Concealed Force

Epilogue: a year later

Laura bent to tie her sneakers (trainers, she corrected, she was in the UK now, had been for a long time).

"You need to get these elastic laces," Kyle said, holding his foot out to show her. "Then you wouldn't always be tripping over."

"Seriously, Kyle? I'm not always tripping over. I tripped once."

"Sorry," he said and then grinned. "I really would recommend elastic laces though."

Laura rolled her eyes. In two weeks she'd be back at uni, and she was trying to catch up with her old school friends in the meantime. Kyle and she still got on and liked to go to the cinema to judge the acting in the kinds of films the rest of their friends wouldn't watch.

They'd got into the habit of cinema-going after she'd returned from Florida last year, and needed distraction.

There had been a brief media frenzy after she was found—it seemed that everyone had expected her to turn up dead. Reporters from television and newspapers had wanted to hear the gory details, but quickly lost interest when it became clear she was relatively unharmed and wasn't going to tell them anything.

Her life had gone back to normal. Almost normal—her dad never snapped at her now, even when she did something silly. He'd been to see her perform in several plays and his presence hadn't bothered her at all. And she'd finally passed her driving test.

So she was different, but she was fine. She was coping. She'd been sent to a therapist, and it had been good to go over the events in a safe space, but the trauma of the kidnap had never fully touched her. Because of Reid.

But she hadn't heard from him since. Not that she'd expected to. She assumed he was on to the next thing, pretending to be someone else again, setting his sights on some new villain. That didn't mean she hadn't spent the last year worrying about him, missing him. Hadn't thought about the way she'd declared her love and the fact that he hadn't said the words back.

How was it possible to miss someone you'd only known for a few weeks? And miss them that hard? Kyle had come to see her the day she got home and he'd been sweet and caring, but she hadn't wanted to get back together. And she'd never longed for him when she was in Florida the way she longed for Reid now she was back in England.

She'd searched for information about the Copperhead Killers constantly. There were a few newspaper articles about the most wanted being rounded up, the lab being razed, the motel building being pulled down, and trials starting, but nothing about Reid. Which was good, she guessed, because it meant his cover hadn't been blown.

She'd wondered if he was back to being a fake prisoner and her heart squeezed. She'd seen how lonely he'd been, how much he'd needed someone to be there for him. All his life. She wanted to be there, had briefly thought she could be.

On her worst days she'd accepted the possibility that he was dead. He could have been exposed as a cop, or something might have gone wrong—prison was dangerous, assuming he was back there. Other gangs were dangerous. And that was without all the more mundane ways to die. Being run over by a bus, or shot at when you pulled someone over for traffic violations. But the idea that he wasn't in the world had been too terrible to dwell on, so she'd forced herself away from that line of thinking.

"So what did you think of the film?" Kyle said now, helping her up after she'd tied her shoe. "The way the lead actor paused after the first word of every sentence made me want to reach through the screen and strangle him."

The film had been an adaptation of a Victorian book that neither of them had read, and which had been a bit dense and over-acted.

"Yeah, he was super annoying, I think he thought it built on the tension, but if I'd been watching at home I'd have pressed fast forward every time he spoke."