The Witness

by Nichole Severn

  Something more than physical exhaustion deepened the color of her gaze as he studied her. She’d already been through so much—a second attack, being forced to relocate once again, learning another woman had died in her place. The sooner they caught her attacker, the sooner she could get her life back. She’d given her statement to Florence officers in the emergency room after the incident, but Finn had been busy giving his own account of what’d happened. Almost a full day had passed since then. Maybe something she hadn’t thought to mention at the time could make all the difference in finding the bastard who’d come after her.

  “Did he say anything to you? When he was in your house?” he asked. “When he...”

  “Strangled me?” Her jaw ticked as she studied the liquid in her mug. “My therapist once told me the more times we’re forced to recount a memory the human brain changes it slightly to protect itself from suffering trauma all over again, but I don’t think that’s true in every case. There are some things you can’t forget.” She lifted her gaze to his, and gravity threatened to pull him straight into those aquamarine eyes. “I remember every second of him being in my house. I remember what he smelled like, the color of his eyes, the feel of the knife cutting into me all over again. No. If he’d said something, I would’ve remembered.”

  “You were conscious when he engraved the last two letters into your chest?” The muscles down his spine hardened, drawing his shoulders back. “Were you pretending to be unconscious like you did back in Chicago?”

  “I...” The edges of her eyes narrowed as her shoulders relaxed away from her ears. Confusion contorted her expression for the briefest of moments, her eyebrows drawing inward before she shook her head. Her hand seemed to float to where he’d patched the lacerations without her noticing. “No. I was running for my bedroom after sending you that message, and... Something pinched my neck. I got dizzy, and I fell. I must’ve blacked out because when I came around, he was sitting on my chest with his knees pinning my arms to my sides. He’d just started cutting.”

  “What happened when you woke up?” His heart pounded hard behind his ears.

  “I tried to roll him off me, but the space between my bed and the wall was too narrow. He got his hands around my throat, but the more I fought back, the harder he squeezed, until...” She slipped off the bar stool and faced him, her mug forgotten on the counter. “I already said all of this to the officer who took my statement. You were there. Why does it matter?”

  “Because he broke the pattern.” Finn crossed the small space to the hallway where he’d set up his makeshift bed for the night. Grabbing his duffel bag by the handle, he tugged the canvas closer and retrieved the thick file from the bottom. The original investigation reports. Crime-scene photos, witness statements, background checks, evidence logs, autopsy reports. It was all here. Everything he’d needed to know about Camille’s attacker and the victims Jeff Burnes had targeted. He flipped straight to the autopsy reports, scanning one after the other as he slowly closed the distance between him and Camille, then moved onto the next. “Every victim the Cook County medical examiner autopsied connected to the Carver’s investigation was engraved with the word mine after he’d already strangled them. Not before.”

  “You brought the file here?” Her voice sounded so small then, miles different than a few minutes ago, and Finn raised his gaze in time to watch the color wash from her face. She stared at the case file in his hands, and he closed it on instinct. Hell. He hadn’t been thinking about... He hadn’t meant for her to have to confront these photos. Not after what she’d told him about Jeff Burnes hiding victim photos on the camera’s memory card.

  “When I take on a witness-protection detail, I do my homework so I’m prepared for any threat that might come out of his or her past, but I’m sorry. You weren’t ever meant to see this.” A sickening knot twisted in his gut. He should’ve had more sense than that. Should’ve known better. Finn turned, slid the file back into his duffel bag and zipped it shut, but that wouldn’t hide the fact he’d brought it into a safe house that was supposed to be a safe space for her in the first place. Straightening, he faced her. “I wasn’t thinking, and as soon as I can I’ll make sure to hand it over to Deputy Marshal Watson so you won’t have to see it again.”

  “Hiding it out of sight isn’t going to make my feelings and memories about what happened go away.” Soft red hair waved below one shoulder, a line of tears welling in her eyes as she smoothed her thumb over a small white wire sticking out of her sweatpants. Headphones. The heater kicked on, and an instant jolt rocked through her as though she expected the Carver to barge right through the front door.

  “I know, and I’m not sure there’s anything that can, but I promise to be more careful from now on.” Finn kept his feet cemented in place. She’d held it together this long since the second attack, but the cracks in her outer armor were beginning to show. Combined with the pain she surely felt every time she breathed and the lack of sleep, he couldn’t imagine the amount of determination, the strength, it took not to collapse back into that bed and hide. How long did she expect her body to hold up under this much stress and pressure without giving out? He’d been assigned to protect her physically until Jeff Burnes reached his trial sentencing, but that job was going to get a hell of a lot harder if his witness wasn’t taking care of herself mentally and emotionally. He nodded toward the headphone wire near her left hand. “What do you listen to?”

  “What?” Her lips parted a split second before she lowered her attention to the plastic casing peeking out from her pocket. Slipping her thumb along the wire, she held on to it as though it was an anchor keeping her from vanishing right off the face of the earth. “I...I listen to white noise. Usually rain, when I can’t pull myself out of an anxiety attack. It helps calm me down.”

