ONE #2
Doyle gave her a single nod. “Travel details will be emailed to you.”
“Got it. Thanks.” She reached for her bag and started adding things to it before Doyle cleared the door, going through the motions she’d run a hundred times. Laptop, secure drive, the go bag she kept next to the filing cabinet for these moments.
She checked it as well—clothes, toothbrush, the body armor that fit to perfection and would save her life, not that she expected to need it at a place with security so high that they required their guests wear hoods.
She paused, hand on the zipper. What was she getting into this time?
Not having anyone to answer to made it easier to run out at a moment’s notice. Easier to put herself in harm’s way too.
She’d been a long way from her hometown of Philly for years, and some mornings the distance was the only thing keeping her upright. She hadn’t been back for a holiday in longer than she could remember. These days, her family only expected to see her at funerals.
She’d gotten exactly what she’d wanted when she joined the Bureau. She’d become an intelligence analyst, built a career she was damn good at, and somewhere along the way, let everything else die on the vine.
No husband. No boyfriend. Not even a cat, because she never knew when she’d have to catch the next flight.
Tonight, this weekend, next month—it made no difference.
There was nobody waiting for her.
One bag slung over her shoulder and her carry-on luggage in hand, she crossed the office to the door. Not even the new assignment could bury what hearing Antonio’s had dragged back up.
Phillip lost his life behind the restaurant.
She’d only gone out for drinks with him a handful of times. His death had shocked her, but the grief clawing its way back up wasn’t for him.
It belonged to the man she’d loved—and lost—years before.
That man was the reason she hadn’t been home in years, because every direction she looked, she saw him. She didn’t trust herself to walk those streets and stay standing.
So she’d made the job her whole life, telling herself it was ambition. Some of it was.
But underneath the commendations and her reputation for being the analyst who never missed a pattern, there was a simpler truth she rarely let herself face straight on.
She stayed with the FBI because it meant she had access. And maybe someday, in a file she hadn’t read yet, she might finally learn what happened to Reid.
As she walked out of the office into a cloudy gray day, she checked her email for the travel plans Doyle promised. A minute later, a car pulled up and she climbed into the back, setting her bags on the seat beside her.
Her driver didn’t speak, which suited her. She was too deep in thought to manage chitchat. Before long, she’d arrived at the airport and boarded her plane for Portland, Oregon. Bound for a place that required the kind of security clearance she didn’t have.
At least not yet.
She’d spent the last few years of her life making herself indispensable, learning everything from cryptology to several new languages. Extended self-defense training made her into a force to be reckoned with…and proved she could take care of herself.
Her dark musings didn’t make the flight feel any faster, and she settled her laptop on the drop-down tray and entered a passcode into the secure system. As she cruised at high altitude toward Portland, she searched keywords: black ops, military and the Pacific Northwest.
She turned up nothing. Not a single hit.
Wherever she was going didn’t exist in any database she had access to, and that unsettled her more than the hood Doyle warned her about.
The jet touched down, and she looked through the small window at another cloudy, gray day. Quickly, she gathered her belongings and made her way off the plane.
When she stepped onto the tarmac, something dark came down over her head before she’d taken three steps.
“Don’t worry. I’m your ride.”
She bit off a cry, then a hand gripped her upper arm and guided her several more steps. A second hand landed on top of her head, and she ducked in time to be bundled into a vehicle.
Questions rose to her lips, along with a litany of demands. She dragged the suitcase awkwardly through the door, onto the seat. The door slammed and a second later the car began to move.
Caryssa threw out her senses, taking in the smell of leather and the whir of tires on asphalt.
They took one turn, then another. The engine whined as they accelerated, but that didn’t give her any indication of where she was, who she was with—or why this person handling her hadn’t thought it important to tell her a damn thing.
“You could have at least carried my bag for me,” she muttered, voice muffled behind the hood. She blinked into the all-encompassing darkness.
Nobody answered. Not that she expected them to.
She forced her breathing to slow and counted the turns. The highway’s steady thrum faded, replaced by rougher terrain.
The hood pressed warm and close against her face with every breath, and she made herself think past the black cloth and the disorientation it was designed to create. Instead she focused on the one thing she still had control over—her emotions.
Despite the heavy thud of her heart, she wasn’t afraid. Fear required something to lose, and she’d made peace with emptiness years back, right around the time she’d stopped hoping anyone would ever bring her flowers and call her Ryss again.
If this was the end of the road for her, she found with a hint of surprise, that she wasn’t sorry for a single thing.
Her one regret she’d already lived through years ago, the day she watched Reid walk out the door and didn’t stop him.
Everything since had just been filling time.