Guarding The Soldier's Secret. Kathleen Creighton

to keep her from popping up to look, as well, while he got in the front, started the motor and inched the car into the flow of traffic. But as soon as the smoothness of the road and the change of traffic noise from pedestrian to vehicular told her they were on a busy city street, she sat up and looked around. After a moment, she said, “Where are we going?”

      Hunt snorted. His eagle’s glare met hers in the rearview mirror. “Thought I told you to stay down.”

      “This isn’t the way to our hotel,” Yancy pointed out, ignoring that. “Where are you taking us?”

      Lashes shuttered his gaze as he shifted it back to the street ahead. “To my place.”

      Yancy considered that for a moment, while her heartbeat ticked a notch faster. She glanced at Laila, who had apparently tuned them out and was peering through the window with avid interest. She hitched herself forward and leaned her arms on the back of the front seat. “Is this a rescue,” she inquired in a low voice, but with a light, almost musical tone, “or another abduction?”

      Although her view of the side of his face was mostly beard, she noted the subtle change in its shape and caught the flash of teeth as he smiled. His eyes clashed briefly with hers in the mirror. “I’m taking you someplace I know she’ll be safe.”

      Safe.

      Laila knew she wasn’t supposed to be listening, but she heard that word and knew they were talking about her, about wanting her to be safe, which was really funny because she didn’t feel safe at all right now. She felt jumbled and mixed up and kind of scared, maybe a little bit happy—the part about Akaa Hunt being here—but mostly she wanted to close her eyes and ears and make the dreams go away.

      At least, she’d always thought they were dreams.

      I used to have them a lot, when I was little and first came to live with my new mom. I dreamed about being in a cave in the dark with a big dog who kept me warm and safe from the demons who screamed and wailed outside, and then Akaa Hunt was there, reaching for me, and I thought at first he was a demon, too, but then he wrapped me in his coat and held me close to him, and I felt safe again, with him.

      But then Akaa Hunt told me in a hard voice that Ammi—my first mother—was gone and he was taking me to someone who would keep me safe, and we traveled through the dark and the cold, and somewhere along the journey Akaa Hunt left me and went away.

      She used to cry after she dreamed those dreams, when she was little.

      Then Yancy became her new mom, and she felt happy and safe and didn’t have the dreams anymore.

      Now, seeing Akaa Hunt again, she remembered the dreams and they seemed much more real than before. But she wasn’t little now. She was eight years old and she was too old to cry. Crying was for babies.

      Laila pressed her lips together and clutched the car windowsill as she stared blindly through the glass and tried not to listen as Mom and Akaa Hunt went on talking.

      “Wouldn’t we be safer at the hotel?”

      Hunt’s eyebrows lifted into the shadow of his turban. “Think so? How did they know where to find you?” He paused. “Who knew you were going to the bazaar today? Who did you tell?”

      “Nobody,” she stated with certainty, then felt herself go cold. With growing realization she added in a whisper, “The hotel concierge. The doorman...the cabdriver...”

      Hunt was nodding. “I know, because I heard you. So could anybody else who might have been in the immediate vicinity.”

      “You...were there? But how did you—”

      Once again his beard telegraphed his smile, and his eyes denied it. “Let’s just say I have an interest in your comings and goings.” His voice hardened and so did his eyes. “Evidently, so does someone else.”

      Yancy sat in stony silence while her heart raced and her mind whirled. She was both furious and frightened, so full of questions she felt she might explode, but acutely aware of all the reasons she couldn’t ask them. Not yet.

      There was Laila, of course, whose hearing was keen and her mind busy even when she appeared to have her attention focused elsewhere.

      But also, there was Hunt, who never answered questions. She thought of all the times...all the questions he’d never let her ask...

      “Where have you—” I would always begin.

      And his mouth would come down on mine, hard and hungry, his beard stubble rough on my face and his skin smelling of gunpowder, smoke and dust, shutting off the rest.

      And I would close my eyes and my mind, letting it be enough that it was to me he came to forget, that it was my clean, female body he turned to, to erase the horrors he’d seen. The ugly things he’d done.

      She eased slowly back in her seat, shaken by the sure and certain knowledge that this time was going to be different. It had to be. Too much had changed. This time she was going to ask the questions, and this time she would not be denied the answers.

      She stared through the dusty windows, and as her emotions settled and her gaze focused, once again she realized she knew approximately where they were. This was another part of Old Town Kabul, only a few kilometers but worlds apart from both the poor section they’d just left and the bustling and modern downtown.

      She slid forward again.

      “You live here?” She dipped her head, indicating the aged trees shading the quiet street ahead, the high walls of houses with intricately carved wood window screens just visible through leafy branches. She waited for acknowledgment that didn’t come, then went on in a conversational tone. “I did a feature here a few years back. These houses are a couple hundred years old, at least, and most of them are owned by Kabul’s oldest families, families that trace back to the days of the Silk Road. How—”

      “A friend of a friend,” he said, in a way that stated clearly, And that’s all I’m going to tell you.

      She must have made some sound of vexation, because he exhaled through his nose and spoke under his breath. “This isn’t the time. Or the place.” The slight movement of his head recalled her attention to the other pair of ears present.

      His eyes met hers and she realized with a small sense of shock that there was anger in them, mirroring her own.

      She pushed back into her seat again, silently seething.

      He’s angry? He’s angry? He pops in and out of my life—my bed!—without warning, as he pleases, dumps a child on my doorstep, tells me she’s his, then vanishes from the face of the earth for three years, and he’s angry? Really?

      In a quick-as-lightning change of mood, fear returned.

      Why? What is he angry with me about? It can only be something to do with Laila. Is it the adoption? The fact that I brought her here?

      What business is it of his? He has no right—

      A panicky shiver rippled through her. Did he have the right? If he was, in fact, Laila’s biological father—and she had only his word on that, after all. That, and those eyes.

      Might he have a legal claim to her?

      Could he take her away from me?

      It was a new question, and it joined the others whirling in her mind.

      Out of the maelstrom, once again one coherent thought emerged: I have to hold it together...put on a calm face...for Laila.

      * * *

      “Here we are,” Akaa Hunt said.

      Laila ducked her head to look out the car window. She didn’t know why she felt funny about getting out of the car and going into the house with the carved patterns over the windows, but she did. Not scared, exactly, although she did have butterflies in her stomach and her heart was beating very, very fast. It was more like the way she remembered feeling on her first day in the new school after Yancy became her new mother,