Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Victoria listened to the whole speech, waiting for something—anything—that would back up the feeling she had that not all was as it seemed. But when he stopped talking and waited, she was stunned. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got? A dead body showed up in my house, and I don’t know who or why but I didn’t kill her?” She would have laughed if she wasn’t so aware of the fact that there was a dead body just a few feet away. “That’s not a compelling story—that’s a textbook explanation that a murderer gives when faced with evidence that he murdered someone.” She shook her head, reaching for her radio again. “I shouldn’t have gone along with this. I’m calling backup. Mr. Rockwell, you are under arrest—.”

  She stopped talking when Barrett was suddenly beside her, his hand on her arm and his face serious as he looked down at her. “Victoria …”

  “Are you attempting to threaten me?” Victoria asked, jerking her arm from his grasp. Even though there was no reason for it, her heart was pounding fast, and her palms tingled. She had arrested hundreds of people throughout her career, many of whom had done worse things than Barrett. Victoria wasn’t afraid of him, but when he was standing over her like that, looking down at her with such intensity, it did something to her that she really, really didn’t like.

  “I’m not threatening you,” Barrett said, through clenched teeth. He looked almost desperate. “I’m asking you to …” He paused, and his eyes flicked over towards the painting, then back at her. “I’m asking you to give me a chance to tell you the real story. The whole real story. I know you don’t like me and my family, and what we do …”

  “That has nothing to do with this,” Victoria said, cutting him off sharply. “There’s a dead body in your freezer, Mr. Rockwell.”

  “I know that,” he said, sounding like he was at his wit’s end. “Just—come with me.”

  “Come with you,” Victoria said, repeating his words because she couldn’t believe he’d actually said them. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “You haven’t called in backup yet,” he said, nodding to her hand, which was still on her radio. “You could have done it. I’m holding your arm, but not tightly. I haven’t restrained you. You could have already made the call if you wanted to, but you’re stalling, whether you know it or not. You’re trying to reason with me. Or you’re waiting for me to give you a reason to do what I’m asking you to do.”

  Victoria did not appreciate what he was saying at all, but only because she knew it was true. That was exactly what she was doing, and she really didn’t like having to face that fact.

  “Come with me,” Barrett said again, moving even closer to her. “You want to know the secret behind the Rockwell’s? I’ll tell you. Better yet—I’ll show you. And I’ll tell you everything that has been going on that has led to this moment—everything. If at the end of it, you want to turn me in, I’ll go without protest.”

  “You can’t resist arrest,” Victoria said, but it was a weak comeback. She already knew that she wanted to go with him. Her curiosity was strong. Stronger, apparently, than her sense of duty to her job.

  “I absolutely can,” Barrett said, his voice meaningful. “You’ll understand what I mean when I show you what I’m about to show you. Come with me, Victoria.”

  It was pointless to pretend that she wasn’t going to go. Somehow, that decision had already been made without her permission.

  Victoria stepped back and held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

  Barrett put it in her hand without question. She pocketed it, making sure that he couldn’t call anyone to remove the body while they were gone.

  Then she walked back out to the garage and closed the garage door. She took pictures of the body in the freezer on her own phone, and then she closed the freezer again. Stepping away from it was actually painful because it was stepping away from her duties as a police officer. But Barrett had been messing with her head for a long time—first from afar, and now ever since she had met him. He had some hold on her, and she had to figure out why. And she had to know what he was promising to tell her.

  If he was just trying to get her alone to kill her …well, he could have already tried that in the house. And it wouldn’t have worked. He might be bigger than her, but she was strong and fast and well-trained. She had been in a number of fights, and she always won. She could take a perp down with no problem. And she was taking her weapon with her. There was no way he was going to get the jump on her.

  Victoria walked back into the living room and held her phone up. “I have documentation of the body.”

  “Fine,” he said, nodding. “Are you ready?”

  She gestured towards the front door. “After you.”

  They walked out and got in his car, silence between them. As he drove, Victoria kept a careful eye on where they were going, making sure that she tracked every turn and kept her wits about her. He was driving them out of Baton Rouge and towards the bayou that surrounded the city. She felt a little flicker of nervousness, but she didn’t let on, and she didn’t ask him any questions.

  Once they were well away from the center of Baton Rouge, Barrett began to head towards the bayou directly, and he eventually parked in an out-of-the-way green space that was clearly used for parking but contained no other cars at the time. Victoria looked over at Barrett, who hadn’t said a word throughout the drive, and he looked back at her for a moment before opening his door and getting out. He walked around to his trunk and opened it, pulling out a duffle bag.

  Victoria, who had followed him out of the car, looked at it suspiciously. “What exactly is that?”

  Barrett opened it and showed her. “Just clothes.” It wasn’t just clothes—it was a lot of clothes. Several pairs of jeans, and what looked like at least eight or nine shirts.

  “Okay, but what’s it for?”

  Barrett didn’t give her an explanation, zipping the bag back up and tossing it over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes. Then, walk down the path that I’m about to walk down, head to the left at the fork, and keep walking. You’ll see me.”

