Chapter Ten
She was in his bed.
Dark high-end sheets worked to soothe the scrapes, bruises and aches from her body. A hint of his citrus shampoo and conditioner combo filled her lungs as she took in the sunset dipping behind the west mountains through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Maggie let herself lie there, recalling how Jones had carried her back to his room. How he’d started the shower for her—hot as it would go—and left her with fresh towels, toiletries and a pair of sweats and an oversize T-shirt to change into.
She’d taken her time. Not wanting to give up that small amount of peace too quickly. Washed the dirt from her hair, scrubbed her skin raw until the first few layers swirled down the drain. Then conditioned and lotioned while trying to keep the bandage on her arm dry. It was amazing how much a shower could bring back a bit of humanity.
When she’d come back into the main room, she found him changing the sheets. The automatic blackout shades had been drawn, the lights dimmed. He’d looked at her as though she was his whole life right then, and she’d liked it. Felt as though she mattered. That she didn’t have to take care of herself. For once, she could let someone else do the job so many others had failed to accomplish. Warmth had started in her belly for the first time in...years. A need that’d triggered when she’d kissed him and hadn’t let go. She’d been ready. For him. Ready to move past the loneliness and betrayal she’d gone through with her ex and to start something new.
But Jones had simply wished her good night and left her to sleep the day away.
And in that moment, a shift rocked through her. No. Not a shift. A damn earthquake. She was falling for him. Undeniably, irrevocably falling for a man she intended to use as a source in exchange for providing a layer of protection during this investigation. Jones Driscoll had fought his way into her life and somehow managed to take up space where there shouldn’t have been any room left. His loyalty to the people he cared about, how he treated Gotham and fought for his beliefs, had the power to erase the pain she’d insisted on carrying to protect herself. To the point it’d become too heavy around him. And she wanted to leave it behind. Once and for all.
She had that chance. To start over again. Question was, would she take it?
Maggie sat up in the king-size bed and scanned the room she’d been too tired and unfocused to take in this morning. It wasn’t as dark as she’d originally estimated. If anything, everything seemed to be in perfect balance between camel-colored leather, dark green paint and highlights of white in the artwork. Complete with a few indoor plants. Very boho. A built-in against one wall took up a good majority of space. Most likely his closet, given there weren’t any other doors other than the bathroom. She slid from the bed, landing on a faux fur rug perfectly positioned beneath the frame. Every inch of this room testified to Jones’s attention to detail. Yet somehow it felt...empty. Almost cold despite the warmth of colors.
Walking the room, she took in everything she could. No family photos. Not even of his foster brother. Nothing to suggest any hobbies. It was like this place was merely a way station. A place he intended to pass through after enough time. Though, Maggie imagined that’d been intentional. The kind of work he did had to come with a hazard warning. He wouldn’t want to leave a mess of possessions for someone else to have to go through. Or maybe it was the result of being moved from one foster home to the other growing up. At the same time, he’d painted, hung the artwork and picked out the furniture. A bundle of opposites.
She skimmed her fingers along the sleek, modern built-in and pressed one of the doors inward. Magnets. The door swung open, revealing a clean line of T-shirts and a shelf stacked with folded pants. Everything in its place.
She couldn’t help but reach out. Soft fabric warmed in her hand as she let herself enjoy the sensory input that couldn’t bruise, cut or hurt her. It’d been a long time since she’d let herself slow down, to just...feel. There’d been some part of her that was terrified by the idea. Slowing down meant not moving forward, of being stuck. Of not proving she was better off after the divorce. But the past week, working beside Jones, had shown her she couldn’t physically live her life going from one goal to the next without taking a breath in between. And the truth was, she was tired of pushing so hard. Of trying to prove to everyone but herself she was worthy of their love and support. She’d lived these past two years in spite of her ex, unconsciously giving him a power over her he didn’t deserve. She’d just wanted to get away, but she’d ended up bringing him along with her.
Maggie brought a T-shirt to her nose and inhaled, long and deep. Making Jones’s earthy, clean scent part of her. As though it were enough to keep her safe from what waited outside these bulletproof walls.
“That’s not creepy at all,” a deep voice said.
Her nervous system spiked in defense. She threw the T-shirt at the source with a pathetic yip as she backed away about a foot. Her heart lodged in her throat as recognition flared. “You scared the crap out of me. How long have you been standing there?”
Jones pulled his T-shirt free of his face and balled it into his hand. “Long enough to thank heavens you haven’t gotten to my underwear drawer yet.”
Embarrassment heated up her neck and into her face. She didn’t know what to say. “For your information, I was... Okay. I was smelling your shirt. I liked the feel of it, and one thing led to another.”
