CHAPTER 24
Tessa
The curtain is pale blue and someone on the other side of it is crying softly. Somewhere, a monitor beeps in a steady rhythm that has nothing to do with how I feel, which is not steady at all.
I’ve been staring at the curtain for a while now. It’s easier than looking at my wrists.
The ER doctor was matter-of-fact about my injuries—efficient, not unkind, moving through the inventory of my damage like someone who has seen worse today and will see worse again before his shift ends.
My wrists are abraded to rawness from the rope, my shoulders both strained.
Lifting them above chest height makes my vision go white at the edges, but the doctor assured me they would heal just fine.
The contact wounds from the Taser are the part that made him pause, the skin around each an angry mottled red.
The nurse dressing them now works with a gentleness I’m grateful for. The sites are tender but are nothing compared to what it felt like when the electricity was flowing into me.
I don’t look at them, instead looking over to Cole.
He’s in the chair pulled up to the left side of the hospital bed, forearms on his knees.
He hasn’t left and the furious expression on his face hasn’t diminished, not since I first saw it when the hood came off.
Those hazel eyes… something in them that I don’t have a word for.
It’s between relief and fury and words I’ve been turning over ever since.
The evening comes back in fragments, out of order, the way I’ve been told shock works.
The sound of the door getting kicked in.
I had no idea what it was, only an explosion of wood.
Quick shouts, another explosion when the second door was kicked in and then the gunshot—sounding like a cannon blast in that small room, the percussion of it punching through my chest like I’d been struck.
Voices. Movement. Hands on the hood, pulling it up and off.
The light was blinding at first and I was still shaking from the current. My shoulders were on fire and I wasn’t entirely coherent for those first seconds.
What I remember is impressionistic only, but I’m sure clarity will come in time. I heard Cole’s gentle voice, felt his hands cutting the rope. My legs didn’t work but he caught me without hesitation, and I held on to him as tight as I could, given the fact my arms were like spaghetti.
He was holding me, reassuring me… a litany of words I didn’t realize how badly I needed to hear. “You’re okay. You’re safe. I’ve got you, Tessa. Look at me. I’ve got you. I’ll never let anything happen to you. I love you.”
Those last three words stood out. They were spoken from the heart.
They came out not like he chose to say them, but because he had to.
The next was a flurry of activity, Reid securing the downed men, Cole bringing me out to the porch, always holding me in his arms without tiring, his mouth against my hair.
I took it all in quietly, but I held on to those three words.
I’ve been turning those three words over ever since.
The nurse finishes with the last contact wound and straightens, gathering her materials. “The doctor will be back to check on you shortly. Can I get you anything?”
“I’m okay,” I say, which is a dishonest answer, but it’s the easiest.
She slips through the curtain. Cole watches her go and then looks back at me. “You’re not okay,” he says.
“No,” I agree. “But I will be.”
He watches me for a moment and then looks down at his hands. He’s been doing that—cycling between keeping an eye on me like I might disappear and looking away like he doesn’t trust what’s on his face when he looks at me too long.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
His smile is sour. “Not by a long shot.”
The curtain parts again and this time it’s not a nurse but a man who steps in, dressed in black slacks and a white button-down shirt.
Mid-fifties, well-lined face, a leather notebook in his hand.
He takes in the hospital bed, the dressings on my arms, and spares a brief nod at Cole. Then his attention is back on me.
“Ms. Ward,” he says. “I’m Dennis Hara, FBI. I apologize for the timing. I know this isn’t ideal, but I need to get a statement.”
“Yeah… sure,” I say, propping myself up higher in the bed and forcing myself not to grimace at the pain in my shoulders.
He glances at Cole. “Good to see you again, Cole. If you could maybe give us a few minutes—”
“He stays,” I cut in.
Hara nods with a short smile. “Sure. Of course. May I sit down?”
I nod and he takes the other visitor’s chair in the corner. “Why don’t you take me through start to finish what happened today and I’ll ask questions as needed.”
I take a breath. “Okay… let’s see. It started with an email from Adrian Schwartz, RainVest’s COO. He reached out directly to my personal account and said he wanted to talk. He led me to believe he had information that would make the case airtight.”
Hara writes but with no follow-up question imminent, I continue.
“I took a rideshare to a restaurant in Capitol Hill and he was already there when I arrived.” I can still see the way Schwartz looked at me as I approached.
I didn’t see it then, but now I recognize what was probably a glimmer of triumph in his eyes.
“It didn’t take long for him to reveal to me that he had no intention of helping me. ”
“He somehow induced you to go with him?”
I nod. “There was a photograph of Cole taken earlier that day and Schwartz made it clear that if I didn’t come willingly, Cole would be killed when he stepped outside of the federal building where he was meeting with you.”
“Son of a—” Cole stops himself. His jaw is tight and he’s looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen on him before. Not anger. Hotter than fury.
I glance at him, a small smile of apology. “I know… I guess I should have assumed you could take care of yourself, but… I couldn’t risk it.”
He looks away and a muscle works in his jaw.
Hara glances between us and gives it a beat before redirecting. “So you went willingly to protect him.”
“I went because I didn’t have a choice,” I say. “Or I didn’t see one.”
“They took your phone at that point?”
“Yes, and all my jewelry.” I glance at my bare wrist without meaning to. “My bracelet had a GPS tracker, but Schwartz threw it out the window.” My voice is flat as I recollect the moment I realized I was never going to return home. “I knew what that meant.”
Hara looks up from his notebook briefly, then back down, continuing to scrawl notes. “Schwartz,” Hara says, pen moving. “Was he present at the cabin?”