  Victoria narrowed her eyes, wondering if he was trying to get her to wait here while he set up some sort of trap for her. “I’ll come with you.”

  “It’s not a trap,” he said, reading her mind. “But it will be better if you wait here.”

  He didn’t give her a chance to protest any further. Instead, he headed off into the bayou, walking along the path that cut through the trees. Victoria was no stranger to the bayou, having grown up in Louisiana, but she had never spent much time exploring such areas. They were waterlogged, and muddy, and filled with creatures that could attack at any moment—alligators, and wild boars, and snakes. She was far more afraid of those kinds of creatures than she was of criminals. She could wrestle a criminal, but she didn’t fancy wrestling an alligator.

  It was agonizing to wait five minutes, and she continually checked her phone as she paced in front of the car, arguing with herself about whether she should have let him tell her to wait. It didn’t make much difference now—there was nothing that a couple of minutes was going to change if she began walking now.

  But she only made it to four minutes. Then she started striding down the path, her uniform boots sloshing through the mud, and her hand firmly on the butt of her gun the whole time. She didn’t know what she was about to see, but she really hoped that it was worth risking her job for, because that’s exactly what she had done.

  Chapter 11

  Barrett

  Barrett didn’t give himself time or mental space to second-guess his decision. When the garage door had inexplicably opened and the freezer had done the same, revealing the body to Victoria, he had known that he had to make a bold move or whoever was conspiring against him was going to get the upper hand, and he was going to be either in jail or on the run. He couldn’t handle either of those scenarios.

  That meant that he needed Victoria on his side, and she was very, very much not on his side right now. He had to do something dr
astic and win her over, and this was the only way that he knew to try to explain to her that there was more going on than met the eye. Because she was right—just saying that a body had shown up, and he didn’t know how it had gotten there wasn’t a defense. He had to take a risk and trust her, and he had no idea if it was going to pay off.

  But he didn’t look back.

  Once he got far enough into the bayou, he stripped off his clothes and set them on top of the duffle bag. Then he jumped into the air and shifted, his dragon form bursting out of him in an explosion of green scales and wide, strong, sweeping wings. He stroked his wings through the air, lifting himself higher with each sweep. Circling the clearing where he’d stopped, he stretched his neck and lengthened his tail, working out all of the kinks that came as a natural consequence of shifting.

  And then, when he was comfortable, he lowered himself down to the bayou floor and turned himself, so that he was facing the path down which Victoria would soon be coming. And he stood there, waiting to greet her with something that would come as a surprise to her, but shouldn’t really after she had heard all of the rumors and even seen the painting in his home.

  He could hear her footsteps approaching, and he felt his nerves fray. He had never revealed himself to anyone before, and doing so now, to a police officer, was a huge breach of the unspoken [but firmly adhered to] tradition of the Rockwell Clan. At least, it had been firmly adhered to until recently, when suddenly everyone was revealing themselves to a significant other. It made sense to Barrett that his reveal wouldn’t be like theirs. He wasn’t in a position to be taking on a non-shifter significant other, and even if he was, he certainly wouldn’t entertain the thought of trying to partner with a police officer. There would be too much inherent conflict in their work and responsibilities.

  No, his reveal was to keep himself from being arrested.

  And here she was.

  Victoria walked into the clearing, her hand on her gun, and when her eyes landed on Barrett, they widened. She stopped walking and just looked at him for a long time, standing there, her eyes locked on his. He was standing on the ground, and he didn’t move towards her or away from her. He didn’t flick his tail or let his wings so much as flutter in the wind.

  He just waited for her reaction, and she continued to stand there, not having one at all.

  If he was honest with himself, it was a bit anticlimactic. He had expected her to scream or gasp or be in awe or try to touch his scales to see if he was real. He had wanted her to rub her eyes and blink at him, wondering if she was seeing things and how this could be possible. He just wanted her to do something.

  But she didn’t. Long moments stretched out, and he waited. And waited.

  Finally, she moved, and Barrett’s eyes flickered towards the movement just in time to see her pull her gun and aim it right at him. The bullet flew from the barrel and pinged off one of his scales, falling harmlessly to the ground, and Barrett looked at it, then her.

  She looked horrified, and she took a step back, pressing a hand to her chest. For a moment, he didn’t know what was happening, but then he realized that she was having a panic attack. She sat down hard on the ground, putting her head between her knees and gripping her legs.

  Barrett didn’t hesitate. He shifted back into his human form and paused only long enough to pull on a pair of jeans. Then he hurried to her side and began to rub Victoria’s back in soft, slow circles as she gasped for breath. “It’s okay,” he told her soothingly. “It’s really okay. I know it was a shock. I’m sorry. You’re fine. I’m right here. Everything is fine, Victoria. Try to breathe slowly.”

  Victoria pushed his hands away, but she was still gasping for breath. “Get …off …me.” She put her head back between her legs to try to regulate her breathing. “Don’t …touch me.”

