by Caisey Quinn
“Well, that’s great. I’m so fucking relieved that you briefed your colleagues. Next time, maybe shoot me a text, huh? ‘Hey, Chase. About that whole being dead thing? False alarm. See you when I see you.’”
“I couldn’t help—”
“Do not . . . you’re not . . . just. Don’t.” Chase sputtered over his words, spitting out the final one when she started to take a step closer to him.
Hurt and confusion twisted his tongue because now betrayal could be added to the messy storm of conflicting emotions he’d been trying to get a handle on for the past four years.
Without further discussion, Chase turned and stalked angrily back to the SUV.
He needed a goddamn minute.
No, he needed four years of his life back. Four years in which he’d mourned the death of someone he’d loved. Still loved.
Someone he never got a chance to say I love you to.
His mind battled that thought with every breath he took. No. He didn’t love her. How could he? Apparently he didn’t even know her. The patch on her gear had said Montgomery, not Brooks. Had Brooks been a false identity? Was she married now?
Whatever her game was, he’d obviously played a role in it until she’d been done with him. Then she’d moved on. Did they put undercover Feds in the military? He didn’t know. He couldn’t begin to answer any of the questions swarming and stinging him like lethal bees on a mission from hell.
The only person who could answer them was a woman he’d been grieving for the past four years. A woman who apparently didn’t need him or his grief.
The passenger door opened and shut abruptly, and now he was trapped in the enclosed space with her and her mouthwatering scent.
“Look. We’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later. I’d like to handle it sooner so neither of our teams or our jobs or this entire town has to pay the price for our past.” She delivered the lines in a rehearsed voice he didn’t recognize.
He stared openly at her profile, torn between wanting to grab her and hold her as close as humanly possible and wanting to shake the damn life out of her.
“And how would you like to handle this? This being you coming back from the dead and all. Just so we’re clear.”
The stubborn woman he knew replaced the apologetic one he didn’t. Through gritted teeth she spoke slowly as if he were hearing impaired. “I never meant to hurt you—to hurt anyone. The Feds came to me the day of the accident. There was a threat—to me, to my family—because of something my father did many years ago. Something I never even knew about until then. I was trying to find a way to tell you, but they were watching. They’d been watching for a long time. It happened so fast . . .”
Yeah, it had happened fast. But the past four years had gone by with excruciating slowness.
“And after?” He stared at her. His mind still couldn’t accept that she was here, living and breathing. “They had you in witness protection or something for the past four years?”
Vivien’s gaze darted toward the windshield. “Not exactly. I worked undercover to help take down some dangerous people linked to my family. I was under strict instructions not to contact you. Or anyone else for that matter. I tried several times and they were able to block my attempts. I didn’t get to say good-bye to you—to anyone. For two years I wasn’t able to contact a single soul, Chase. Okay? Not you, not my family, not Jen or Emerson, hell, none of my friends. I couldn’t even attend my grandfather’s funeral. In a way, I was truly dead because I was dead to everyone who mattered. Try to understand what it was like for me. I—”
“What it was like for you?” Chase broke in. “Are you kidding me right now, Viv?” He scoffed loudly. “Wait. Your name is Vivien, right? Or was that a lie, too?”
The sneer in his tone likely matched the one on his face. If anyone had told him he’d see her again, even just for a moment, he would’ve sworn that all he would’ve wanted was one more chance to hold her. To kiss her. To stroke her perfect skin and tell her he’d never stop loving her and to wait for him, because he’d meet her in whatever came after this life. He’d find a way.
But here she was, and the only emotions he could channel were livid anger and brutal betrayal.
“Stop,” she pleaded softly, turning to face him. “Please, stop this. You have every right to be angry. I’m still angry too. Believe me. But what we had—”
“What we had was clearly a lie—like everything else between us. Once we get out of this vehicle we can just pretend the past never happened. Do your job and move on. Shouldn’t be too difficult since you’ve already done it once before.”
Chase didn’t wait for her to heed his demand. He stepped out of the SUV without a backward glance and made his way to his team, leaving his past, and a ghost he could finally give up once and for all, behind him, where she belonged.
Four
“Shut the front door.” Annalise Gamble, his roommate Aiden’s younger sister, stared at him with wide eyes. “She’s really back? It’s not just a rumor? You cannot be serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
After restless attempts at sleep but thankfully no nightmares, Chase had gotten up on his off day and run six miles before returning home to shower. Unfortunately, Aiden was home that day as well and he and his sister had plans to go to some antiques-and-crafts festival downtown to find a birthday gift for their mom. But not before they’d grilled him about everything from Ethan’s injuries to Vivien’s mysterious reappearance. Their dramatic scene at the storage facility earlier that week had already made the rounds through the department. Aiden heard it from a rookie he was training and Annalise heard it from a girl she worked with in Intelligence.
