Chapter Seventeen
The next few days reminded Ellis of his FBI days. The intense research and investigating prior to any undercover assignment. It wasn’t glamorous, certainly not what he’d pictured being an agent would look like when he’d started, but it was the reality of the job.
Information was the real currency in any investigation. And now he had plenty of it. On Colleen and her second identity. On Tom West and what he’d been doing since setting a fake Ellis up in Alaska.
Zach still hadn’t found anything to connect Dr. Leigh directly. Boyd hadn’t gotten back to him yet on the investigation into what had happened. He had more information, but everything remained nebulous.
It left an itch between his shoulder blades, and yet the situation he found himself in beyond all that was not terrible. Aside from all the research and danger, it was a bit like being on vacation with his wife.
She puttered around the kitchen a lot. She dusted the Christmas tree, fashioned little ornaments out of what she could find, and always had the little string of lights glowing.
They ate meals together and talked. About their past, and about this case.
They mostly avoided talk of the future—or he did.
They shared a bed.
So much of it was easy. Like everything had been frozen for two years. Now, melted, everything could just go back to normal. As if nothing had ever happened.
But so much had, and none of this was normal. Not just the fact that they were under some kind of threat he still hadn’t found the crux of, but being isolated up here on a mountain and in a tiny cabin. It wouldn’t be real life, no matter what happened next.
He found himself regretting that a little bit.
She was in the kitchen again, putting together a meal with canned and freezer items. She was humming Christmas carols.
In a few short weeks it would be Christmas. And for the first time in two years, Kirsten would remember. They might actually spend her favorite holiday together. They might be something again.
Did he really let himself think that was on the other side of this? A second chance? But what better end of this could he hope for?
It was the hope he’d learned to distrust.
Fear. He kept wanting to deny he’d been afraid, that he was afraid. Fear was for men with guns pointed at you. It wasn’t for feelings. It wasn’t for…good things.
But he had a harder time ignoring that fear had been driving him all along. Loving her had pushed him past a lot of fears he would have held on to otherwise, but there was one he hadn’t been able to get through, even if he hadn’t been able to admit it to himself.
Starting a family unlocked so many things he was afraid of—loss, namely.
And he’d lost her, more or less, for two years anyway. But she was here, and she still loved him, and it was a chance.
He didn’t want to lose it because he was so focused on keeping them safe this time.
“What?” she asked him, interrupting his thoughts and making him realize he’d been staring at her pretty intently while he’d been thinking these thoughts.
“You’d make a really good mom.” Maybe it was a terrible way to broach the subject, but he didn’t know a better way to do this.
She stilled and didn’t look at him. “I’ve always wanted to be,” she said. Carefully.
“And it doesn’t scare you? That…you didn’t have a good one. That we don’t know what that really looks like?”
She took her time answering him, studying his face in a way he didn’t know what to do with. But he didn’t look away. He wanted to give her what she needed.
Fear be damned.
“No, not really. Maybe it’s my background in teaching.
Maybe it’s loving you. Maybe it’s that she never made sense to me.
I tried so hard to take care of both Mom and my sister, to make things okay.
And she never did the same. I’m not like her.
I couldn’t put anyone in danger the way she put me and Erica in danger.
So whatever fears I have, and they certainly exist, they aren’t that I’d be like her.
I don’t have to be like anyone. I get to choose my own destiny.
I got out of there. I found you. I’ve always believed you and I could make anything work we put our minds to. ”
He’d believed that once and lost it somewhere along the way. She made him want to believe it again. And he knew the only way to do that was to do the opposite of what he’d been doing those last few months before he’d gone on the assignment that had threatened everything. Even now.
He’d been pulling in, withdrawing. Thrown too much into work and not enough into her, because putting work into his marriage meant facing all those things he feared.
He’d prefer a gun—then and now—but losing Kirsten made him realize that was really damn stupid. He’d face anything for her.
“Maybe I was afraid. Terrified. I don’t know what to do with fear.
I’ve felt it plenty, but it’s always just been…
you shove it away and get through whatever you’re afraid of.
But the FBI gave me somewhere else to go.
Anytime I was afraid, there was somewhere I could go that was black and white, more or less.
