“You look so different.”
The Mr. Sampson whom I had known was always freshly shaven and dressed impeccably in tailored suits that highlighted his powerful build. He kept his dark hair close-cropped and slicked back. This man sported a three-day beard peppered with gray stubble and looked unkempt and disheveled in a wrinkled unbuttoned flannel shirt over a plain white T-shirt. He wore a pair of jeans that were a combination of broken-in and over-worn, but as I held the handkerchief to my nose I smelled the faint scent of the Mr. Sampson I used to know—a scent that was spicy, familiar, with just the slightest hint of salt and pine.
Sampson pulled me to the couch and I sat down next to him, leaving just enough space to let him know that despite his heavenly return from death, all was not forgiven.
“What happened to you?” I managed to whisper.
It was then that I noticed the easy laugh lines that had sat like commas on either side of Sampson’s mouth were hard etched now; it was only then that I noticed the latticework of worry lines between his eyes, the thick frown line that cut across his dark brow and the thin streak of gray that sprouted at his hairline, peppering his deep brown hair with a washed out sheen.
“I’m sorry I never contacted you.” Sampson shook his head and stared at his hands in his lap. “I wanted to; the last thing I wanted was to have you—you and everyone else at the UDA—worry about me. But if you knew I was alive, that’s what would have happened. You would have worried.”
He offered me what I assumed was to be his appeasing smile but it only served to stir up a hot seed of anger in my belly.
“You could have let us decide whether or not we worried about you,” I spat. “I thought that the Chief killed you. That’s what Alex said—”
I stopped, the words going heavy and bitter in my mouth. I felt my eyes narrow, and knew that I was holding my mouth in a hard snarl. “Did Alex know? Did he know this whole time?”
Sampson pushed himself off the couch, avoiding my gaze. “Sophie, Alex—”
I launched myself up then, too, hands on hips. “Alex knew this whole time, didn’t he?”
“Not the whole time, Sophie. I had to hide. I had to make it look like I was dead or they would keep coming after me and no one at the Agency would be safe. I wasn’t going to do that to the Underworld, Sophie. I needed to know when it would be safe to come back again. And the only way I could do that—the only way I could do that and still even have the slightest hope of coming back was to have eyes out here.”
“Alex’s.”
“He helped me, Sophie.”
I thought of Alex, of his ice blue eyes and that cocky half smile, of the two-inch scars above each shoulder blade that had grown silvery with age after years of wandering the earth without his wings.
Alex was a fallen angel, earthbound but determined to do good, to one day be restored back to grace. He had been my protector, my lover, my friend; and he had lied to me.
“Does he know you’re back now?” I wanted to know.
Sampson made a show of looking around my apartment, his silence a clear answer. I made a mental note to Google “ways to kick a fallen angel’s ass” on the Internet.
“So, where were you?” I asked.
Sampson cocked his head. “Everywhere. Nowhere. After that night—”
An involuntary shudder wracked my body. The memory of being chained with Sampson in an underground basement while a madman sharpened the sword he was going to use to pierce my flesh was still as cold and as fresh in my mind as it was two years ago. Sampson slid a comforting arm across my shoulders and I slumped against him, my body relying on muscle memory because my brain was still calculating, figuring, tying to make sense of Pete Sampson, alive, in my living room.
“I was rescued—or so I thought—from that damn little kennel.”
Sampson clapped a hand over his chin and rubbed where the salt and pepper stubble littered the firm set of his clenched jaw. He looked at me and I could see the smallest flitter of embarrassment cross his face; his shoulders seemed to sag under the weight, under the memory of being chained, being beaten—being treated like an animal by a man whom he had once considered a friend.
“There were people; they said they knew about the Underworld. I didn’t have a choice. I got in the car and immediately passed out. I must have been drugged. Then I was crated, moved. I woke up in a shipping yard, somewhere. I knew it was woodsy, or forested, but that’s all I knew. Nothing was familiar.”
“They dropped you in the woods? In the middle of nowhere? That’s awful!”
Sampson wagged his head, the hand that was stroking his chin now raking across his ragged curls and over eyes that were tired, heavy. “I was starving, naked, in the middle of nowhere and by the time I came fully to, so did they.”