Epilogue
SYLVIE
Things quieted down faster than I would have expected. The FBI arrived at the cottage, and after a few questions, they removed the body. That was the last we heard of our mysterious bomber-assassin.
The team did some digging and identified him.
He, like the data broker, went by a few aliases, but Maddox thought he’d most recently gone by Seventeen.
A former NSA agent gone freelance, who’d taken his affection for explosives in the wrong direction.
Basically, the opposite of Eli, who mainly used his skills to keep bombs from blowing up.
Our guy was responsible for a long list of murders and assassinations. Sometimes he used a bullet, sometimes a knife, but mostly a variety of explosives. The FBI had accepted that he’d been neutralized by an unknown party, though they would rather have taken him alive.
No one was happy that we didn’t know who’d set off the device that had killed him. While the team had managed to uncover the identity of our assassin, they’d been unable to determine who had hired him. The best lead we had was the mysterious Ghost Trace.
For my part, I was happy to leave that one in more qualified hands. I had enough to deal with getting my life back on track.
Eli had been right. No one minded my moving into his room at the barracks.
The building was plenty big enough for everyone, and despite the fact that there were now seven people living there, we weren’t bumping into each other all the time.
For one thing, Eli’s team were all workaholics.
And though there was an office set up in the barracks, most of them preferred doing their work at Sinclair Security’s main building.
Though Miranda seemed to handle more administrative tasks and was sticking close to home, the rest of them were out of town as often as not on different assignments.
Eli had opted out for the time being, saying even with me living in the barracks, he wasn’t comfortable leaving until we determined with absolute certainty that I was off the radar of whoever had hired the bomber.
I told him I was okay if he had to go, but he’d kissed me and said he wasn’t interested. Not yet. And I hadn’t argued because, while I was okay with it—this was life, and it was part of his job—I still hadn’t shaken the creepy feeling of being targeted by an assassin.
When Cooper Sinclair asked me to come on staff part-time doing research, I’d accepted happily.
We’d agreed my hours would be flexible. If I needed to be on the road working on my podcast, no problem.
And Eli had made Cooper and me promise that my involvement would start and end at research.
Strictly a desk job. I’d agreed. Neither of us could forget how close fieldwork had brought us to dying.
I wasn’t looking to get blown up again any time soon.
Cooper had only smiled and said, “A desk job works. For now.”
Eli had scowled. I’d let Cooper’s comment go, but every once in a while, I wondered exactly what for now meant.
I hadn’t asked. I was happy with the projects the Sinclairs handed me.
I wasn’t a hacker, but you didn’t have to be to find ninety percent of the information that was useful.
You just had to know how to dig, where to look, what threads to follow, and when not to give up.
Sinclair didn’t just research the cases they took on for clients; they also researched the clients themselves.
They’d learned the hard way that you had to know who was hiring you before you took the job.
It was a good deal all around. They got access to my excellent research skills, and I got a taste of interesting cases along with coworkers I liked, a plush office space, and Alice to chat with at the front desk.
The extra cash in the bank was welcome, since my next season would be inevitably delayed.
Cooper and I had agreed that there would be no podcast season about Emily Shaw.
There were too many unanswered questions.
I hated to give up a season I’d spent so much time on, but even I didn’t feel comfortable putting any of this information out in public.
Whatever was going on, it was dangerous enough to remotely take out their own assassin.
Not knowing who’d killed him, or why, or what the hell this was about, the wisest move was to walk away.
I could live with that. We’d gotten justice, in a sense.
The bomber was dead. I’d rather have seen him arrested, in the hopes that law enforcement would have been able to get more information out of him than we had.
But in the bigger picture, he’d taken more lives than we’d ever know—over twenty that the team had tracked down.
Emily Shaw would be the last. His death wouldn’t bring back those he’d killed, but it felt like justice.
My insurance company had declined to pay anything on the destruction of my van, citing some bullshit clause about vandalism not being covered. And, according to the police report, the explosion had clearly not been an accident.
That was a setback, but now that I had access to my accounts again—and a steady income from both the podcast and the work I was doing for Sinclair Security—I’d been shopping for a new van.
