“How different?” She shifted in her seat, taking in his beige hair, beige skin, thin pale lips, unobtrusive nose, and a small set of milky brown eyes. He certainly lived up to his nickname, the Ghost. Though she mostly called him Paul.
Without a word he handed her a photo of herself as a very young girl.
Madison gripped it by its edges, making a careful study of the tangled hair, the dirt-smudged face, the blaze of defiance burning in those bright, determined eyes. A long-lost before picture in a life meticulously cultivated to consist entirely of afters.
Until now.
Her hands trembled, as she tried to remember who’d taken it—how old she might’ve been. Talk about a ghost. It’d been years since she’d seen that version of herself.
“I thought everything was burned in the fire.” She turned to him.
It was the tragic explanation used to defend Madison’s lack of baby pictures, or any other remnant of a life before her parents’ death. The story had been fed to the press so many times it’d become almost mythical. An eight-year-old girl who managed to escape a terrible fire with barely a scar, only to rise from the ashes like a phoenix, reborn, wiped clean, delivered into the next glorious phase of her life.
She absently ran the edge of the photo against the scar on her forearm, remembering that day when she’d grabbed a piece of smoldering wood and held it to her own flesh while Paul looked on in astonishment. “It’s to make it more believable,” she’d said, knowing even back then she’d be playing a part from that moment on.
“Everything was burned.” His tone was grim. It
was probably the worst thing he could’ve said.
If someone had pictures of her, there was no telling what else they might have.
“There’s no mistaking it’s me.” She looked at Paul. For the first time in a long time, she feared for her life.
He sighed, gripped the wheel tighter. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”
She waited for the formula that would make it go away, willing to do anything to put an end to the nightmare.
“You’re going to go about your life, and alert me to the first sign of anything unusual.”
She turned on him. So incensed she thought she might spontaneously combust in her seat. “Nothing about my life is usual. I wouldn’t even know how to recognize unusual.”
“You know what I mean.”
She frowned. Up to this point, she’d trusted him implicitly, but even the Ghost had his limits. “What I know is I’m not going to sit around and wait for this to destroy me.”
She shook the picture in his face, and he plucked it from her fingertips. “Have I ever failed you?”
She studied him a good long time. “You just did.”
He squinted, stared at the quilt of scars covering his knuckles. “If you’re worried about people letting you down, you should take another look at your boyfriend.”
She gazed out the window, watching a crane load a container onto a ship. Maybe she should crawl inside one of those large metal boxes, sail away to some exotic port, start a new life under a new identity, and Madison Brooks would disappear off the face of the earth. She’d already played that card once, and it’d worked out far better than expected. But now, it was just another fantasy that would never be realized. There was nowhere to hide for someone as famous as her.
Or was there?
“Ryan’s stepping out with a girl named Aster Amirpour.” He reached into the backseat and handed over a fat dossier, detailing nearly everything about the poor dumb girl’s life.
“I know all about it.” Madison shrugged. Suddenly feeling sorry there wasn’t a single person she could trust. “You’re not the only one on my payroll,” she said, reading the surprised look on his face.
She opened the door and started to head back to her car, when Paul called her by the name her parents had given her.
“Be careful out there.”
She frowned, shaken by the sound of that name on his lips. “Just do your job and I won’t have to,” she said, slipping behind the wheel and driving away.
TWENTY-THREE
SUICIDE BLONDE