25. Indiana
Tears stung my eyes as I stormed away from Tyler. The enormity of just how alone I was hit me like a tsunami. During my life, I’d had many days and nights alone because Dad was oblivious to the world.
This was different. I didn’t just have nothing. I had nobody.
I pulled the gaffer tape off my wrist, tossed it and my empty bottle onto the sand, and strolled into the crashing waves. The warm water wrapped around me like a velvet blanket. Tipping my head back, I washed sweat and grime from my body and hair like I’d done thousands of times before.
Living on the ocean was the only life I knew. Rhino was the only home I’d ever had. When Rhino sank,my career and my home sank with it. Nothing would ever be the same.
Floating on my back, I squinted at the brilliant clouds above. I didn’t even have a pair of sunglasses.
“Indiana.” Tyler’s muffled voice drifted to me through the water.
He charged through the water to my side, casting a wave over me.
Wiping water from my face, I stood. “What?”
The muscles along his jaw clenched as he stood so close I could feel his frustration.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Yeah. Me too.” I scooped my hands through the water. “Sorry I told you about Mom.”
His shoulders sagged. “Hey, don’t be like that.”
He reached for me, but I snapped my hand away.
“Like what? You’re just like every other cop I told that story to—heartless.”
“Fuck! No, I’m not.”
“Really? Prove it. I don’t need your fucking protection, Kingsley. I need—” A knot wedged in my throat. I needed so many things I couldn’t string them into order.
He gripped my hand. “Tell me what you need.”
My chin quivered. I need to be held. I need someone to believe in me. I need love. Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“Hey.” Tyler pulled me to his chest and squeezed me so tight I could barely breathe.
I kept my arms at my sides, refusing to let him into my head.
“I’m sorry, Indy. I’ve done things.”
I draped my arms around him and pressed my ear to his chest. “We’ve all done things, Tyler.”
His heart thumped in my ear. “But what I did put everyone I know in danger.”
Frowning, I pulled back. “Tell me.”
His eyes softened.
“Tell me, Kingsley. I can handle danger.”
His expression darkened. Then he pressed his palms to his eyes like he was trying to force horror from his head.
“I’ve seen the scar behind your ear,” I said. “Is that a cigar burn?”
He flopped his hands to the water. “You don’t give up, do you?”
I looked into his impossibly perfect eyes. “Do you want to give up . . . on me? On whatever we have going on?”
A tiny smile drifted across his lips, but the turmoil behind his eyes seemed to crush him.
I gripped his hands. “I honestly don’t know what’s going on between us . . . I mean, you’re a cop, for god’s sake.”
He burst out laughing. “And you’re a pain in my butt.”
“I’ll give you a pain in your butt if you don’t tell me.” I shook his hands in the water. “Call this our first major hurdle. We get over this and we can get through anything.”
His expression twisted. “You’re forgetting all the crap we’ve already been through.”
“That was physical problems. They’re a thousand times easier to hurdle than emotional ones.”
Frowning, he tilted his head. “Wow, what are you? A psychologist or something?”
“Or something.” I grabbed his cheeks and pulled him down for a kiss.
His lips softened, and I stepped closer to him, pressing our bodies together.
He eased back from me and heaved a sigh. “I hope I don’t regret this.”
“You won’t.”
“You might change your mind when I tell you.”
“Nope. I won’t.”
A deep frown crossed his forehead as he studied me, then he grabbed my hand. “Come on, we need to find that guy and?—”
I yanked my hand free.
He flared his eyes at me. “And then, while we wait to be rescued, I’ll tell you everything.”
“Yay.” I grinned.
Growling, he wrapped his arm around my back like he was stopping me from escaping, and we pushed through the water to the shore. Shielding the sun with his hand, he squinted up the steep hill we’d climbed down. “Can you see that cave we slept in?”
Blazing sunshine was right in my face as I searched the top of the cliff. “There it is.”
“Good work.”
Water squelched from our boots as we crossed the sand. He picked up the plastic bag containing the hard drive and returned it to his pocket.
“I hope that thing works after all this,” I said.
