“Let’s do it.”
We got out of the car, armed to the teeth beneath our clothes, heading toward the Lincoln Memorial. I kept an eye on our surroundings, my hand linked with Kate’s.
It was busy tonight, tourists clearly taking advantage of the warm weather. We sidestepped a group of kids playing on the sidewalk, our strides eating up the pavement. I didn’t like the crowds, didn’t like how difficult the space was to contain. I would have chosen a more private location, but our source was jittery as fuck so he’d only been willing to meet in public. I hoped that the patrols of the memorial would at least deter any attacks. We’d taken the most circuitous route possible to get here, doing everything we could to ensure that we weren’t being followed.
We neared the memorial, the building lit up against the D.C. night sky. Kate’s grip on my hand tightened.
We milled through the groups of people talking and laughing, my heart racing a bit each time they came too close. I fucking hated crowds.
Kate squeezed my hand, closing the distance between us, as though her presence could chase my demons away.
“So what does this guy look like?” she murmured, her gaze scanning the memorial much as mine did.
“He’s tall. Caucasian. Big. Forty-ish. Dark hair cropped close to his head. Dark eyes. He has a tattoo on his arm.”
“Where did you guys agree to meet?”
“Near the statue.”
We walked up the steps, my body tense.
“Do you feel okay?” Kate asked, and I knew what she was really asking was, “Does it feel like the last time?”
I jerked my head in a nod, sweeping the crowd, hoping he’d actually show. My gaze ran over a couple holding hands, a family—one of the kids crying—a group of friends taking pictures, a guy in jeans and a black T-shirt. I froze.
“He’s here.”
I glanced around again, my chest tightening at the clusters of people. Clusters were not good. Clusters meant hiding spots, opportunities to blend, motherfucking danger.
“It’s okay, Matt,” Kate murmured, her voice low, soothing. She tugged on my hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
I didn’t have it in me to be embarrassed by the fact that she could tell I was close to losing my shit. I was too grateful to her for calming me. I didn’t know how to explain it, but it was like she pulled me out of whatever hell I spiraled into, reminding me of the here and now, of the need to protect her and keep her safe at all costs.
We walked toward my father’s employee, his gaze drifting over the crowds much like mine had until he settled on us and he jerked his head in greeting, moving behind the statue of Lincoln. He was ex-military, and he moved with the methodical precision of someone who’d spent time in combat.
I followed him, Kate in tow, nervous energy coursing through my body. I was ready to end this and move on.
We faced off from each other.
“I told you I couldn’t help you,” he said, his expression angry. “I’m not going to the authorities, not going to the media. I gave you everything I had.”
I’d expected this.
“We need more.”
“No fucking way. I’ve been watching the news.” He jerked his head toward Kate. “I know who she is. I know how involved she is in all of this. I want no part of it.”
Kate made a frustrated noise in her throat that almost sounded like a growl. I positioned myself between them, not wanting him looking at her, talking about her, and more than a little concerned that if provoked, there was a good chance Kate would go for the fucking jugular. She might have been a tamer version of herself with me, but I knew her well enough to know that her temper was about to explode.
I opened my mouth to speak, when suddenly I saw a flash of light across his face. I froze, my gaze narrowing, everything tunneling to that red dot dancing on his forehead. There was a second when its presence seemed incongruous, and then I knew.
“Get down,” I shouted, my body connecting with Kate’s as I knocked her to the ground. I heard the gunshot and then the world exploded into chaos.
Kate
For the second time in as many days, I ended up on the ground, staring up at Matt’s face. This time he didn’t look scared or panicked, he looked like he was going to burn the house down.
“Are you okay? They didn’t hit you, did they?”
I shook my head, the feeling I was becoming all too familiar with—panic and terror and adrenaline—swirling inside me. I looked down at my body, running my hands over my torso, my palms coming away red and wet.
Oh god. Oh god.
It wasn’t mine.
“Were you hit?” I asked, panic in my voice.
Matt shook his head.
“What happened?”
“Sniper. We need to move. Now.”
“What happened to …”
Oh my god. The lifeless eyes of the man we’d just been talking to stared back at me. Nausea rose as I stared at the blood, the gaping wound, the parts of his body spilling out …
“Don’t look at him. Look at me,” Matt demanded.
Another shot rang out around us. Screams erupted around the memorial.
“Do exactly what I do,” Matt shouted.
I nodded, my breath hitching, heart racing.
“Kate.”
“Y—Yes?” My teeth chattered together, my limbs ice.
“You can do this. We have to run.”
He jerked me to my feet and I stumbled. His arms came around my body, steadying me, holding me up. We took off running, his hand pulling me along. Around us people screamed and cried, the pandemonium giving us the cover we needed. The police were on the scene, but for the moment the attention was definitely on the body lying on the ground, and capturing the shooter, rather than on us.
My muscles ached as we ran, my legs little more than wet noodles. I was so going to freak the fuck out whenever we stopped running.
