MIDNIGHT SHADOWS
A MIDNIGHT ANGEL SHORT STORY
Lisa Marie Rice
Dedication
This is for my wonderful husband, every bit as steadfast as Kowalski.
Chapter One
Kratior
Southernmost island in the Greek Cyclades archipelago
Hagios Nikolaus Luxury Resort
She saw shadows that weren’t there.
So. The shadows were back.
Allegra Kowalski, née Ennis, had spent the past four months fighting shadows, fighting her weakness, fighting gravity, even. All in the quest to regain her sight. A brutal beating had left her with a hematoma right on the vision centers of her brain and she’d had risky surgery to dissipate the hematoma. It had been a long haul back to normality after the six-hour-long surgery, and she wasn’t there yet.
There had been a lot of shadows along the way.
For an instant, as she sat by the infinity pool looking out over the Mediterranean, with a straight view to the Turkish coast if she could see that far, she thought she’d seen a huge shadow which might be her husband, Douglas Kowalski. Or rather Senior Chief, or Senior, as his men still called him, though he’d been out of the Navy and out of the SEALs for years now.
But no, it was an ordinary shadow, the kind that flitted across her sight occasionally. The kind no one else saw.
Maybe she thought she’d seen Douglas’s shadow because she missed him so much. Though he’d fought it tooth and nail, Allegra had insisted that while they were in Greece on a much-needed vacation, he go conduct talks with potential clients in Istanbul, as his partner wanted. Douglas wanted to stay by her side, but already he’d lost lots of work, staying by her side during the long painful months of rehab.
She was better now, much better! And of course he must go visit potential clients for a few days. She was fine, fine.
Well…
Sometimes not so fine. But she’d learn to mask everything because with her newfound sight she didn’t want to watch the worry lines grow on Douglases’ face any more than they already had.
It had been a very rough four months. But it had been worth it, every excruciating second, because she could see.
Even though she sometimes saw shadows where there were none, like now.
“Everything okay, Allegra?” Now that was a shadow for real. A big one, too. Not tall, but immensely broad and the real reason Douglas was willing to leave her side for a few days. Yannis Latsis, former SEAL teammate. He’d been blown up by an IED, retired on disability and had chosen to help his Greek cousins create and run the Hagios Nikolaus resort on the beautiful island of Kratior.
Yannis was always around, which was why no one tried to hit on her. The male clientele of the Hagios Nikolaus tended to be on the rich and the idle side, willing to hit on anything female that wasn’t a dog and wasn’t accompanied. But one look from Yannis and they stopped asking her for an autograph or to join them for a drink poolside before dinner.
“I’m fine, Yannis.” She sat up from the chaise longue and smiled at him. Yannis was definitely one of the good guys and he had a boxful of medals to prove it. And, like her, he’d been wounded. She’d lost her sight and he’d lost a leg. You couldn’t see it right now because Yannis was wearing chinos, but his right leg from the knee down was a state-of-the-art miracle of space-age material and robotics. It worked so well that Yannis joked that he should lop off his other leg below the knee and become Bionic Man.
Yannis took a quick quelling look around the pool and every male there averted his gaze. Yannis was like her husband. The alpha male in any setting. He sat down on one of the luxurious pale pink cane lounge chairs with the silk cushions Allegra didn’t dare use when wet from the pool.
“How you doing?” Yannis’s voice was casual but his eyes were sharp. Well, he was a former Special Forces soldier and a good one, according to Douglas. All of the former military men she’d met at her husband’s company were sharp, her husband top of the list.
“Fine,” she replied, and gave a dazzling smile. It was Allegra’s patented smile that she gave while touring. She smiled, no matter what. The hotel bed was uncomfortable, the concert hall was drafty and there’d been no time that day for anything but a dry sandwich, but no one would ever know that from her smile and her behavior. Allegra was a performer and a performer, to his or her dying day, was never anything but fine.
