Read Online Blood and Bone by Tara Brown - Free Book Online Page A

realize by the way he said my name that he is the Irishman. He is the man searching for me. He shakes his head, cocking it to the side with a grin that makes my stomach twist in knots. “What in the fucking hell are ya doing in Seattle, ya crazy bitch?”
    I pull back, stunned and unsure of what to say.
    “I’ve been searching high and fucking low for ya. I knew ya weren’t dead. I knew ya just went deep with him.”
    I shudder from the cool in the room. I didn’t notice it before, but I’m suddenly freezing.
    “Did ya miss me? ’Cause I missed you.” He cracks a bigger grin and takes a step closer but stops when he sees I’m trembling. “It’s real then? The memory? It’s not an act?”
    I shake my head slowly, completely scared.
    He moves cautiously with purpose to the desk, picking up a file and sliding it across the table to me. He nods at it. “Sam, you were my partner for five years. We were undercover together at Berkeley for two. We were undercover in Ireland for a year. We worked the assassinations of seven men and one woman. It’s what led us to this case.” He chuckles again as he takes small steps to the desk and sits slowly. Everything he does is purposeful and planned, like a tiger walking in a cage, always watching you.
    I lift a hand, dragging open the file.
    Everything crashes inside me. My emotions hit a wall of sorts, but break through. Hot tears flood my face. They try to blind me and block out the truth, but every page is another answer to a question I never thought to ask until recently.
    I am thirty-two years old. I work for the American government in something that’s blacked out on the files, so it must be intense if they won’t even tell me about me.
    My mother’s name was Sheila. She died in a car accident when I was two. My father was an abusive drunk. His name was Leroy Anderson. I was abducted as a small child, taken by my aunt Pat, and raised as her daughter. Barnes is my aunt’s name. She’s still alive, living in North Carolina. The file says she saved me. She abducted me to save me from my father.
    I have no sisters or brothers.
    There are pictures of a cat, a black-and-white cat.
    The tears try to block it all out, so I get blurry images of a history—schools, houses, and people that just can’t be real.
    It’s all about me.
    Me as a blonde, a redhead, a brunette. I am thin in every shot, much thinner than now.
    “Aye, look how skinny ya were.”
    I lift my snotty face, crying harder.
    He laughs at me, completely at me, as if we have a comfort level that can support that level of mockery. He hands me a tissue. “You look better like this. More real. You were always a bit of a Barbie doll before. So thin and pert. Ya look like a regular girl now.”
    I sniffle. “I don’t believe this, any of it. I’m Jane Spears, and I want a lawyer. You’re trying to make me do something I don’t want to do. I need to go home. I demand to be released.” Panic fills me as the walls creep in closer and closer.
    “You don’t know you’re Sam, and it’s gonna take some time to get you back on track. Just look at the evidence.” He nods. “I would imagine you have spent a long time being lied to. How long since you lost your memory?”
    Before I answer, I blow my nose and wipe my face. Trying desperately to get some sort of control over my emotions, I shake my head with my eyes closed. It’s like being in Oz or
The Twilight Zone
. But when I open my eyes again, he’s still here and I’m still some secret agent of sorts with a dead mother, an abusive father, and an aunt who might have actually saved my life.
    “Answer the questions and you can go home.”
    “Three years. I was in an accident and got amnesia.”
    His eyes narrow in disbelief. “Were you hurt badly?”
    I shrug. “I have hordes of scars. Derek said it was bad.”
    He scowls. “Who? You aren’t with Dash anymore? Did you kill him? Fuck, he didn’t get away, did he?”
    My brow knits. “You have to ask