She didn’t respond, but her eyes were open, and she was looking around the room. Gedeon located the gun he’d tossed aside before he eased his weight off her. He wasn’t taking any chances. She might be upset enough with him to shoot him in places he considered sacred. He swept the gun up off the floor as he went past it.
Meiling sat up slowly, brushing at the tears on her face and jerking down the thin crop top. She sat in the middle of her bed, feet pulled up under her, rocking back and forth, self-soothing. Gedeon sank onto the bed behind her and opened the medical kit. It was a very small one. He used an antibiotic cream and bandaged the two puncture wounds on her shoulder.
“How did you find me?”
He didn’t want to tell her. If somehow she managed to get away again, he wanted the same resource open to him. “I have to hand it to you, Lotus Blossom, it took hours of watching the same surveillance tapes over and over before I figured out how you did it. When I first realized you were gone, I started to panic. Can you imagine that? Me panicking? I’ve come to depend on having you with me. All of a sudden, to know you’re no longer there was a shock to my entire system. I fell back on the years of discipline. I knew I would never find you if I didn’t think logically. I just had to apply all the things I knew about you.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her onto his lap. She had hunched into herself, making herself smaller than ever. For him, seeing Meiling that way was heartbreaking. She was strong. He knew they could work things out once he could get her to talk to him openly again. She was honest about her emotions, much more so than he was. He didn’t like that feeling of being vulnerable, or putting the only two people he loved, Meiling and Slayer—if he could call Slayer a person—at risk by his admission.
“I looked at those security tapes a hundred times. I knew if you made an exchange with someone else at the Café Du Monde, you had to have done it when you went to the restroom, yet you came out, stood in line, ordered your normal drink and went to the river as you always did.”
Meiling shocked him by leaning against his chest. She didn’t do that very often, not even when she’d come to his room when they first were together. It was a rare occasion, and only when he sensed she really needed comfort. She never asked him to hold her, but she did lean into him like she was doing now. He tightened his arms around her. Slayer moved closer to the surface, trying to give her comfort as well.
Gedeon knew better than to call attention to the fact that she was allowing him to hold her. He continued with what he’d discovered. “I watched the woman who was supposed to be you walking. Most often people change appearances, but they don’t change the way they walk. She looked exactly the same as you when you walk. Unhurried. Fluid. Practiced.”
He kissed the top of her head. “You’re so brilliant. I found myself just staring at the surveillance tape and thinking about that word. Practiced. Was that woman wearing your clothes? Was she wearing your jewelry and carrying your drink? Was it really you or someone pretending to be you? It took a lot of studying those tapes before I realized a switch had been made. You even had her practice the way you walked.”
There was genuine admiration in his voice. He didn’t want to go any further. Let her believe he had found her by uncovering the woman Meiling had trained to be her. He knew everything there was to know about her, but she hadn’t been able to help him find Meiling. He hadn’t even bothered to question her.
He rocked Meiling gently, trying to comfort her when no matter what he did, the tears kept flowing. Tears were out of his scope of expertise. He didn’t offer comfort. He fell silent, shifting her small body in his arms so that he cradled her fully against his chest. She buried her face against his heavy muscles. Right over his heart. He buried his fingers in her hair and began a slow scalp massage.
“You have to tell me where this is coming from, Meiling. I know you’re upset with me, and you have every reason to be, but we’ve always worked. It’s always been the two of us. My hope all along has been that your leopard would rise and accept Slayer. I thought, I hoped, that you would want the same thing.”