  He respected her request, sitting back and holding his hands up to show her that he intended to comply. “Okay. I’m over here. Just keep breathing. In and out. Slow, deep breaths.”

  She did as he said, and eventually—slowly—her breathing began to normalize again. When it did, she looked up at Barrett, and there was a steely skepticism in her gaze. “What. The. Hell?” She scrambled on to her feet and backed away from him, her hand on her gun again. “What the hell was that? I want an explanation now, Rockwell. What did you slip me? Am I on hallucinogens? It is illegal to drug another person—add that to your list of crimes.”

  Barrett let her rant, knowing that it was a coping mechanism. She clearly didn’t think he had slipped her anything—that would be impossible. But she’d had a shock, and she needed some way to cope with that shock. Some way that fit into her current worldview.

  “Oh my God,” Victoria said, shaking her head, as she moved along in the processing process. “Oh my God, there was a dragon. You were the dragon. You’re a dragon. A dragon shifter. That’s real. That’s an actual thing. I—you hear about it, but … God. Oh my God. That painting—on your wall. And now you—you were green. That was a painting of you. You’re a dragon shifter.”

  Barrett nodded, slowly, watching her to make sure that she didn’t go into a panic attack again. “Yes. I am.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Do you want me to show you again?”

  “No,” Victoria said, sharply, holding up her hand at him—the hand that wasn’t on her gun. “No. You just stay …” she gestured to him. “Stay there. Like that. I need a minute.”

  He gave her a minute, and she walked around slowly, pulling her hair out of its ponytail and letting it fall in shiny waves down her back and around her shoulders. It was long, and sleek, and she twirled strands of it around her fingers as she paced, and Barrett thought that it was, oddly enough, the prettiest thing he had ever seen. There was a grace and a strength about her movements, both in equal measure. Her brow was furrowed and her lips were pressed together. Her uniform hugged the curves of her body, and Barrett had to struggle to keep his eyes from lingering in inappropriate places because this was a highly inappropriate time.

  Finally, Victoria turned to him, her hands moving down to rest on her hips. “I have a lot of questions,” she said, thrusting her chin up slightly as she spoke to him, perhaps to demonstrate her dominance. “I’m going to put a lot of them aside for the moment in order to focus on the most important one.”

  “And which is most important?”

  “Why is showing me this an appropriate response to my finding a body in your freezer? Being a dragon shifter doesn’t put you above the law.”

  Barrett shook his head. “No. It definitely doesn’t. The reason that it was important for you to see this is because of what I’m going to tell you next. I needed to get your attention and provide you with context.”

  “Well you certainly did that.”

  “Good,” Barrett said. “Because there’s more. My family—the Rockwell’s—have always run an agency here in Baton Rouge. That agency has been devoted to solving supernatural issues and crimes. Sometimes we take a case that isn’t supernatural, just because someone needs help that we can provide or because it’s important to maintain a cover. But we mainly deal in the supernatural.”

  Victoria had her arms crossed over her chest again, and she was just watching him, not saying a word.

  “I took over the agency over a year ago, and in the past six months, things have been going wrong all the time. Missing money, mixed-up files, break-ins. Yesterday, I got fired from my position, essentially. By the Rockwell Clan elders.” He paused and looked at her for a long moment. “They say that I’m corrupt and stealing from the agency …or that I’m inept and can’t keep up with things. Neither of those things is true. I’m not the one responsible for what’s been happening. I don’t know who is. I meant to spend my time off figuring it out and clearing my name, but this morning …I woke up to a body in my house, and I don’t know who the person is or why they were there. But I’m confident that the person who has been manipulating me out of the agency is now trying to manipulate m
e out of free society—or out of Louisiana. Or the country.”

  Victoria’s face took on another level of skepticism. “Really.”

  “For a while, I thought you were in on it,” Barrett said, putting all of his cards on the table. “I thought that it was no coincidence that you showed up on the same morning that there was a dead body in my house. I thought that you must be part of some larger conspiracy—especially when it became clear that you didn’t like me or my family, or what we do. I don’t think that anymore—not after the shock on your face when you saw the body. At that point, I knew I had no choice but to trust you …and to tell you everything.”

  He took a deep breath, moving towards her. “I know what it looks like, Victoria, but I’m not what I look like and neither is this situation. I need you to be on my side here. I need you to help me figure out what happened, and if you do, and you decide that I’m guilty, I’ll go without protest. Without fight. And I could fight—I could fight and win. But I won’t if you really believe I’m guilty after we do a thorough investigation. That’s how confident I am that there’s nothing that will even suggest that I’m the person who killed that woman. I’ll stake my life on it.”

  Chapter 12

  Victoria

  Victoria had to admit, his argument was now far more compelling. She felt as though she had stepped into a completely unknown world where everything that she thought she had known had to be put aside and replaced with new information that she didn’t fully understand. If he was part of some organization with a long history and someone had been sabotaging him—someone who didn’t feel bound by the laws that other people had to follow—then it was suddenly far more likely that what he was telling her was true.