by Jenna Mills
Holding Val tighter, he realized the priest had finished the psalm and returned his attention to the casket, where the man he'd once called friend lay inside. Whatever secrets Alec had known, whatever truths he'd refused to disclose, lay inside with him, lost forever.
Guilty or innocent, Gabe thought and felt his mouth go flat.
No one would ever know.
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother, Alec Michael Prejean…
Cain stared beyond the coffin to the stretch of brown grass between crypts where the bagpipers should have stood. A stream of police cars should have been parked along the winding road that snaked into the cemetery. Men and women of uniform from throughout southern Louisiana should have been standing behind him, paying their respects to a fallen officer.
But Alec had walked away from the force, and his death was not one of honor.
…earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dust to dust.
Vindication, Cain had heard whispered at the sparsely attended wake. He'd felt the stares the second he'd walked into the funeral home, heard the whispers even as he stared at the picture of Alec, smiling and alive and in uniform, placed atop the casket. One of the detectives had actually thumped him on his back, asked if he'd come to enjoy the last laugh.
The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace.
Closing his eyes, he saw Alec as he'd been eighteen months before, when he'd found Cain kneeling with Savannah's blood on his hands. His partner had been among his staunchest defenders. He'd stood beside him when very few had. He'd dragged Cain out of bars and poured coffee down his throat, driven him into the swamp and pressed his camera into his hands, stood in the cold while Cain had stared out at the mist rising from the water, and silently wept.
But now Alec was dead and Savannah was alive, and sweet Mary have mercy on his twisted soul, Cain could make claim to neither.
Amen.
"Someone thinks they've gotten away with murder," he said to his uncle as the small crowd broke fifteen minutes later. He glanced at each of them, Alec's grief-stricken parents and Tara's sister, a childhood friend Alec had introduced Cain to a few years before, Gabe and Val, five members of the New Orleans police department who'd come not to pay respects but to gawk at the spectacle of burying a dirty cop, two men, one woman and a little girl he'd never seen before. Two reporters and a photographer hung farther back.
Cain would stake his life that at some point during the past twelve hours, he'd come into contact with not just Alec's killer, but the bastard who'd framed Cain for attacking Savannah.
Edouard slipped his hand into his suit coat and pulled out a CD. "You need to see this."
Cain took the disk and turned it over, saw his partner's name scrawled in bold black marker. "That's Alec's handwriting."
"Came this morning. There's two files on it, one word processing, the other encrypted."
The buzz started low, spread fast. Dirty cops didn't leave messages in case they were taken out.
Cain turned toward the dispersing crowd and spotted his cousin and Val, waiting to talk to Tara. "Gabe knows someone," he said. "Let me get—"
"No." Edouard's voice was urgent, his eyes grim. "The Word file had instructions, said to make sure no one in the district attorney's office finds out about the disk until it's decoded."
The implication sickened. "Gabe's blood," Cain ground out. "One of us."
"I'm not taking chances."
"There's no way in hell—" His protest died the second he saw her step from behind a marble crypt. Dressed in a slim-fitting black suit and dark sunglasses, with her long dark hair pulled behind her head, she walked with a disturbing combination of grace and apprehension. He watched her move toward him, watched her skim a hand along a statue of the Virgin Mary, and felt something sharp and ragged shift through him.
His heart pounded hard, a brutally familiar rhythm as though not a day had passed since he'd stood inside the small French Quarter jewelry shop and fingered the ring she'd unknowingly picked out. He could still see the shock in her eyes when he'd shown it to her three days before. Still hear the broken edge to her breathing. Still feel the cold moment of truth when he dropped the ring to the floor and walked out the door.
But Christ have mercy, if he let himself, he could still see and hear and feel other things, unwanted reminders that intruded during the long hours of the night—the glow of passion in her eyes when they'd made love and the sound of his name on her lips when they'd come together, the hope and promise and hunger in her kiss. The way she'd touched him and held him, the way she'd given herself to him with such unabashed abandon that it had almost killed him to roll from the bed.
He stood there now and watched her approach, using each step she took to shove aside everything that made him weak and made him want, still, after everything, baring the impervious edges that allowed him to feel nothing.
"What the hell is she doing here?" his uncle asked.
Cain slipped the disk into an inside pocket. "What she does best," he drawled. What she'd always done best. Messing with my mind. But he didn't say that, wasn't about to let his uncle think she'd crawled under his skin. Wasn't ready for him to know the truth. Wasn't ready for anyone. Except Gabe. Half a bottle of scotch and Cain had told him everything.
He glanced at his cousin now, found him standing quietly as Val and Tara embraced, but his eyes, hard and implacable, tracked Renee. Savannah.
"That woman doesn't belong here," his uncle said. "She's like one of those storms that blows up from the Gulf and catches you off guard. Mark my words, she's up to something."
Cain watched her approach, didn't allow himself to move. Didn't trust himself to. For seventy-two hours he'd been maintaining a death grip on the hot boil inside of him. The sight of her now, walking toward him through a labyrinth of crumbling statues and weathered monuments to the dead threatened to undermine everything he'd taught himself about survival.
