kissed-by-moonlight, Rakhibul hasan [golden son ebook .TXT] 📗

an entire building. Sure, I pushed it off the roof of a parking garage, but imagine all the lives my petty refusal to share had saved.

 

I mean, come on. Where was my freaking medal?

 

Instead of pats on the back and congrats, I was getting hate mail and being accused of being a communist. Apparently no one was buying my version of things, which was that it had all been a big misunderstanding. According to the majority there was no way I hadn’t been in on whatever nefarious plot the as of yet unknown terrorists had planned. They had been parked in my space after all. I must have had a change of heart at the last minute and decided to do the Christian thing by getting rid of the bombs before they could enact their bloody purpose.

 

I knew it was bullshit, but hey. I had to appreciate the creative genius behind it. After all, it had been on the front page months ago, and for a while my face had been plastered all over three major news channels. If today was any indication, people hadn’t forgotten about it nearly as quickly as I’d hoped they had, and I mentally prepared myself for another rejection.

 

Ever since the car bomb thing, other newspapers had been reluctant to hire me on. Just because the police weren’t able to prove that I hadn’t been involved didn’t mean that I was innocent, and the controversy surrounding the part I’d played in the whole debacle had cost me my job. No paper wanted to employ a woman that many believed to be a domestic terrorist. Bad for sales and bad for employee morale.

 

I’m pretty sure that the only reason I wasn’t facing jail time was because the cops wanted to see if I would eventually lead them to any of my accomplices. That, and because I’d done my fair share of favors for a particular judge during my years at the Examiner and he’d vouched for me. In the end, I had saved lives after all.

 

So here I was, almost a month later. Still looking for a job that wouldn’t put my journalism degree to waste and glaring at parked cars with tinted windows because I was 99.9% sure that they were surveillance vans put in place by the Feds.

 

There were a number of ways that I could have answered Ms. Dawson, but in the end I simply shrugged and said, “I’m a reporter who got on the wrong end of a story.”

 

She regarded me for another moment or two, and then smiled.

 

“You’re hired.”

 

My eyes went wide and I gaped. “Really? Just like that?” Not that I was complaining or anything, but usually when an interview took less than three minutes it was because I hadn’t gotten the job.

 

“Just like that,” she said, getting to her feet and stretching the kinks out of her back. “I know your work, Miss Conners,” she continued, wandering back over to her board. “You’re good at what you do. You’d be an asset to our team. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t—”

 

Dawson seemed to struggle for the right words; finally, she simply used her fingers to make a circular motion in the air above one temple.

 

I laughed despite myself. Far be it for me to look a gift horse in the mouth but— “What about the Fiery Phaedra thing?”

 

She shrugged without turning around. “We’re a tabloid, Conners. Any publicity is good publicity as far as I’m concerned.”

 

Happiness was a hesitant warmth in my chest, and I found myself stifling giggles as I came to my feet.

 

“Thank you. You have no idea how much this means to me. I promise I—”

 

She waved the rest of my words away. “You start Monday. We have staff meetings every Wednesday. Give me headlines. Proof it wasn’t a mistake to hire you. That’s all the thanks I need.”

 

* * * *

 

That night I lay in bed watching TV, flipping from one channel to the next, when something caught my eye. A newscaster was standing in front of the Examiner and gesturing behind her to where you could see the parking deck connected to it. I got the gist of what the story was about even before I turned the volume up.

 

The newswoman was standing next to an older gentleman who was squinting at the camera as if it were a beast he’d never before seen. He had his hands folded at the small of his back and his suit was so crisply pressed that it was a wonder that he could move in it at all.

 

“—true that your employer, CEO and philanthropist, Gabriel Evans was visiting the Examiner that day?”

 

“Yes, it is. Mr. Evans and I were there conducting an interview when we heard the explosion.”

 

“Many citizens are skeptical that there was any danger at all. In fact, some are even saying that the bomb was for Mr. Evans rather than a paper that focused mainly on political and economic issues.”

 

I sat up, my blanket pooling around my waist. Gabriel Evans had been at the Examiner the day the car bomb went off? They must have found some footage of him or something. The man was notorious for avoiding both the cameras and the people who wielded them for a living. Spotting Evans was like spotting a chupacabra. Which is to say that it was the singularly most terrifying thing that could ever happen to you. Especially if you were dumb enough to go after him alone. It made me wonder how Channel 8 had managed to land an interview, even if it was with one of his lackeys.

