Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “Don’t bother trying to find me, catch me, or stop me. No one ever has, and no one ever will.”

  Capelli rubbed the last of the sleep from his eyes, taking a long, hard look in Shae’s pantry before shaking his head in defeat. “Seriously. I can’t believe you live like this,” he said, unable to keep a smile from creeping over his face as she came up beside him with a giant mug of coffee in one hand and both brows raised.

  “Live like what?” she asked, and Christ, that sassy little grin of hers ought to be classified as a weapon for how quickly it rendered him fucking useless.

  “Like you’re running a fraternity house. Is any of this stuff even edible?”

  Shae laughed, the loose neckline of her dark green sleep shirt falling away from one shoulder as she pressed to her toes to give the contents of her pantry a closer perusal. The sight of her bare skin made his dick twitch behind the fly of his jeans. Capelli pondered, not briefly, skipping breakfast and taking her back to her bedroom. Pulling the cotton from her body to map out the constellations of freckles on her smooth, creamy skin. Tasting each one slowly, learning and re-learning the most sensitive parts of her body until she shook with desire. Need. Release.

  Right. Because what Capelli needed was to be more distracted.

  “Don’t be such a food snob,” Shae said, delivering him back to the real-time of her sun-filled kitchen. “There’s plenty to eat in here. Box-o’-noodles, canned chili, and—oooh! My favorite!” She whipped a yellow and blue can from the shelf in front of her with an exaggerated waggle of her brows. “Squeezy cheese!”

  He bit back his laughter, but the move took all of his restraint. “I draw the line at cooking you breakfast with any ingredients that can be described using the word ‘squeezy’. I told you, I have standards.” He sent up a prayer that her refrigerator would give him more to work with than her pantry, and ah! Bulls-eye.

  “Now we’re talking,” he said, pulling a carton of eggs from the top shelf of the fridge and holding them up in victory.

  “Fine. Go the boring route,” she teased.

  “This isn’t boring. It’s classic.” Capelli moved around her to put the eggs on the counter, mentally shuffling through a couple of potential recipes. “How do you like your eggs?”

  “In a cake.” Shae’s laughter nixed any chance she had of nailing the joke, though, and she held up her free hand in concession. “Okay, okay. You don’t have to make the serious face. I’m not a total breakfast heathen. How about scrambled?”

  “Scrambled works.”

  A minute of comfortable quiet passed, during which Shae unearthed a bowl and a frying pan from one of the cupboards by the stove and Capelli took the milk out of the fridge. He lined up the necessary steps in his mind—crack six eggs into the bowl, add one tablespoon of milk per egg to keep them tender when cooking, whisk thoroughly and then add—

  “So. You stayed last night.”

  Shae leaned against the counter, taking a draw from the mug in her hand like nothing doing. Meanwhile, Capelli’s chin whipped up in total, heart-rattling shock.

  “I, uh. Did,” he finished lamely.

  After their insanely hot, somewhat impulsive trip to her bedroom, he’d expected things to get a little awkward—when he’d come here last night, he hadn’t even planned on kissing her, much less having mind-blowing sex with her. So coming up with something smooth when he’d gone back into her room after they’d done just that? Yeah, not exactly in his wheelhouse. Plus, even though it had been pretty far from his mind when he’d stripped off all her clothes, they were still working together on a case. The odds that they’d escape without any sort of weirdness had been astronomically high.

  Except…that’s exactly what had happened. Shae had simply thrown on that grin he was fast becoming addicted to, and the next thing he’d known, they were finishing their cleanup job and eating Chinese food and tumbling back into her bed for round two of crazy-good sex. Falling asleep next to her had felt like the most normal thing in the universe, even though nothing about him had ever been normal, predictable, or good in his entire twenty-eight years.

  A thought trickled into Capelli’s brain, pushing his heart into a hard thump against his sternum. “Did you not want me to stay?”