Life and death. Not…all these screwed up, mixed-up feelings that didn’t have anywhere to go. ”
“They had somewhere to go,” she said. A note of hurt in her voice. “You could have talked to me.”
“I know I could have, but at the time I just…didn’t know how. I ran before I even allowed myself to really feel them. Understand them. Because feeling them…meant facing that I always lose the things that matter.”
She didn’t speak right away, so he had to sit in that…that truth. That fear. This thing he’d been avoiding for so long that saying the words felt worse than avoiding. He tended to jump headfirst into loss rather than be blindsided the way he had been for so much of his childhood.
He was about to stand up, tell her to forget it. Find something to do.
But she pulled a chair next to him, slid her hand across his shoulder and into a kind of half hug where she met his gaze.
“I don’t know how to tell you that you won’t lose. Loss is a part of life. And it’s awful.”
It wasn’t comforting, but it was illuminating because…it wasn’t unique, loss. Maybe he’d gone through life thinking he was uniquely targeted, but…all of his work should have taught him otherwise. Maybe he’d lost both his parents young, but he’d been given a lot of love too.
And so many people hadn’t.
“I didn’t want any kid of mine to feel like I did,” he managed to scratch out. “But I guess we all…have to deal with our own challenges.”
Kirsten nodded. She pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I happen to think you’ll make an excellent father if you decide that’s what you want.”
It filled him with dread, and terror, and yet…the thought of her with a child. Their child. That wasn’t scary. Doing it with her wasn’t terrifying.
He had to clear his throat to speak. “I guess we have to…figure this out first. Make it safe.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but a notification popped up on his phone. It was the security system he’d tapped into.
Someone was outside.
He shoved to his feet. “Keep the door locked until I come back,” he told her. He reached down and pulled the gun from his ankle holster.
She was standing. “Ellis.”
“I mean it. Trust me. Please.”
She blinked at what were clearly tears in her eyes and nodded.
He slipped out the door, into the cold. Probably should have put a jacket on, but he didn’t have time. Whatever was out here wouldn’t make it to Kirsten. No matter what. He surveyed the gray day around him. The snow was high, the world quiet. No footprints in the snow.
The motion detector had gone off in the back of the house, so once he was sure there was no one out front, he moved around the cabin, gun drawn, stealth his number one priority.
They didn’t have cameras on the cabin, just some motion detection.
It could have been an animal, but animals hadn’t been setting it off the days they’d been here.
No, Ellis truly believed someone was out here. Zach would be able to check the wildlife cameras, but someone could have avoided those. Though he didn’t know how they avoided a watch person at the lone entrance and exit.
Unless something big had happened.
But Ellis couldn’t think in worst-case scenarios. He had to focus on the present. The cabin was secure, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something out beyond the trees or outbuildings.
Then he heard it, the faint little nothing of a sound, but Ellis knew. He whirled, gun drawn and ready to shoot.
“Freeze.”
And then he followed his own order, because a man with a gun very similar to his, a pose identical to his, had said the exact same thing. To him.
Besides, even with the heavy winter gear, he recognized the intruder.
“Boyd?”
“Ellis?” Boyd seemed as surprised to see him as Ellis was to see Boyd.
It both took them a few seconds to lower their guns. Then Boyd blew out a frustrated breath.
“Hell, I followed the wrong damn trail,” Boyd muttered, taking a few steps toward Ellis, crunching through the snow. “I thought I was tracking down who was in cahoots with Colleen and Tom. Instead, I’m tracking you?”
It felt…off, and yet there was real pleasure in seeing his friend. A strange disorienting dichotomy of seeing a piece of his old life, that life he wanted back especially now that Kirsten was remembering, but he couldn’t forget where he was in the here and now. And what had brought him here.
Boyd studied him critically. “You don’t look quite as bad as you did last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, it’s been a while.”
“I’m freezing my ass off here, Sutty,” Boyd said, using that old FBI nickname. Not exactly clever. “I get how it looks, but… Seriously. You didn’t give me the whole picture, did you?”
Ellis didn’t answer, but Boyd kept on.
“Don’t you know better than to ask an FBI agent to look into something without giving them the whole story?”
Ellis sighed, looking back at the cabin. There was definitely a lot of the story he’d left out. “I guess not.”