Chapter 13
Bray drove us to his place, an apartment complex across town by where we’d had coffee the day before. He parked outside a building with an outdoor staircase, and I hoped he lived on the first floor. We climbed out of the car.
“Let me help you,” he said when I took a painful step toward the stucco building hedged with greenery and pink flowers. The property was beautiful; even nicer than mine. I assumed a good chunk of his rent went to landscaping.
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth. My ankle felt both like it was on fire and like it was full of shards of glass grinding against each other with each step. I wondered if the man had pulled and twisted it hard enough to effectively sprain it.
“No, you’re not,” Bray said and rounded the car’s hood toward me. “You can barely walk, and we have to go upstairs.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Of course we do,” I muttered.
“What?”
I would have let it slide, but the cooling adrenaline in my blood and everything that had just happened had my mood sharper than normal.
“I said, of course we do. Of course you live on the second floor of this building where I need to go hide so some whack job from ten years ago doesn’t find me and try to kill me!
Of course!” I whirled on him, arms out and balancing on one foot, and glared.
“What were you even doing there, Bray? I told you I was going to handle Brittany on my own.”
He recoiled like I’d slapped him, looking incredulous. “Uh, don’t you mean thank you?” His face pinched into an affronted scowl. “I’m pretty sure I just saved you from some guy—who apparently wants to kill you—trying to snatch you off the street!”
He was completely right, but admitting it felt like treason.
I glared at him and turned for the stairs. “I didn’t need to be saved.”
He pressed his fob and the car chirped behind us. “That’s not what it looked like. You still haven’t told me who that guy was.”
I sucked in a breath and put my foot on the first step, preparing to bear my weight.
Memory of the man chasing me crawled through my veins like an army of ants.
I didn’t want to think about it until I was safely behind a locked door, preferably one where the owner inside had a gun.
Too bad there was a switchback staircase in my way.
“I’ll tell you inside.” I took one aching step and winced.
“Here.” Bray reached out for me, and I swatted him away.
“I don’t need your help!”
No one ever offered to help me. I did everything on my own.
I’d had plenty of injuries before, but this one felt like it topped the list. I wasn’t sure my ankle wasn’t broken.
Perhaps it was because of the fear coupled with the pain and the knowledge they’d found me, and nothing would ever be the same.
Or perhaps it was the humiliation of Bray watching me struggle up the stairs.
Either way, every step made me want to cry.
I made it to the fourth step with a biting wince when Bray stepped in.
“Okay, this is going to take forever.” He came up behind me and looped my arm over his shoulders.
“Bray, what are you—?”
“Up we go, tiger,” he said and effortlessly scooped me into his arms.
Almost effortlessly.
“Ouch!” I cried when my injured ankle banged into the wall in the narrow space.
“Sorry!” he said and pulled me closer to his chest. “Tuck in your legs.”
“Put me down!” I fought the tight grip of his arms but couldn’t get anywhere against his strength.
“No. You said that guy chasing you wants to kill you, and I’m not about to die waiting for you to climb these stairs.”
He walked up them as if the inconvenience of my weight was a bag of groceries rather than an adult body.
My feet bobbed with each step. I felt his arms behind my back and knees, his hard chest pressed into my ribs.
He cradled me against him like I was precious cargo, and it sent an embarrassing wave of warmth from my head to my toes.
“This is mortifying. I feel pathetic.”
We rounded the switchback, Bray moving slowly so as not to smash my foot again, and started up the second half of the stairs.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I saw you scale that fence. You’re a badass.”
I blushed again.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually.” He paused to carefully set me down at the top of the stairs. His warm hand lingered on my hip as I found my footing on one leg. “I do. That’s why I asked.” I gripped the short wall for balance both from being set down and the feel of his touch. He fished his keys out of his pocket.
Memories of all the times I’d scaled fences played through my mind like a highlight reel of a delinquent youth.
In truth, I couldn’t even remember the first time; I’d probably been thirteen years old.
No one had taught me how to do it. I’d learned out of necessity, either because I was running from bad guys, or I was the bad guy making a getaway.