  “Of course I wanted you to stay,” Shae said, her smile wide-open and strangely sweet, and hell if his heart didn’t thump even harder at the sight of it. “If I hadn’t, I’d have kicked you out. Look”—she slid her coffee mug to the counter, stepping in front of him on the floorboards without invading his space—“I’m not really a hold-back kind of girl, so I’m just going to be blunt. I had a great time with you. I’m not saying I want to run out and get matching tattoos or anything, but it seems kind of stupid for us not to keep having a great time together just because we’re working on this case.”

  “It’s not technically a conflict of interest,” he said slowly. There weren’t any rules against them spending time together outside of work. Hell, after this week, they wouldn’t be working together at all.

  “It’s not,” she agreed. “And more importantly, I think we’re both far too determined to let anything, even sex, stand in the way of us finding this killer.”

  Ah, she definitely had a point there. “That’s also true.”

  Shae tipped her chin at the eggs on the counter, giving up a little bit of a shrug and a whole lot of a sexy smile. “So what do you say we start with breakfast and see how things shake out from there?”

  Capelli paused. He didn’t do relationships, even casual ones like this, and for damn good reasons. Logically, he knew he should be cautious, on guard, defenses up.

  The trouble was, he didn’t want to be any of those things. As crazy and impulsive as it felt, what he wanted was Shae.

  So he closed the space between them to kiss her.

  “I say starting with breakfast sounds great.”

  Ten minutes, four pieces of toast, and a batch of scrambled eggs later, they were sitting at her kitchen table, forks in hand. “This smells fantastic,” she said, gesturing to the pile of fluffy yellow eggs on her plate. “Even better than Pop-Tarts.”

  He laughed, startled at not only how easily the sound came, but how unassumingly good it felt falling from his lips. “Thank you, I think.”

  Shae took a bite, her little sigh of approval making eggs Capelli’s new favorite food. “So does everyone call you Capelli?” she asked, and even though the question took him by surprise, he shook his head and answered as he always did: with the facts.

  “Yeah. I mean, I’ve never really gone by anything else at the precinct. But to be fair, Sinclair introduced me that way on Day One, all the way back when he was still a detective and I’d been assigned to the equipment room to fix busted surveillance equipment and rebuild ancient desktop computers for the clerks and desk sergeants.”

  He counted his heartbeats in an effort to keep his pulse slow and steady, the way he’d trained himself to do any time the memory of that day became a slideshow in his mind. Facts. Stick to the facts. “Anyway, Capelli is my name.”

  “It’s your last name,” Shae clarified. “But your first name is James.”

  His spine stiffened against the ladder back of his chair, even though—like all the others—this was a fact, too. “Mmm hmm.”

  Most people took the expertly placed hint and changed the subject when he clammed up about his personal life. But there was nothing “most people” about Shae, so of course she just tilted her head and leveled her bold green stare right at him.

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, but we did just kind of have wild monkey sex for half the night. I’m thinking a first name basis isn’t entirely out of line here.”

  Capelli laughed, breaking the tension that had filled the space between them. “Fair enough,” he said, because, really, she wasn’t wrong. “It’s just that my mother used to call me James, so no. I don’t really go by that anymore.”

  “Ah.” Now that, she seemed to know better than to push. T
hank fuck. “Well, then. Capelli it is.”

  He nodded in a weird sort of gratitude. He’d never known the man whose surname he shared. Probably, his mother hadn’t either. But it was better than hearing his first name over and over again in his memory in his mother’s raspy, two-packs-a-day voice.

  James, honey, go over to Coleman Avenue and run the stranded-kid con so we can pay rent and get the damn super off our backs. James! I need you to figure out a way to get past the password protection on these accounts. Me and Bruno wanna go to the casino this weekend. We’re going to make a fortune! James, I know this thing at the bank is kind of a big job, but just think of the payday. Plus, we’re not going to get caught. I’m your mother. Would I ever let anything happen to you?

  “So.” Capelli took a breath, and by the time he’d finished his exhale, his composure was locked back into place. “Is Shae short for anything?”

  “Yep.” She took a bite of eggs without elaborating, and after a handful of seconds, his curiosity burned a path right out of his mouth.