“Hey, whatever gets your engine going, I’m all for it.” Jones tossed the T-shirt she’d considered smuggling out of the building on to the end of the bed, humor playing at the edges of his eyes. “Thought you might still be asleep. I didn’t want to wake you. Doc wanted me to check on you, make sure you were still breathing.”
“I’m still breathing.” Her arms automatically made an attempt to cross over her midline, as if that would protect her from any further embarrassment on her part. Didn’t do any good. Realistically, she didn’t have anything to be embarrassed about. At least, that was what she was going to tell herself.
“Searching for anything in particular?” The mattress dipped under Jones’s weight as he took position off to her left.
Her throat convulsed. “Not really. Hoping maybe you had a phone or a laptop stashed somewhere in here. It’s been a few days since I’ve touched base with my editor. The last time I talked to him, I came clean about following those Sangre por Sangre members. Told him I was going to see this through to the end. I was captured that night. I can’t imagine what he’s going through not being able to reach me, how many people are looking for me.”
“Reaching out could tip Sangre por Sangre and whoever the hell else they’re working with to your whereabouts.” No hint of emotion or surprise. Just statement of fact.
“You and I both know Socorro has ways of masking GPS signals. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to do your job.” Her gut said there was more to his detachment. Maggie stepped closer to him, almost between his knees. “What aren’t you telling me?”
His jaw flexed under the pressure of his back teeth. “Your editor isn’t looking for you, Maggie. I’ve been monitoring the police bandwidths and cross-referencing missing person reports. Even had Alpine Valley’s chief of police reach out to Albuquerque PD. No one knows you were abducted.”
He didn’t have to finish the rest of that thought. The last two words were already at the front of her mind. Or cares.
“That’s...not true.” Blood rushed from her upper body and pooled in her thighs. A knot pinched behind her shoulder blade, cutting her next breath short. She had coworkers. Neighbors. Even her ex must’ve noticed he hadn’t been able to torture her for a week. Someone must’ve realized what’d happened. Someone had to care. A low ringing started in her ears. She wasn’t alone. Because if she was, that meant everything she’d done over the past two years had been worthless. That she was worthless. No friends. No family. No one to miss her. That wasn’t a life. That was living as a ghost. She stretched out her hand. “Give me a phone.”
“I’ve been monitoring the news for days. Your name hasn’t been brought up.” His voice leveled, which somehow cut deeper than his initial accusation. “This is a good thing, Maggie. Staying off the radar gives Sangre por Sangre a chance to forget about you over time. You can move on. Start fresh, maybe somewhere else. You can leave all of this behind.”
“I already started over. I already gave up everything and everyone I loved. I can’t just walk away from that.” Because the unknown was far more terrifying than the threat she knew. Her hand shook as she waited for him to budge. “Give me a phone.”
“This is a mistake.” Jones unpocketed his cell, tapped in the passcode and handed it off.
“I don’t care.” She latched onto the device as though it would solve the problems closing in. She knew better than to trust her emotions. They hadn’t done her any good before, but she had to know for herself. Dialing her editor’s direct line, she pressed the phone to her ear. The line rang once before connecting. “Bodhi?”
“You got him. Who’s this?” he asked.
Her heart squeezed at the fact he hadn’t recognized her voice. Which was currently shaking. “It’s Maggie.”
“Maggie, where the hell are you? You missed your deadline. I had to give your piece to Don. You were already on a short leash, and now you think you can just skip out on me?” The tap of a keyboard cut through his end of the line. “You know what? I don’t care. I’ve got to have something from you by the end of the day or you’re gone. Got it?”
The nerves in her temple lit up as she pressed the phone harder to her ear. “Bodhi, you remember what I told you about those Sangre por Sangre soldiers? The ones peeling off from their corners?”
“What about it?” A palpable energy shifted as the tap tap tap of the keyboard died on the other end of the line. Bodhi lowered his voice. “You got something for me, Mags?”
“I followed them out into the desert.” Her skin felt too tight as Jones leveled that gaze on her. Like he could see right through her. “I saw them kill ten American soldiers during an operation to capture Sosimo Toledano. The cartel buried the bodies, then a military unit came along and burned them, but I had proof. I took photos. They abducted and tortured me for them. People need to know, Bodhi. This is big.”
There was so much more she needed to tell him, but the excitement of the story was getting to her. Her editor’s heavy exhale filled the silence, but he hadn’t given her an answer. “So do you think we have something?”
“Where are the photos?” he asked.
