What Doesn't Kill You

by Aimee Hix

  “I’d be happy to look at it.”

  We lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. I wanted to stay mad at him for tricking me into having to relocate to his apartment, but I just wasn’t. I had acted like us sleeping together after Michael’s memorial service had taken me by surprise, but it had actually felt inevitable. It hadn’t been a delayed reaction to grief or any of that crap about reaffirming life. We knew what we were doing was the result of years of holding back, of taking the higher road, of thinking of someone other than ourselves.

  I rolled over onto my side to face Seth. He’d been on his side facing the door and we were almost touching. He’d brought his own blanket in with him and had lain down on the comforter. I shimmied free of my covers and slipped under his.

  “What’re you doing, Willa?” His voice was soft but it was the uncertainty in it that made me reach out and place my hand on his chest. “If this is about earlier, my remark about the kiss, I—”

  “Someone tried to stab me tonight,” I said.

  “I thought you weren’t scared.” His voice was teasing.

  “I’m not. And that scares me. Seth, what would you do after that memorial service?”

  He brought his hand up and grabbed mine. “Don’t say that.”

  “Where would you go? Who would you drink with? Who would know you then? It was always just the three of us and then you left us.”

  He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed it. “We grew up, Will.”

  I slid my leg in between his. “You grew away, Seth.”

  “I’m here now.” He kissed me gently. “I thought you said this wasn’t a good time to figure out—”

  “I wasn’t that drunk. I knew what I was doing,” I said, interrupting him.

  He reached up and used his phone to light us up. I shifted my eyes away and covered the phone with my hand. I had only started talking because he couldn’t see me.

  He dropped the phone on the bed. It still wasn’t dark enough but if he wanted to hear what I had to say he’d have to do it my way.

  “It wasn’t grief. Not really. I was mad at him. He’d died and … he’d left me alone and you’d already left me and I wanted … someone back.”

  “Someone?”

  “You.”

  “You know I didn’t mean any of the things I said the other day. It’s not just anyone. It’s you.” He kissed me again.

  No one came in to interrupt us and I didn’t stop him. I kissed him back.

  Chapter

  18

  I woke with Seth’s arm thrown over my rib cage and the rest of him pressed against my back. Memories of the morning after Michael’s memorial surfaced and I thanked several gods I didn’t believe in that at least I wasn’t hungover too. Why hadn’t I thought of the morning before I invited him into my bed? But I knew that if I had thought about it I wouldn’t have done it. And I’d wanted to. I hadn’t wanted to talk it all out. I knew what would resolve that particular tension.

  It was too late for self-recrimination—a game I was exceptionally good at—so I tried to squeeze out from underneath his incredibly heavy limb and ease out of the bed. He tightened his grip and let out a sigh that tickled the hair on the back of my neck. Well crap. The domestic bliss of the scene was starting to make me itch.

  “Seth? Wake up.”

  “Fifteen more minutes.”

  His hand inched lower and he pressed his stubbled chin against my shoulder.

  “What you want will take longer than fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “You underestimate my determination, Sunshine.”

  “It’s not your determination I’m questioning, Seth.”

  I got my arm free enough to send a glancing blow to his rib cage. He coughed hard and rolled off me. I sat up and smiled down at him. He grabbed his torso and put on an exaggerated expression of pain. I hadn’t actually hurt him. I had barely touched him and I knew exactly how to use that move to cause real injury.

  “I don’t have time for your antics, Agent. Can you amuse yourself while I make some phone calls?”

  He smirked at me. “I’m sure I can find something to keep busy with.”

  “Ew, perv,” I said, laughing. “Maybe get cleaned up. You look rough.”

  I dressed hastily and called John’s mother while Seth showered. She was more than happy to host Ben for as long as it took. I’d given her an abbreviated version of events, leaving out the murder and gun ring entirely. That with the fire investigation and commotion, I felt Ben should be away from the whole mess so he could focus on school. I didn’t have to worry about him treating this as a vacation. John’s mother would be on him worse than ours.

