Photography had been such a big part of her life—her passion—and being able to travel the world with Global Geographic had shown her things she’d never imagined possible. Waiting hours, sometimes days, in impossible conditions for a single glimpse of the most beautiful creatures and marvels this world had to offer had given her a sense of completeness and wonder. She learned patience, strength, endurance and things she hadn’t believed herself capable of. She’d hiked into canyons no human had ever stepped in before in Peru, brought the world the first images of a cave beneath Heceta Head Lighthouse here in Oregon, gone scuba diving with the ocean’s most dangerous predators in the Atlantic and climbed the peaks of Annapurna in Nepal. Adventure had burned in her veins and having her camera in her hand only made her experiences that much more memorable. Being behind a lens had given her purpose, given her an identity. Significance.
Until the Carver had taken that from her.
“Camille, he didn’t take your life.” That voice. His voice. She’d come to rely on it more than she wanted to admit over the past year—her one true connection to the outside world. The tremor in her hands settled at the sound of that rich, deep timbre, but it was only a matter of time before she broke completely. “You’re still here, right now. You’ve survived. When this is over, you’ll have the chance to start again.”
Over?
“When will that be? Because from where I’m standing and the constant pain in my neck, it looks like it’s just begun.” Her vocal cords throbbed with every word, but it was important he understood. She centered her attention on her camera bag, which still peeked out from the duffel. “Do any of the reports in that file you have on me tell you how he and I met? That we’d been assigned to work together on an expedition the magazine was hosting for tourists to Patagonia?”
“You both worked for Global Geographic.” He neutralized his expression, as though trying to keep the shock out of his body language, but the air between them changed. “No, none of the reports I read mentioned that.”
She lifted her gaze to the marshal assigned to protect her, and an instant awareness of how close he’d gotten penetrated through the haze of anger, of shame, that’d clouded her head since that night. The muscles in the backs of her legs braced automatically, waiting for whatever came next, but he only stood his ground. Gave her the space she so desperately needed. “Photography was my life. Every time I picked up that camera, I felt as though I was doing exactly what I’d been put on this earth to do. I had the entire world available to me, and even after Jeff and I got engaged, I never planned on giving that up.”
“Why did you?” he asked.
Her chest squeezed.
“The first time I unpacked my camera after the attack, I sorted through the images on my memory card just as I’ve done before starting any new assignment.” Gravity increased its hold on her body and took the last remaining control she’d held on to so tightly since leaving the marshals office. Camille shook her head as if the simple action could erase the memories, but of the thousands of times she’d done it before, this one wouldn’t be any different. She knew that. The images were still too fresh. Too final. She had a feeling they always would be. “But Jeff had switched out my memory card with one of his own. I don’t know why, but I found...”
Her breath hitched, but she forced herself to keep going in the hope that the more she talked about it, the easier it’d get.
“I found the photos he’d taken of all those women after he’d killed them. I saw their faces, their eyes.” She wrapped one arm around her midsection, her hand skimming the sore skin along the base of her neck to keep herself in the moment. “It was bad enough experiencing what he was capable of firsthand, but finding out there were more victims than the FBI had identified, to see the proof hidden on my camera...” Tears burned in her eyes, blurring her vision. “I gave the memory card to the agents assigned to the case, but when I pick up my camera now, all I see is the lives he destroyed on the screen.”
Silence descended between them.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.” Finn reached for the duffel and pulled the heavy camera bag from the depths. Turning toward what she assumed was the bathroom in the corner of the room, he maneuvered around her as though if he touched her she might shatter right here in the middle of his safe house. “I can have Deputy Watson pick it up at our next exchange and take it back to your house.”
“I know what you must think of me.” His opinion probably didn’t stray far from what she’d thought of herself for the past three hundred and sixty-five days. Camille turned to face him as he halted in the center of the room. “You think I’m letting the past control me, that I’m giving my attacker power over the rest of my life. Sad thing is, you’d be right, but I don’t know how else I’m supposed to accept what happened.” A burst of humorless laughter escaped from her lips and her sore throat burned. “A lot of good any of it did for me tonight.”
He faced her. Brilliant blue eyes locked on her, and suddenly she felt as if Deputy Marshal Finnick Reed could see straight through her. Past the trauma, the loss of her identity, the terror. Fluorescent lighting overhead cast shadows along his angled jawline, highlighting the perfect curve of his mouth. He shifted her bag between both hands as if he was carrying a football and not one of the most important representations of her life. “I wasn’t thinking of any of that.”
“Were you thinking I didn’t notice you’ve stashed a package of chocolate under the mattress?” She pointed to the corner of the bed, to the sliver of silver wrapping with the chocolate brand stamped into the foil. She couldn’t hold back the smile tugging at the edge of her mouth. Because if she didn’t test this connection between them, if she didn’t have something outside of the sickening nightmare playing on repeat in her life to hold on to, she’d have nothing left. “I’m sure if you got ahold of their sales department, they’d tell you I’m the one keeping them in business.”