Mostly when curled up in bed with Eli, scrolling on my tablet, him looking over my shoulder as we debated the relative merits of Rams versus Sprinters, how many feet long, and what I’d do differently on the inside.
Especially considering that for the first time since I’d started this gig, it looked like I’d have a copilot on my research trips.
“Are you sure?” I’d asked him as we scrolled through another listing, this one promising. Rebuilt engine. Stripped interior. No rust. “I know your job’s demanding. You’ve been sticking close to home for now, but that won’t last forever.”
He’d grinned at me, his dark eyes lit from within.
“My job is what I want it to be,” he said.
“I spent a lot of years working around the clock, not taking R and R, going from one assignment to the next because I wanted the adrenaline and the challenge, and because I didn’t have a reason to slow down. ”
“Yeah, but you’re not going to walk away from the adrenaline and the challenge. It’s part of you.” I knew him well enough by now to say that with certainty.
“It is,” he said, pressing a kiss to my cheekbone. “But I’m going to spread it out a little bit.” He waited, eyebrows raised. “If you’d rather do these trips alone, that’s different.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that. I’d love to have you go with me. I’ll probably drive you nuts sometimes. I get back to the van after a day of interviews, and all I want to do is talk everything out, but I’ve never had an audience.”
“I’ll be your audience,” he said. “Helping you work through the pieces of a puzzle while we camp out in your van sounds like fun to me. Anyway, you don’t spend all your time on the road.”
“No, definitely not,” I said.
“We’ll make it work. Sometimes we’ll have to make compromises, but, you know, that’s life.”
“Exactly.” I plucked the tablet from his hands and scrolled through the listing again.
“We should go see that one tomorrow,” he said. “And listen, I talked to the team and to Cooper and his brothers about the garage out back.”
“Yeah?” I raised my eyebrows, hoping he was going to say what I thought he might say, but not wanting to expect it.
There was a space tacked on to the back of the barracks—a combination of a storage warehouse and a garage. You could drive into it, but it wasn’t meant for regular parking. It would, however, be the perfect place to rebuild a van.
“They said we can rearrange some of the shelves,” Eli continued. “And when you find a van, you’re welcome to work on it in there. And then if the space is good for that, once you’re done, we may transition it to a regular repair shop for equipment, stuff like that.”
“Really? That would be amazing,” I said.
Figuring out where to work on the van had been the piece of the puzzle I hadn’t been able to sort out.
I’d done the first one in my parents’ driveway, but that was states away.
And as much as I’d loved building the van with my dad, I didn’t want to leave Eli for as long as it would take to get ready to hit the road.
“You’ll have plenty of people around to lend a hand,” he said. “And maybe we can talk your dad into coming out for a visit.”
I loved that idea. Part of what had made the first van special was all the time I’d put in shoulder to shoulder with my dad. I had a feeling with this one—building it basically surrounded by Eli’s family—I wouldn’t have a lack of helpers.
I still grieved my first van, still flinched when I thought of the photographs the detective had shown me of the burned-out shell that had been meant to be my coffin.
But that was the past. Sylvie’s Van: Version Two was going to be fun.
I clicked the save button on the listing and tossed the tablet to the end of the bed, safely out of our way, before turning to Eli. “I’ll make an appointment to go see that one tomorrow. I think it’ll be big enough for both of us. We already know we can handle a small space together.”
Eli glanced around. As he’d said, the space was bigger than a van. The rooms at the barracks weren’t small, and this was one of the larger ones, with a king-size bed and enough room for a couch and an armchair on the other side, along with a walk-in closet and a generous bath.
“We’re all alone in the building,” Eli murmured in my ear, flipping me to my back, pushing the straps of my nightgown down off my shoulders. “Half the team is on assignment, and the other half is still at the office, so you can be as loud as you want.”
“I’m not loud,” I giggled as he nipped the curve of my neck.
“That’s what you think.”
His hand slid down my side, fingertips digging into my ribs in just the right way to make me shriek with laughter.