None of it was charming or badass as Bray implied. It was mostly terrifying.
“I’m not sure it’s in my best interest to confess all my crimes to a government agent,” I told him.
He shoved his keys into the lock and shot a grin over his shoulder. “Well, it’s not like you can run away from me, so.” He glanced down at my swollen ankle, and I knew he’d meant it as a joke, but it served as a reminder that I was trapped. Always trapped.
We entered his apartment to a spacious and tidy living room. He tossed his keys into a bowl on a small table and turned to throw the dead bolt behind us. “Let me get you some ice,” he said and pointed at his couch.
I took in the room, and it was indeed decorated much like my own apartment: soothing neutrals and cozy furniture. The only splashes of color lighting up the walls were a painting and a bookshelf stuffed to the gills.
I pictured him lounging on his couch and turning pages of a book with his long fingers. Perhaps he wore reading glasses. I bit my lip at the thought.
I hobbled over and lowered myself into the plush cushions.
I considered putting my foot up on his stone coffee table but thought that might be rude.
Instead, I lay back and tried not to think about the fact I’d just been chased by a ghost and what it all meant.
I focused on Bray’s living room and not the pain in my leg or the fear in my mind.
He had nice furniture and a big, but not obnoxiously big, TV mounted on the wall.
Given the tidiness of the space, I wondered if I’d been right about him being a control freak that day we’d first met.
“Here you go,” he said and returned from the kitchen I could partially see through a cutout wall.
He passed through the small dining room and crossed the room to the couch with a bag of ice wrapped in a tea towel.
I silently watched him reach for a pillow and gently place it under my injured ankle.
He used another pillow to prop against the ice bag and hold it in place.
Then he leaned over me, his chest coming close to my face and the smell of him hitting me like a gust of wind, and adjusted the pillows behind my back.
“Comfy?” he asked with a smile. He’d created a little nest, which supported my body in all the right places to make me feel weightless.
“Yes, thank you.”
He sat atop the coffee table, directly facing me and rubbed his palms on his knees.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I repeated his question from the stairs. “Do they teach pillow fluffing at the Academy?”
He laughed. “No.” His face flushed, and he ran a hand through his hair. “No. I spent some time recovering from an injury and learned a lot about the proper placement of a pillow.”
The statement felt miles deep, and I wondered if it had to do with his security clearance being revoked. His face held a secret. I couldn’t help but probe. “What happened?”
He looked at me with his lips softly pressed together and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
Something about the way he said it told me it did matter. A lot. Apparently, we were still keeping secrets from each other. I wanted to know his, but the look on his face told me not to ask.
“Do you want anything for the pain?” he asked and nodded at my foot.
The throbbing had stopped now that I wasn’t standing on it, and the ice was helping, but something to take the edge off sounded great.
“Yes. Got anything good? Any repo’ed narcotics? I could go for a line of Percocet,” I said with a suggestive bounce of my brows.
His face fell and his eyes widened in horror.
“Bray, I’m kidding. Jesus. I’m not a junkie. I’ll take some ibuprofen.”
He released a breath and stood from his table. He headed down the hall this time, and I wondered what Agent Calvin Bray’s bathroom looked like.
“You know, I have sampled my share of drugs though.” I found myself disclosing more information, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was being in his personal space and the fact that he was taking care of me, but I felt closer to him.
“Oh?” he said from down the hall.
“Yeah, unfortunately. I’ve been in a few situations where I couldn’t blow my cover and passing up on an offering would have done just that.”
He returned and placed two blue gel pills in my hand. “That sounds … awful.”
A laugh, of all things, burst from my throat.
Most people asked which was my favorite when I talked about drugs, and then reliably launched into their own anecdotes of wild nights and hazy memories.
In truth, I’d hated every last second of it.
But if the alternative was a bullet in my head—or something worse—I’d take a line of coke any day.
Bray walked to the kitchen to get me a glass of water.
“It was awful. I hated when Wallace put me on drug cases. They were always the most dangerous and usually required me to do drugs at some point.” I rolled my eyes and accepted the glass of water.