  The Horowitzes had gotten up and were feeling less overwhelmed. The fire had been put out pretty quickly thanks to the fire crews and the house was salvageable. It was a mess but they’d already spoken to their insurance company and Susan’s sister in Rhode Island. They were going to drive up and spend a week or two with her family in Providence. Four hundred miles away seemed like a good idea. I had no proof, but I was pretty sure Providence was where they had sent Violet off to when she called them the first time.

  I had Ben and the Horowitzes squared away, so now I could focus on the intertwined cases. Seth came up from the basement just as I was ending my call with Boyd. She would be back at the house mid-afternoon, which gave all three of us some time to get settled into our respective new situations. Seth probably needed to check on his cover business and update his boss on the case’s new elements.

  When he entered the kitchen, I fixed myself a cup of coffee, two sugars and cream, downing it hastily. I had pulled out a second mug for him. He grabbed the cup and poured his own serving, black.

  “I read somewhere that drinking coffee black indicates psychopathology,” I said.

  “And what does it indicate if you only drink milk and sugar with a dash of coffee?”

  “I was just making conversation to avoid telling you that you smell like strawberries. Pretty girly, if you ask me.” I shrugged. “But I’m sure your cover is enough of a badass to pull it off.”

  He groaned. “I have badass manly shampoo at home, you know.”

  “I can go see if Ben has anything you can borrow. Something that smells like tools or beer.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  I nodded. “I’m a wicked, wicked girl.”

  “You don’t need to remind me, Sunshine. It’s only been a few hours.”

  I turned away from him, to the sink, dumping the dregs of my coffee. I didn’t want him see me blush. Which was silly considering what we had done.

  I turned around and leaned against the sink. “Okay, ground rules. We cannot be like this in front of Boyd. Or Ben. Or anyone.”

  He nodded. “Agreed.”

  “Once this is all done we’ll decide how we want to handle … whatever this is. We both need to keep our wits about ourselves. What’s our plan for the morning before we meet Boyd again? I did some short stakeouts on Reagan’s known associates. I think we need to expand those.”

  He came toward me. I didn’t like the look on his face. He slid his hand into my hair, running his thumb on my cheekbone. “Sunshine, after last night I thought you’d realized that our deal was off.”

  I pushed him away hard, sloshing his coffee on my shirt. “And why would I have realized that? Were you under the impression that after we screwed I was just going to hang out and, what, bake you some damn cookies while you saved the day?”

  He looked incredulous. “No, I thought after someone tried to knife you and set fire to the house next door that you’d have come to your senses. And if I had any idea that you hadn’t I would definitely not have gone to bed with you.”

  “Did you think you were doing me a favor? Oh, I get it. You rewarded me for being a good girl and realizing my place.”

  He set th
e mug on the counter with exquisite gentleness. I could see the control in his taut forearm. “You’re twisting my words. It was not like that, but I’m not going to apologize for trying to keep you safe. That is my job, Willa.”

  “No, Agent Anderson, your job is to bust a gun ring. Protecting me is your own personal crusade. And you think you can accomplish that by treating me like I’m some stupid little girl.”

  “I’m trying to get you to see reason.”

  “And I’m trying to tell you that you can’t. I’m not reasonable on this. I was a damn good cop, Seth. Let me be that cop.”

  “Even if I have to watch you get yourself killed in the process?”

  He left without another word. I just stood there as he gathered his things and walked out. I heard the motorcycle’s engine kick over. I listened as he drove away, the roar of the bike fading.

  My phone bleeped with a text.

  I had your car towed to the garage. Have your bags ready for when we meet Boyd.

  He wouldn’t have had time to reach the shop, so he had to have stopped. Maybe for coffee. He hadn’t finished the cup he’d poured. It sat there on the counter. I picked it up and dumped it down the drain then set the mug next to mine. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d pulled down a pair of the His and Hers mugs my parents used.