Yannis just looked at her for a moment, gaze so penetrating it was as if Douglas had given him orders to pull her thoughts from her head—and she didn’t doubt for a moment that if it were possible, Douglas would have ordered just that thing. Then he gave a nod and smiled.
The bomb that had taken his leg had also taken a chunk of his neck. One side of his neck was puckered with keloid scarring and when he smiled, he pulled all that tough tissue askew.
Allegra didn’t mind. Her own husband was scarred. And unlike Yannis, he hadn’t been good-looking to begin with. The one great gift of her period of blindness was the ability to ignore people’s appearance and delve straight into the heart of a person. Yannis and Douglas were both scarred and it meant nothing. They were brave, honorable men and Allegra didn’t give their scars a passing thought.
Not everyone thought the same. She’d seen some of the rich women at the resort turn away in disgust when Yannis put on shorts to work on the place, his prosthetic leg clearly visible.
They saw that, and not how hard Yannis worked. Just as they saw Douglas with his facial scars, rough, unlovely features and basso profundo voice, and dismissed him as a thug, hired muscle.
Yannis had sunk all his savings from his military career to help his cousins build this glorious resort. They all lost their jobs in the Greek crisis. No one worked harder than Yannis.
Just as no one worked harder at Alpha Security than her Douglas.
No one knew that, for all his rough looks and huge body, he was enormously delicate with her.
And, the big plus, he loved music as much as she did and could be considered even more knowledgeable than she was. He loved it all and he had a wider repertory than she did, though he couldn’t sing worth a damn and couldn’t play any musical instrument. But he appreciated and understood her music down to his bones. It was unmistakable.
And well, there was the other big plus. Douglas was a god in bed. Had been a god in bed. Since the operation he’d treated her like a maiden aunt. An elderly maiden aunt.
Yannis looked behind him at the sea, and in the instant his face was turned, another shadow flitted across her field of vision.
Oh God, please no.
The doctors had said the surgery would be risky, but she’d pulled through and regained a goodly portion of her vision. She refused to think that she was relapsing. That the hematoma was forming again. That the nerves had been too damaged for complete recovery. That the prolonged period of blindness had created permanent artifacts.
All things she had been told could happen and she had resolutely refused to listen.
No. She saw just fine. Just fine. The shadows were a trick of the light, that was all.
“So.” Yannis turned back to her with a smile. “You’ve not only been studying Greek, you’ve been studying something else, too. I’ve been hearing some pretty nice sounds coming from your suite. You seem to be making progress.”
“Oh!” Allegra’s eyes rounded and she touched his forearm. “You mustn’t say anything to Douglas, Yannis! Promise me!”
Yannis’s dark eyes danced as he mimed zipping it shut. “Not a word,” he intoned. “I’ll treat it like SCI. More than Top Secret.”
Allegra had been around military men enough by now to know that SCI was Secret Compartmented Information, stuff not even the President was cleared to know. And co
me to think of it, a former SEAL wouldn’t be a blabbermouth.
“I want it to be a surprise, and I want to make sure I’m not going to make a fool of myself,” she confessed. “I can’t—”
She couldn’t go any further because her throat stopped up. Her voice had remained unchanged after the surgery. She could still sing, and did, often.
Playing her harp…not so much. Her fingering was clumsy, nothing flowed as it used to. It had been years since she’d had to actually concentrate on individual notes on the harp. To her, the music that floated from Dagda, her insanely expensive Irish harp, had been one long seamless sound, not many plucks of the strings. A seamless beautiful sound that came from her fingertips but partook of something else, something very special.
That something special was gone. She was now a competent player, but the magic had fled from her. She never let on the depth of her grief, but Douglas understood. He understood everything.
“I can’t bear the thought of playing badly,” she confessed. To her knowledge Yannis had no musical talent at all, but somehow he understood her. In his way he’d been as gifted a performer as she, except his exceptional talent had been infiltrating nasty places and whacking bad guys. His playing days were definitely over.