“Where are we going?” I asked, my body doubling over to catch my breath as soon as we’d gotten far enough away. Matt might be in peak physical shape, but even though I worked out, there was running and then there was running for your life. Clearly one thing did not necessarily prepare you for the other.
“Metro. We need to leave the car.”
“Are we going back to the hotel?”
“Right now, I can’t think of a better place to go. We don’t have any evidence that they know where we were staying. They could have been following him.”
God, it was like I couldn’t breathe. I kept trying to drag in air, fire burning through my chest.
“Can you run a little longer? They’ll shut down the surrounding metro stations. We need to get farther away.”
I nodded, even though that was kind of a lie. If the fucking sniper didn’t kill me, Matt’s running might.
“Are you okay?” I asked, surprised he was keeping it together as well as he was. I was the one who was utterly terrified and ready to completely lose it.
“Yeah. I am. I’ll be a lot better when we’re somewhere safe. Ready?”
Fuck. Fine.
“Yes.”
We ran to the point where I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to walk tomorrow. I worried we looked suspicious, but no seemed to be paying us very much attention. Besides, I guessed by the way we were dressed we could have looked like a couple going out for a run at night. The blood blended in with my dark clothes, and if you didn’t look too closely—which, thank god, no one did—you wouldn’t spot it.
The image of that man’s dead body, his lifeless eyes, the blood pouring from him, kept flashing before my eyes until finally I couldn’t take it anymore.
I leaned over the sidewalk and heaved, the lunch we’d eaten in the hotel room with Blair, Gray, Jackie, and Will coming out all over the grass.
Matt was behind me immediately, pulling my hair away from my face, his arm wrapped around my waist, cradling me in the curve of his embrace. His hand stroked my back, his touch soothing.
“Sorr
y,” I gasped, feeling disgusting, tears threatening, my entire body nearing collapse.
He cupped my face, his gaze intent. “There’s nothing to apologize for. Your reaction is totally normal. We just need to get out of here. A little bit longer and then we’ll be safe back in the hotel,” he urged.
I nodded, my eyes welling up. “I’ve never seen someone die before,” I whispered, feeling like an asshole after everything he’d been through, but wanting to give him some explanation for why I was completely losing my shit. “His blood …” My voice broke, another wave of nausea threatening.
Matt didn’t answer me, he just put his arms around me, gathering me in his embrace, his hands in my hair, our bodies plastered against each other as he whispered in my ear, telling me he loved me, telling me it would be okay, giving me the support I needed to keep going.
I was shaking by the time we got back to the hotel, my tenuous grip on whatever strength had carried me this far failing me now.
I couldn’t imagine what I would have done without Matt. He ushered me into the room, his tone calm.
“Let’s get you into the shower, okay? You’ll feel better once you’re cleaned up.”
Considering I’d run in the August heat and thrown up, not to mention the blood on me, I figured it was all up from here.
I nodded, surprised to see that my hand trembled, my legs buckling beneath me.
Matt began taking off my clothes, his touch more soothing than sexual.
“The shock will wear off soon. I promise.”
When I was naked, he sat me down on the bed, stripping off his clothes and setting them in a heap on the floor. He led me into the bathroom, his hands on my shoulders guiding me toward the shower, giving me the support I needed to hold myself together.
Matt turned on the shower spray, and I walked in, lifting my face up to the falling water, closing my eyes, feeling clean for the first time all night. I felt him behind me, giving me the space I needed along with the reassurance I craved.
I saw a man die. He’d bled on me. We’d almost died. Again.
My body shook, my heart pounding as the first sob escaped, then the next one. Matt reached out and held me as I cried, comforting me, the water running down my body, washing away all of the ugliness that surrounded us. When I was finished, long after my tears had subsided and the water began to cool, he kissed me, his mouth replacing my pain with pleasure.
We came together, our bodies finding comfort in this moment, in the break from all of the craziness and fear. Our last lead was dead, we’d had two attempts on our lives, and it seemed more and more like getting out of town was our only option.
We deserved this. Needed it. So we took it, disappearing into each other for the moment, lingering in it, gathering our strength before we had to disappear for good.
Chapter Twenty-one
The funeral of Intech founder and CEO, James Ryan, was widely attended by Washington’s power players …
—Capital Confessions blog
Kate
We met at our hotel again, Gray and Blair still in D.C., trying to regroup, attempting to figure out what came next. I was on my second day of calling in sick to work, leaving another message on my boss’s answering machine, and I had a feeling I was pretty much fired anyway. Hopefully, when we did run, the CIA wouldn’t bother coming after us. I was a low-level employee and my security clearance was the lowest access level at the Agency. I wasn’t exactly a threat to national security.
“So we’re back where we started. We don’t have any proof.” Matt grimaced. “He killed my entire unit, tried to kill me, killed my father and god knows who else, and he’s just going to get away with it.”
No one spoke. He wasn’t wrong.
Matt’s jaw clenched. “How is this possible? How is there nothing we can use to incriminate him? To see him tried for his crimes?”