“It will. Listen,” he said as we stepped back into the vegetation, “when we find those men, their bodies will be pretty gruesome, so don’t get too close, okay?”
“Okay.” I already had nightmares from one lifeless body. I didn’t need to add to those images.
The cliff face loomed above us like an angry demon, but thankfully, it also blocked out the blazing sunshine and made navigating the bushes a fraction easier. Thorns scraped at my forearms.
“Over there.” Tyler marched ahead. “I see one of them.”
He pushed through the dense undergrowth with some kind of unearthly determination, and it took everything I had to keep up with him.
We rounded a massive Pandanus palm that had to be a hundred years old. Wedged between two rocks was one of the bodies. The shattered branch next to him confirmed he’d hit the palm on the way down. He was facedown, with a bloody halo seeping into the soil around him. It was Clark. Not the man we needed.
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. I couldn’t shake the image of Clark jumping off that cliff. It had happened in an instant. His plummet was long enough to regret that decision, though. I wondered if he did.
We continued looking and found the second man, Briggs, fifteen feet away.
His broken body seemed to have embedded into the rocks he’d landed on, proving gravity was a nasty bitch when she wanted to be. He was sprawled backward, limbs splayed at impossible angles.
“Stay back.” Tyler shot me a fierce scowl. “You don’t want to see this.”
“You got that right.” Folding my arms, I leaned my back against one of the Pandanus palm branches and positioned myself so Tyler blocked most of my view of Briggs.
Tyler crouched over his battered body, and I cringed as he fished into the dead man’s tactical vest pockets. He turned to me. “Here.”
He tossed two protein bars my way.
“Hell, yes.” I yanked open a packet with my teeth and took a massive bite.
“Got a phone.” Tyler stepped away from the body but as he strode toward me, my moment of joy plummeted. The phone screen was cracked.
To my surprise, the screen lit up.
Tyler held the phone up, searching for a signal. “Damn, only one bar.”
I peered over his shoulder, watching the weak bar of reception to see if it got better.
“Only thirteen percent battery left,” he said. “Hopefully, that’s enough for one call.”
“Yeah, but it’s locked.”
Tyler marched back to Briggs and pressed the dead man’s broken finger to the screen. “Not anymore.”
“Gross, but clever.” I smirked.
”Survival doesn’t have room for squeamishness.”
“Huh. Remind me not to use fingerprint security for my phone.”
He chuckled. “Come on, let’s see if there’s a better signal on the beach.”
As we made a beeline for the ocean we could hear through the vegetation, Tyler devoured the second protein bar.
The sand was barely three feet wide and flanked by crashing waves and dense bush. It was beautiful and secluded, perfect for anyone wanting a romantic getaway, but this island was in the middle of nowhere. Anyone coming out this far would need a decent-sized fuel capacity, and that eliminated most pleasure motorboats.
Standing in the middle of the beach, Tyler made a phone call, and his back was rigid with tension as he held the phone to his ear. “Captain, it’s Tyler Kingsley.”
Relief washed through me as I heard shouts from the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t decipher the words.
“Yes, sir, we’re fine. Indiana is with me, but her dad was murdered. Listen, I don’t have time to explain. We are on a deserted island.” He spun to me. “Do you know the name of this island?”
“It’s Wombat Island. We’re on the eastern side.”
He relayed our position.
I could only hear half the conversation, but it was enough to send my heart racing.
“Captain, we were attacked by a drone.”
“What the fuck!” His captain was so loud, I heard him.
Tyler gave a summary of the explosion on Rhino, my boat sinking, and how we managed to get to this island. “We need immediate evac, sir, before the bastard behind that drone sends in more assholes to kill us.”
Tyler looked like he was seeing right through me as he squeezed the shattered screen to his ear to hear the voice on the other end.
“Understood,” Tyler said, nodding.
He ended the call, checked the screen, possibly to assess the battery life, then his eyes met mine. There was something raw and exposed in that gaze.
“It’s not good,” he said. “Levi still isn’t available, and the border force boat is still out of action. He’s contacting Aria and Air/Sea rescue and putting out a mayday call.”