“You and I would probably be tied.” His eyebrows shot up as his laugh flooded through her, sank into the deep recesses she’d believed couldn’t feel anymore. Finn stepped toward her, the edges of his eyes crinkling, and she fought the automatic counterstep to keep him at a distance. He wouldn’t hurt her. If anything, he was probably the only person in the world who’d made her feel safe over the past year. He’d checked up on her, made sure she had everything she needed, talked with her. “This camera didn’t make you who you are, Camille. What happened that night—what happened tonight—doesn’t have the power to make you who you are. There’s absolutely no shame in trying to find a new normal or wishing any of this hadn’t happened. It’s human nature. But where you see that determination to hold on to the past as a barrier preventing you from moving on, I see that it’s made you strong enough to get you to this point. It’s what is going to get you through the next few days, through the next minute, and is going to make sure you come out on the other side of this stronger than before.”
Her mouth dried. She didn’t know what to say to that, what to think. Her therapist had spent an enormous amount of time asking her to relive every detail of the attack in Chicago in the hope it’d trigger a new memory or piece of information that explained why she just couldn’t accept what’d happened and learn to move on. But she already knew why. It was because no matter how many times she’d tried to deal with the anxiety, the trust issues, the constant pain of holding herself so tight all the time to get ahead of the next threat, there was a small part of her that had internalized the blame for what Jeff Burnes had done. Her FBI interrogators had gotten part of their theory right after her fiancé’s arrest. If she hadn’t been so focused on her career or had paid better attention to the lies Jeff had told up until that night, she couldn’t help but wonder how many of those women might still be here. How many victims would never have come across his path if she’d seen the signs earlier? She hadn’t strangled the life out of them or carved those four nauseating letters into their chests, but
she felt just as responsible as if she had. “If you think that speech is going to stop me from getting into your chocolate stash in the middle of the night while you’re sleeping, you need to come up with a better strategy.”
“I’ll make a deal with you.” Finn moved in close, almost as if he intended to step right into her, but quickly redirected toward the bed. The comforting aroma of warm laundry surrounded her as he reached down for the silver package peeking out from beneath the mattress. He broke the bar straight down the middle, then tore open the crisp foil and offered her half. “After the night you’ve had, I’m willing to at least split it with you. In exchange for letting me switch out the soaked dressing on your wound.”
He reached for her.
“No!” Terror dropped her body temperature, and she bolted backward until she hit the wall behind her. Panic hiked her pulse into overdrive, her lungs fighting to keep up. Bringing her hands to her shirt collar, she tried to control her breathing, but also knew Finn wouldn’t hurt her. “Please, don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” He increased the space between them and set her camera and the chocolate on the bed. Dislodging the product he’d used to style his hair as he ran a hand through it, he backed off. Hands outstretched, palms forward, he nodded toward the fresh stains on her shirt—the same shirt she’d been wearing when someone had broken into her house and put his hands around her neck—and her stomach lurched. “You’re just... You’re bleeding through your shirt again. I have the supplies to change out the gauze, but if you’d rather do it yourself, I can walk you through it. I don’t need to touch you, okay? But you should change the dressing to avoid infection.”
Camille fisted her own T-shirt in her hands as a combination of shame and rage boiled hot under her skin. Her fantasy self, the one she’d built up in her head over the years and aspired to be, would be able to handle the thought of Finn touching her, of him seeing the scars—old and new—she went out of her way to hide. As one of the most confident women in the world, that delusional part of her would never let fear or trauma control her like this, but she wasn’t that woman. She feared she never would be. “Can you tell me how to do it after I’ve had a shower?”
“Sure.” He hiked a thumb over his shoulder. He picked up the chocolate bar from the bed and set it on top of the duffel his teammate had packed for her, then grabbed the bag and pushed open the bathroom door behind him. He moved the shower curtain aside and twisted the water on. In seconds, steam filled the small room, and he backed out to give her space, leaving the duffel with her things and the chocolate on the floor. “It’s all yours. I’ll see what I can come up with food-wise while you’re cleaning up.”
Her body ached as she crossed the small room toward the bathroom, an apology on the tip of her tongue. “Thank you.”
Shutting the door behind her, Camille breathed heated air to battle the tenderness in her throat. Patches of red had already started to darken around her neck, distinct thumb prints visible in the oval-shaped mirror above the pedestal sink. She stripped off her shirt and the soaked gauze, forcing the last few minutes out of her mind. Swallowing a groan as the fresh gouges on the left side of her chest protested every move, she came face-to-face with the single word her would-be killer had finished carving into her skin.
Mine.
Chapter Three
He’d made a mistake.
He shouldn’t have tried to touch her. The medical training that’d been drilled into him since the day he stepped into the army’s ranks had made his attempt to help her so automatic, he didn’t stop to think about the fact Camille might not be comfortable being touched. The carved lines in her skin had started bleeding again, and Finn had wanted nothing more than to fix the problem. That was what he did best. That was the only way he knew how to help, but it’d take more than antiseptic wipes and a fresh dressing to help Camille heal.
Deputy US Marshal Karen Reed wouldn’t have made that mistake. His mother would’ve known exactly what to do in this situation, how to talk to a witness who’d been through the worst ordeal of her life—twice—and would’ve left Camille stronger than when she’d started.