  I slipped back down to my room and changed my shirt then headed back to Dad’s office to run some searches on the average guy with the average car. I accepted that it wasn’t all a coincidence, that all the events were related—the murder, the guy with the knife, the fire—and that meant it was more than likely my car hadn’t just conveniently sprung a coolant leak just at the right time. The guy must have cut the line when I was parked at the garage. A spark of fear for Seth flared up. If this man knew about me, he knew about Seth.

  I had picked up my phone to text him before I realized that Seth being undercover meant the guy didn’t know who he really was even if I had been trailed to the garage. I could have been there for any number of reasons, like the ones I’d listed just yesterday. There was no reason to think Seth wasn’t safe. And even if he wasn’t, he was a damn ATF agent with a gun and everything. Multiple guns, in fact. He could take care of himself. He didn’t need me to rescue him and he didn’t want me to either. Being a hero was his job.

  The computer didn’t pull up any prosecuted cases with the MO I’d input. There were a few cases of people victimized on the side of the road, but most were crash-for-cash scams or Good Samaritans being robbed when they pulled over to help someone. I added in sexual assault search terms just to be sure. My instinct was telling me this was all related, but that didn’t mean the guy hadn’t done something like this before. It was a pretty good plan for a criminal—tamper with a woman’s car and then follow her until she breaks down. Plan it for a deserted area and you had everything you needed.

  I was relieved when I didn’t get any hits on those searches. I knew Boyd would have run similar searches trying to pull up offenders but with the description I had given, the results would have either brought up nothing or so many she’d never be able to narrow it down to a pool of suspects we could get through in the next year. That meant we had to find this scumbag through his relationship to Joe Reagan.

  I grabbed the file and reviewed all the notes I had so far. I looked again at what Violet had told me about Joe’s friends. I kept coming back to what she’d said about Mark. How he was creepy. How Joe seemed afraid of him and in awe of him at the same time. She hadn’t said anything about tattoos but, then, I hadn’t asked. I scrolled through my call log and found the number she called from. It rang without going to voicemail, which was typical for a burner phone. I really wanted to either add Mark to the suspect list or rule him out. I was pretty sure the guy from last night had a tattoo on his neck. I didn’t see any Marks on the list I’d compiled of Joe’s known associates.

  Once I talked to Violet, I’d have something definitive to give Boyd and Seth. And a name, even just a first name, could yield us a much more manageable suspect pool. If we had a suspect for the attack that we all believed was connected to the murder, we’d have the door we needed to the guns. We might be able to get this case closed by the time my parents got back from the cruise. It’d be a nice start to my partnership with Dad to be able to tell clients we’d assisted the ATF on a major gun theft and the local police with a murder. I just had to solve it first.

  Boyd arrived at three, sharp. I had just gone back inside after fruitlessly waiting for Ben’s bus, having forgotten that he was at John’s for the foreseeable future. I tried to play it off that I was waiting for her but, though she had the decency not to laugh, she knew it was a lie.

  “He’s a great kid but I can see why you mother him. He’s too sweet. Too soft. He thinks he’s older because he’s responsible, but there’s a difference between being an old soul and knowing the world. Knowing what it’s capable of. How it can crush good people just as easily as the bad.”

  In a few sentences, she’d nailed why we all pushed Ben away from justice and toward college and computers and a safe desk job. He was too sweet, too soft, too easy. He truly thought the world was a safe, benign place. And if it wasn’t, that people like me and Dad and Seth and the Colonel would make it a better place. I thought that way too once. That we made a difference. That we made the world a better place. And then my best friend had been blown to hell half a world away from home just six days before he was supposed to leave. And I didn’t think that way anymore. I didn’t think there was a way to stop bad things from happening to good people. I knew we were just holding the ugly brutality at bay. Like human sandbags against the rising tide of greed and need from people like Joe Reagan and his friend Mark. And one day, no matter how hard we tried, the banks of that particular river might rise too high and flood our whole world. I hoped Ben never realized that and I’d do whatever it took to shield him from it.