  “If you don’t tell me what it’s short for, I’ll be forced to start guessing,” he said, straightening his glasses in an effort to look as scholarly as possible. “And with my memory, we could be here for a really long time.”

  Rather than concede, though, Shae gave up a shockingly angelic smile, and who the hell knew she had that in her arsenal? “Oh, you won’t get it in a million years. Unless you’re hiding a very weird, highly Irish side somewhere in there.”

  “Shae, I’m not even wearing a shirt,” he pointed out. “But if you want me to start pulling ethnically specific names out of thin air, I guess I can take it from the top of the alphabet and—”

  “Oh my God, fine!” Her laugh echoed through the sun-brightened space between them, and Christ, even in that wrinkled sleep shirt with her tangled hair in a sloppy knot on top of her head, she was beautiful. “But you have to swear you won’t tell anyone at Seventeen.”

  “Damn. Is it that bad?” he asked.

  “Not terribly.” She lifted a shoulder in a haphazard shrug. “I mean, I’m not named after a vegetable or one of the Seven Wonders of the World or anything. But you don’t get to pick your nickname in a fire house, and the last thing I need is to end up with one I’ve got to live down.”

  “Tell me about it.” At her oh really expression, Capelli added, “Maxwell calls me Encyclopedia Brown.”

  Shae took a long sip of coffee, but he suspected it was more to hide her smile than for the purposes of properly caffeinating. “So you understand where I’m coming from. Anyway”—she sat back in her chair, popping a bite of toast into her mouth before continuing—“in a very adamant nod to our ancestry, my parents decided to go all-in when it came to naming all three of their children. We each got ‘S’ names. My sisters are Siobhan and Sinead, which honestly, is bad enough. But being the baby, I got the prizewinner. Most people don’t know how to pronounce it, let alone spell it.”

  Saoirse, Sheenagh, Sibeal, Sile…dammit, his curiosity was going to give him a brain cramp. “Try me,” he finally said.

  “Okay, smartass.” She folded her arms over her chest. “My full first name is Seighin.”

  After a lightning-fast burst of whoa, Capelli’s brain pounced on the lilt of the Irish accent she’d put to the syllables, the way she’d pronounced them “shay-eeeen”, and a few seconds later, he pointed his fork at her with a smile.

  “First of all, you didn’t tell me it’s normally a boy’s name.”

  Shae’s lips fell open on a gasp, but oh no. He wasn’t losing steam now. “I’ll let you slide on that one, though, since I’m going to spell it correctly. Speaking of which, I’ve got two options there, although I’m sure you know that, too.”

  Now her jaw dropped in full, which only pushed his satisfaction into deeper, darker territory. “It could be either S-e-i-g-h-i-n or S-e-i-g-i-n-e, but since your family seems pretty diehard Irish, I’m going to guess the former.”

  “Impressive,” she said after a few beats of silence, her smile marking the compliment as genuine. “My parents are first generation Americans, so their values are still pretty old world. They believe names have power, that a person lives up to his or her moniker, blah blah. Mine means—”

  “Little hawk,” Capelli murmured, his eyes not budging from her stare across the table. “It suits you.” An odd pang shot through his gut, and he shook his head to try and bring himself back to normal. “And for the record, I’m with your parents.”

  “They gave me a very weird, very Irish boy’s name.” She frowned, although the expression carried more humor than actual heat. “You’re not seriously siding with them, are you?”

  “I’m afraid I am. Names do have power. And by the way, yours might be unusual and untraditional, but it really is perfect for you.”

  Shae let go of a small laugh. “If you say so.”

  She turned back to her breakfast, beginning to eat in earnest. Capelli took a few bites of his eggs even though his appetite had taken an abrupt hike. He knew all too well how names could define people. Not just because he secretly hated his given name and the fact that it tied him to his mother in a way he’d never, ever lose.

  But because he’d always be trying to escape from another name that haunted him at night, on the weekends, any time he was idle. A name that was part of him. A name that defined him no matter how hard he worked at the RPD and no matter how busy he kept his mind.

  The Wraith.

