He’d stored a lot of critical stuff in this drawer and on these devices. It was all well hidden, but after what had happened, he wondered if it was still safe. He didn’t have time to check further, but everything looked to be there, he assured himself. But suddenly his mind went back to Cleveland, to the matter he’d left behind and the remote chance the invasion was related.

No way, not possible. It’s thirteen hundred miles away. I was very careful. I’m just being paranoid.

Jeff leaned back in his chair, listening to Bowie. If nothing was missing, then everything was okay.

No.

It’s not okay.

The images of the attack tormented him: the knife at Lisa’s throat, the intruder’s hands all over her, brazenly assaulting her, terrifying her while glaring at him, making a twisted show of it, knowing Jeff could do nothing.

And that’s what he’d done.

Nothing.

The rational Jeff played the calm, powerless, suburban male, accepting that the only way to save Lisa was by standing there helpless, watching her be assaulted. But inside, deep in the darkest region of his soul, he seethed with mounting fury, a feral frenzied force he had battled all his life to keep caged.

There’d been instances over the years where he hadn’t been able to contain it, times it had broken loose from his control. Memory hauled him back, beyond Cleveland, back to Chicago and an incident after his father’s death and his mom’s downward spiral. He’d been the new kid at another new school, living with his mother in a van, then a homeless shelter, then an apartment with rats. Somehow, the other kids found out. They always found out.

During a ball game on the playground, they began taunting him. “Hey, that shirt you’re wearing is the one my mother donated!”

“I bet he’s wearing my underwear, too!”

“Get your welfare ass off the field!”

Then the leader, the biggest one, the kid named Marshall, got in his face while the others circled around. “Know what I hear?” he said. “I hear your mother’s a drug-addict whore, and you don’t even know who your father is.” Marshall’s eyes glinted, and he smiled. “That makes you a real son of a—”

The cage broke.

Jeff saw nothing but white and blanked out.

The next thing he remembered, he was in the principal’s office listening to Marshall, practically in tears, recounting how Jeff had found a bat and with red-hot wrath had swung it at Marshall’s face.

“He said he’d make my head explode like a pumpkin.”

Marshall related how Jeff had swung the bat at him with all of his might and how he’d ducked with only a fraction of a second to spare, feeling Jeff’s swing brushing his scalp, catching a few hairs as it sliced the air.