  I didn’t know how to put that into words without sounding like I was about to take a razor to my veins, so I just nodded. Boyd understood the fight better than I did. She’d been doing it a lot longer. And even if the tide was rising, there were people who deserved to be stood for. I knew she understood that too.

  We were heading up the walk toward the stairs when Seth arrived. He was driving an unremarkable sedan that could have been found in any office parking lot in any city in the country. It was even beige. He got out of the car in a business suit, his hair slicked back into the semblance of a conservative style and wearing those mirrored sunglasses. He may have been driving his mom’s car, but Seth couldn’t disguise the way his body moved. Not from me anyway. Even in that suit I’d know him anywhere.

  His appearance screamed Fed and he looked less like himself than I had ever seen him. If I barely recognized him, no one else would take a second glance. And it occurred to me that he had done this to make it appear to anyone watching that I was surrounded by the good guys. He was determined to protect me no matter how much it pissed me off.

  “Another new friend, Willa?” Boyd asked.

  She hadn’t recognized him up close even after sitting across a table from him for an hour. He slid his sunglasses down his nose and peered at her with a wry expression. She shook her head.

  “You clean up well, Agent.”

  I parked them at the kitchen table and cranked up a pot of coffee. Maybe Seth could stick around to finish his cup this time. I kicked myself for not remembering to get more cookies. I hadn’t left Dad’s office most of the day, but a quick run to the store wouldn’t have killed me. Seth had told me to stay parked but I had a listening problem: I didn’t. Listen, that was. I couldn’t get in trouble for regretting not going anywhere. I could, however, twist the knife a bit. He’d scammed me and I was still feeling a little sore about it.

  “Sorry there aren’t any cookies but you finished them last night and I wasn’t allowed to go to the store today.”

  I deliber
ately let the cups clank together as I pulled them down. I’d made sure there weren’t any cute matching mugs being handed out.

  “I can fix that.” Boyd pulled a bag of butter cookies out of her voluminous handbag. I got down a plate because my mom would have known from an ocean away that I hadn’t and would beat me raw when she got home if I let “guests” eat out of a bag. The coffeemaker gave an irritated beep.

  When the coffee was poured and the cookies plated, I joined Seth and Boyd at the table. She had obviously gotten over the fact that Seth had managed to fool her so thoroughly. I decided to jump in with my research.

  “I’ve been going over my notes and I think I found a suspect.”

  “Based on?” Seth asked.

  I tried to determine if he was challenging me or just asking for more information. I decided that I needed to stop being so defensive.

  “I had a conversation with Violet a few days ago. I asked her about Joe’s friends. Any interactions she witnessed, things like that.”

  Boyd laid her pen down, carefully lining it up next to the notepad’s edge. “You had a conversation with Violet a few days ago how exactly?”

  She didn’t sound pleased. That was fair since I hadn’t told her I talked to Violet. Nor had I asked Violet to contact her.

  “Um, I threatened Dave Horowitz that if he didn’t have Violet contact me I would tell you that they were hiding her and that you’d jail them for obstruction.”

  Seth and Boyd both gaped at me.

  “Jesus, Willa, they’re like grandparents to you. How could you?” Seth asked.

  “Exactly. They are like grandparents to me, which is why I did it. I told them over and over that they needed to trust me and Boyd and have Violet return to talk to the cops, but they decided that hiding her was a better idea. I did what I had to in order to protect them.”

  “So, it’s fine when you do it but no one else gets that privilege?” Seth had gone furious in an instant.

  Boyd held up her hands. “Thank you, Willa. In situations like this most people tend to want to hunker down and protect their own, even cops. I’m honored that you have that much faith in me.”