With her, the jury was still out.
Yannis was sitting in Male Mode, knees apart, big hands dangling from his knees, contemplating the expensive tufa tiling. He exhaled and lifted his head and she saw grief briefly cross his face, then it closed up again. “I understand completely. And I can’t tell how well you’re playing because my tin ears have two left feet. It sounded great to me. But Cousin Gavras, who knows what he’s talking about and plays a mean kithara, says you have an extraordinary sense for the instrument. I’m quoting him.” He shrugged. “What the hell would I know? I’m just a Navy diver with a bum leg. Most of my countrymen’s instruments sound like a cat yowling to me.”
Allegra laughed and at his pleased grin she realized that’s what he wanted. To make her laugh.
How kind of him, she thought. Then another shadow filled her vision and this time it wasn’t an artifact, this time it was real.
Douglas! Coming around the corner, scowling, a day early.
Allegra’s heart gave a huge thump. There were no thoughts in her head at all, simply an upwelling of immense joy at seeing him again. She leapt up and ran toward him and encountered something else very real. A small planter she didn’t see because she couldn’t see anything but Douglas.
She tripped, and everything happened in slow motion. The unmistakable feeling of losing control of her body. Her feet slipping out from under her, falling at an angle where she would slam her head against the travertine edges of the pool then fall in, in slow motion, but unstoppable.
Someone screamed.
Allegra was in slow motion but Douglas was in fast forward. For such a huge man he could move like lightning. There was a blur and then she was caught in his arms, heart pounding, mind still dealing with the consequences of the fall, though there hadn’t been one. Douglas had caught her.
His heart was pounding too.
Allegra let out a huge breath against his chest and tightened her arms around him. “Quite an entrance, Senior Chief,” she said breathlessly. “Are you sure you aren’t in show business?”
She pulled back to look at him, but he wasn’t smiling. He was pale under his tan, harsh brackets around his mouth.
“Shit,” he breathed. He looked her up and down. Not the look of a lover, but the look of a teammate checking for wounds. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Allegra ducked her head. Once again she’d been clumsy. She used to be so graceful before the operation, before the blindness. She could remember her body working in harmony with itself and the outside world. Now it felt as if her body was composed of Frankensteinian chunks of flesh badly stitched together. The clumsiness was a small price to pay for the recovery of sight, but still. “I’m so sorry, Douglas.”
Chapter Two
Kowalski waited for a second for his heart to stop thundering before answering his wife.
He was a Navy SEAL. He’d been in more firefights than his wife had had hot meals. Together with his team, he’d infiltrated into North Korea, connected with a mole, got a flash drive containing info on that crazy fuck Kim Jong Un’s plans for a rail gun, and exfiltrated without anyone knowing they’d been there.
He was cool under fire. His heartbeat had been tested at 60 beats per minute under live fire. Every single SEAL was deemed ‘stress hardy’—able to immediately pump out neuropeptide Y in their brains at the first signs of stress. NPY acted like a fire hose extinguishing fear and keeping the neocortex thinking under stress when other people simply clocked out.
So where twenty years of having everything but a nuclear bomb thrown at him couldn’t shake him, watching Allegra nearly kill herself did the trick.
He was an expert on combat falls and his mind supplied a complete, 3-D, hi-def, Technicolor image of what was going to happen, a perfect storm of wrong place, wrong time. She was going to crack her head on the very edge of the swimming pool’s stone edge, then fall bonelessly into the water. For someone who had survived very tricky, highly experimental brain surgery, the crack on the head would either kill her or put her in a coma.
He’d never moved so fast in his life.
And while he clung to her, to his miracle wife, slender and perfect in his arms, his brain kept shooting him images of Allegra in her coffin, beautiful and perfect and silent.
And, of course, he’d have to crawl right into her coffin after her, because he couldn’t begin to imagine life without her.