  Rain. Completely random and completely perfect for the woman standing in front of him. Finn took a single step, slowly, and offered his hand. Those brilliant aquamarine eyes swirled with confusion for a brief moment before understanding hit. She reached into her sweats and tugged the headphones from her pocket. Handing him an earbud, she inserted the other into her ear then pressed Play on the button below her chin. A roll of thunder gently cascaded into his left ear, followed by a constant patter of rain, and an undeniable wave of ease released the tension from around his spine. Interesting. “I like it.”

  “I know it’s probably something your boss might discourage between her deputies and the people they’re supposed to protect, and if I’m asking too much I’ll understand, but I...I don’t want to be alone right now.” She lowered her gaze to the scrapes along the backs of her hands, then pinned him with the desperation etched into her expression. “Will you sit with me until I fall asleep?”

  Air locked in his throat.

  The USMS had good reason for discouraging interpersonal relationships between marshals in the same district or with assigned protective details. Giving in to personal requests breached the professional barriers set between marshals and witnesses, which led to a sense of friendship, deeper emotions and mistakes.

  “I can do that.” Finn understood firsthand the danger of agreeing to Camille’s request, but he was already moving slowly toward the single bed with her in tow. He took possession of one side while she climbed over the mattress and lay down on the other, never once breaking their headphone connection. The bed dipped with their combined weight, pooling them in the middle as the storm in his ear lightened. Her body heat bled through her sweats into the side of his thigh after a few erratic heartbeats, but in that moment, Finn couldn’t imagine himself anywhere else but right here. Protecting his witness from whatever monsters awaited her when she closed her eyes. “I’ll stay as long as you need me to.”

  * * *

  IT’D STOPPED RAINING.

  Camille slipped her arm from over her eyes, her body heavy with one of the best nights of sleep she could remember. The earbud she’d fallen asleep wi
th slipped down her neck, and a sudden awareness of how quiet it’d gotten intensified the sound of her heartbeat in her ears. Prickling needled through her shoulder as she rolled to one side and hit something solid and warm. Not something. Someone.

  The drugging haze of sleep faded from her vision as she realized how close she’d gotten to him in the night. As though she’d subconsciously sought out Finn and pressed right against him in sweet oblivion.

  Over the past year he’d checked in on her once a month and had run through the protocols of being in witness protection with every random visit. Had she been in contact with any of her friends and family? Had she noticed any suspicious behavior or the same car hovering around the property? With the paths of communication to her old life off-limits and out of reach, she’d started looking forward to those short meetings, the chance to get to talk to another human being where she could be...herself. Not Camille Goodman, the newest resident in a small coastal town made up of barely 8,900 residents as a freelance virtual assistant to a handful of entrepreneurs. Not the woman who only left her house once a week for groceries and kept to herself because the rumors about who she was and where she’d come from whispered around her every time she went into town.

  With him, she was Camille Jensen, born and raised in Chicago. The same Camille who’d put herself through four years at Northwestern University and worked every hour of every day to land her dream job as one of Global Geographic’s new wave of photographers. A traveler, sister, daughter, coworker and friend. Someone who didn’t have to worry about the future or look over her shoulder for the next threat. Someone who’d lived in the moment and didn’t second-guess interactions with the people around her. During those check-ins, she didn’t have to lie.

  She didn’t dare move. Didn’t dare lose this sense of connectedness to another person. Something she hadn’t let herself feel in a long time. Because in those brief interactions over the past few months, talking to him—trusting him—seemed almost easy. Effortless. The ridged sweep of hair over his forehead curled down along one side of his face, softening the hard, often guarded, angles he kept in place while conscious. Cords of strength shaped impressive muscles down the arm she’d turned into during the night, his body heat tunneling through the thin fabric of her shirt. At nearly six foot four, the queen-size bed barely contained his mountainous frame, but where the men in her past life—where Jeff Burnes—had used their size to intimidate her, Finn used his size to protect. The urge to push the strand of hair away from his face tensed the muscles in her hand, but she didn’t want to wake him. Not if there was a chance she could extend this moment longer, a chance to just...feel. Stillness. Peace. Quiet.

  “Some people might think it’s creepy when you stare at them like that.” He kept his eyes closed, but the fact he hadn’t slurred his speech and made sense told her he’d been awake for a while. Possibly as long as she had, and her pulse ticked up a notch. How long had he been lying there? Aware she was watching him?

  “You didn’t seem to mind.” Sweat trickled at the base of her spine as she put a few inches of space between them. Setting her headphone cord between her thumb and index finger, she rolled the casing under her fingernail and pressed down. “You know, it’s impossible to tell what time it is or what day it is without windows in this place. Like we’re so far removed from reality, that nothing exists outside of these four walls. It’s disconcerting and comforting at the same time.”

  Clear blue eyes peaked out from a thick line of dark lashes and settled on her. “I bought and renovated this place when I came home from my second tour with the army. With the soundproofing and lack of windows, it gets to feeling like a sensory deprivation tank when things get out of control. I come here between assignments sometimes to shut down, get away, but I’m still close enough in case my office needs me.”

