Chapter 3
three
Naomi was still cursing him under her breath when she pulled into her rental’s gravel drive. The sky was lavender, the mountains black against the fading light. She cut the engine, but her whole body kept humming, tension sparking in her bones and refusing to die down.
Pathetic. She’d faced down murder suspects with less adrenaline. It wasn’t even the meeting; it was him, the way he’d stood there calm as a glacier, like she couldn’t touch him if she tried. Like he was already two steps ahead.
She slumped in the driver's seat, face buried in her hands. Maybe she’d picked the wrong line of work.
Or maybe she was just tired. When was the last time she’d slept more than four straight hours?
Maybe back in Missoula, before her last case went sideways and she stopped trusting anyone, especially herself.
She grabbed her case file from the passenger seat and strode up the steps to the cabin.
Inside, the place felt even more temporary than usual. Boxes stacked by the wall. No photos. No art. Nothing that said she lived here.
She kicked off her boots, shrugged out of her jacket, and dropped it over a kitchen chair.
The silence wrapped around her, thick as a blanket.
Usually, she welcomed it. Tonight, it felt harder to bear.
She flipped on the lamp, dumped her keys on the counter, and peeled off the sweat-sticky shirt she’d worn under her jacket.
Balled it up and tossed it in the laundry bin.
She caught her reflection in the window glass—a tired woman in a sports bra, hair falling out of its braid.
She looked like hell. Is this how Ghost saw her?
She pressed her palms flat to the counter and closed her eyes.
Why did it matter so much what Ghost thought of her?
She’d spent years squashing down every impulse that tried to drag her off mission. Even with partners she trusted, she never let her guard drop, never let anyone close enough to see past the armor.
And yet—
That damn moment when his eyes had caught on her mouth and held there.
She shivered, every nerve ending prickling.
No. She was not doing this. She was not going to get sidetracked by a man who freaked when his name was mentioned in public.
She yanked the fridge open, grabbed a bottle of water, and drank half in three gulps. The cold hit her stomach like a punch.
She was… what? Attracted to him? She could admit that, in the privacy of her own head. He was infuriating, arrogant, and as emotionally available as a brick wall. He was also competent as hell, unflappable under pressure, and able to read a room in point-two seconds flat.
And he’d kept his promise. Showed up. Put himself in the line of fire, just because she’d asked.
No one did that. Not for her.
She set the water down, hard enough that the bottle almost tipped, and tried to focus on something else.
Work.
She should work.
Review her notes, cross-reference the statements Ghost had made in the meeting with what she already had on the missing women. Plan her approach for tomorrow.
Instead, she caught herself replaying the way he’d crowded into her space, just enough to make her feel the heat coming off him. Not threatening, exactly, but intense. Like he’d been holding himself back, and if she’d so much as leaned in, he might have—
She pressed her fists to her forehead.
No. No, no, a bazillion times over no! Not happening. She had too much else going on right now.
Get a grip. You’re not here for Ghost. You’re here for Leelee. For Mary Rose. For the girls who never made it home.
Her phone buzzed with a text.
You’re back in town and you didn’t call me??? I had to hear it from Mariah who heard it from Nessie!
Shit. Greta. Her best friend. She should’ve been Naomi’s first stop when she arrived back in Solace, but instead she’d hidden away in her rental house, poring over case files and trying to make sense of why she’d thrown away her career.
She typed back quickly.
Sorry. Needed some time to decompress. I was going to call you.
Almost as soon as she hit send, the phone rang, and Greta’s face filled her screen. The picture was one Naomi had snapped during a hike last summer, Greta making a face for the camera at the top of Burnt Peak.
She almost didn’t answer. Just stared at Greta’s goofy, sunburned face, lighting up the screen, wanting to throw the whole thing across the room.
But that was coward shit, and she wasn’t built that way.
She accepted the call. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
Her throat tightened. Greta had been her anchor through everything—Mary Rose’s disappearance when they were kids, the FBI academy, the brutal cases that followed, the slow realization that the job was eating her alive from the inside out. She deserved better than radio silence.
Water wasn’t cutting it. She needed something harder.
She found the box that contained the entire contents of her old apartment’s kitchen.
There was the bottle of whiskey she’d gotten from a secret Santa office party last December.
She didn’t drink much as a rule—not since her parents were killed by a drunk driver when she was twelve—and she wasn’t generally a whiskey fan, but here she was, pawing through packing paper at the bottom of a moving box for a cheap bottle and a chipped mug.
Classy.
She poured two fingers and knocked it back. It tasted the way gasoline smelled, but she didn’t even flinch.