“Shit. Then let’s hope the good guys find us first.”
“Agreed.” He turned his attention toward the ocean, and I followed his gaze.
All my life, the ocean has been my haven. Now, it was working against me. I had a rotten feeling that lack of drinking water was the least of our worries.
We found a shady patch at the edge of the tree line, and I collapsed into the warm sand without grace. Tyler sank down beside me, and we both sagged with fatigue as we sat in silence, watching the waves crash into the shore.
I leaned against the rough bark of a palm tree, and its shadow was a perfect palm shape on the sand a few feet away. Tyler sat against another tree and his eyes fixed on the horizon. Grit stuck to my skin and salt-crusted my lips.
Tyler tugged the device from his pocket, and as he placed it onto a massive fallen palm leaf next to him along with the phone, I noticed the nasty circular scar behind his ear.
He pulled his half-empty water bottle out of his other pocket and offered it to me.
“You still have water?” My eyes bulged. “I finished mine ages ago.”
“It’s all yours.”
My dry throat forced me to take the bottle. I drank one mouthful, and the tepid water was a balm for my parched throat. I passed the bottle back to him, and without drinking, he rested it on the leaf next to the phone.
Time stretched endlessly, and as the sun dipped lower behind the rock island at our backs, shadows lengthened along the beach. I was torn between being pissed off that Tyler didn’t open up to me like he promised and being too damn tired to care.
Hunger pains rumbled from my insides and blended with the crashing waves and the distant cry of seagulls that raced back and forth in time with the swell. I removed my booties, tipped the water out, and rested them upside down against a skull-sized rock.
“Indiana,” he said, breaking the quiet, “if I tell you about Operation Vivid, I could be putting your life at risk.”
“I know. You told me.” I dug my toes into the sand. “I never got anywhere without taking a risk, Kingsley.”
He shifted in his seat so he could share those stunning eyes of his between me and the ocean. “I was an undercover cop for three years in Melbourne. It was supposed to be a straightforward six-month assignment.”
“Nothing’s ever straightforward.”
“No. That’s true.” He huffed. “I was good at my job.”
“You still are.”
“Many would disagree.” He scanned the beach. “Look at where we are.”
“We’re alive, aren’t we?”
“Will you let me tell this?”
“Sorry.”
He chuckled, but then a hardness crossed his expression. “I witnessed some things that I can’t tell you about . . . and because of the way I handled myself, I was able to go deeper undercover.”
I tried to picture the swanky-dressed detective that I’d first met getting down and dirty as an undercover cop.
“A year into Operation Vivid, I became the personal driver for one of Australia’s most notorious criminal families. When I wasn’t driving Albert around, I drove his wife to her appointments and their boys to school and their other activities.” His hand draped over the cigar burn, and I braced for the gruesome story behind that brutal wound.
“The boys, Wesley and Owen, were twins. They were thirteen when I first met them. Man, those kids were brats.” Heaving a sigh, he shook his head. “But they were just trying to get attention. Their father . . . he?—”
Tyler’s face twisted, and I thought he was going to vomit.
He pulled his knees up to his chest as if silently telling me to keep my distance while he got this story out. “I witnessed seven murders by that man. Every one of them was cold and calculated.”
He stared at the ocean, but I knew it wasn’t the vast blue he was seeing.
Hopefully, revealing this story would help him in some way. I wanted to tell him that I knew exactly what it was like to re-live witnessing a murder over and over, but he didn’t need to hear that from me right now.
“I thought their mother was a cold and calculating bitch, but she wasn’t. Nikki was trapped in a world she could never escape from. She kept up a fa?ade to keep herself and her sons alive, when, really, she was drowning in self-loathing . . . she was a functioning alcoholic.”
He swept his gaze to me and frowned like a piece in a puzzle slotted together.
Our puzzle. Our pieces.
I nodded. “Dad did the same.”
Tyler ran his palms up his thighs, and grains of sand caught on the hairs on his legs.