Two years Aiden’s junior, Annalise was headstrong and a damn fine officer, but Aiden strove to keep her out of harm’s way every chance he got. Not having any siblings, Chase didn’t understand how they could be screaming at each other one minute, bickering the next, then completely fine and thick as thieves later, laughing as if they hadn’t been at each other’s throats.
“She’s alive and she’s here. I mean, what are the odds?” Aiden shook his head, but Annalise had more to add.
“What if she requested this assignment, Chase? What if she’s here to clear everything up about what happened and she wants another chance?”
Chase grunted his disapproval at that particular theory while pouring a glass of OJ. “Doubtful.”
“Why? These past four years . . . you know you haven’t been okay. Maybe she hasn’t been either.”
Exactly. The past four years had been hell. And all because someone who was actually alive had played dead.
“It’s in the past, Annalise. Jesus. This isn’t the sappy women’s romance movie channel or whatever it is you watch.”
Aiden looked skeptical. “Still, kind of a huge coincidence that she’s here. Did she explain how she got assigned to this case?”
“Does she want to try to patch things up?” Annalise broke in before he could answer.
“No, she didn’t—and I wouldn’t care even if she did,” Chase answered.
Annalise gave him a hopeful smile. “If she does, maybe you should hear her out. Life’s too short, Chase. At the very least maybe you could get some closure so you can move on. I know the endless string of one-night stands is a real blast and all but maybe it’s time to grow up. She said so herself, it wasn’t like she had a choice in the situation.”
Chase bristled, regretting telling them anything about the exchange from the day before and tossing Aiden a pointed glare when his little sister commented on his sex life.
Aiden placed both hands palms up. “She wanted to set you up with one of her friends. I said you didn’t do relationships. That’s all. You’re welcome, asshole.”
Annalise rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to fire out more questions, but Chase put a hand up. “My personal life is m
y business. What’s done is done, and hopefully she’ll be out of here as soon as I can get this damn case closed. No more discussion of her in this house, period. Got it?”
Chase didn’t typically snap at his friends but he was over the third degree. He wasn’t going to listen to Annalise romanticize what Vivien had done. The woman had stolen four years of his life, and he wasn’t going to forget that anytime soon. No matter how painfully gorgeous she still was.
Aiden stood to retrieve his breakfast sandwich from the microwave. “Got it. Good luck with the case. And with . . . all that other stuff.”
Aiden had never been one to pry. He kept his private life pretty private too and Chase appreciated that. Between the two men, Luke was the charismatic talker who might’ve actually gotten some answers out of him. He was already the youngest detective in the department for a reason. They called him Silver Tongue around the squad because he was always able to get confessions out of people. Some perps offered to take him out for beers once they’d served their time. Chase was thankful that he wasn’t home at the moment.
However Luke did what he did, it was weird Jedi mind tricks Chase didn’t have the mental energy to deal with today.
He prayed he could steer clear of Luke until Vivien was out of his life once again.
For good this time.
Five
Vivien sat in the small conference room they’d been permitted to use at the Nashville precinct. The rest of her team had headed back to the hotel to get some sleep, but she stayed, staring intently at the pictures posted to the bulletin board and hoping something would somehow start to make sense.
The maps, the materials, even Ethan’s injury had become part of the Music City Bomber case. Fortunately, no moves had been made to blow anything up yet.
Well, Chase had blown up on her, but she deserved that and she knew it.
When Captain John Raeder came into the room to check in Vivien shook her head. “I can’t make heads or tails of this map. Why set off an explosion in the place farthest from the heart of downtown?” She pointed to the red circle that she’d assumed was the intended detonation site. “If he or she wanted to make maximum impact, wouldn’t Broadway or Church Street be a better location?”
The aging Captain frowned. “I don’t know that we’ve deciphered what each symbol means for certain. I’m still not convinced that’s the location.”
The two of them studied the random symbols dotting the map in silence.
Vivien sighed. She’d been at this all night and they were no closer to coming up with any answers. The storage facility was foreclosed on years ago, so it wasn’t like he or she had rented the space legitimately.
“Get some sleep, Agent Montgomery. Let the others take a shift. The map will still be here tomorrow,” he told her.
With that, he left, leaving Vivien alone with the pieces to one majorly fucked up puzzle.
She was tempted to beat her head against the table to see if anything shook loose.
The last thing she wanted was for this case to drag out longer than necessary. Seeing Chase again was difficult enough. Seeing the hurt and the hatred in his eyes every time he looked at her was nearly killing her.
She swallowed her pain and stood.
This was just another case.
She was going to do her job by helping to provide a solid psychological profile of the perp, analyze any explosives that came across her path, and report her findings to Chase in order to guide the local law enforcement in the right direction. It sounded so simple. Just do her job as she would with any other case and move along. But it was so much more complicated this time.
The map taunted her from the table. It might as well have spoken the words out loud.
Nothing about this operation was going to be simple.
***
The next morning, Vivien was briefing the local PD on what the FBI behavioral analysts had come up with based on their evaluation of the storage container’s contents. She made a point to pan around the room, not making eye contact with anyone but addressing the group as a whole.