 

“Whether the bomb was meant for the newspaper or Mr. Evans is irrelevant. The Lumière Corporation is opposed to all forms of violence. We abhor the thought that anyone would have to live in fear, regardless of the bomber’s real intent. That is why Mr. Evans is hoping to increase the city’s security by donating over half a million dollars to the police department. These funds will allow them to hire new officers as needed, acquire new equipment, weapons, and so forth. In addition to that, the Lumière Corporation will also be financing the building of a new task force that will be designed to respond to high risk situations that other officers may not be trained to handle.”

 

For a split second the look of stunned disbelief on the anchor’s face mirrored my own, but she bounced back with almost no hesitation.

 

“That’s very generous of him, but what sort of ‘high risk situations’ are you preparing for exactly? And what do the Mayor and Police commissioner have to say about such a drastic change?”

 

The man’s smile was a little frosty. “You can’t put a price tag on a peaceful night’s sleep, and the Mayor and Commissioner are behind the project 100%. In fact it was their idea. As far as the types of situations that would call for a specially trained task force, the bomb incident wasn’t the first, nor the only, sign that criminal syndicates are fighting for dominance within the city limits. Our current police force is too small and too poorly equipped to handle the crime wave. If our only line of defense is overwhelmed, then it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us start drowning as well. Mr. Evans only hopes to prevent such an outcome.”

 

The anchor was nodding along with the man (whose name appeared to be David Reed, if the little box below his face was to be trusted), but I was more than a little skeptical. I’d be the first one to admit that Briarcliff had its share of…mishaps. It was a lot like Sin City, or maybe Gotham City before Batman started taking out the trash. But even if we were overrun with our fair share of murder, drugs, prostitution, and smuggling, nothing about Gabriel Evans equaled “hero” or “savior.” That half a million dollars sounded like some sort of payoff, and now that I knew he’d been in the Examiner, I was convinced that the bomb had been meant for him.

 

Now he was creating a “special task force”? A division that would probably be full of highly trained individuals who answered solely to Evans whenever they weren’t out kicking ass and taking names.

 

God help us all. The man was taking over the city, and he was going to pull it off without even a token protest. I tuned back into the broadcast at the sound of my name.

 

“—about Phaedra Conners? There’s a lot of speculation going around that Miss Conners was responsible for the bomb’s presence there that day. Can you tell me what Mr. Evans has to say on the subject? Will people like Phaedra Conners soon find themselves with a target painted on their backs?”

 

My heart started beating a mile a minute. While Reed’s face was just as composed as it had been throughout the interview, there was a new hardness in his voice when he spoke.

 

“Mr. Evans doesn’t believe that Miss Conners had anything to do with the events that occurred. He believes that she was simply in the wrong place at the right time. Either way, no matter her involvement, or lack thereof, Miss Conners was single-handedly responsible for saving countless lives. The fact that Mr. Evans could have been included in the death toll simply makes him all the more aware of her heroism.” His eyes bored into the camera in a silent bid to drive his point home. “We are grateful for her intervention in this matter.”

 

And that was that. The anchor thanked him for his time, and they segued smoothly into a story about a local boy being suspended from school for attacking one of his teachers. I sat back against my mound of pillows, still staring at the screen but no longer really seeing or hearing anything. I was lost in my thoughts. Lost in the warm glow of that single statement:

 

We are grateful for her intervention.

 

It wasn’t exactly a medal or the key to the city, but it was more than I’d gotten in the month since I’d pushed that car off the roof. I knew that I was no hero, but it was still nice being confused for one.

 

“I didn’t always howl at the moon. I used to be a housewife.”

 

—Kestril Winters

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

 

Six Months Later…

 

 

 

 

 

You know those people who go to work and they’re completely satisfied with their lives? The ones who feel a sense of personal satisfaction from walking through the doors in the morning because they know that they made the right decision?

 

I’m not one of those people.

 

The only thing that kept me functioning like a regular human being was a grim satisfaction that at least I didn’t work in customer service. The only thing I disliked more than tabloids were people. Somewhere along the line, I’d developed a deep, burning dislike for the human race. There seemed to be no cure.

 

“Good morning, Phaedra.”

 

I grunted in response and walked just a little faster. Obviously I didn’t look harried enough if my coworkers were still trying to engage in early morning small talk. Or at least, that’s what I liked to think. More than likely they were just all aware that I couldn’t look busy because I was never working on anything interesting.

 

In some respects that was all Dawson’s fault. I presented her with really good ideas when we had our meetings every other week, but she always shot them down. You see, tabloids were complex creatures.

 

They survived on a strange mixture of facts, gossip, and wild speculation.

 

The trick to being successful in them was to sniff out a story, no matter how faint the scent, and run with it. I had been working for Dawson for nearly a year and not once during that time had I been able to come up with anything that lived up to the woman’s standards. I was used to working for a more conservative paper. Writing articles about the AIDS epidemic in Africa and the