
“I have family without blood,” Alik had said, a reference to Sayid’s family, to whom he had sworn absolute allegiance.
“A family by choice. She is your family. You are bound to her. To dishonor something so strong would be a mistake.”
“No, my only mistake was coming here for the weekend instead of heading down to Paris or Barcelona to get laid.”
“Running is your specialty, Alik,” Sayid had said, his tone deathly serious. “But you can’t change what is by running. Not this time.”
His friend was right. Alik lived his whole life moving at a dead run. But he was never running from something. Nothing scared him that much. But he wasn’t really running to something, either. He was simply getting through as quickly, as loudly and recklessly, as possible.
He found it was the loud and reckless things in life that offered the most return in terms of what they made him feel. And he was hungry for feeling. For tastes of what years of existing in survival mode had denied him.
Maybe that, more than Sayid’s comments, had been the deciding factor in why he’d come. That or watching the other man’s life, watching all of the change it had brought about for Sayid to acquire a wife and children.
Either way, when he’d decided to come after his daughter, he hadn’t made the decisions hesitantly or lightly. No, there had been no instant bond between them, but he had hardly expected that. Alik had never bonded to people instantly. Sometimes he simply never did.
Sayid was the exception, and then later, Sayid’s family. But he’d been twenty-eight when he’d met his friend, who was more a brother to him than anything else, and it had been his first experience of caring for another human being.
It still didn’t come easily to him. But swearing his alle-giance? That came as simply as seeing whose name was on the check. It always had for him. Even now that he’d moved into the business of tactical, cutthroat corporate raider, rather than tactical, cutthroat mercenary and overthrower of governments, that fact remained true.
His loyalty could be bought, and once he was purchased, he would defend those he was loyal to till death if he had to. And then, when the job was done, he would break the bonds as easily as they’d been forged.
Again, Sayid was the exception. A job gone wrong, turned into a rescue mission to save the life of the sheikh, even when everyone else had given up, had made their bond unbreakable.
He would simply choose to cultivate that bond with his child. She had bought his loyalty with her blood, a check that could never simply be cashed, could never just disappear.
That meant, no matter what, he would defend her. Fight for her, die for her.
Or pound the streets as long as it took, looking for the woman she called mama.
“I will protect you,” he said to her, looking at her red, tear-streaked face. “That is my promise.”
His daughter was unimpressed with the vow.
He pushed the door to the limo open. “Wait here,” he said to his driver.
He got out, holding Leena, who was squirming and screeching against his chest. People were staring at him, at them. He was used to being able to fly under the radar when he wanted to. Used to making a scene only when he wanted to. But he had no control over this scene.
How a tiny child could assume total control over things with the ease most people breathed astounded him. He walked down the sidewalk, cursing the rain, and the knots of kids in skinny jeans smoking cigarettes and blocking his way.
Cursing his total lack of control.
There was a clothing store, a pizza place and a coffeehouse along the main drag of the shopping center, and he was willing to bet that Jada hadn’t gone far.
He