Her stomach clenched. It always had to come back to proof. American Military News wasn’t some tabloid that ran pieces on the promise of getting subscriptions. Journalists had to work through classified intel, establish contacts within the military and walk a thin line between exposing government secrets and doing their jobs. “I don’t have them anymore. They were destroyed.”
“I didn’t want to do this, but now I don’t have any choice. You’re fired, Maggie.” Bodhi’s voice sounded sad. And afraid. “Don’t contact me or any of the other writers here again. I won’t answer.”
The line disconnected.
M AGGIE HANDED BACK the phone, her face white, jaw slack. “I need a computer.”
Hell. She wasn’t going to take the truth at face value. No one had filed a missing person report. No one had gone to the landlord when they couldn’t get her to answer the door. No one had attempted to contact her since her abduction. Not a scammer or the bank to ask about the inactivity on her cards, according to her phone records. That feeling—the one trying to convince her she was utterly forgotten and alone—was a lie. She had him. She had Gotham and the rest of the team at Socorro. “Maggie, I know what you’re—”
“He fired me.” Her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “I told him what I’d uncovered, and he fired me. Said I shouldn’t contact him or any of the other writers. Then he hung up.”
His instincts prickled as Jones got to his feet. He took back the phone he’d lent her, on high alert. “Why would he fire you?”
“I have no idea.” Maggie threaded her hands through her hair, turning away from him. The armor she’d donned against the world was starting to shed. She was coming apart at the seams. “This job...was everything, Jones. It was providing the income I needed to finally live on my own. I’m going to lose my apartment, but worse, I’m going to have to use the money my ex pays in alimony every month to survive and prove him right. That I can’t live on my own, that I’ll always need him. That I’m nothing without him.”
“He told you all those things?” Deep-seated anger filtered through his muscles until his arms and legs ached under the pressure.
“Amongst other things.” She swiped the back of one hand against her face. “But I was finally figuring this out for myself. I was...happy. I felt like I belonged there. It was cutthroat, but the pressure to perform was making me better. I wasn’t stuck. I had a plan. And now... It’s gone.” She collapsed onto the bed, her head in her hands. “What am I going to do? No news outlet is going to touch me after this, and you were right. My editor didn’t even know I’d been abducted. No one knows, or they don’t give a damn, and isn’t that just pathetic?”
Jones wanted nothing more than to hunt the bastard down who’d dared step on her confidence and self-worth and show the man the error of his ways—and maybe what a few cracked ribs felt like. But Maggie needed him more at this moment. He dropped to his knees in front of her, setting both hands along her thighs. Lean muscle contracted at his touch, an automatic response honed over the course of permanently living in fight-or-flight mode. “Maggie, look at me.”
She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe.
“Maggie.” Something in his voice brought her head up. “The people who believed a narcissistic, manipulative jackass like your ex and turned their backs on you are dicks.”
Her laugh jolted her upper body. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“You want to know why your friends and family chose his side? Because they were afraid. They thought letting you slip out of their lives would be easier than disproving the lies he told them about you, and they were right.” Jones squeezed her leg as an unfamiliar tightness constricted around his rib cage. He wasn’t good at this stuff. Empathizing. Showing how much he cared. His entire life had been forged from abandonment and searching for support that might not even exist in his line of work. Of being the first through the door and getting the job done in hopes someone would be proud of him. He was the wrong person to sit here and try to convince Maggie she didn’t need to earn her happiness.
“I can’t tell you that you’re better off without them because we all need those connections. We all need to know that if we fall, someone will be there to catch us. But look at you. You took a stand. You made a life for yourself all on your own. You survived multiple days of interrogation and pain and came out the other side stronger. I know at least one man who wasn’t capable of that.”
Grief tugged hard at his insides at the thought of Kincaide’s last moments, where the effects of brain damage had gotten so bad Kincaide had no longer recognized his own brother. “You’re a fighter, Maggie. You see something and you go after it, and I admire the hell out of that. You stood up to an entire unit of soldiers ready to kill you, not to mention put up with me the past few days. That doesn’t come close to pathetic in my book.”
“I can definitely say putting up with you is a feat in and of itself.” Her smile deepened the dimple at the right side of her mouth. Just before it slipped from her face. “But the past week has shown me something. I don’t want to be a fighter anymore, Jones. I don’t want to be strong or resilient. I don’t want to inspire people with my struggles or have my entire self-worth dependent on my job. I’m so tired of fighting.” She took his hands in hers. “I want to be soft. And loved. I want to feel safe enough to make mistakes and be normal instead of going from one life trauma to the next. I want to be able to sit on the couch and watch a TV show without feeling guilty for slowing down. I want to be happy.”