Because Chase was front and center, practically annihilating her with his glare.
“So far, we don’t have much to go on other than a few roughly scrawled handwritten notes seemingly to himself and several maps with symbols we’ve yet to decipher.” She took a deep breath and continued. “What we do know is the planning, staging, and organizational patterns indicate that we’re looking for a male, probably Caucasian, probably single, most likely lives alone, between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five. It’s unlikely that he has a criminal record aside from minor traffic violations as the level of meticulousness indicates a carefully detailed plot that he’s probably spent years planning.” She cleared her throat and avoided Chase’s smirk of disbelief. She knew he wasn’t one to buy into the behavioral analysis statistics, but she’d seen it work too many times to ignore its relevance. “Furthermore, the main concern at this point is that we’ve derailed his plans. He’s going to be frustrated, and while he might stew in his anger for a bit, giving us time to make progress on finding him, time is of the essence because his rage will overflow and there will be repercussions.”
“Meaning?” a female officer prompted.
Vivien’s chest tightened at the answer. “Meaning he’s not going to just throw his hands up and say, ‘Oh well, gave it my best shot,’ and go back to teaching junior college chemistry—or whatever he’s doing for a day job—because the Nashville PD spoiled his plans. He’s still most likely going to do whatever he intended to do and now he might add a cherry on top because he’s pissed off.”
“So basically any second now we can expect an enormous-ass explosion in our city?” a male officer sitting so far in the back she couldn’t see his face offered.
“Basically,” Agent Levinson broke in calmly, “you can expect a bomb to go off in your backyard while we sit here discussing it. Or you can pretend this guy is going to forget his plans and go on with his life. What Agent Montgomery is saying is that we have a live wire on our hands where this particular unsub is concerned. He’s been temporarily stanched because his supplies were uncovered, but it’s like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound. It won’t last. Our findings indicate he’s spent years working on compiling the materials in that storage unit. There were enough materials contained there to level downtown. That’s years of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears. Gone in a day because the cops busted up in there and stole from him. That’s how he’s going to see it. So the sooner we find him, the better. Because there will be fallout and it won’t be pretty.”
Captain Raeder thanked them and took over at the podium. “We’ve divided each shift into teams.” He pointed to the dry-erase board behind him. “Your teams and leaders are listed here.” Vivien watched as he nodded to an attractive brunette. “Gamble, your team will be looking for any and all locals with explosives knowledge who might’ve had a triggering event in the past five years. Getting fired, divorced, loss of a child, and so on. Start with every person fitting the FBI’s profile who might’ve rented space at that storage facility when it was still in business.” He turned in Chase’s direction. “Fisk, I want your team to sweep each location marked on the maps from the unit. Daily. Hourly. As often as possible.”
Vivien felt her throat constrict. That was what she would be doing also. So they’d be together, trying not to create too much friction so one of them didn’t spontaneously combust while looking for explosives. An unsettling mixture of dread and excitement at the thought of working closely with him settled into her stomach.
“Foster, you and Hawthorne interview everyone who lives within a ten-mile radius of the storage facility. If they saw anything suspicious at any time, I want to know about it.” Vivien glanced at the attractive blond detective she knew was friends with Chase because he’d been with him the night they’d met four years ago.
The Captain continued on with his list until he’d finished and dismissed them. Vivien was impressed with the way he ran his unit. No political nonsense or favoritism. He’d been welcoming and professional with the Bureau’s involvement, no us-versus-them chip on his shoulder. Just straight to the point and singularly focused on what needed to be done. He reminded her of her grandfather.
She turned to Isaac Davis. “Guess we’re with Fisk’s team. You ready?”
He tilted his head in a show of sympathy she didn’t want or need. “I think the better question is . . . are you?”
She swallowed thickly and nodded. “Guess I have to be. Can’t put off catching a maniac just because I have man trouble.”
Isaac’s dark chestnut-colored eyes had always reminded her of a horse’s. All-seeing, all-knowing, but he rarely spoke unless he was certain of what he was saying. So she was wearing her heart on the sleeve of her tactical gear then. Fabulous.
“Let’s do this, then,” he said, gesturing for her to proceed ahead of him.
Once they’d joined the small congregation where Chase’s team stood, he handed out copies of the maps with zones listed on them. He gave each team a zone except her and Isaac.
Vivien had a flashback of EOD training.
To the very first day she’d had to wear the bomb suit. He’d toyed with her, not giving her a group, only to tell her she was with him. She studied him intently as he continued ignoring her. Surely he wasn’t going to put her in his group after he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her. Was he?
This time she didn’t break. She wasn’t under his command and she sure as hell wasn’t going to raise her hand and beg him to put her in a group so she could play with the other kids.
She kept her chin up until he’d finished, then held her hand out. “If you have an extra copy of the zoned version of the map, we’d love to have one.”
