Chapter Three #2
Anja packed tactical pants, two spare tees, and a softshell for weather she couldn’t predict.
Her Sig P320 was in its holster and had been oiled the previous weekend.
She added her Glock 43 backup in an ankle rig.
Anja never went anywhere without her CObrA Securities phone, which Tyler Redmond swore on his life was untraceable.
She didn’t doubt it for a second. It included a Tyler-created bug-sweeping app.
She had every intention of walking into Leo’s condo and giving it the kind of inspection he’d never thought to want.
The bag had a special compartment for her laptop and pockets for all her charger cables.
Every CObrA Securities vehicle contained a locker full of supplies, including extra ammo, a full medical kit, two bulletproof vests, flash-bangs, and an assortment of other items, so she didn’t have to stop at the equipment room.
She didn’t want anyone to know what she was doing until she determined what was happening in Missouri.
Anja zipped the pack, hoisted it, and stopped in front of the dresser where her civilian clothes lived.
She pulled the top drawer open. Her hand found the blue cashmere sweater she’d bought last winter that accentuated her eyes. Underneath it, folded flat, were the jeans that fit her perfectly. She studied both pieces, then threw them into the duffel.
“Because you don’t know how long you’ll be gone,” she muttered, which was apparently the excuse of choice when you knew you were lying to yourself.
Then she reached into her lingerie drawer and grabbed some of the lacy stuff and tossed them in with the sports bras and boy-short panties she wore for work.
She zipped the bag a second time, slung it over her shoulder, and walked out.
As Anja pushed out the door, she almost ran into Jalen Ellis and Remington Methany.
Jalen was tall, muscular, brown-skinned, and built like a middle-distance runner.
He was also brilliant, which made everybody else in the room work a little harder to keep up.
Blond-haired Remi was a couple of inches taller, with an NFL linebacker’s physique.
He’d only been hired a couple of weeks ago, so Anja knew little about him, but he always wore a smile and joked around.
Everyone had taken an instant liking to him, her included.
Jalen took one look at her bag and his eyebrows shot up.
“You’re being sent out on a case this late on a Friday night?”
“Uh, no.”
“Okay. Where am I pretending you aren’t?”
“St. Louis.”
“Huh. For Chloe’s bro?”
Sheesh. Did everyone in the complex know? Had there been a staff meeting she wasn’t privy to? A newsletter?
Anja had been operating under the mistaken impression that she’d been subtle. She hitched her bag higher on her shoulder. She needed to keep Leo’s secret until she knew what was happening, so they could do all the speculating they wanted. “Yes.”
Jalen nodded once. “I had fifty bucks riding on it.”
She glared at him.
He held up his hands. “I’m kidding.”
Remi grinned. “No, he’s not.”
Jalen elbowed him. “Traitor.”
Remi shrugged. “I notice things. Occupational hazard.”
Jalen sighed dramatically. “Fine. My lips are sealed. Drive safe, Valkyrie.”
As it always did, the moniker caught her sideways because she’d never been able to figure out how to feel about it.
Jalen had started using it in his second week, after watching her take down a man twice her size in the sparring ring without losing her ponytail.
It had spread through the compound within a month.
Most days, she pretended to hate it. On evenings like this one, walking toward her Escalade with a go-bag on her shoulder and a mystery waiting for her, she was grateful for it.
A Valkyrie didn’t flinch, and she needed to be that woman today.
The sound of music and laughter drifted to her from the park as she climbed into the driver’s side and tossed the bag onto the passenger seat. She reached for the ignition when a face suddenly appeared beside her window.
Anja’s hand flew toward the Sig on the console before her brain caught up with her reflexes. Kayla stared back at her through the glass with an entirely unapologetic grin.
Wonderful. She’d almost been ambushed by one of her own. She started the SUV and rolled down the window.
“Didn’t we say goodbye already?”
“I thought of something.”
“Kayla—”
“Be careful.” Kayla rested her forearms on the window frame and studied her with an unreadable expression. “And be honest with yourself on the drive.”
“I always am.”
“No, sweetie, you’re not. That’s the problem.”
Kayla patted the roof of the Escalade twice, stepped back, and walked off toward the park without a backward glance.