Bray stared at me in awe while I sipped and swallowed the pills.
“What?” I asked him.
He shook his head like he was snapping out of a daze. “Nothing. You just talk about it like it was a bad day at the office, and not a threat to your life.”
A sad laugh shook my shoulders. “Well, I kind of have to think of it that way, you know? Don’t have much choice.”
He sat back down on the coffee table and leaned his elbows on his knees. He was only a foot away from me. “I’m sorry, Erin.” The sincere furrow in his brow and the sound of my real name put a hard lump in my throat. I had to take another sip of water.
Uncomfortable, I sat back against the pillows and sighed. “Well, at least the Del Rio moms aren’t into that kind of smuggling—unless, are we sure they aren’t?”
Bray held my gaze, seeing through my attempt to joke and not bending. “They aren’t. I’ve checked.”
The heat of his eyes pushed a flush into my cheeks. I tried to fight it off with another quip. “Good. I’d hate to discover diapers full of heroin or something.”
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, his eyes still on me.
I swallowed another gulp of water, emptying the glass. “Do what?”
He reached for the glass and set it behind him on the table. He pressed the tips of his fingers together and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Act like this is all normal and not very hard for you.”
I suddenly felt like I was naked. Like he’d been stripping layer after layer from me and finally gotten to the bare skin beneath, where he could see all my scars and secrets. The urge to cry swelled up in my throat, my eyes. I blinked away a wash of moisture and deflected.
“Thanks, but I don’t need a therapist, Bray.”
The look of disappointed hurt on his face immediately made me regret saying it. He stood from the table and turned away.
“I’m sorry!” I blurted, my face hot with embarrassment.
I searched for the right words to salvage the situation.
So rarely had I been close enough to someone to hurt their feelings, I didn’t know what to do.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I know you’re only trying to help—and thank you, really.
It’s just …” My throat tightened again, and I spilled the truth.
“No one ever offers to help me, so I’m not used to it. ”
He stilled before turning back to me. When he sat on the coffee table again, a wave of relief washed over me. “That’s really sad.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes, wondering if he matched me in lack of interpersonal social skills. “Thanks.”
He blushed and waved his hands. “Sorry, that sounded rude. I didn’t mean to—” He cut himself off and took a breath. He looked up at me. “You know what? Maybe we should just get back to the case.”
A pang of disappointment struck me in the chest, but I agreed. Keeping our relationship professional was in everyone’s best interest.
“Good idea.”
Bray nodded and smoothed his palms over his knees again. “So, what happened back there?”
I knew he wasn’t asking me to report on my conversation with Brittany, although there was valuable information to be shared there.
He wanted to know about the man who’d chased me down the alley and nearly broken my leg.
I leaned back into the pillows, wishing I could sink into them and disappear along with the day.
I didn’t want to speak the words aloud for fear of making it all real.
“Something very, very bad,” I finally said.
He studied me with narrowed eyes. “What does that mean?”
I sat up and adjusted the bag of ice. The chill on my fingertips even through the towel was shocking.
Part of me didn’t want to say anything more.
Part of me, perhaps the part that had looked in his eyes in the coffeeshop and momentarily imagined we were on a date, wanted to go back to that moment and stay there pretending it was real.
The same part of me wanted to go back to the moment we’d just had, where he was sincerely kind to me, sympathetic, and wrap myself in someone else’s care.
If I told him the truth, he’d never look at me the same.
It would change everything. I would go from whatever he thought of me now to a true criminal.
But, in the end, that’s who I really was.
I took a big, heavy breath and got straight to the point. “The classified part of my file fills in the gap between my father and I arriving at that hotel room in Houston and me becoming a CI. That guy from the alley was there too.”
Bray slowly nodded with a purse of his lips, making his scar jump. “I figured.”
Only a handful of people knew what happened in that missing space. Two were in prison, one—I thought—died that night, one had died just a few days ago, and the other was me.
I didn’t want to tell Bray for a host of reasons, but I knew on some instinctual level I could trust him. I took a breath and told him a story I’d never shared with another living soul.