Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

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The numbers locked themselves into Jenna’s consciousness, and with that realization, a door opened in her mind. Yet as she mentally stepped toward that door, she heard the distant voice answer Soter’s question.

The spell broken, she surged to her feet and crossed the room in three steps, heedless of Mercy’s cry, “Jenna, no!”

Some part of her wondered if Mercy had heard as well, and if the purpose for her warning was to safeguard Jenna’s emotional health as much as her physical. It was a fleeting thought. No force on Earth could have stopped her.

She burst out onto the balcony, right behind Soter. Cray saw her and made a half-hearted attempt to restrain her, but he was already too late. Jenna’s eyes met those of the man who had just a moment before shouted: “I want to talk to my daughter.”

Standing on the rain-soaked grass less than fifty feet away was Noah Flood.





47



10:27 a.m.



Jenna had not thought it possible for her world to be shaken any more than it already had, but Noah’s appearance was another roller coaster plunge into the impossible.

Rivulets of rain dripped from his hair and nose. His eyes found her and his craggy face broke into a relieved smile. His lips formed her name, but she couldn’t tell if he had said it aloud.

A dam broke inside her. Every emotion she had experienced in the last two days in connection with this man—admiration, grief, rage, acceptance—deluged her. She wanted to scream at him for taking away an existence that had never truly been hers. She wanted to rush down the fire stairs and hug him, and never let go.

My daughter.

That was what he had said, and she desperately wanted to believe he felt that way. And yet, the very fact that he was here, that he had tracked her down, told a different tale. He was working with Cort. It was the only explanation. And that meant he was trying to draw her out so that the government agents could finish their deadly assignment.

She searched his face, looking for some hint of what to believe, knowing even as she did that he was too skilled in the arts of deception to ever reveal the truth. A thousand questions ran through her mind, but all she could say was, “I thought you were dead.”

His smile became a grin. “I’m too ornery to die,” he called back.

Jenna realized now that her assumption about his fate had been made at the start of the nightmare, when all she knew about violence was what she had seen in Noah’s movies, where people dropped dead from a single gunshot, because that’s what the script called for. Her own experience had revealed just how much punishment a human body could actually take, yet at no time had it occurred to her that Noah’s wound might have been only superficial.

Soter turned on her. “Go back inside, Jenna. This man is not your father. He’s here to kill you.”

Noah spoke quickly. “Jenna, you have to listen to me. I know what you’re thinking, but remember what I taught you. Listen to your gut…”

“But make up my own damn mind,” she finished, repeating it like a mantra. Her guts were so twisted, she had no idea what they were trying to tell her.

“He hasn’t told you the whole truth,” Noah continued.

And just how would you know that? She didn’t say it aloud, and despite the fact that she did not want to trust this man who had lied to her about everything, she knew he was right. Soter was holding something back.

“He told you some story about aliens with a message of peace, right? There are no aliens, Jenna. He lied to you about that.”