Finn memorized every detail of the door separating him and the woman on the other side as shame coiled tight in his gut. He’d only managed to drive his witness away.
The constant downpour of water hitting the tiles of the shower echoed throughout the room. The existence of her camera bag seemed to pull at him from the end of the bed. Old hinges on the cabinet that’d come with the place protested as he swung one of the doors outward to get to the supplies Deputy Marshal Jonah Watson had stocked earlier. Canned beans, jars of marinara sauce, pasta, cereal, bottled water, some brownie and cake mixes, plus whatever else his teammate had stocked in the refrigerator. He and Camille would have enough food and water to get them through two or three days while the rest of the deputies in his division processed the crime scene at her house, but after the hell she’d survived, she deserved some real Oregon home cooking.
He pulled a few potatoes from the bag on the bottom shelf, along with salt, pepper and cooking oil, and set to work. Within thirty minutes, the chicken-fried steak he’d cooked up in the pan had a crisp outer layer of flour, seasoning and a mouthwatering kick of heat. Just the same as what his grandparents had him raised on.
The bathroom door clicked open, and suddenly the heat from the pan was nothing compared to the warmth sliding along the back of his neck.
“I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed one of your superhero shirts from the closet in there.” Coming into his peripheral vision, she tugged at the bottom of the oversize shirt that hid any hint of the softness underneath. Her long red hair snaked trails of dampness across her shoulders as she rounded into the small kitchen and the color of her eyes intensified. “Your, uh, deputy friend forgot to pack me a clean pajama shirt and nothing else in the bag is comfortable enough to sleep in.”
He strengthened his grip around the pan’s handle as that lavender scent he’d equated with her hit him full force. The burn of pain cleansed the guttural urge to breathe in as much as he could, to make it part of him at the sight of her in one of his favorite shirts. He forced himself to turn back to the pan before he started burning their dinner, or managed to burn the place down, and twisted off the heat. “Not at all. Looks better on you, anyway.”
“Not sure I can pull off the whole superhero thing, though, you know.” Camille slid onto one of the bar stools on the other side of the kitchen counter. “They’re the ones usually saving lives. Not the ones who need saving.”
A new layer of emotional honesty laced her words, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. True, the men and women whose emblems he wore on his shirts risked their lives to protect the world from evil, to make it a better place and fight for the weak, but they weren’t always capable of doing it alone.
“Everyone needs saving at one point or another. Anyone who says different is lying to themselves.” He’d learned from his own experience. His back to her, Finn removed both steaks from the pan with a spatula and arranged them on separate plates already piled with potatoes. He set one in front of her. Satisfaction coursed through him at the widening of those brilliant aquamarine eyes. “Aside from the obvious differences in choosing good over evil, there’s a very thin line between a hero and a villain. A lot of times, I think it comes down to admitting you can’t do everything alone, that you have to trust your team.”
“Is that why every shirt you own has a superhero logo on it?” She spooned a mouthful of potatoes past perfect lips and moaned softly. “Because it reminds you you’re part of the United States Marshals Service super team?”
“Uh, no. Not exactly.” His laugh sounded weak, even to him, as he clenched a towel on the counter in one hand. As much as he trusted his fellow deputies to have his back on the job, that was as far as any of his relationships with them had gone. The aroma from the oi
l and spices he’d used on the steak battled to chase back her sweet floral scent, but in the end, he knew she’d win. She always did. He wiped at an invisible stain on the counter in order to distract himself from the question, but after everything she’d shared with him, Camille deserved to know the truth. “My mom was the first one to buy me one of these shirts. I still remember it. I was ten when she brought it home after spending two weeks on a fugitive recovery assignment down near Medford.”
“Your mom is a marshal, too?” She cut through the steak with a savageness Finn imagined had been created by exhaustion, fear and draining adrenaline reserves. Some color had come back into her face, but he wasn’t sure if it was from the shower, the distraction of food from her circumstances or the fact she didn’t seem to be bleeding through her clothing anymore. “Sounds like your family is trying to give superheroes a run for their money.”
“She was a marshal.” His fingers ached from the tightness with which he held the damn kitchen towel, as though it’d take the sting out of opening up to a near stranger. Though, when he looked at her, Camille didn’t feel like a stranger. Instead, there was a familiar warmth beneath all that vulnerability he hadn’t felt before, struggling to break through and into the light, and some deep part of him wanted to latch onto it and hold on for dear life. “She died in the line of duty a week after my tenth birthday.”
Camille hesitated to bring the fork to her mouth, then set it back down on the edge of the plate. “I’m sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been for a ten-year-old. Was it hard for you after that? Did you handle it okay?”
No. He hadn’t, and Finn would be damned if he had to go through that again by having someone he cared about ripped away the way his mom had been taken. He cut into his steak, but didn’t raise his silverware to take a bite, no longer hungry. “I had my grandparents there to help. Good people. They took over raising me, got me through school, made sure I had clothes, food and a roof over my head until I enlisted in the army. Once you’re in the military, though, your commanding officers tend to do your thinking for you, so I didn’t get a whole lot of time to miss her after that.”
The Witness Page 3