“He’s good at covering his tracks. He always has been,” Jackie interjected, anger threading through her voice. “I’ve tried for years. The best I could do at Capital Confessions was take some shine off of his reputation. But I could never actually find something to pin on him.”
That was the thing about people like my father. They were slippery as fuck.
I looked at the circle; five grim faces stared back at me. No one wanted to see him win, but it felt like David going up against Goliath. How did you take down someone who had more money and power than you could ever dream of?
You didn’t.
“What are you guys going to do?” Blair asked.
Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. We need to get out of town.”
We’d been prepared for this. Part of me didn’t even mind it. The leaving, at least. But not like this. I wasn’t going to run with my tail tucked between my legs. If we were going to leave, then it was going to be on our terms. I was going to light a match and burn this motherfucker down.
We needed to hit him where it hurt, to find the one chink in his armor …
Oh my god.
“What if we didn’t need proof?” The idea slowly took root. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but it was better than nothing. It was something we could cling to.
“What do you mean?” Jackie asked.
“What if we didn’t need to prove what he did? What if we just needed to make it look like there was something suspicious there? We don’t necessarily need to connect the dots; we just need to prove that there are dots to connect. Let the authorities investigate him. Let public opinion condemn him.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know who he has on his payroll,” Blair pointed out. “What if we take this to the FBI or something, and then they just bury it? How do we know who we can trust?”
She had a point there. I thought about what we knew, how my father operated, mentally discarding options …
“So we don’t go to the authorities.” My gaze met Jackie’s. “We know one person that we can trust. One person who isn’t afraid to print things about our father. One person who has the kind of audience to shine a light on this whole thing, to garner the level of attention we need. The kind that will ruin his career.”
Her gaze narrowed speculatively, and then her lips curved into a smile, ruthless and beautiful. “You want to use Capital Confessions. You think Sean will do it.”
Sean Dell was the editor of Capital Confessions, and while the man wasn’t exactly trustworthy under normal circumstances, Jackie had been his best blogger for years, and even though he didn’t show it in a touchy-feely sort of way, I did genuinely believe he had a sliver of a slightly soft spot for Jackie. We’d both provided him with information and some of his biggest stories, so in a way he owed us. Especially Jackie. Besides, the man would sell his grandmother for a good story, and this one had all the markings of the ultimate scandal—plus he’d get an exclusive.
“Don’t you?”
“Yeah, I do,” Jackie answered. “He’ll have to be careful with how he handles the information, but that’s right up his alley.”
Jackie and I grinned at each other, and I knew that whatever she’d decided when she quit Capital Confessions, there had always been a part of her that craved this. We were a bloodthirsty pair; maybe it was the genes.
My gaze swept the rest of the group. I couldn’t read Matt, but Will and Gray looked resigned, as though it wasn’t their fight, but they would fight it anyway for the women they loved. They’d both had their dirty laundry aired in Capital Confessions, so I figured they had their reservations—justifiably so. Blair looked worried, and knowing my cautious sister like I did, I figured she was already thinking of all the ways this could backfire and blow up in our faces.
And there were many.
For a moment I just looked at my family, my sisters, the men they loved, and thought of the lives they’d built, the challenges they’d overcome. They had bright futures ahead of them, and as much as I knew they hated our father, it wasn’t their fight. Gray and Blair were just starting out, trying to put their baggage behind them. Will�
��s political future was huge, and Jackie had worked so hard to build her career in an industry that wouldn’t understand her involvement in chipping away at a prominent senator’s power. It would embarrass his party, possibly implicate some of his many political allies. It wasn’t worth it. She had way too much to lose.
I didn’t.
I enjoyed my job at the CIA, but it was just a job. No matter how this played out, we would never really feel safe if we stayed in town, if we didn’t shed our identities. And I knew that my father was just one crooked politician in a long line of many, but I needed to feel like all of this had meant something. That the years Matt and I had suffered had some purpose. I needed this.
“I think you guys should sit this one out.”
Jackie made a face. “Are you joking? After everything? I started this.”
“I know.” My gaze shifted to Will. “If you get tied up in this, how is it going to look for Will’s political career?”
She closed her eyes.
“How’s it going to look for your career? You love what you do. You’re good at what you do. Really good. So is Will. You guys are already making a difference in this town. Don’t screw that up.”
Jackie opened her eyes, and I saw the resignation there. “What about you?”
I shrugged and my gaze connected with Matt’s. “I think I’m ready to try living in the shadows for a bit. I’ve done the spotlight thing and hated it. I’m never going to get to be ordinary. Never going to get to put this shit behind me. Neither one of us can. So instead of trying to force our future into something we can’t have, I’m going to go out on my terms.”
Blair shook her head. “I don’t want all of this to be on you.”
Gray squeezed her hand and I knew that in my absence, Blair would never be alone.
“It is on me. I need you to accept that. Let me handle this. I’ll talk to Sean. I’ll leak the info. And then we’ll leave D.C.”
“Are you sure about that?” Matt asked.
“Yeah. I am.”
Falling For Danger Page 20