  “I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been for you, having to be a combat medic in a war zone all that time. Having to see all that hurt and pain.” Maybe as hard as it’d been for her seeing all those women collected on Jeff Burnes’s memory card like trophies. Or was it worse because he hadn’t been able to stop the threat from taking more lives? Camille let the headphone cord slip from her grasp and replaced the pressure under her fingernail with the hem of his T-shirt.

  “That’s part of the deal when you sign your life over to the government, but at least over there I knew who the enemy was.” His attention dropped to her hand a split second before he swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He pushed to his feet, out of her reach, and in an instant, the connection she’d felt between them was compromised, like a rubber band on the edge of snapping in two. With his back toward her, Finn pulled a fresh coffee mug from the single cabinet in the corner of the kitchen, emergency lighting highlighting rough ridges of puckered skin on his left shoulder blade. “Working for the marshals is a different story. The threat could come from anywhere.” He filled his mug with water from the sink tap and took a gulp. “Anyone.”

  Camille set her bare feet on the floor, every cell in her body attuned to every cell in his. The tape he’d secured on the left side of her chest tugged at sensitive skin as she closed the distance between them. The muscles down his spine hardened vertebrae by vertebrae as though he sensed how close she’d gotten. She reached out, tracing the pattern of scar tissue puckered two inches to the left of his spine, but he didn’t pull away. Didn’t turn on her. His shoulders sank on a strong exhale under her touch, and she couldn’t seem to force herself to stop. A gunshot wound? “I didn’t know you had any scars.”

  “Don’t we all?” His voice dropped into dangerous territory. Guttural. Pained. He faced her. So close. So real. Men like Jeff Burnes—the Carver—manipulated, hurt and betrayed the people they were supposed to care about, supposed to support and protect, but Finn wasn’t like them. She saw it in the way he’d put himself between her and the man who’d attacked her last night, felt it in the way he’d ensured to keep his distance while they’d shared the bed, but more than anything it was a gut feeling. One she’d learned to trust since her fiancé had tried to kill her last Valentine’s Day, and right now it was telling her that being within his arm’s reach was the safest place she could be. She’d never had anyone be as gentle with her as he had. Not just with sweeping her to safety or cleaning the wound on her chest, but through the comfort he’d offered so she could get to sleep. The concern he’d shown. “My mom’s last assignment as a marshal was a fugitive recovery case. A man who was sentenced to ten years for the death of his newborn. It was supposed to be routine. Nothing she hadn’t done before. Routine search, upping the protection detail around his wife, who was set to testify against him, connecting with acquaintances as to where he might go. Deputy Marshal Karen Reed was the best, and she always got her fugitive.”

  Yet she’d been shot in the line of duty.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “She still had to be a mom to a ten-year-old kid.” He drove his hand into his sweats pockets, the fabric molding to the outline of the backs of his knuckles as though he’d wrapped his hand in a tight fist. “She’d leave me with my grandparents when she was on assignment, but they could barely take care of themselves, let alone me. So she’d come home when she could, no matter how many miles or how many hours it’d take her. Sometimes I’d stay awake long enough to get a glimpse of the headlights of her SUV crawl across my bedroom wall, but I’d really know it was her when she’d come to check on me. I remember she always looked so dead-tired from the long days, the long drives. So tired she hadn’t noticed the man she’d been closing in on had followed her home one night.”

  Awareness of where they were penetrated through the engrossing intensity of the conversation, and it took every ounce of strength she had, every fiber of her being, to break through the anxiety and terror of getting close to another person to reach out for him. She set her palm over his heart. “Finn, I’m so sorry. I had no... I didn’t know.”

>   “I was pretending to be asleep when she leaned over me to kiss me good-night. Didn’t even know what was happening before the bullet went straight through her and into my back. By the time I got through my own shock, it was too late for her. I couldn’t do anything but watch her die right in front of me.” Finn lowered his chin to his chest and slid his hand over hers, and heat unlike anything she’d felt before exploded through her. “You’re right, you know. About our brains changing small details in order to cope with trauma. It’s garbage. Because I remember everything about that night, too.”

  “Did they find him?” Camille studied her hand beneath his, memorized the feel of his heart pounding under her fingers. She raised her gaze, locking onto the crisp outline of his mouth, and suddenly she wanted to be the one to comfort him, to help him forget the nightmare of his past. “The fugitive who followed her home that night?”

  “Her team caught up with him within a few hours, before he hit the Canadian border.” Finn stepped away. Away from her, but she couldn’t take it personally. There’d been dozens of times over the past twelve months when she couldn’t stand the thought of being touched, of being vulnerable around someone else, let alone a stranger, and he deserved the right to choose for himself how much was too much. Just as he’d done for her. “Bastard shot himself in the head before they could force him to serve his time behind bars for what he’d done. He took the easy way out and left a trail of hurt and death along the way, and there’s nothing that can convince me to go through that pain again.”