  The thought had come out of nowhere. But now that it had appeared, the memory that accompanied it unfurled in his mind’s eye as if it had happened yesterday rather than nearly a decade ago. The shitty apartment with the rotting floorboards under the kitchen sink. The half-empty bags of stale, roach-infested chips that were meant to serve as his dinner. The stink of vomit and other, worse things he hadn’t wanted to contemplate coming from the bedroom down the hall.

  Damn, James! Don’t be so uptight. We might not be living in a palace, but don’t you see how much better we are than all those dumbasses putting in fifty hours a week at their stupid, mindless jobs? We’ll never have to work for a fucking thing because we’re smart enough to take anything we want, any way we want and never get caught. The world is different for people like us. We’re cold and ruthless, like shadows and wraiths…

  The voice—not his mother’s, but one just as gut twisting—flew through Capelli’s brain, leaving a chill on his skin in its wake. Memories of Conrad Vaughn, a.k.a. the Shadow, coughed themselves up from time to time, even though Capelli avoided them like the most viral strain of the plague.

  And for good goddamn reason, because the guy was just as dangerous and every bit as lethal.

  Vaughn had—unsurprisingly—kept a low profile after Capelli had begun working for the RPD. Still, Capelli would hear rumblings about the Shadow on occasion, jobs the guy had allegedly done and people he’d allegedly scammed. Most of those rumors had been credit where it was due—Capelli would know the Shadow’s online quirks and signatures anywhere, and anyway, Vaughn had never been shy about his arrogant pride in his work. He’d also never been caught, although intelligence had gotten damn close three months ago when the Shadow had surfaced in the DuPree investigation.

  The DuPree investigation. Forced prostitution. Sex parties. Two victims left to die in a flophouse fire in North Point. The strategically planned attack on Kellan, the raid that had brought the lunatic down…

  The only person who had escaped that night.

  Capelli’s breath jammed in his lungs. The images in his head crashed into a different scalpel-sharp memory, this one of the scene of the meth lab fire he and Shae were currently investigating. The differences between both cases fell away, leaving the similarities to line up with astonishing clarity, one by one. Using arson to cover up murder. The sufentanil in both Kellan and the Scarlet Reapers’ systems. The meticulous planning in both sets of crimes, the signature scrawled deeply but definitely beneath the surface of their current arsons, and
all at once, the pieces clicked firmly and irrefutably into place.

  “Holy shit.” Capelli’s fork clattered to the floor, his heart ricocheting through his rib cage like a freight train, and Christ, how had he not seen this before?

  “Capelli? What is it? What’s the matter?” Shae asked, her eyes wide and brimming with concern.

  But his brain was spinning too fast, calculating too hard to form words. Pushing up from the table, he lasered a path to the front door, roughly grabbing his laptop bag with one hand while yanking the machine free with the other. Not even bothering with pleasantries like breathing or a chair, he sat in his spot, his lungs feeling like boulders and his fingers flying over the keys fast enough to ache.

  “Come on. Come on.” He whipped through the case file, his synapses firing like a Fourth of July finale. “I know you’re in here somewhere, you cagey bastard. You never could resist. Just give me the proof.”

  “Okay, seriously. What is going on?” Shae’s voice registered dimly from beside him. In a faraway part of his mind, Capelli realized she must have moved to sit next to him on the floor, but the rest of his thoughts—his pulse, his adrenal gland—were all pumping far too quickly for him to focus on anything other than his search.

  Don’t you see how much better we are…we’re smart enough to take everything we want, any way we want and never get caught…

  Realization smashed into him like a four-ton boulder. “The surveillance video.”

  Of course. Christ, it was just Vaughn’s style. Smug son of a bitch.

  Pulling up the security footage from the night of the break-in, Capelli clicked to the section of video Shae had reviewed. She’d never seen Vaughn in her life, so of course she wouldn’t have recognized him. The guy made such a habit out of hiding in plain sight and blending into the shadows that most people never even saw him.

  Not even when it was too late.

  “The surveillance video? What about it?” Shae asked, and finally—finally—his mouth and his brain decided to take the teamwork path.