His throat dried up on his next inhale. She deserved it. She deserved all of it. And, hell, Jones wanted to be the one to give it to her. To make her feel safe and loved and soft. Because maybe he wanted a little bit of that, too. And why couldn’t they give that to each other? Her soft skin caught on the callouses along his knuckles.
“But I’m not giving up on this story.” Determination bled through the exhaustion playing at the corners of her eyes. “Bodhi might’ve fired me, but I know there’s something big going on here. Somebody ordered that unit to cover up the Sangre por Sangre ambush the night I was taken hostage, and I want to know who. I’m owed that much, and I need your help.”
“I gave you my word when we got into this mess I would see this through,” he said. “And I keep my promises. What do you need?”
“Access to a laptop or computer or a notepad and pen.” Maggie shoved herself to standing and started pacing the room. A frenzy of energy burned behind her eyes. Though her left leg seemed to drag slightly behind the right. He hadn’t noticed that before. “I need to write down everything that’s happened so far so I don’t forget any details. About that night, about the military unit destroying evidence and Toledano’s involvement. That soldier, the one in charge, he burned my SD card, but we might still be able to recover the photos I took that night if we can get our hands on my camera. Maybe not all of them, considering the limited memory, but there’s a chance.”
“Slow down. You’re talking about the camera Sangre por Sangre confiscated when they took you captive?” Jones got to his feet and approached the built-in. Pressing one cabinet corner down, he revealed a safe. The fingerprint reader glowed green, giving him access to the contents inside, and he extracted his laptop. If he didn’t give Maggie something to do in the next few seconds, he feared she might explode. “I thought you said it broke when you fell.”
“The gunman who found me hiding in the bushes took it from me and handed it over to Toledano. After that, I’m not entirely sure what happened to it.” She hadn’t stopped pacing, the excitement of a lead clear in her voice. “But even if we have the photos, that doesn’t prove who ordered Toledano’s capture or who is trying to cover up the deaths of those soldiers. We’ll need more. My editor... He sounded scared after I told him what happened. Like he needed to wash his hands of anything having to do with the story. I think he might know something.”
“I’ll have Alpine Valley PD run a background check on him, review his financials and phone records. He told you not to contact him or anyone at the paper, but if your editor is connected to the cartel in any way, we’ll at least have leverage we can approach him with.”
Though explaining his continued involvement in all this to Ivy Bardot—despite not finding evidence at the ambush site—had the potential to end his access to Socorro’s internal systems and their partnership with local law enforcement—and end his career.
Hesitation had his thumb gripped over the contact information for Alpine Valley’s chief of police. Socorro had given him a second chance after he’d directly disobeyed orders not to go after Kincaide overseas. Ivy and the rest of the team trusted him to do what was best for the company and the people they protected. Going off script—following Maggie to the end of the line and disobeying another set of orders—would put all that at risk. Could cost him everything.
He watched as Maggie took the laptop to the edge of the bed and navigated to a notes app. Within seconds, he’d lost her to a frantic pace of typing. Her mouth silently followed the words she put on the page, and it was easy to see, despite not working for American Military News anymore, she had a passion for investigating. For getting to the truth and ensuring the public got the answers they deserved. That she was good at this. Happy, even.
“There’s another option.” Jones tucked his phone back into his cargo pants pocket without reaching out to the police again. He would. In time. The editor was a good start, but they had the means to cut out the middleman and end this sooner rather than later. Without putting his second chance in danger. “Another source we haven’t considered.”
“What source?” Maggie pulled herself away from the soft white glow of the screen, setting that newly brightened gaze on him. Understanding sank in the longer she studied him, and a tenseness that’d taken days for her to lose infiltrated her upper body. She dragged herself off the bed. “You’ve got to be joking. No. No way in hell.”
“You and I both know he’s the fastest way to get to the truth, Maggie.” Though Jones would give anything not to put her in this position. Because he wouldn’t have asked it of his brother. He wouldn’t have asked it of anyone on his team. But this story was something that could destroy her from the inside if she let it, and they had a chance to finish this once and for all.
“You mean if he’s even still alive, which for the record, I hope he is and that he’s suffering from the bullet you gave him and being slowly eaten by that fire.” She pointed a strong index finger at him. “Toledano kidnapped and tortured me for three days, and now you just want me to walk right up to him and ask, ‘Hey, want to tell me about who’s trying to cover up your massacre that killed ten American soldiers? Oh, and can I have my camera back? Pretty please?’”
“I’ll let you throw a couple punches if it’ll make you feel better,” he said.
She cut her attention to the laptop and the beginnings of the story she had there. “If you want me to do this, it’s going to be more than a couple.”