"Leave her to me," he said. "I know what she's about."
His uncle snorted. "I've seen the way you look at her—"
Cain lifted a hand in silent warning. "Leave her to me."
She hesitated when she neared Val and Gabe and Tara. Sunglasses concealed her eyes, but the uncertainty, the longing, was obvious. Gabe and Val had been her friends. They'd cared for her, mourned her. But their lives had moved on. They stood together in a small intimate circle, with Renee—Savannah—on the outside. She was a stranger to them. A passing acquaintance. Someone they didn't know, didn't trust.
What must it be like? he started to wonder, but killed the thought as soon as it started to form.
"For now." Despite the concession, suspicion remained in Edouard's voice. He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons, swore softly. "Call, damn it," he said, then shot Cain a loaded glance before turning away.
The breeze sent loose strands of dark hair against Renee's face. She shoved them back and stepped around the paltry three sprays of gladiolas and roses.
And then she was there, standing so close he could smell the subtle scent of roses and vanilla, and it punished. "You don't belong here."
In a gesture that threw him back in time, she angled her chin and squared her shoulders. "He was my friend, too."
"He was Savannah's friend," Cain corrected, "and despite your little fantasy that the past can be rewritten, she doesn't exist anymore."
His words were deliberately harsh, but typical Savannah, she didn't wince or flinch, didn't back down. "You know that's not true," she said with a quiet strength to her voice. But there was sorrow there, too, compassion, and the combination landed like a punch to the gut.
He looked from her to Alec's casket, where Tara stood with a single hand pressed to the mahogany.
"There was no funeral, was there?" she asked quietly, and the memory spilled through him like poison. "Witho
ut a body—"
He spun toward her. "Without a body hope tries to survive." He stepped toward her and lowered his voice, couldn't stop himself from touching. His hands found her arms and his fingers curled, not rough like all the edges inside of him, but with a softness he despised. "Without a body you never stop looking, wanting. You never know if the woman who makes love to you in your sleep is dead or alive, if she comes to you as a dream or a nightmare. You never know if she's hurt or scared or if she's beyond feeling anything at all, if she needs you, wants you, if you let her down somehow, if you should have held on tighter, looked harder, done something, anything—"
He broke off and tore his hands from her, sucked in a harsh breath and looked toward a statue of the blessed mother standing in silent prayer over the grave of a child.
"Cain." Just his name, that's all she said, but the sound of it on her voice—Savannah's voice—lacerated something deep inside.
Her hands then, soft and gentle, settling against his forearm. "Don't you want to know who did this to us?"
His jaw went tight. He looked down at her and lifted his hand, slid the sunglasses from her face. The crystalline blue stunned him. It was Savannah's color, so pure and unfathomable it almost gutted him.
"Maybe you can just walk away from the past," she said, "but I can't. I won't. Not until I find out who took away my life and destroyed yours, and make them pay." She paused, slid the hair from her face. "But I can't do it alone."
He should go home. Gabe knew that. Val would be waiting. She'd been upset when he told her he had to go out. Worried. She'd asked him to stay. Told him she would cook dinner.
He'd picked up his keys and pressed a kiss to her forehead, walked out the door.
He hadn't turned around to see if she'd been watching through the window.
Restlessness twisted through him. He needed to do something, damn it. But didn't know what. Go somewhere. But had nowhere to go. He'd driven around for hours, sat outside the remains of the warehouse while the sun set, waiting for a bottle of whiskey to kill the slow burn of guilt.
It hadn't happened.
He'd failed him. Alec. His friend. No matter how many ways he tried to twist and spin what had happened, he couldn't get past that one dominating fact. He'd failed Alec.
Scowling at the bookcase full of law books that mocked him, Gabe took another long swallow from the bottle and tried to kill another certainty—the insidious reality that Alec's death had not been an accident.
"Thought I might find you here."
The smoky voice came to him through the darkness of his office and had him slowly turning to see Evangeline standing just inside his door.
He knew he should have closed it.
"Evie." Her name scraped on the way out. She looked better than she had any right to standing there with a soft smile on her face. As always she wore her long leather jacket, but it was open now, revealing a red blouse, and blue jeans.
He'd never seen her in jeans. "You don't want to be around me right now," he practically growled. Because God, the sight of her fed something dark and needy he'd been trying like hell to deny.
"Leave that to me to decide," she said, crossing to where he stood on the far side of the office, near a small sofa and table where he conducted meetings.
He watched her approach, forced himself not to move.
"Gabe—"
"It was all a setup," he ground out. "There never was a goddamned shipment."
"You don't know that," she said.
But he did. "Someone used you to lure Alec into the open—"
A dark curtain of hair fell against her face. "But that doesn't make any sense. Alec wasn't a cop anymore. How could telling the D.A.'s office—"
"Then why was he there?" Gabe wasn't sure what he was getting at, knew that he made no sense. But something wasn't adding up. "There's no other reason for him to have been there, damn it."
She lifted a hand to his arm, stilled him with her touch. "You have to stop torturing yourself like this."