Anja sat there for a three-count. Then she shifted into drive and rolled out toward the gate with the last of the sunset burning in her rearview mirror.
#
As she crossed from Indiana into Illinois, Interstate 70 stretched flat and straight through farmland only beginning to green up after the long winter. Anja drove with the stereo off, a bottle of water in the cup holder, and her mind moving along two parallel tracks at once.
Fifteen minutes in, she started to instruct her phone to call Leo but paused.
She didn’t want the story filtered over a car speaker.
Phone calls were for logistics or to pin down an ETA.
She’d end up reacting to his pacing and word choices, not to mention his lawyer’s instinct to structure a story for the listener.
Whatever he had to tell her, she wanted to watch him say it.
Civilians leaked information through their hands, eyes, and even how they held a coffee mug.
Leo might be a talented liar in court, but he was a very poor one in his own kitchen.
She’d learned that at four in the morning while watching him drink water at her counter without clothes, his face giving him away every time he looked at her.
Whatever he wasn’t saying to her yet, she’d catch it faster in person.
She sent a single text instead.
Three and a half hours out. Don’t touch the thing, whatever it is. Stay inside. Don’t answer the door for a delivery, building management, friends, or anyone.
His reply came within thirty seconds. The automated voice read: Copy. Door’s locked. I’ll be here. Drive safe. Thank you, Anja.
She listened to it twice, felt the inconvenient hitch in her chest she’d been managing since his name came up on her screen, and stared out the windshield.
Some things didn’t require a reply. They needed to be left alone until you could look them in the face in a room with doors and walls and the grounding weight of actual work to do.
As she drove, the operational track in her head started building a list on its own. Sweep the unit the second she was through the door—every room, fixture, and outlet. Find out what had Leo so spooked. Loop her bosses in by morning.
The personal track was harder to silence, and she didn’t try.
It ran like a second radio station she couldn’t quite turn off, the volume low but the signal clear.
She was going to be in a room with Leo De Luca tonight.
She’d been managing the absence of him for five months by telling herself she didn’t need to see him, and here was the universe handing her a legitimate reason to be in the same room as him.
The bottom of her stomach was doing an entirely unprofessional, inconvenient thing about it.
Kayla’s parting words came back to her ten miles past Effingham. Be honest with yourself on the drive.
Anja had told herself for five months that what had happened at the wedding had been an answer to a question she’d been carrying around since she’d met Leo.
One night. A choice. Nothing more. She’d left that reasoning untouched because it kept certain things orderly, and a woman in her line of work relied on structure far more than honesty.
That logic was flawed.
In between bouts of thoroughly, mind-blowingly unforgettable lovemaking, she’d lain awake next to Leo with his arm across her waist and listened to his breathing. She’d known, in a way she hadn’t bothered to examine since, that one night was not going to be enough.
She’d let him leave anyway, which meant the choice she’d made wasn’t one night. It was only one night, and the difference between those two phrases was the entire problem.
Leo was different. He hadn’t cost her anything yet, and he had asked nothing of her either.
He’d given her months of uncomplicated silence, and that wasn’t insignificant.
It might, in fact, have been everything, because five months of respecting the distance between them, despite obviously wishing it didn’t exist, had turned out to be the most patient thing anyone had ever done for her.
And now he was in trouble, and he’d called her first, and she was driving west at seventy-three miles an hour with a cashmere sweater in her bag she had no business packing.
Be honest with yourself.
Fine.
She would be honest.
She was going to walk into Leo’s condo tonight wearing her professional face, sweep his unit, then sit at his table and make him tell her what had happened.
Anja would ask the questions that needed asking.
At some point between now and midnight, she’d have to decide whether the drawer stayed shut or if she let it crack open a finger’s width and find out what she could live with.
See, Kayla? That was honesty. Anja wasn’t above this. She’d just been pretending she was.
She switched the radio on and let a low rock guitar line fill the Escalade because she needed something to drive with. Silence had started to feel like company she didn’t want.
#
The Gateway Arch came up in her windshield around hour three and three-quarters, catching the moonlight in a long silver curve that arose out of the Missouri side of the river.