She’d been running to him because she was so happy to see him and she was apologizing?
Allegra was still mumbling sorry into his shirt and it broke his heart. Every time she tripped, every time it took a moment for her eyes to accommodate and see something, she apologized. He couldn’t seem to break her of the habit. The person who should apologize was the fucker who’d given her the hematoma and blinded her in the first place. Her former agent, now deceased via a shank to the heart in prison.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Kowalski curled himself over his wife as if he could protect her not only from the fall but from any danger coming from any quarter, including the sky.
“Man.” Yannis came up and met his eyes over Allegra’s short red hair. They’d had to cut her beautiful waist-length hair for surgery and it had grown into short curls over her gorgeous head, like duck’s down. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. It was close.”
Yannis understood body language and knew how close Allegra had come to knocking herself out. Kowalski closed his eyes for a second and clenched his jaws.
Allegra pulled away and smiled up at him. Man, her smile. She had a gorgeous smile at the best of times, but she reserved the real knockout just for him. Kowalski let her go and rubbed his chest, where it hurt when she gave him that special smile.
“You’re early,” she said. She reached out a hand and touched him. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”
“Yeah, everything went really smooth. So I decided to come back early.” She didn’t have to know that he’d moved heaven and earth to cram four days’ worth of appointments into three. He couldn’t complain about having to leave her here. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yannis would protect her with his life—though really on this luxury resort about the only thing that represented a threat was the rich food. And he owed it to his partner, John Huntington, aka the Midnight Man, to do some work while he was here. The past four months of Allegra’s rehab he had practically been AWOL from their company, without Midnight saying a word about it.
“So you can stay with me until we leave?” Allegra asked. She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice.
He smiled down at her, knowing his smile wasn’t anything compared to hers. “Sure. I might have to do some stuff at the computer, but I don’t think I’ll have
to take another trip.” If the two bank presidents he spoke to had further questions, he’d just Skype. “So,” Kowalski said to Yannis, “how have things been around here? Anything happen?”
Allegra frowned, shot a glance to Yannis and shook her head slightly. What the fuck was this?
But Yannis merely smiled and shook his head. “Nope. Nothing exciting. As a matter of fact, for the next couple of days things are going to get really really quiet. We’ve got some bigwigs coming tomorrow and they’ve bought out almost all the rooms. Just a couple of guys and their entourage. Financial big shots, probably scheming to take over the world.” He shrugged. “As long as they’re paying premium prices I don’t care. Less work for us. As a matter of fact, they asked to be alone in the restaurant so for the next three days you and Allegra will be served room service on the terrace of your suite, how’s that?”
The last thing Kowalski wanted was to share any space at all with the money men. He dealt with money men on a daily basis in his work. The ones that weren’t creeps were fuckheads and they were all spoiled rotten. Staying on a gorgeous hotel suite terrace overlooking the most fabulous view in the history of views, dining alone with Allegra? Oh yeah.
“Sounds great,” he said. “Will the pool be off-limits too? Because we can always go down to the beach.”
Yannis frowned and hesitated. Which was unlike him. Kowalski got the impression Yannis wasn’t ecstatic about this little financial summit. Which he understood completely. Kowalski hoped fervently that Yannis was milking the money men dry.
“I don’t know about that, they didn’t specify anything about the pool area. I’ll get back to you on that.”
Allegra did a happy little jig in bare feet. “The beach! Let’s go to the beach, Douglas! Right now!”
Kowalski knew Allegra loved the beach of the resort. Strange for an Irishwoman who had countless generations of living next to freezing Irish Sea water and gray waterlogged dunes in her DNA.
“Well, you’ve got your answer, Kowalski,” Yannis said. “Take your lady down to the beach and enjoy yourselves. I’ll have complimentary drinks in your room at nautical twilight.” He gave Kowalski an ironic salute, Allegra a wink and then walked off.