“It took me three years to get all the pieces of Operation Vivid together, and I finally had concrete evidence of a shipping container full of drugs and weapons coming in.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. “The showdown was at a giant warehouse. Every man we’d been tracking was there. A big raid was organized, but I was instructed to stay away to keep my undercover identity intact. Just in case there were some loose ends that needed tidying up. But I wanted to be there when those fucking bastards were taken down. I wanted to see their faces, you know.”
“Yeah, I do know.” I clenched my jaw. “I would have given anything to be there when Dad killed the bastards who murdered Mom.”
“I was supposed to take Wesley and Owen to boxing class and make everything seem normal, but I deviated to the warehouse instead. It was stupid, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted to see an end to my years of work.”
He dug his thumb into the dimple in his chin then clenched his fist. “I parked the car in a side street and told the boys to stay put until I got back. I talked a police officer, Ebony, into letting me in on the action, and she gave me a police vest.”
He drove his hand through his hair. “It was madness, Indy. Bullets flying. Police yelling. Men dying. Then, Wesley appeared out of nowhere. I have no idea where he got his gun from, but he didn’t even flinch when he raised that Glock and shot me in my lower back.”
I winced as his hand brushed over the raised circular scar on his back.
“I rolled over and tried to reason with Wesley.” Tyler rubbed his hand over his second bullet wound on his chest. “He shot me here. I begged him to walk away. Begged him. When Wesley raised the gun again, I shot him in the stomach.”
Tyler put his hands over his eyes and puffed out his cheeks.
“Oh, Tyler. That’s awful.”
“I crawled to him and pulled him onto my lap, trying to stop the blood pouring out of him. Do you know what his last words to me were?” His blue eyes pierced me.
I shook my head.
“He said, you’re a cop. Like I was the worst vermin in the world. Then he tried to spit on me, but it oozed over his lip instead and he died.”
The sadness in his eyes crushed my heart.
“I loved that kid, but I couldn’t say that to him.”
I nodded. I couldn’t remember the last time I told Dad I loved him.
“The worst part was that Nikki saw me kill her son. I didn’t even know she was in the warehouse. Nikki got her arm around Ebony’s throat and used her body as a shield. I managed to get to my feet and aimed my gun at Nikki, begging her to let Ebony go. There was so much hatred in her eyes.”
He turned to me with his mouth ajar like there was something truly rotten he had to tell me, but it was chewing up his insides so much he couldn’t say it.
Tiny spider veins crept into the whites of his eyes, and I knew he was fighting his tears.
I slipped over to him and clutched his hand in mine. “What happened?”
He swallowed so loud I heard it. “Nikki slit Ebony’s throat.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, and a tear spilled down his cheek.
“Oh, Tyler, it’s not your fault.”
Sucking his lips into his mouth, he nodded. It was a long agonizing moment before he sucked in a breath. “That’s what everyone has told me, but if I’d just stayed away . . .”
“You couldn’t have known what would happen. Just like Dad didn’t know what would happen to Mom.”
A frown drilled across his forehead. “At least your dad got his justice. Blood splatter evidence proved that my bullet hit Nikki, but she got away, and both her and Owen vanished into thin air. That was two years ago.”
“Maybe she died?”
“I don’t think so. I can feel . . .” He shook his head.
“What can you feel?”
He curled his hand over my knee, and it was so tender I nearly wept, but when he looked at me, the raw pain in his piercing blue eyes made me hold my breath instead.
“Nobody prepares you for ghosts.” His voice was barely a whisper.
I sucked in the air. “I see Mom’s ghost, Tyler. All the time. I know what you’re talking about.”
He shook his head. “This is—” His head jerked forward, and he jumped to his feet. “A boat!”
I surged to my feet, and the rocky sand dug into my instep.
Grabbing my hand, he dragged me behind the tree. Peering over his shoulder, I stared at the glint on the water as the boat emerged from the shimmering horizon.
“A rescue party?” Tyler’s breath hissed with uncertainty.
“Can’t tell,” I said. As the vessel drew closer, my heart stuttered. “Son of a bitch! That’s Kane fucking Devlin.”