“No. He handed me over to Pelham and left.”
Hara nods, jots another note. “And Pelham ran the interrogation himself.”
“Yes.” I pause. “At first it was almost civilized. He sat across from me, asked his questions. What was on the flash drive, who else had seen the evidence, whether my editor had been given copies.” I glance down at the burns on my wrists.
“He wanted to know the full scope of what we had so he could figure out how to contain it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“As little as I could. I confirmed the article was with my editor but that he didn’t have the evidence.” I pause. “That part was true. I wasn’t going to give him anything that cost us the case.”
Hara looks up at me. “That was very brave.”
“Didn’t feel like it,” I mutter. “When I stonewalled on the rest of it, he stopped being civilized.” I say it plainly, without inflection, because I can’t lend any emotion to the retelling of this story.
It might make me cry, and I don’t want to be weak.
“They hauled me up by my arms and tied my wrists to a hook in the ceiling beam. High enough that my feet barely touched the floor.”
I hear Cole shift in the chair beside me, but I don’t look at him.
“They cut my clothes off,” I say, and Cole’s head drops, his fingers going to his nose where he pinches the bridge. “Pelham, um… threatened to let his men have me.”
I can feel the rage vibrating off Cole, eyes riveted to the floor.
I clear my throat and blurt the rest out quickly, not because it’s hard on me to recount it, but because it’s torture for Cole to hear it.
“At any rate, he put a hood over me, hit me with a Taser a few times, and then Cole and his men were there rescuing me.”
There… easy and quick. A story for the record books and now I want to move on. The room is very quiet and I risk a look at Cole. He’s staring at me as if he wants to go back in time to kill those men.
“Where did he use the Taser?” Hara asks.
Cole growls. “Is that really necessary? You can have the fucking medical records for your case.”
“Cole,” I admonish.
Hara intervenes, speaking more to Cole than me. “I know this is hard, but I want to make sure we have everything we need. It has to be her words… her recollection.”
Cole opens his mouth to argue, but I start talking, giving Hara what he wants. “Pelham used the device on my thigh, my lower back and my left rib cage.”
I glance at Cole and he stares back at me in anguish. “I’m okay,” I tell him. “Truly.”
“You’re a badass queen,” he murmurs. “But then again, I always knew that.”
We both allow ourselves to smile at each other, a true acknowledgment that the horror is behind us.
“Where is he?” I ask, turning back to Hara. “Pelham, I mean.”
“Surgery,” Hara says. “The bullet lodged in his femur. He’ll survive but I’m guessing he’s going to have a permanent limp.” His mouth breaks into a grin. “That’ll be a prison problem though.”
Something settles in me at that. I like the thought of him in prison.
“I need you to tell me about all the evidence you’ve collected. I assume you’ll hand that over now?”
I nod and then proceed to lay it all out.
The architecture of it, the way each piece connects to the next.
The flash drive Erik handed me in that parking garage—reports, contracts, land deeds, internal files documenting the scheme from the inside.
The emails between DelRey and Schwartz, open to interpretation for sure, but when paired with the SAPG invoices time-stamped against red flag advisories and fire ignition dates, it’s hard to deny the circumstantial connection.
I tell him about Erik’s notebook with Thomas Vega’s name and that he was the same man that ended up dead in my house.
I answer what feels like a hundred more questions from Hara but then he starts to wrap it up. “Where’s all of this proof?” he asks.
“It’s all at Jameson.”
Hara writes steadily. “And the article? Still with your editor?”
I look at him. “Yes, but we called him from the ambulance and it’s already on its way to press.” A pause. “It runs in the morning edition.”
He stops writing. “Ms. Ward—”
“Agent Hara.” I keep my voice even. “Erik Lanning died for that story. He was run down in a parking garage, the footage was wiped and the people who ordered it expected it to stay buried.” I hold his gaze. “The article runs. Your investigation runs alongside it. That was always the arrangement.”
After a long moment, he closes his notebook. I take that as acceptance, if not agreement. He stands slowly.
“What is going to happen to DelRey and Schwartz?” I ask.
Hara smiles, this one slightly gleeful. “I’ve got agents executing arrest warrants for them right now. SAPG is being raided as we speak.” He looks at me with what might be called respect. “You did good work, Ms. Ward.”
“Erik did the work,” I say. “I just made sure it mattered.”
He nods once. “Well done,” he says and reaches inside his pocket, pulling out a card. “Call me if you think of anything else. I know the federal prosecutor will want to talk to you as well.”
Hara shakes my hand and then Cole’s, slipping through the curtain.
The silence stretches between me and Cole and it’s in no way uncomfortable. It’s the quiet of two people who have been through so much and are still processing that they came out the other side, everything having worked in their favor.
“Everyone’s outside,” Cole says eventually. “Josie. Reid. Sully. Malik and Anna drove up.” A pause. “They’ve been here awhile.”
A warmth moves through me at that, cutting through the pain and the exhaustion. These people who showed up and waited in a hospital corridor for a woman most of them have known less than two weeks. Hell, I’ve not even been officially introduced to Sully yet.
“Tell them thank you,” I say with a smile. “And then tell them to go home and get some rest.”
Cole looks at me. “What do you want to do?”
I don’t have to think about it. “I want to go home too. My home.”
Something moves through his expression, but he understands what I mean—not just the address, but the need to be somewhere that’s mine. To sleep in my own bed and begin the work of figuring out who I am now, on the other side of this.
“Okay,” he says simply as he stands, then reaches for my hand. He’s careful to avoid touching my wrist, his fingers folding around mine with a gentleness that tightens my throat.
I let him hold on and I think about those three words he gave me.