Somewhere in the background, Greta was still talking. “Naomi. Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” Naomi said, voice rough. She pressed her hip against the counter, bottle in hand, and stared into the wild darkness outside her window.
“So? Are you okay or not?”
“I’m okay,” she assured as she splashed some more whiskey into her mug. “Just needed some space to breathe and figure things out.”
She braced herself for the guilt trip, but Greta’s voice was gentle, not scolding. “Don’t go dark on me, Nomi. I worry.”
“I know. Tell you what, let’s do a girls’ night Friday.” She could take one night off, couldn’t she? Not without guilt, but she’d do it for Greta. “I’ll bring ice cream.”
“Ah, bribing me with ice cream?”
“I know the way back into your good graces is through your stomach.”
Greta laughed. “Manipulation. I like it. And this is why we’re friends. But, fair warning, you’ll need a lot of ice cream. I’m very annoyed you didn’t tell me you were coming home for a visit.”
Naomi scanned the boxes stacked around her and decided to wait until she saw Greta in person to break the news that she wasn’t just visiting. Maybe it, along with the ice cream, would take the sting out of forgetting to call.
Greta was still rambling, but Naomi let the sound of her best friend’s voice fill up the empty places in her brain. She sipped more whiskey. Let it burn.
“I’m holding you to it, you know,” Greta was saying. “Friday. Ice cream, maybe some trashy TV, and your actual face in my actual living room. I miss your face.”
“I miss yours more,” Naomi said, already anticipating the onslaught of hugs and the way Greta could read her better than any profiler. “It’s a date, but let’s do it here instead.”
A pause.
“You really okay, Nomi? Because I can come over right now. You just say the word.”
It was tempting. Greta was the kind of person who took up all the space in a room with her light and laughter, and she would be the perfect distraction.
“No,” Naomi said, managing a smile even though Greta couldn’t see it. “I’m tired. I’m heading to bed as soon as we hang up.”
“Liar,” Greta shot back. “But fine, I’ll wait until Friday. But you better believe I’m dragging the truth out of you. You want reality TV, you’re about to get a full-on emotional intervention. Or at least a lot of crying at the end of a bad movie.”
Naomi snorted. “Good night, Greta.”
“Don’t think you can get rid of me that easy. I’m a persistent little shit. Friday! And you better have chocolate fudge swirl or whatever that stupid flavor is called. The one you used to eat in high school when you were sad. We’re going to pack it away like calories aren’t a thing.”
Her heart twisted. “Copy that. See you.”
She hung up before Greta could call her out for sounding like a robot. The silence crashed back in, thick and heavy, swallowing up her whole kitchen.
God, she was tired.
The one-bedroom, one-bathroom rental was smaller than her apartment in Missoula had been, and the boxes occupied a lot of the free space. She probably should’ve rented something bigger, but she’d been operating on autopilot when she’d driven into town three days ago.
The decision to come back to Solace hadn’t been rational. It had been pure instinct, the kind that sent wounded animals crawling back to familiar territory to lick their wounds.
She should unpack, but as she stared at the boxes, the idea of it was too daunting.
Tomorrow.
She would get her life back on track tomorrow.
The whiskey burned as she finished it, but the warmth didn’t chase away the chill that had settled in her bones.
She needed sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, she saw Leila Padilla’s face staring back at her from the flyer.
Another girl gone. Another family torn apart.
Another case where law enforcement seemed more concerned with managing public perception than finding answers.
Just like Mary-Rose.
A pang shot through her, just as it always did when she thought of her cousin. She exhaled hard, trying to ease the growing knot in her throat, and set down the mug a little too hard. Good thing it was only plastic, or it would’ve broken.
Bed.
Definitely time to go to bed before she wandered any farther down memory lane.
Naomi dragged herself up the narrow stairs to the loft bedroom, each step heavier than the last. The bedroom was barely larger than the queen-sized bed it contained, with sloped ceilings that made her feel like the space was closing in.
She hadn’t bothered unpacking her clothes yet, just lived out of the duffel bag she’d tossed on the floor three days ago.
She stripped off her jeans and T-shirt, trading them for an oversized FBI Academy shirt that had seen better days.
She scrubbed her face with both hands. Wished she could rub away the memory of Ghost’s gaze pinning her in that parking lot, cold and steady and… God, what was it? Judgment? Curiosity? Or something else she didn’t dare name?
It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.
She flopped onto the bed, letting gravity do most of the work. The mattress squeaked. She barely felt it beneath the dead weight of her own exhaustion. She lay there, one arm flung over her eyes, willing her brain to shut up for five freaking minutes.
No such luck.