"It was a trap." Through the stillness of the office, he stared down at her hand splayed across his forearm. "No one was meant to leave there alive." Slowly, he lifted his eyes to hers. "And whoever set that trap, Alec's blood is on their hands."
The light in her eyes went dark. "I—I'm so sorry."
He should have turned away. He knew that. He should have broken the contact and walked out of the office, like he'd done when she'd first put her hands to his body.
But this time he didn't. He moved so fast neither of them had a chance to react. He lifted a hand and stabbed it into her soft, soft hair, pulled her to him and crushed her mouth to his. The kiss was hard and dark and desperate, and it made him feel more alive than he had in days.
Longer than that.
He waited for her to struggle. She didn't. She lifted a hand and touched his face with devastating gentleness, pushed up on her toes and opened to him in ways that damn near drove him to his knees.
Walking her backward, he guided her toward the sofa and urged her down onto the cushions, went down with her and felt her legs fall open in greeting.
She was so damn soft and so damn sweet, offering herself to him like—
Offering herself to him.
And he was damn near about to take.
Room spinning, he pulled back and stared down at her lying there on the sofa, hair spilling around her face and eyes heavy lidded, lips parted and swollen, shirt yanked from her jeans, and realized he really was a son of a bitch.
Not trusting himself to look at her one second longer, he turned and walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The barking penetrated his shower. On a growl of his own, Edouard turned off the water and grabbed a towel, strode toward the front of the house where Hanoi, the scrawny fleabag of a hound who'd moved in on him years before, paced anxiously at the screen door.
"Something out there you want?"
Soulful eyes darker than melted chocolate met his.
"Go ahead then," he said, pushing open the door.
Hanoi bounded into the early morning, where he would no doubt reunite with the other mutts who thought a filled food bowl every morning made a place home.
Hanoi kept barking, an agitated sound quickly joined by a chorus of half-breeds.
Scowling, Edouard dried off and dropped the towel, strolled to the fridge. He wanted a beer. Maybe a whiskey. But it wasn't yet 8:00 a.m., and he needed to be at the station in thirty. Never mind that he hadn't gotten home until sometime after one, then had spent another hour trying to find a link between the Lambert brothers and Renee's appearance and Alec's death.
Settling for orange juice, he grabbed a handful of chocolate-chip cookies—only four remained on the plate—and headed into the main room, sprawled out in his big easy chair. The dogs were still barking—
Edouard flipped on the TV, but he barely heard a word the news reporter was saying.
My plane leaves in the morning.
The uneasiness oozed deeper, forcing Edouard to confront a truth he preferred to deny. To make sure he never became that mangy dog that Lena had no choice but to bring in from the rain—to flat out survive in a world in which he no longer fit—Edouard had done the only thing he could. He turned off all those emotions his daddy had insisted made a man weak. His once-proud, booming father had never recovered from the death of his wife from an infection that set in after giving birth to her fifth son.
They'd buried him just a short time later.
His oldest brother Jacques had fallen, too, marrying young and immediately fathering two children, only to drop dead of a sudden heart attack. His young wife, fragile even before she'd lost her husband and became the single mother of a one-month-old and a one-year-old, had joined him seven weeks later, courtesy of a prescription for sleeping pills and a bottle of schnapps.
Faced with the task of helping raise his brother's children, Edouard had vowed to never do anything that might leave him weak in any way. After h
is sister lost her husband and left two more children, Gabe and little Camille, fatherless, Edouard's need for control morphed into a monster.
Becoming sheriff had been the logical progression.
Caring for Lena Mae was not part of the plan. He'd had no choice but to secure a tight grip on their relationship and set the parameters, make sure it never slid too far toward commitment.
And for a while, she'd gone along with it.
Until the baby.
Even now, almost twenty years later, the memory of learning he was going to be a father had the power to shake him.
The memory of finding Lena Mae slumped on the bathroom floor in her own blood had the power to destroy.
Grabbing the remote, Edouard changed the channel. Again. And again. But nothing appealed. Nothing held his interest.
Nothing killed the thoughts.
Hanoi was howling now. So loud Edouard almost didn't hear the phone ring. Almost.
On a growl of his own he rolled to his feet and found his cell phone on the kitchen table. "Robichaud."
"Eddy." The voice was soft and sweet and … wrong.
"Lena?" Something inside him started to shake.
"Someone's in my house," she whispered. "My bedroom."
He was running before she'd finished speaking.
Places carried memories every bit as real and powerful as those recorded in a diary. A house absorbed what transpired in its walls. Trees stood silent witness to the beauty that blossomed at their trunks—and the depravity that bled at their roots. Rivers flowed, the current concealing evidence that sank to the murky bottom.
Time moved on, but the essence of all that had once transpired remained. Love lingered. So did hate.
Pulling a cluster of vines aside and stepping into the circle of massive oaks, Renee knew without Cain saying a word that they'd reached the place where her brother had drawn his final breath. She felt the chill, an icy slap to her body, and stopped.
Sensations blasted her, vivid slashes cutting like lightning through the thick canopy. The unease was as primal as it was immediate, a nauseating awareness, uninvited and unwanted. Completely unvindicated.
